Paper Dolls profiles the music trade

The outdated jail is rockin’. Contained in the sinister sandstone partitions of the decommissioned Parramatta Jail, the previous chapel is alive with color and music as Harlow takes the stage. The members of the fictional lady group are out-fitted of their usually skimpy type, this time curve-hugging costumes that includes a camo sample that’s oddly applicable given the combative circumstances. The band has been booked to carry out on the hardcore Reformatory Competition, an occasion patronised by goths, punks and emos, and it must win over an unimpressed viewers extra inclined to cheer loss of life steel than an upbeat quantity from a pop group born of a reality-TV present.

Compounding the already difficult circumstances, Annabel (Naomi Sequeira) is struggling on stage, requiring each emotional and bodily help from her bandmates following a severe meltdown, and there’s concern that she won’t make it by their quantity.

It’s the fourth episode of the brand new, eight-part drama, Paper Dolls, and it comprises lots of the components that characteristic by the collection: an brisk, tightly choreographed music quantity; a level of rigidity as a result of the stakes are excessive; and a suspenseful undercurrent because the members of Harlow must get their act collectively in the event that they’re to succeed.

Enthusing in regards to the jail as a location, manufacturing designer Jamie Cranney explains, “By means of the collection, we had been at all times interested by how we might elevate the expertise and make it cinematic. We didn’t need a music pageant that was an open discipline, with a white marquee and demountables and portaloos,” he says, referencing the acquainted Glastonbury look. “We didn’t wish to accept one thing that we’ve seen earlier than.”

Created by Ainslie Clouston, Paper Dolls relies on an authentic idea by Belinda Chapple. In 1999, Chapple was one of many younger ladies forged by Channel Seven’s reality-TV present, Popstars, to turn into a part of the lady group, Bardot. Its speedy rise to fame, from shopping-mall appearances to enviornment excursions, was chronicled by the present and Chapple has written in regards to the expertise in her not too long ago printed memoir, The Lady within the Band.

“Belinda took her idea to Helium Footage (Mystify, Final King of the Cross),” Clouston remembers. “And so they reached out and requested me to assist develop it additional.” From there, work started on the characters who would make up the band. “Every of the primary 5 episodes faucets into one of many lady’s factors of view,” says Clouston. “We labored with a medical psychologist to have a look at the psychological results of fame and the way persons are drawn to it. What was most fascinating to me was why folks need it, that it may be pushed by some type of wound inside them. Fame each exacerbates a sense of inadequacy, or no matter that core wound is, and soothes it, so there’s an exterior validation. We began constructing these fictional characters round their psychological connection to fame.”

Set in 1999, the collection opens with Izzy (Emalia), a former teen sensation and present pizza-shop worker, keen for an additional shot at success. She talks her manner into the group created for the TV present Pop Rush, which already contains Annabel, Jade (Courtney Clarke), Charlie (Miah Madden) and Lillian (Courtney Monsma). Their progress is tightly managed by Margot (Emma Sales space), the seen-it-all-before head of promoting at Millennium, the music firm headed by Roger (Ditch Davey).

‘They’re very conscious of how disposable they’re, that they’re a part of a machine.’

Paper Dolls creator Ainslie Clouston

In what was to turn into a well-known reality-TV set-up, however in these early days of the style was nonetheless a novelty, the bandmates stay collectively, their experiences captured by Pop Rush’s cameras. Cranney describes his vividly vibrant design for the Harlow home as having “a hyper-real, maximalist Jetsons type of really feel”. The one room free from a prying digital camera lens is the toilet.

It rapidly emerges that all the band members are concealing secrets and techniques, fears and insecurities. “With every episode we see what every of the ladies is hiding from the world, and hiding from the music trade, in order that they will preserve their place within the group,” says Sequeira. Borrowing a slogan from the manufacturing playbook, she describes Paper Dolls as “shiny however gritty”.

Sequeira sees her character as “free-spirited, no filter, trustworthy”. She provides, “Annabel has this main-character power about her. Despite the fact that she’s at all times attempting to get forward, she stays loyal to the group and he or she’s grateful for the expertise as a result of she didn’t come from a lot.” Annabel’s delighted when the band’s supervisor, Teddy (Thomas Cocquerel), assigns her the persona of “provocative wild youngster” whereas others get labels like “attractive schoolgirl” and “seductive ingenue”.

Relating to the drama’s perspective, Clouston says, “We had been trying on the music trade of the ’90s and the manufactured teams of that period. Popular culture on the time was a really masculine, with movies like American Pie, and it was a poisonous masculinity. Paper Dolls is in regards to the commodification of expertise, about the way you go from being an individual to a product within the eyes of a giant establishment, and the psychological injury that comes from the ladies realising who they’re as folks not issues. They’re very conscious of how disposable they’re, that they’re a part of a machine. All of them need solo careers, however they’re in a bunch and the machine continually pits them in opposition to one another.”

How a lot change the brand new millennium has dropped at the trade might be debatable, however Clouston explains, “We’re leaning into the truth that within the ’90s folks wished to listen to feminine artists: the Spice Women had been popping out, there was Lady Energy. However when it comes to ladies truly having a voice within the trade, about what they regarded like, about what they sang, about how they had been handled, they didn’t have one.”

When it got here to casting, Clouston says the producers had been on the lookout for “triple threats”, performers who might sing, dance and act. Sequeira remembers that she and the opposite hopefuls all initially auditioned for the function of Izzy earlier than testing for different elements. Nevertheless there was no chemistry testing to evaluate the group dynamics earlier than the ultimate 5 had been chosen. As with the members of Harlow, the chosen few met for the primary time as soon as they had been forged.

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Again on the jail, midway by the 12-week shoot in March, the actors run by take after demanding take of the track, All Night time, stomping their naked toes, singing, dancing, tossing their hair, working exhausting to painting Harlow’s efforts to win over the gang. The chapel turns into more and more claustrophobic as atmosphere-producing smoke is pumped into the area filled with 100 extras, three cameras plus one other swinging overhead on a crane, in addition to the roving Pop Rush digital camera crew.

Harlow’s high-energy efficiency, repeated a number of instances over hours of an evening shoot gives some indication of the dedication and stamina required of the forged in a manufacturing schedule that additionally contains dance rehearsals on Saturdays and music-studio classes to report Harlow’s songs.

It’s no shock that 28-year-old Sequeira says that after the shoot she had “a little bit of a bodily and psychological blowout”. She now does common fitness center classes in addition to martial-arts and energy coaching with the goal of being match for the action-movie function that she hopes to land sooner or later.

It appears as if Paper Dolls has offered some helpful preparation.

Paper Dolls is premiering on Paramount+ from Sunday, December 3.