To whom it may concern,
We are a Ponsonby located extras agency who are currently casting for the new tele-feature, LIFE'S A RIOT due to screen on TV1 (Sunday Theatre) early next year. The story is set in the slums of Auckland during the depression (1931) and focusses on the Edwards family, more particularly, Jim Edwards, the man inadvertantly responsible for starting the Queen Street riots - the greatest riot in New Zealand's history.
We are on the hunt for
slim, european men aged 18-70 to be a part of the famous riot scene. Filming will take place on a Sunday on Queen Street in early September.
If you can organise a group of say 20 guys for the riot scene (that fit the above description) we can donate $500 to your club.
Please let me know if you're interested.
Thanks and regards
Becky Smith
TALENT AGENT
Jimmy Edwards is turning 14. He lives in the direst poverty, sensitive to the constant, grinding pettiness of those who dispense charity. He is the oldest in the family, with five brothers and two sisters. He and his brothers hawk a household cleanser round the slum streets of their neighbourhood. The cleanser is a bizarre concoction made up in a bathtub by his unemployed father and packed into old tin cans fossicked from the dump.
His father has another way of raising the readies. He's a sly-grogger. Every night he brings home the wretched of the earth, hangmen and hangers-on, "Snuffy" Wilson, "Squeaker" Dudley, "Hellfire" Dave, "The Shaker". All are unemployed. All believe New Zealand is about to undergo a total collapse and then a re-birth. And the mid-wife of that re-birth, they tell young James, will be his father. In the meantime—they can always buy a beer off his dad after closing time…
Jimmy is caught up in all of this. He loves the anarchy of it, the grogging, the songs, the outlandish yarns, and all of it surging around its center-piece—his father. He loves the old hymns his father sings, the oratory, relics of a Salvation Army past. And out on the streets Jimmy sees it's his father who's cock of the walk, it's his father who's raised high at public meetings to proclaim the revolution and bring hope to the hopeless, it's his father whom some police want arrested and others respect.
On top of escalating unemployment comes the news that the government of Prime Minister Forbes and Deputy PM Coates is to cut the wages of all those in public employment. The announcement is a lightning rod for all, employed and jobless. Jimmy witnesses plans for a great march through the main city. The march will start a rising culminating in the poor finally taking power away from the rich. The world's wealth for the world's workers.
April, 1932. The great, silent march, tens of thousands strong, move up Queen Street. It reaches the Town Hall. At the front of the unemployed is Jimmy's father. Jimmy is with him. Rows of police refuse the unemployed entry to the Town Hall. Tension rises. James is caught up in the swirling crowds. Jimmy's father hauls himself up to address the marchers. A policeman who'd vowed to get him off the streets batons him to the ground. Jimmy hears the cry, "They've killed Jim Edwards! They've killed Jim Edwards." The marchers rip palings off the fence outside the City Mission opposite the Town Hall, fight it out with police. Others flood down Queen Street, smash in the windows, loot the glittering goods.
Jimmy flees back home, tells his horrified mother. But then, into the house stumble the rioters and looters. They reveal that Jimmy's father survived the batoning, crawled away from the police and is now loose somewhere out in the city, wanted on a charge of being the instigator of the greatest riot in New Zealand history. . . .
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Originally Posted by Squiggles
wouldn't it be better to give the skinny white guys a feed instead of a donation, they will only blow it on booze or petrol for their mopeds 
Don't just live to ride but ride to live.
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