By Garry Maddox and Steve Meacham
IT SOUNDED like a promising idea for a film - the colourful, rebellious lives of the Australian hippie intelligentsia as they took on swinging London in the 1960s.
Based on a memoir by Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake featured a who's who of the counterculture, including Germaine Greer, artists Martin Sharp and Jim Anderson and the designer Jenny Kee. It centred on the launch of the London edition of the radical magazine Oz and the famous trial for distributing a sexually explicit issue.
Dig it ... the rebellion can be seen in the direct-to-DVD bin.
Interest in the film ratcheted up when Greer lashed the writers in her Guardian blog for fashioning her likeness ''out of their own excreta''. But there was always going to be anticipation for a £20 million film from Beeban Kidron - the director of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason - and her husband, Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot.
But more than three years after the film was shot in England, rumours that Hippie Hippie Shake has turned out dismally have proved to be accurate. After a promised release failed to eventuate last year, the British production company, Working Title, has confirmed it will not reach cinemas.
The managing director of the distributor Universal Pictures in Australia, Mike Baard, said: ''I suspect … it's going to land in the direct-to-video bin … it's off our release schedule.''
The early signs were not encouraging. Said Neville: ''We saw the first cut of the film - Jim, I and other Oz people - and there was a lot of disappointment … We made a lot of suggestions to the producers … the final cut was very much better. It wasn't a work of genius but it was a watchable film.''
Neville said: ''Universal Pictures decided to shelve the film and save themselves a lot of tax payments.''
But a distribution source said: ''There are cases where movies just come out really … badly.''
Anderson said the central problem with the movie was the portrayal of Neville. ''They ruined it by turning Richard into a reconstructed heterosexual male. Back then, he was certainly unreconstructed - as we all were.''