Читать книгу Anything You Can Imagine - Ian Nathan - Страница 11

Of course, nothing is ever new to Hollywood. In 1928, the great Erich von Stroheim filmed The Wedding March back-to-back with its sequel, The Honeymoon. In 1966, Hammer Films shot Dracula: Prince of Darkness in concert with the unrelated Rasputin: The Mad Monk so they could make profitable use of the cast and crew, led by the redoubtable Christopher Lee. In 1973, The Three Musketeers simply carried on swashbuckling into The Four Musketeers. And, in 1978, from behind a veil of secrecy, Warner Bros. brought back Superman, knowing they already had Superman II ready for take-off. During the double-production, they even managed to dispense with director Richard Donner and replace him with Richard Lester.

While the rights to The Lord of the Rings were stagnating at UA, David Lean tried to get the studio to bail out his two-part, single-schedule version of The Bounty, which had got as far as building a three-mast replica merchant ship before backer Dino De Laurentiis swam for shore. Attempting to edit down great swathes of Cleopatra in 1963, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz recommended releasing a five-hour version in two halves, but 20th Century Fox vetoed the idea.

Perhaps the most publicized of all hybrid productions was Robert Zemeckis’ back-to-Back to the Futures, two intertwined sequels filmed in one gallop between 1989 and 1990, impressively spinning from a dystopian future to the Wild West.

Less celebrated by the chronicles of Hollywood was Peter Jackson’s avowed intention to make Bad Taste 2 and 3 in one go. This extension to his interplanetary saga of man-eating alien fast food operators, while considerably bigger in scope, was still scheduled to take considerably less than the four years it took to complete Bad Taste. The sequels have yet to come to pass, but here was proof that Jackson had already given serious consideration to the idea of juggling two films at once.

For all the risks involved — you would be doubling down (in gambling terminology, the doubling of an original bet in Blackjack; or, in more general terms, the doubling of one’s commitment to a risky strategy) on a sequel to a film that could stumble out of the gates — Jackson knew back-to-back filmmaking was the only conceivable way to do justice to The Lord of the Rings. To wait on the sequel would result in spiralling costs and a loss in the richness and flow of storytelling. Throughout his early discussions with Harvey Weinstein, he was clear they were telling one long, baroque story artfully sliced in twain.

And despite the best efforts of their lawyers to prevaricate until kingdom come, Harvey had called to say that he had finally struck a deal with Saul Zaentz. Miramax were officially making The Lord of the Rings. Or would be once they had agreed upon the script.

Throughout the endless legal quibbling, Jackson hadn’t even touched a copy of the book. The uncertainty had played on his superstitious nature. He was terrified of re-reading it, getting excited imagining the movie he could make, only for it all to fall apart.

In short, he was not in the business of tempting fate.

So it wasn’t until the spring of 1997, on the day they received the news, that Jackson and Fran Walsh took a momentous shopping trip into downtown Wellington to buy what would be his second copy of The Lord of the Rings. Until that time, as he admitted, it had ‘been a bit foggy’. Years later, interviewers would be staggered to find that Jackson had not spent his puberty pining over Middle-earth. Neither he nor Walsh had ever been Tolkien fanatics. It had been an abstract possibility. Which they now needed to make a reality.

Symbolically, the very copy they bought was the one Jackson would keep to hand throughout the entire production, the margins graffitied with notes. He still has it somewhere: three large paperbacks packaged in a box and adorned inside and on the covers with fifty beautiful watercolours by Alan Lee. The beauty of those pictures the deciding factor in the purchase.

What a pleasure, almost innocent, that moment must have been. Opening it up, flexing the cover back and letting the pages flow past, sensing the film that he might make. Only now realizing the full magnitude of what he was attempting. Only now gauging the thrilling possibility of what lay before him.

