Filmmaker Leonard Lee writes:

I have belatedly read Bob Gosford’s article about the coronial inquiry into the death of filmmaker Bob Plasto.

Leading the chorus regarding what a travesty his death was, not least the high praise of Plasto sung by Ben Sandilands who worked with him in the ’70s, has left me incensed.

“A wonderful man”?

I don’t think so, Ben, at least not when I met and worked with him 1984-85. Plasto was an addled, dope-addicted lunatic who committed one of the biggest acts of bastardry I have ever witnessed in the world of television journalism.

I went into Iran on behalf of his production company, Imago — he was incapable of getting in there himself — and over three months at significant risk to the lives of my film crew and myself researched then directed some 100 hours of exclusive footage about life in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. I remember his grand words well: “It’ll be your story to tell, Leonard.” When I completed the film shoot, Plasto fired me on the spot — and secretly took the extraordinary footage to Turners it Atlanta, sold it uncut for about than $600,000 and then let CNN put it together blind for four hour-long specials.

Plasto arrived for the last few days of the shoot and was mainly holed in our Tehran apartment; he did not direct a frame of the footage.

Iran: In the Name of God won a prestigious Colombia DuPont Award — the television equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize — for Plasto and CNN. Plasto had the hide to hypocritically stand on the platform with Christiane Amanpour to accept it in New York. Footage included a sharia-based murder trial and material shot inside the former US embassy; I was the first Western filmmaker to get in there after the Iranian revolution in ’78-’79. (The footage also won gold awards at several other international film festivals; Plasto must have thought he was in awards Heaven. Especially for work he did not do.)

The CNN series rightly caused uproar from the Iranian delegation at the UN after it was screened. Every prejudice perpetrated by the Western media was compounded by the series; all promises of an even-handed treatment given by me to the Iranian authorities were expediently broken.

I wanted to tell a balanced story in part about a magnificent country whose people, the religious regime notwithstanding, were warm-hearted, fun loving and generous — as opposed to them all being fanatics chanting “death to America” at the gates of the old US Embassy. I wanted to tell how many women I spoke to did not necessarily like the religious regime but did make the point that their husbands had “come home” to their families after the flesh-and-booze bars of the big cities such as Tehran had been shut down.

But the most historically significant content would have been a claim made away from the cameras but recorded on a tape recorder during an interview with Khomeini’s older half-brother, Ayatollah Morteza Pasendideh, in a prayer house in Qom.

“How is your brother, the Imam?” I asked.

“I do not know,” he replied. “They do not let me speak to him on the telephone and he cannot receive my mail. My brother is a prisoner. He is a prisoner of the revolution.”

It was an extraordinary moment: here was Khomeini’s older brother confirming a long-circulated rumour that Khomeini was merely the token leader of Iran and that he was actually a house-bound prisoner of the real rulers of the country.

“They should not have let you come here and speak to me; you are in great danger,” he added.

At that moment, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance guide snatched the tape recorder and ordered us to leave with him. He was white and shaking — with fear. We were thrown into our car and spent several minutes screeching around the back streets of Qom, the guide literally sweating with terror. He relaxed only when we made it through the toll gates on the highway back to Tehran. The tape recording was never returned.

Only I could have told that story and I would have because there was a witness to it: Australian stills photographer Michael Coyne. But my story, particularly that part of it, was not to be told — ever. Thanks to Bob Plasto. Devastated by Plasto’s treachery, I arrived back in Sydney to take up life as a solo dad to my three kids and literally starved for the next 18 months trying to kick-start a some sort of career as a writer.

I have remained silent on this matter for almost 25 years but it’s about time someone spoke up. Plasto was a documentary bloodsucker — a user — who deserved no credit for most of the work he appeared to produce.

I will be accused of dancing on Plasto’s grave, I know. I’m not actually — more like putting the cat of reality among the bullsh-t pigeons. He hurt my kids by unconscionably leaving their dad without an income and a career; I am certainly very and rightly angry about that. We ended up in the Sisters of Mercy Home for Dispossessed Families in Waitara as a result of it.

I confess to a tiny voice somewhere in there that says “but the poor bastard was mad.” Yes, sadly he was — but that’s rather like justifying Hitler as a mere fruit cake, isn’t it?

Filmmaker David Millikan writes:

I was not with Leonard Lee in Iran, nor was I witness to the perfidious behaviour of Plasto following. But I have my own history with Plasto, which is entirely consistent with the picture that Leonard has drawn.

I made a two-hour docu/drama with Plasto about the Coniston Massacre in Central Australia in 1927. It was a successful 10BA film, which went to air in prime time on Friday night on Channel Nine.

In the cause of filming, I found Alex Wilson living west of Yuendumu. At the time of the massacre, he was 17 years old and from Western Australia. He was the Aboriginal tracker who guided the hunting party, led by Constable Murry to where a group of women, children and older men were hiding. Incidentally, Murry was designed by the SA Government as Protector of the Aborigines. The detail of Alex Wilson’s account was remarkable. He saw women, and children gunned down.

People were pawns that Plasto used in the pursuit of his belief that he was the greatest documentary filmmaker in Australia. Before the end of post-production I could stand it no longer. I told him I would never work with him again and walked away. In the following years Plasto slowly devolved into madness. Every few months he called. He would badger me to join him in one last film. He pleaded, and promised and confessed his wrong doings in the past.

Each time, I said the same thing: “Plasto, I will never work with you again.”

Several months before he died, he called again. There was the sound of desperation in his voice. He wanted to do a film series on great religious leaders of the world.

He said: “Millo, Millo, you are the only person I know who could do this …”

I said: “Bob, it sounds like a great project. But I cannot. I was too burnt the last time and I know it would happen again.”

There was a long silence before he spoke. He was seething with rage.

“I don’t know why I bother with you. You’re a small-minded, pathetic lying c-nt.”

It was the last thing I heard him say.