Since completing the smash hit film William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann and his team of creative collaborators have settled in Sydney, Australia where they are working on the development of Baz's next film, from their home: the House of Iona.
The album "Something for Everybody" was a project to bridge the completion of Romeo and Juliet and the commencement of work on a new film. Baz worked with Bazmark music producer Anton Monsted under the alias BLAM; together they produced and remixed the music on this album with cutting-edge and established Australian musicians, technicians and performers.
A large reason for doing the project was to become reacquainted with the local scene and work with some of the burgeoning young talent in the Australian music industry. At the same time, it was a chance for the Bazmark team (which also includes Oscar nominated production designer Catherine Martin, and Romeo and Juliet co-producer Martin Brown) to flex their muscles on a project of scale that could be completed in a fraction of the time it takes to make a feature film. The team wanted to create a musical work which marked the journey of the past decade, before embarking on further travels.
Baz Luhrmann and the team are currently working on several new Bazmark productions, including their forthcoming 20th Century Fox film which they are currently researching in Paris. Bazmark recently produced the Collette Dinnigan fashion show which was directed by Bazmark production designer Catherine Martin.
The Story Behind Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
Anton Monsted, Josh Abrahams and I were working on a remix of Everybody's Free when Ant showed me something he had received from a friend by e-mail; apparently Kurt Vonnegut's graduation speech to students at MIT. On reading it, Vonnegut's simple observations and ideas seemed to provide a profoundly useful guide for getting through life, and we instantly decided to record it. The problem was we only had a day or two to go on the deadline and contacting Vonnegut's agent in time was impossible. The idea seemed unlikely. It was two o'clock in the morning, and this somewhat depressed us, so Anton plugged his computer into the wall and surfed the net to find more information on contacting Vonnegut.
What he found was to surprise us all: newspaper articles on what had become the "Sunscreen Controversy" and what was to prove an amazing moment in the early life of the internet. Anton was immediately printing out news of how the work of a brilliant columnist for the Chicago Tribune had been lifted from her column, and a student as a hoax had connected Vonnegut's name and chain e-mailed it to students all over the world. The words struck a chord with those who read them, and so Vonnegut's "sunscreen speech" was born. It was now four o'clock in the morning and we sat stunned as we read pieces of information.
It seemed to us, whether Vonnegut wrote it or not, the ideas in the piece make such great sense. Back onto the internet again, and we were e-mailing Mary Schmich, the young journalist who wrote it for the Chicago Tribune. Fortunately, Mary had quite a connection to both Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet, so a day later we were in Sydney recording with a local actor the spoken element of what is now "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)." What I think is extraordinary, apart from the inherent values in the ideas, is that we were experiencing ourselves a historical moment in the life of the internet, an example of how massive publishing power is in the hands of anyone with access to a PC.
Biography Provided By Capitol Records