Image: Quentin Kenihan via Twitter and the ABC.
‘My name is Quentin Kenihan and I’m an actor, filmmaker, online content creator, writer, disability advocate, and Adelaide personality. I have a genetic disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which has given me a lifetime of challenges to overcome. Being wheelchair-bound has given me an evolved perspective of living in the City of Adelaide.’
Quentin Kenihan wrote that for his campaign to become an Area Ward Councillor, but he died before the election. He was a remarkable figure in the screen sector who understood the theatre of his presence and the value of his life. Mike Willesee made a program about him when he was only seven, came back as an adult for a documentary World at my Wheels, hosted a show called Quentin Crashes, was on The Panel – and generally used his wit and presence to confront our approach to people with disabilities.
He was in four feature films. He was Van Man in Thunderstruck, Hot Pants 69 in You and Your Stupid Mate and Man on Trolley in Dr Plonk. But he entered the visual history of our culture with his role as Corpus Colossus in Mad Max: Fury Road in which he was unafraid to use his body as a medium of communication.
Shane McNeil is an Adelaide producer, director and writer whose remembrance of Kenihan is compelling and tender.
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Qulogy for my mate
As is serendipity’s want, I first met Quentin when he literally burst into my life like an unexpected, tropical thunderstorm.
I was directing a TVC, shooting some pick-ups in and around Q’s local stomping ground – the Adelaide Central Markets – when he came rolling towards me with the full force and intention of a heat-seeking missile doing what it does best. Stopping with exact precision a mere six centimeters in front of me (as became his trademark entrée), Q quizzed me on what I was doing so I filled him in.
“Mate… Why’re you wasting your time doing shit like this? Come work with me and make something worthwhile.”
And in time, I did. I ended up working closely with Q on-and-off for nearly 20 years, helping him develop & devise, plot & produce, administer & apply for a variety of film and TV projects along with numerous cunning plans that continually sprang forth from his amazing brain, all demanding to be made fruitful.
But as with all long-term weather patterns, our collaboration brought with it both high and low troughs; critical droughts followed by creative downpours, as well as the occasional temperamental drizzle.
But as a producer, Q taught me that despite the prevailing climate, we should always appreciate how fortunate we were to be able to plant creative seeds and then watch them grow. And that regardless of the long-range forecast predicted by the naysayers, we should always protect our seeded ideas against the wind and fully commit to either making hay or singin’ in the rain.
Two short reminiscences to hopefully illustrate…
I was working as a writer/director on a doco series Q was developing for Channel 10. Q took us away – on his own dollar – to a rural spa retreat so that we could think, plot and write. I soon realized why we were isolated as no-one should have to hear the bollocking he gave me when I handed him my initial treatment.
I can still picture Q tossing my papers into the air like Louis B. Mayer with a handful of feathers, and then scooting off without so much a word of “where-to-next, boss?” With tail between legs, I scurried back to my hotel room and rewrote the entire pitch document before sheepishly sliding it under Q’s door in the dead of night.
The next morning down at the breakfast buffet, I cautiously arrived to find Q back to his playful self, holding court and cracking jokes. We continued working to the pre-arranged schedule so it wasn’t until our lunch break that I quietly took Q aside to ask if he had read the new treatment.
“Yeah… it’s good.”
“OK… great. So what was wrong with the first one?”
“Nothing. It was actually pretty good. But I knew you could do better and you did.”
That was the kind of old school producer Q was.
I also recall literally being locked in a room with Q at the old Hendon studios as part of an SAFC/ABC TV pitch incubator workshop. The intention behind the enforced ‘shut-in’ was to remove ourselves from all outside stimuli so as to come up with three to six pitch possible ideas for a reality TV show.
I emerged into the light two and a half hours later – mentally exhausted and suffering early onset of Carpal Tunnel syndrome – but proudly clutching a notepad listing 39 original concepts for potential reality shows that would make even Alan Partridge take stock.
Although Auntie eventually passed on our pitches (understandably preferring more conservative approaches), Q & I later took pride in seeing various bastardisations of our more bizarre pitches like ‘Kid Nation’, ‘My Secret Addiction’ and ‘World’s Deadliest Jobs’ eventually pop up across the myriad of Foxtel’s reality channels.
Q called me one night after spotting the latest incarnation from our list emerge somewhere on TV. I was down and dejected that we had come up with these very same ideas years earlier but no one saw their potential. Q offered up that famous clucking laugh and said, “Mate, the best part about being rejected is knowing you were on the money before anyone else ever did.”
And I’ve never forgotten his advice.
I loved collaborating with Q because it reminded me of how studio writers worked on the back-lot bungalows of Hollywood. Because his brain was so much faster than his hands, we quickly worked out that he would spruik and I would scribe. He would serve, I would return serve. He would then spin, and I would lob and so on and so on until one of us finally scored the point that needed to be made.
