Plot
Dogs in Space is a show about a group of young music fans sharing a house in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond. The style of the film is a legacy of Lowenstein's background in advertising and music video production; before Dogs in Space he had served as director for a series of promotional clips for songs from the INXS album The Swing.
The script was developed from Lowenstein's own experiences and the central character Sam is based on Sam Sejavka from the band The Ears, with whom Lowenstein lived in the 1970s. Chuck Meo, who plays a drummer in the movie, also lived with the pair. The house, in Berry Street, was the same house Lowenstein and Sejavka shared and was rented from its new owners and modified at considerable expense for the film. Lowenstein wrote himself out of the film and several of his exploits were attributed to the character Tim (Nique Needles). Sejavka has a brief cameo in a party scene as a character called Michael. In the film, Sam and Tim are the key members of a band called Dogs in Space and share their house with various social misfits including Sam's girlfriend Anna (Saskia Post), a university student called Luchio (Tony Helou) and a transient and apparently nameless teenager known only as The Girl (Deanna Bond), a character based extremely closely on Sara, who for a period lived with Lowenstein at Berry Street.
The film's minimal plot traces the day-to-day existence of the characters, particularly the relationship between Sam and Anna, and is virtually an endless sequence of intense party scenes involving heavy substance-abuse. In between, there are trips to Ballarat (at the time, the closest town to Melbourne with a 24-hour convenience store) and humorous encounters with an aggressive neighbour (Joe Camilleri) and one character's fast-talking, chainsaw-wielding uncle (Chris Haywood), who simply turns up one afternoon with his family (the baby in this scene is Lowenstein's niece Robyn). There is also a minor sub-plot in which the characters try unsuccessfully to pass off some rubbish burned in an oven as a piece of Skylab to a local radio station. In the end, the group's dysfunctional and hedonistic lifestyle claims a victim when Anna dies from a heroin overdose.
Read more about this topic: Dogs In Space
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