A fine way to earn a living Author: Malcolm Knox Date: 30/01/1995 Publication: Sydney Morning Herald HOW do you get back at parking cops for thousands of dollars in fines? May we suggest a good birching? The knout, cudgel or pillory? Or the modest but memorable Chinese burn? Marcella Hayward had another idea: make a film about them. Parking police are the focus of "the stress of living in the city", says the 34-year-old, whose film Roses Are Red won the 1994 Kodak film award and will be screened this week in the ABC's Australian Collection of award-winning short films. "It's so easy to dump that stress onto a parking cop, because they ask for it," she says. Which is not to say the red in Roses is the colour of spilt brown bomber blood. Hayward's film is a simple narrative about a parking cop named Joy (Jacqueline McKenzie) who develops a crush on a rose-seller, Brian (David Wenham). The story plays on our natural dislike for the ticket-writers, with Joy's unexpected naivete confronting Brian's blind scepticism. The film opens with a harried businessman dousing his car in petrol and threatening to set it ablaze if the two parking police (McKenzie and her partner, Di, played by Kris McQuade) come closer. Hayward says this true story was one of many she heard during her research. "Everyone's got a story to tell about parking cops. They really attract strong antipathy. Gathering all these stories pushed me along in making Roses, and has helped me prepare my next film, a feature involving the same two characters." Hayward's previous work includes the short film Bait, which screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1993, and a documentary called Merv, about an accountant with a secret penchant for having his body tattooed and pierced. This followed what she calls a "gypsy existence" which took her from her birthplace in New Zealand to South Australia, the Pitjantjatjara country in the Northern Territory, London and the one-year production design course at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. The screenplay for Roses Are Red is written by Jacqueline Perske, whose husband, Rowan Woods, made another of the Australian Collection films, Tran the Man. Tran is the nickname of the protagonist, Ray (also played by David Wenham), a security guard in Cabramatta. His brother and uncle pressure him to abet their activities in the Cabramatta heroin trade - increasingly topical since the murder of State MP John Newman last year. "The exciting stories for me tend to be in south-western Sydney," says Woods, whose present project is a feature film set around Cabramatta, Flemington and Fairfield. "It's a rich and exciting trading place ... but also a belly of corruption. I grew up with a connection to the Cabramatta area: my mother was a teacher there, and we had a lot of family friends who were Asian immigrants. "In Tran I wanted to set an Anglo story against this background." A childhood in Balmain in the '60s and '70s, "a stone's throw from a lot of the crime that's since been reported by people like Bob Bottom", incited a curiosity in "the seedier side of life", he says. "I don't think Australian films that have covered that sort of activity are up to scratch. There's been a lot of good factual reporting, but not much really imaginative work weaving bigger mythic structures into events." The visual effect of Tran the Man's petty-crime milieu is enhanced by the camera work of Tristan Milani, who is also director of photography in Roses Are Red and another of the Australian Collection, Guillermo Martin Sepulveda's surreal fable, El Angelito. The other three short films to be screened are Rick Randall's The Sewing Room, a prize-winner at the Chicago International Film Festival; Dennis Tupicoff's The Darra Dogs, which won the Best Animation AFI Award in 1993; and The Hero, a comic vignette by James Mairata. The Australian Collection is on ABC on Wednesday at 8.30 pm.