It wasn’t until several years later – after a minor work protest-cum-hissy-fit on behalf of my ever-cramping hands – that Q confessed he actually hated writing and would rather do a hundred elevator pitches than write up one formal application for funding. We never spoke of it again and on we went…
Q redefined tenacity. There was nothing or no-one Q would not confront or challenge if he wanted to be heard or something to be known. Mohammed may have come to the mountain but Q would go through it. He called a spade a spade. Then he would tell you to shut up and go home or get down and dig a hole.
After a while I saw no disability in his company, except my own. My own self-doubt and my tendancy to be overly critical blocking my ability to embrace life’s potentiality to the max, as Q always did. But over time he taught me valuable life skills as both a friend and a filmmaker. He taught me how to be a more effective shit-stirrer through my choice of words, how to provoke crew members to ensure better results, how to compliment talent without gilding and how to talk to girls in bars.
Q was the only person I ever met who could name-drop without sounding like a braggart. Every time we used to spitball about ideas, talent or access, Q would say “Let me check-in with Russell,” or “I’ll call Kevin and get back to you” or “Baz might be able to help us…” His Contact List was as big as his heart, or rather was so big because of it.
One final lost memory. I was walking back with Q from the 10 Studios at Pyrmont through a sun shower, when some bogans in a green ute sped past, spewing the most hurtful abuse at Q. I froze, momentarily stunned. Most people we passed-by in the street always greeted Q with spontaneous, kind familiarity as if they had grown up with him (as most of them had.)
However upon this occasion, Q showed no response. Nothing. He just kept on rolling and talking about the pitch meeting we’d just left. We walked on for another 15 seconds before I felt compelled to ask WTF just happened and if he was OK.
Q braked, turned and simply explained, ‘Mate… It’s their problem they can’t control their anger. Not mine…”
And so we rolled on…
A couple of years back just before his 40th I had the rare privilege of actually sighting Q’s Bucket List. And yes, there were indeed lines crossed through ‘movie role’, ‘TV series’, ‘crash Star Wars’, ‘meet Jewel’, ‘write book’, ‘one-man show’, ‘film reviewer’ and so on.
Even with his passing, Q still managed to tick yet another item off his bucket list by getting the Adelaide City Council and State Government to create a designated disability playground in the CBD in his name. He’s still working harder in death than most of us do daily.
Despite my attempts to reignite his film flame, Q ‘unofficially’ retired himself from the industry a few years ago, confiding that he was simply exhausted by the petty politics and bureaucratic banalities that accompanied it. Besides he had a couple more items left on his Bucket List to knock off that would be better served by his focus and energy, such as running for City Council.
It’s been less than a week since Q died and I miss him terribly. I stayed in bed and cried all Sunday after waking to hear of his sudden death. I hate knowing that I’ll never hear him tell me I’m full of shit, or be able to cackle at his spot-on impersonations of Cartman, or take another late night phone call from him announcing he’s had a great idea for a kid’s TV show.
With Q’s passing, I suddenly feel the crushing weight of mortality bear down on me as never before. The mistake we all made was thinking Q was immortal. But then I hear his voice telling me to reign in my self-pity and just remember what he once said about his beloved Kal-El, “A hero isn’t defined by what others say about them but by what they do, and the lives they change.”
Q was a hero who didn’t need to wear a cape. His only superpower was his X-ray vision which allowed him to see through all the bullshit, platitudes and pretensions served up to us myopics, exposing a more truthful, tolerant world behind it. A world of infinite possibility and opportunity if only we put our heat and mind to it.
That, and his superhuman (Q-man, perhaps?) ability to stoically suffer through his own pain and physical limitations, never complain and just keep on going…
Q lived his whole life under a death sentence. He once told me that every year since he was born, doctors kept revising their estimates on how long they thought he had left to live.
One week, one month, one year, five years, 10 years, next year and so on….
In-and-out of hospital, on-and-off oxygen, breaking bones and concealing moans and so on…
But reminiscent of those rude dudes whom I witnessed abuse him, Q always ignored what others said and just kept on going, accomplishing more in half a lifetime than most of us do in a full one. I now realise it was because his sense of time was far, far better attuned to this mortal coil than the rest of us. Q knew that time was THE most valuable gift bestowed upon the creative artist.
Farewelling Q, I’m reminded of Beckett’s eponymous narrator in The Unnamed who – trapped in a glass jar on a Parisian window sill – likewise struggled against his limitations to forge his identity only to then ambiguously proclaim, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Like Q, we should all take heed and follow his lead. And hopefully, learn to be a little bit more Q-man to each other along the way…
Shane McNeil
9th October 2018
Quentin Kenihan negotiated the gaze of the world all his life