However, between the dying breath of King Kong and the dawning of The Lord of the Rings there had been a lull of six weeks where Jackson had been faced with his persistent Weta Digital problem. Their thirty-five Silicon Graphics machines were sitting idle and growing obsolete. Licence payments were due on the software packages, as well as the wages of the operators who were likely to up sticks for an increasingly bountiful digital revolution in Los Angeles. During development on King Kong they had doubled their staff. Mothballing Weta Digital until Middle-earth was ready wasn’t an option.

Again it was Zemeckis who arrived in the nick of time. He was in post-production on an expensive, hard-science fiction adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact and offered Weta Digital the opportunity to create the sequence of Jodie Foster plunging through a wormhole.

‘That was the first thing we ever did for an outside vendor,’ reports Jackson. While only a stopgap, this was enormously significant in industry terms. Here was the first, faint signal that Weta Digital would one day operate outside of Jackson’s projects and rival the likes of ILM and Digital Domain as a visual effects house for all-comers. For now, it was a matter of necessity. And Jackson was still serving as go-between with Zemeckis.

‘I supervised it a bit from my end,’ he laughs, amused by his credit as Additional Visual Effects. ‘He wanted me to help visualize it, and sort of supervise. So, I did act like a visual effects supervisor for that scene, you could say.’

While still wary of jinxing the deal by even touching a copy of The Lord of the Rings,¹ Jackson and Walsh had risked taking one step in the direction of a screenplay. They asked erstwhile collaborator Costa Botes to break the book down scene-by-scene into a working précis. Loading it up onto their computer they could then experiment with different road maps from Hobbiton to the Crack of Doom.

Once they began to re-assimilate the book, the issue of structure became more serious. What of Tolkien’s vast story would they keep? What would they excise? What would they dare add to the precious story? How faithful would they be to the book? It was the biggest question of all. Could they radically alter Tolkien and still be authentic? Ironically, given what eventually transpired at Miramax, at this stage they briefly explored the idea of ‘one long, epic film’. Jackson also wondered whether it really ought to be three films, but Harvey swiftly disabused him of that notion.

Out of these first sessions emerged a ninety-two-page treatment, made up of 266 sequences: the embryo of an Oscar-winning trilogy.

Already mindful of how much interest the adaptation would engender, even in sleepy Wellington, Jackson codenamed the treatment Jamboree: The Life of Lord Baden Powell. You suspect more to amuse themselves, this also involved the adoption of grand but hardly uncrackable nom-de-plumes: Fran Walsh was Fredericka Wharburton; Peter Jackson became Percy J. Judkins.

Says ‘Judkins’, by way of explanation, ‘Jamboree was the codename for the 1933 film The Son of Kong, and we gave it the scouting theme on the cover.’ The caution to ‘be prepared’ would gain unwelcome prescience.

Not long afterwards came a stroke of phenomenally good fortune. Unable to gauge whether what they were writing was any good, Walsh decided they needed another voice in the mix. So they contacted Stephen Sinclair, a Kiwi playwright who had worked with them on Meet the Feebles and Braindead. Sinclair, who knew little of Tolkien, would in turn seek out the advice of his girlfriend, who knew her stuff. In this understated way, Philippa Boyens became pivotally involved in the project.

Parallel to wrestling the book’s great girth into two palatable films was an extraordinary period of quasi-scientific research into how the two sides of Weta were going to solve a problem like Middle-earth without sillification. Pint-sized hobbits, outsized creatures, epic battles, the magnificent variety of place and people that made the book so popular: Jackson needed to prove that not only filmmaking technology was ready for Tolkien, but Kiwi aptitude as well.

By August 1997, they were storyboarding and generating animatics (a rudimentary computer-based pre-visualization, or pre-viz, of key action). The influential artists Alan Lee and John Howe were installed in Wellington, already turning their intuition for Tolkien into reams of concept art. Locations were being scouted, logistics fathomed and the Gordian knot of scheduling loosened.

