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The release in 2011 of Fred Schepisi's film of The Eye of the Storm (1973), the first adaptation to the screen of one of Patrick White's novels, was the culmination of many years of planning and fund raising. It also broke a hoodoo that had seemed to afflict anyone who tried to film a White novel, given the large number of unsuccessful attempts over the years. In particular, there was the long-running saga of efforts to film Voss (1957), seemingly as doomed to failure as the explorer's own quest. The repeated disappointments turned White against his novel and even made him wary of Richard Meale's opera based on it. On 21 February 1981 he wrote to David Malouf, author of the opera's libretto, T suppose deep inside me I feel nobody will do anything with Voss in any medium; that will be Leichhardt's revenge for something I should never have done' (Marr Papers). Contrary to his fears, the opera was 'a tremendous success-full houses and enthusiastic audiences,' as he told his English publisher Graham C. Greene, noting that this should help sales of the novel (Marr ed. 610-11). Indeed, from early in his career, White dreamed of his novels being filmed, not just because of the possible boost to sales but because of his love of film.
As David Marr's biography records, White had a longstanding interest in the theatre, writing plays while still at school (58, 61). His love of going to the cinema was just as longstanding though this has received much less attention from critics and biographers. In his autobiography Flaws in the Glass (1981), after expressing his gratitude to his mother for introducing him to 'theatre at an early age,' White continues:
My vocation came closest to revealing itself in those visits to the theatre, usually musical comedy, in the early bubblings of sexuality, and expeditions through the streets observing, always observing. I suppose I was happiest visiting elderly literate women, book shops in which the smell of books, the feel of them, the titles I read, intoxicated, and most of all, during the hours I spent at 'the pitchers,' either at the Cross or down George Street. My mother did not approve of the cinema; films, she maintained, hurt her...