Some of you probably know that my husband and I spent last May in New Zealand. (We wrote about it on our “Observations on film art and Film Art” blog, here and here.) While there I picked up some Kiwi books and DVDs, since it’s sometimes difficult to order them from abroad. One such purchase was Lindsay Shelton’s The Selling of New Zealand Movies (Awa Press, 2005). Shelton was an important behind-the-scenes figure in the country’s film industry and culture, starting the Wellington Film Festival in 1972 and becoming the overseas sales agent for the young New Zealand Film Commission from 1978 to 2000. I don’t know of any other book written by a major film-sales agent, and it gives a fascinating insight into how such things work. (As anyone who has read The Frodo Franchise is aware, I’m intrigued by the nuts and bolts of many aspects of the film industry.)
Shelton’s book provides a good overview of modern filmmaking in New Zealand. It also shows a novel vantage point on how the film industry developed in the decades leading up to Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Familiar names crop up at intervals, and one can trace the earlier circumstances of various firms and people who eventually converged to make Rings. It’s sort of a subtle game of “six degrees of separation,” with the number of degrees gradually disappearing.
The separate threads come together
The process begins early on, when Shelton mentions the 1979 Kiwi films Middle Age Spread, edited by Michael Horton (p. 32), and Squeeze, edited by Jamie Selkirk (34-35). Horton later got nominated for an Oscar for The Two Towers. Jamie, one of the three founding partners in Weta Ltd., supervised the editing on all three parts of Rings and won an Oscar for The Return of the King. Geoff Murphy also crops up, most prominently for Goodbye Pork Pie (37-41), the 1981 road comedy that helped establish the New Zealand film industry. Murphy eventually went abroad to work for many years but ended up returning to do second-unit work on Rings. Many of those beautiful shots of the plains of Rohan are his work.
In 1983 Jim Booth took over as the second executive director of the NZFC (73). He would play a key role in Peter’s career, including fostering Bad Taste by helping it get funding and producing Meet the Feebles, Braindead, and Heavenly Creatures.
New Zealand’s first horror film, Death Warmed Up, was directed by David Blyth in 1985. It won the top prize at the Paris Festival of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films (77), a path to success which Peter would soon follow with his early comic splatter films.
Chapter 9 of Shelton’s book reaches Peter’s own career, giving an interesting wrap-up of the funding of Bad Taste from the NZFC’s perspective. It reveals how Booth and Jamie were assigned to it as “consultant producer” and editor so that some professional experience could be associated with the slapdash project. Shelton also describes in some detail the sales effort for the film at Cannes in 1988 (an effort that provides the book’s cover illustration) and how he had already lined up three buyers on the basis of the brochure and synopsis before Jackson arrived at the festival. “But Peter didn’t like the idea of his film being sold to people who hadn’t seen it, so I postponed the pre-sales deals.” In hindsight that seems ironic, given how Rings was largely financed by pre-sales of all three parts of the trilogy, sight unseen, to dozens of international distributors. At the 1988 Cannes, screenings led to sales to fifteen countries, and Peter’s career was launched. Shelton follows up with a synopsis of Bad Taste’s early theatrical and television showings.
One interesting detail is that the NZFC tried to sell Bad Taste to New Line—a logical idea, given that the firm was then doing its fifth Nightmare on Elm Street film. New Line’s buying agent, Sara Risher, had Shelton turn the film off after twenty minutes. He points out that twelve years later, he and Risher attended the Los Angeles reception for The Fellowship of the Ring (91-92). (Not that I blame Risher. Bad Taste has a devoted cult following, obviously, but it doesn’t have the professional polish that even a small Hollywood firm would look for—something that Peter’s team had achieved by Braindead.)
A double irony struck me upon reading that passage, since in 1998 Jackson and his team famously met with Bob Shaye to pitch Rings to him when it was in turnaround from Miramax. (See Chapter 1 of The Frodo Franchise.) They had been warned that Shaye might watch for five minutes and then ask them to turn off the half-hour pitch video they had brought. That time it didn’t happen, and the rest is history. Of course, if New Line had bought Bad Taste, Peter’s career might have taken some very different turns, and Rings might never have been conceived as a project.
Shelton also writes about how video piracy in the United Kingdom kept Bad Taste from making any money there for about three years. Ironically, the bootleg copies made the film popular enough that Polygram brought out a legitimate video, and the film generated income for its makers (103-104).