The journey of writing and visualizing the films will be tackled in the next chapter, but across Miramar the great beast of preproduction was stirring into motion: eighteen months of great hope and greater strife. Jackson and Walsh were slowly, respectfully and fretfully forming a relationship with a strait-laced Oxford don who had never suffered film people gladly. They were also developing a markedly different kind of relationship with Harvey Weinstein, a film person who didn’t suffer anyone gladly.

*

‘Fran remembers this stuff much better than I do,’ says Jackson stoically. ‘It’s like a car crash, I tend to sort of wipe out all the bad memories. Fran hangs on to every detail.’ However much he may wish to forget, their dealings with the brothers grim are sewn into the fabric of this story …

With their initial treatment completed, Jackson and Walsh flew to New York to begin their script meetings at Miramax, and get their first taste of the Weinstein way. There would be three script meetings in all, principally with the two executives Cary Granat (inevitably dubbed ‘Cary Grant’), the head of production at Dimension, and John Gordon, a Miramax production executive who had survived as Harvey’s assistant, who were managing the project. Harvey and Bob were, as Jackson ominously puts it, ‘floating around’. It had been decreed that this was to be the first Dimension-Miramax co-production and both brothers would make their presence felt.

Meetings at Miramax’s Tribeca office were conducted in a small, unventilated room walled in frosted glass, known among browbeaten indie filmmakers as the ‘sweatbox’. From the very first it was clear the Weinsteins were going to subject the project to the full glare of their nervous scrutiny. The honeymoon of getting the deal sealed was over; this was now about how their money was going to be spent. Jackson had a genuine feeling that it was only now that the brothers were truly rationalizing what was involved.

While Harvey had read the book in college, it became clear many of the executives, including Bob, had not. They were faced with the same frustration that confronted John Boorman and Ralph Bakshi — how could you drill down into the fine print of Tolkien’s world when everything you talked about was met with various degrees of bafflement?

Bob took almost malicious pride in playing the incredulous audience member who had never heard of Mr. J.R.R. Whoever. Any script was going to have to pass the Bob test. Indeed, having submitted an early draft, Jackson remembers Bob slamming his hand down on the table in triumph.

‘I know what this is!’ he declared. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring, these nine characters, are all expert saboteurs. They all have their specialties. It’s the fucking Guns of Navarone!’

‘Really? The Lord of the Rings?’ laughs Jackson, recalling his own incredulous reaction — and he couldn’t be a bigger fan of the fucking Guns of Navarone. ‘He had figured it all out. He now had a filter by which he could understand this thing.’

Harvey would generally give good notes, nothing too crazy. Bob was big on the fact they had to kill a hobbit. ‘Pick one,’ he kept telling them. All they could do was keep deflecting this stuff: ‘Well, we will certainly think about that …’ It soon became a slog. They were rewriting and rewriting, then flying to New York to play Tolkien tennis with the Weinsteins. Jackson started to suspect that the brothers might be stalling.

The budget, Harvey insisted, was not to exceed $75 million, which based on the $26 million The Frighteners had cost with all its CGI, Jackson naively thought was achievable. Then the whole process was like a whirlpool of elusive possibility in which they were increasingly likely to drown.

Amusingly, if only in hindsight, the Weinsteins revealed a good Harvey-bad Bob routine. Whenever Bob was out of the room, Harvey would tell them to ignore his brother, who was just crazy. Stick with his ideas.

‘But you know that is not really the truth,’ sighs Jackson. ‘You’re lulled into thinking Harvey is the one you can talk honestly with. But the real truth is he is really tight with Bob. It’s an illusion.’

On occasion this Abbott and Costello routine would explode into full theatrics. For instance, after another of Bob’s ill-informed ideas, it was Harvey who slammed his meaty fist onto the table before storming out of the sweatbox. They watched his silhouette retreat down the corridor while Bob carried on regardless. Within moments Harvey’s silhouette, as unmistakable as Hitchcock, came back down the corridor clutching an Oscar. The one his half of Miramax had received for The English Patient. He burst back into the room and thrust it in front of Bob.

