Gino's best mate is the hyperactive class clown Renato (Maurice Devincentis) and the pair like to hang around in a wrecked car in a derelict lot with bogan, mullet-decorated Allan (Tibor Gyapjas), and blonde Sandy (Sally Cooper) who is infatuated with Gino, and the boisterous, blunt, overweight Helen (Desiree Smith).
Gino hangs loose with his mates, drinking beer and smoking, playing pinball, arguing with his parents, and deliberately mis-translating to his father what Mr Clarke has to say about his schoolwork.
"Right, let's go", the removalist adds, as the van pulls into the street, and the camera cranes up to give us a last sight of Gino as he heads away from Fitzroy, into the wilds of an uncertain future in doric-pillared Doncaster ... Director Michael Pattinson made much later in publicity of his casting techniques for the film, claiming that he had seen and interviewed some 2,000 teenagers in Melbourne schools.
(The Age 19 April 1983) According to another press report: The experience was so much fun that he and his scriptwriter, Jan Sardi, rewrote some of the film's characters around the school kids they'd met" (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 1983) For all the talk of the wide-ranging casting exercise, in some areas the seed fell close to the tree.
He claims the kids at his school thought they were auditioning for roles as extras in Cop Shop and remembers all the boys who stayed back did so because they hoped to meet that show's cast members, Linda Stoner and Paula Duncan.
These various "local" connections should be remembered, up against the notion that the cattle call search produced major results for the film (for more on the project's script development and casting see point 8 below) Perhaps the best thing about the DVD interview featurette is Vince Colosimo reminiscing about the things he found confusing about making feature films - getting up at 6 am, only to hang around, shooting out of continuity, and shooting at all sorts of locations, in order to construct a scene.
According to the DVD interview featurette, the newspaper posters seen in the film were real and are a good guide to dating the actual period of the shoot.
This might help explain why Vince Colosimo and Desiree Smith both grumble that the first day of the shoot was located in the wrecked car, which the unit had placed in tall grass in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.
According to director Michael Pattinson, he encouraged improvisation: On set, the bravado of his young leads was so infectious that they adopted the practice of letting a scene go on beyond the words on the page.
Sardi notes in the DVD commentary adds that at the time it wasn't cool to be seen as Italian and so a lot of the kids at the school attempted to hide their migrant background.
The low tech style had its rewards however - Pattinson notes that it was the use of abundant talcum powder at Melbourne airport by the film's grip that allowed Pippo to eventually make his slide down the escalator railing.
Colosimo recalls the conventional portraits of Italians in such shows as the TV sitcom Kingswood Country, which had the migrant character called a 'dago' throughout, and a Paul Hogan sketch about "Luigi the unbelievable".
In this sense, the film was charting relatively new territory for the revival, and not surprisingly Roadshow and Hoyts passed on the picture, with GUO agreeing to pick it up.
In the DVD commentary, director Michael Pattinson recalls the film played for almost 26 weeks in cinemas around Australia, built largely by word of mouth, though Vince Colosimo remembers attending a big, scary and exciting premiere of the film in Adelaide, a launch that was supposed to have been the biggest staged since Urban Cowboy.
Thousands of Vince's peer group have been taken to see it - and his teenage relatives are always on the phone wanting to know the answers to questions like "Why is Gino shy about sex and sometimes embarrassed by his friend Renato?"
This is an okay figure relative to budget and, with the 10BA tax breaks, it would have been enough to put the film's early 10BA investors in the black, and so might be called a modest success.
While the film was more a domestic critical success than a break out commercial hit, it was widely seen, and attracted the teen demographic, courtesy a number of appealing qualities, not least Vince Colosimo.