Almost Famous

"Obviously he probably let me start making the film because I was young and blonde,” 27-year-old director/actress Gracie Otto admits to The Music. She's talking about her debut feature film, The Last Impresario, which premieres in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival this week.

The film charts the life of acclaimed Scottish film producer Michael White, whose list of credits needs to be read to be believed – from the original British stage production of The Rocky Horror Show to Monty Python And The Holy Grail to Yoko Ono's first London exhibition. By speaking to White and to his son, lovers, friends and admirers, people from Ono to John Cleese to Anna Wintour, The Last Impresario paints a picture of a man described as an “impresario”, a “playboy”, a “gambler”, and “the most famous person you've never heard of”.

Otto met White in Cannes in 2010: “He was kind of this enigma because he had all these exchanges with people and he'd keep on taking me out all night until five in the morning to these parties, but also he looked, like, 80 years old.” Otto says she saw him as a “high roller” and had no idea about his rich professional and personal history. Then after discovering that White was selling his huge collection of personal effects and memorabilia at Sotheby's, Otto knew there was a story here. To make the film she travelled between Europe, America and Australia to interview White and his friends, initially as a one-woman crew. Then she gathered archival footage and was given access to White's personal collection including hundreds of candid photographs of White with his famous friends, as taken by White himself.

Last July Otto showed White an unfinished cut of the film. “I wanted to make sure that he liked the film. Even though there's good things in it and bad things, at the end of the day I would hate to have made a film that he hated or didn't want anything to do with after all this time. It was always intended to be a positive film about him, not ripping him to shreds… All he really cared about was that he didn't want a shot of him with walking sticks, because he was saying to me on the phone, 'I feel pathetic with these walking sticks'… They're still in there because I said to him, 'You've got walking sticks, they have to stay, you can't cut them out.'”

Beyond the thrill of finding herself face to face with the likes of Jack Nicholson, who declined to be interviewed, and Kate Moss, Otto says she learned a lot from the film, and from White as a person. “I think I learnt a lot from Michael mainly and his story because he's such an inspiration. All the health challenges and everything, y'know, he was really on his last legs. A couple of months ago I was in the hospital with him in LA, he got sick again, and now he's in a wheelchair, and he still bounced back. He still doesn't give up on life.”