‘I’ve got one of these; you haven’t got one of these. So who the hell do you think is the smarter one? Shut up, Bob!’

Looking back with a less jaundiced eye, Jackson likens Harvey’s tricks to Tony Soprano or what it must have been like to work for one of the old, bullying Hollywood moguls, a Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Kohn, who would rage or weep to get their way. Everything had shifted into a different register, one of emotional extremes utterly alien to a New Zealand temperament. It was all so bipolar: tantrums followed by largesse.

During the darkest hours, as relationships fragmented, Harvey had called Ken Kamins and began to rant down the cell phone. Eventually Kamins got a word in edgewise, ‘Harvey, I just don’t want to hear this. I am with my wife giving birth.’

The next day a huge gift basket arrives care of Miramax.

Beneath all of Harvey’s volatility was a stealthy manipulation. As the mists began to clear on a workable structure for the two films, it became starkly apparent that $75 million was vastly short of what was required. Experienced Australian producer Tim Sanders, who had worked on The Frighteners, had come on board at Jackson’s behest expressly to draw up a budget. Realistically, he estimated the two films would cost $130 to $135 million. The news didn’t go down well with Harvey, who had already invested in the region of $12 million toward serious development costs. A fact, Jackson says, ‘that was driving him nuts’.

What Harvey wasn’t telling Jackson was that he couldn’t get Disney to let him greenlight anything beyond $75 million. He later claimed he had tried to entice them onboard as partners, but they turned him down flat.

Kamins isn’t so sure that Disney had been so dismissive. ‘I have since talked to [then Disney CEO] Michael Eisner and he tells me that he wanted to engage, but Harvey wouldn’t show him anything. Wouldn’t show him scripts. Wouldn’t show him artwork. Wouldn’t let him talk to Peter. I don’t know if this is history being rewritten by the different participants, but he claims that he had asked Harvey for the ability to talk to Peter and the answer was no. And so when the answer was no, it was kind of like well, “Okay, no to you too.”’

Harvey had even ventured to other studios in an attempt to offset the swelling costs. Whether it was the uncertainty of getting into the Miramax business, the pervasive scepticism over the viability of the project, or good old-fashioned schadenfreude, no one was buying.

In desperation, Harvey dispatched the ‘executive from hell’ to New Zealand charged with rationalizing Sanders’ estimates back to $75 million. Jackson had looked up Russ Markovitz’s credits and ‘it was all a bit bloody dodgy’. With loose ties to Dimension through risible straight-to-video horror sequels for The Prophecy and From Dusk Till Dawn, Markovitz aggravated one and all by showing scant interest in the movie but a great obsession with Jackson having a medical in order to be properly insured. His increasingly paranoid imagination concocting nefarious plots to bump off the director for the insurance money, Jackson kept coming up with excuses to get out of it, before flatly refusing. ‘It was a screwy time,’ he admits. After two months, the mysterious Markovitz returned to from whence he came and was never heard from again.

With better judgment, Harvey then sent down Marty Katz, a more genial, square-jawed old-Hollywood type fresh from trouble shooting on Titanic, who expended a lot of energy trying to get his Porsche shipped over from Los Angeles. Katz, who was an old friend of Zemeckis, got along well with Jackson. He was impressed by what they were achieving in Wellington and reported back to Miramax both his enthusiasm and the confirmation that, ‘If you’ve only got seventy-five million you can only do one film.’

In the end, his Porsche would never get to Wellington. Jackson, Walsh and Katz were summoned to the looming Orthancs of New York for a crisis meeting

‘That is when it all sort of went pear-shaped,’ says Jackson.

