Street of Dreams (Martin Sharp film)

Street of Dreams is an unfinished documentary film about the musician Tiny Tim and the 1979 Ghost Train fire at Luna Park Sydney, directed and produced by Australian artist Martin Sharp.

Themes and content

The film firstly features Tiny Tim, showcasing footage of his record-setting, two-hour-and-seventeen-minute professional singing marathon at Luna Park Sydney in January 1979. It tells Tiny's life story, framed around the marathon performance footage, while highlighting his many eccentricities, religious convictions and sexual hangups as captured by Sharp's camera crews in both Australia and the United States.

The film's other major theme is the 1979 Ghost Train fire at Luna Park, which occurred five months after Tiny's visit. Sharp became convinced the two events were somehow linked, and so the film covers the perceived synchronicities and theological underpinnings of the fire while also telling the story of Luna Park in general. As filming went on, Sharp also began to gather evidence, also presented in the film, that the fire was not an accident as had been originally reported but was in fact deliberately lit by associates of Abe Saffron.

Street of Dreams explores all of the above themes - Tiny, the marathon performance, his life in general, the Ghost Train fire, potential causes of the fire and the history of Luna Park in general - in an interconnected, theological way, with heavy Christian motifs and joined by a narrative in which Tiny makes his way through the park's mirror maze.

Post-production and incomplete status

Although Sharp obsessively worked on Street of Dreams in the years that followed, a final product did not materialize. In 1988, a rough version entitled "The Brighton Cut" was compiled at Tiny's insistence so that the film could be shown at the Brighton Festival. This version was played at various other film festivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s and occasionally aired on TV, though Sharp still considered it a work in progress.

Sharp continued to work on the film up until his death in 2013. The Sharp estate considers it an incomplete work and has never released it officially, although poor-quality bootleg copies of the Brighton Cut circulate online.

In 2014, footage of Tiny's complete Luna Park marathon performance shot for Street of Dreams was released on streaming services as The Non-Stop Luna Park Marathon by Planet Blue Pictures. As of 2023, it can be viewed for free on Vimeo.

Selected cast

Songs performed by Tiny Tim

As per the Brighton Cut.

Selections from the Luna Park Marathon

External links

• Street of Dreams at IMDb
• Street of Dreams at AllMovie
• Street of Dreams at the TCM Movie Database

References