Apart from Jamie and Peter, some of my other interviewees-to-be show up in these pages. Sue Thompson, who was the CEO for The Film Unit when I spoke with her in 2003 and again in 2004, makes some brief appearances about midway through the book. I’ll never forget sitting down with Sue for the first time, in a large office in the grim old Film Unit building in Lower Hutt. She seemed puzzled that I would want to interview her, saying that she didn’t think she could tell me much. Twenty minutes later I was thinking to myself how incredibly long I would have to spend taking notes on the recording, since Sue was talking a mile a minute about the technological build-up of the Film Unit, its struggle for international business, the showing of the preview footage of Rings at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, and much more, all with an apparent perfect recall for facts and dates. I couldn’t possibly use everything she told me in that 77-minute interview or in the 73-minute one about a year later. Still, I learned a lot from both and got a vivid picture of how Peter’s filmmaking facilities in Wellington developed.
Sue only appears briefly in The Selling of New Zealand Movies as the head of sales for the short-lived Energy Source production company (1987), attending the Rio Film Festival with Shelton in 1988 (97, 101).
There’s a short section on the making and selling of Meet the Feebles, which didn’t sell well for theatrical release but was popular at festivals. Speaking of the Mifed festival of 1989, Shelton remarks, “Peter arrived toward the end of the market, exhausted by completing his film to a tight deadline and with an even tighter budget” (103). The budgets may not be so tight these days, but the last-minute completions are not gone.
Shelton also summarizes the fortunes of Braindead (aka Dead Alive), which won prizes at various science-fiction festivals and had a modest theatrical success (124-125).
1993 saw the beginning of Miramax’s connection with New Zealand cinema. It bought Desperate Remedies, a romantic drama, at Cannes and released Jane Campion’s The Piano. The latter was actually financed with French money, but its subject matter, New Zealand locations, and Kiwi director led it to be perceived as a local production. Miramax had also been following Peter’s career and closed a deal on Heavenly Creatures at Cannes (127-133). As I explain in Chapter 1 of The Frodo Franchise, that deal was one of the crucial factors that would eventually make the production of Rings possible.
The degrees of separation are definitely disappearing by this point in the book. Mark Ordesky acquired Once Were Warriors (1994) for New Line. (New Line had previously distributed one Kiwi film, Campion’s An Angel at My Table.) Although extremely successful in New Zealand and other territories, Once Were Warriors did only moderate business in the U.S. Still, Ordesky’s experiences acquiring films in New Zealand and Australia gave him a familiarity with the industries there that later made him the ideal producer to mediate between New Line executives and the Rings team.
Another interviewee appears when Shelton describes how Dr. Ruth Harley became the CEO of the NZFC in 1997. (She still holds that position.) I talked with Ruth twice, in 2003 and 2005, and she gave me a great deal of insight into the impact Rings had on local filmmaking. At the time Rings was being made there was some controversy over whether it would damage the domestic industry. By now it has become apparent that that industry is distinctly healthier than it was before Rings, and the NZFC continues to subsidize and sell a small but steady stream of Kiwi movies.
Other interesting factoids
In Chapter 10 of my book I talk about how Investment New Zealand organized receptions and parties in various international cities around the premieres of Rings’s three parts, serving New Zealand food and wine. A similar, though doubtless smaller, reception was held by New Zealand’s consult-general for the New York release of Sleeping Dogs in early 1982 (51-52); that film was a turning point for establishing Kiwi films abroad (and was Sam Neill’s first step on the way to stardom). By the way, another reception planned at the Hamburg Film Institute in relation to a retrospective of Kiwi films fell flat in 1989. It was held on the night the Berlin Wall fell (104).
My chapter also discusses the impact of Rings on New Zealand tourism. The promotion of the country through its films had started much earlier, though. Shelton mentions that a season of Kiwi films on German television in 1984 led to a doubling of inquiries about travel to New Zealand at the government’s Frankfurt office (71).
My Chapter 4 deals with the brand partnership formed between New Line and Air New Zealand for a Rings-based promotion, including some sweepstakes with trips to New Zealand as prizes. Shelton reveals that Air NZ refused to get involved in a sweepstakes relating to Harry Sinclair’s The Price of Milk (2000). Qantas agreed instead and gave four free tickets for the contest. Air NZ probably made a good call. The Price of Milk is a quirky and charming film, and it had an American release, but it wasn’t a success.
Finally, in researching the Kiwi film industry, I kept running across a quotation attributed to the American Film Institute, calling New Zealand cinema “one of the wonders of the world … a major achievement that deserves wide recognition.” I wondered just why the AFI should say such a thing. Shelton reveals that the words come from a catalogue written on the occasion of a 30-day season of New Zealand films in 1985 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (a very big deal indeed, obviously, for the recognition of the young industry). The NZFC used that quotation for decades. The commission seems to have dropped it at last, but it still crops up in official promotional material, as on this New Zealand embassy site.
How to get the book
Fortunately The Selling of New Zealand Movies isn’t as difficult to buy abroad as some New Zealand books are. It is distributed by the Independent Publishers Group and can be bought at its website and at ecampus.com. Within New Zealand it is available direct from the publisher. My friend Harriet Margolis, a professor at Victoria University Wellington, reviews Shelton’s book here.