They were sat in the sweatbox. But there were no theatrics, no double-act. In fact, there was no Bob. Which was a very bad sign. Harvey was about to give them the benefit of his feelings and this time the fury wasn’t an act. Jackson had betrayed them. He had broken their agreement. He had wasted $12 million of their money. Wasted his time, squandered his good will. Now the director had to do what was right and make a single film of The Lord of the Rings of no more than two hours in length for $75 million otherwise he was going to get John Madden to direct it.

Courtly and intelligent, a similar man in some respects to John Boorman, Madden was the very English director currently finishing up Shakespeare In Love to Harvey’s satisfaction. The featherlight period rom-com concerning the famous playwright’s romantic distractions would soon give Harvey another Oscar with which to berate his brother.

Kamins recalls a more radical threat. ‘Harvey was like, “You’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it.”’

Mad as that sounded, there was no way to know if it was a bluff. At the time he took it as gospel: Quentin Tarantino’s fucking Middle-earth.

Harvey had already sent Jackson’s two-film draft to British screenwriter Hossein Amini, another talent in good standing at Miramax having adapted Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Amini remembers being baffled by the peculiar cover: ‘Jamboree, The Life of Lord Baden Powell.’ Turning the page, it evidently had little to do with the Scout Movement.

Amini was a huge Tolkien fan and had been following the rumours about an adaptation. Now, here in his hands, was the secret script for The Lord of the Rings. He knew nothing of Harvey’s ultimatum to Jackson that either Madden or Tarantino was waiting in the wings. ‘They mentioned it might need some work, but I couldn’t really see why. I read it and loved it,’ he recalls.

When Miramax suggested converting it into one film, Amini’s mind shot back to Bakshi’s animated effort. A single film version would do nothing but alienate the massive fan base. ‘I believe at the time budget was the biggest stumbling block,’ he says, remaining convinced he was a bluff to get Jackson to rethink his approach toward the single film option.

In the sweatbox, with New York indifferently getting on with life somewhere outside, Jackson had reached the same conclusion. His face taking on a Gollum-like pallor, his hands trembling, he refused to crack. He just couldn’t see how you could make a single film and still do justice to the book.

Harvey engaged the full orchestra of his fury, threatening lawsuits to get his money back once he had kicked them off the project and back to New Zealand.²

Says Kamins, ‘Harvey really didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And I think Peter was putting him in an awkward place. There was a mix of a lot of different feelings.’ Indeed, it remains a tricky situation to parse. Jackson had agreed to a $75 million budget, and his plans had vastly outstripped that. Channels of communication had broken down. But he was on a road that would lead to over three billion dollars and Oscars galore. While no one could have quite predicted that, Miramax’s voluble supremo had neither the foresight nor the means to back Jackson’s vision, and in his frustration was pursuing something inevitably inferior. Did he really believe in the single film option?

To Jackson here was irony as bitter as burnt coffee (and he is assuredly a tea man). When they had first come to Miramax, Harvey had actually screened the Bakshi debacle proudly announcing, ‘This is something we are never going to do.’

Jackson had been forewarned. Katz had got wind of the single-film scenario, although Jackson had thought he meant a first part with a potential sequel to follow. Even this thin hope was shredded, however, when a memo arrived at his hotel emblazoned ‘ultra-confidential’. It turned out to be a litany of suggestions on how to crush Tolkien’s novel into a tidy two hours, written without Jackson’s knowledge.

Dated 17 June 1998 and written by Miramax development head Jack Lechner, it began, ‘We’ve been thinking long and hard …’ Despite Jackson’s yeomen’s efforts, the two-film structure was too dense — code for too expensive — and they had a more radical, streamlined approach utilizing ‘key elements’ but still dispensing with many. Among its manifest sins, Helm’s Deep was cut, Théoden and Denethor combined (QED: so were Rohan and Gondor) and Éowyn replaced Faramir to be Boromir’s sister, while the memo vacillated over whether the problematic Saruman should be cut or present at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The great, subterranean drama of Moria was to be ‘drastically’ shortened: Balin’s Tomb, Orc attack, Balrog and out.

‘It was literally guaranteed to disappoint every single person that has read that book,’ concludes Jackson, still smarting.

Scribbled on the copy of the memo now archived in Miramar, was a note from Jackson to distribute it to all the department heads, ‘so they can see why the project is coming to a sticky end.’

Harvey had cornered him. He understood the producer was doing what he felt was best for Miramax, that was his job, but Jackson and Walsh were shattered. They couldn’t even think straight.

‘We just said to Harvey, “We can’t give you an answer. Please will you just give us time to fly back to New Zealand to think about it?”’

That was when Harvey’s mood got worse.

The filmmakers left Miramax’s office as if escaping Mount Doom, dashing across Tribeca to find a haven with their friend David Linde, the executive who had first gone to New Zealand to see Heavenly Creatures and since left Miramax to start his own production company, Good Machine. Linde could tell at a glance they were in a bad way. He retrieved a bottle of Scotch from a cabinet, stored for such an emergency.

Jackson smiles. ‘It was the first time in my life I had ever drunk scotch.’

Catching the next flight home, Jackson and Walsh headed down the coast for a few days with the intention of celebrating Walsh’s birthday. But on 8 July 1998, the trip was more about decompression; a chance to breathe blessed New Zealand air after all that American humidity.

Reflecting on their situation, it must have felt like they were cursed. They had spent nine arduous months on their remake of King Kong with Universal only for it to come to nothing. Now their even longer quest to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen was heading the same way, or arguably somewhere worse. Being forced to make a hugely compromised version of the book they knew in their bones, no matter how hard they worked, would only be met with the scorn of fans; who would place the blame squarely upon Jackson’s shoulders. This was no longer about making the best version of the book under the circumstance. This threatened their credibility as filmmakers.

Walking along the beach, you like to think with the sun setting, they accepted that there were forces you could not conquer. Skull Island or Mordor had nothing on Hollywood.

‘I’d been hit too many times,’ says Jackson.

He called Kamins. ‘Just tell Harvey we can’t do it. We’d rather have our lives and do our films and not deal with all this crap anymore. Tell Harvey to go ahead and make his film and good luck.’

Kamins being Kamins, he didn’t actually do that.

Undaunted, resolute, the voice of reason: Kamins allowed fevers to cool down then went back to Harvey with a request. ‘At the end of the day, what was the worst that was going to happen?’ he laughs. If Weinstein still said no, the disappointment would remain the same.

These guys have killed themselves for you, he insisted. They have a vision that they had all signed up for. Would he give them an opportunity to make the movie the way they envisioned it somewhere else? You’re not obligated, but I’m asking.

Harvey agreed, but his terms were draconian.

The most aggressive studio turnaround period, in which a filmmaker can attempt to find a new home for their project, might be six months. Traditionally, it’s a year.

‘You have four weeks,’ Harvey told Kamins. ‘If you set it up someplace else, I get all my money back immediately on signature. Not on the first day of photography. I get it all on signature. And I get five per cent of first dollar gross across the board.’

‘Okay,’ said Kamins, icy calm, ‘let me give it a shot.’

*

So the phone would ring again, the shrill, insistent call of fate. Hope was back on the agenda. A fool’s hope maybe — Kamins had been frank: relocating a project in four weeks was unheard of — but for now they were back in the Tolkien business. And that was enough.

‘Exactly four weeks as the clock ticks,’ echoes Jackson ruefully. Twenty-eight days later, if no deal had been struck, Harvey would take back control and offer it to Madden or Tarantino or whoever. You sense Weinstein really didn’t believe it would happen, not under his impossible conditions. That ultimately he was hoping Jackson would learn the error of his ambitions and agree to make one film with Miramax.

Miramax had done a fine job distributing Heavenly Creatures, raising the New Zealand director’s status immeasurably as a commercial filmmaker. They had invested in Jackson and wanted a return on that investment.

‘Harvey didn’t want to give up the movie,’ says Kamins. ‘Harvey had really wanted these films and he wanted them with Peter. But I think Bob didn’t. They weren’t on the same page. Bob was second-guessing the economic investment and was worried that they could really be putting themselves on a bad financial footing.’

Right now, what Jackson needed was a presentation. One that, as Kamins explains, quickly answered the questions, ‘Why these movies? Why now? And why us?’

Of course, they were sitting on a hoard of concept art, test footage, storyboards, animatics, and even props and prosthetics. Richard Taylor admits that even as the mood had worsened with Miramax he and his team had refused to stop working. Frankly, they were in denial. The thought of abandoning the project was too painful to recognize. ‘We were like addicts,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t stop ourselves.’ They went on designing, sculpting maquettes, and forging weapons and armour for a hypothetical Middle-earth. Lee and Howe, at least, would return to England and Switzerland respectively, their brief, wonderful sojourn in the moving picture business over with.

This was far too much material to play show-and-tell with the limited patience of a prospective studio. They would be out of the room before they’d finished setting up their slide show. There was also scant chance of encouraging anyone down to New Zealand to see their nascent operation. Half of Hollywood still couldn’t find it on a map. Jackson’s solution was to shoot a short film, a presentation piece that told their story. Kamins dubs it ‘the making of the making of’.

Jackson still considers it the most important film he has ever made.

Cutting short Walsh’s chaotic birthday trip, they were a good three-hour drive from their Wellington base. And so a story, already fraught, once again gathers the patina of movie melodrama as a storm bowled in off the Cook Strait and two filmmakers thinking of nothing else but the ticking clock persuaded a helicopter pilot to brave the tempest.

Jackson sounds rueful. A bad flier, he was known to turn his knuckles transparent gripping the armrests as 747s drooped into LAX. ‘We had the worst helicopter ride in the world around the coast,’ he remembers. To a Weinsteinian chorus of thunder, pummelled by winds, lashed with rain and plunging between pockets of air it felt as if King Kong had plucked them out of the sky. When they touched down in Wellington, Jackson’s legs almost gave out, but it never occurred to either of them they were now risking their lives for the sake of these films.

So while Kamins began a preliminary round of the studios, armed only with the scripts and a basic animatic of the story, Jackson enlisted Allun ‘Bolie’ Bollinger, cinematographer on Heavenly Creatures, and roused his team to help create a forceful ‘documentary’.

What immediately impresses is how confidently the thirty-five-minute pitch answered Kamins’ questions. It demonstrates an affinity with the material and the certainty that technology had not only caught up with Tolkien’s imagination but this New Zealand operation was more than capable of wielding those advances. With a youthful Jackson in the starring role (bearing no ill effects from his recent dalliance with death), the film makes explicit how this vast world would be brought to life.

Talking heads extoll the need for realism. A mythical reality that is ‘lived in, sweated in’ says Howe. Using the power of the Lee-Howe artwork and behind-the-scenes footage from Weta Workshop, they describe how hobbit stature would be achieved using forced perspective, motion-controlled cameras and body doubles with digital face replacement. There are beautifully lit maquettes by the sculptural magician Jamie Beswarick: powerful, redolent versions of Orcs, Ringwraiths and the Balrog exactly as they would appear in the finished film.

At Weta Digital they talk up the Cave-troll as their test case for digital biology, modelled on a real human skeleton and musculature then distorted into a troll’s frame. Motion capture is discussed but not yet in relation to, at this stage, a more alien-looking Gollum. Software magician Stephen Regelous reveals prototype footage of the MASSIVE software program that would allow them to mount battles with thousands of computer-generated ‘thinking’ soldiers.

There is also a slender tally of things later abandoned or used limitedly: large puppets to scale up humans alongside hobbits, demonic horses for the Ringwraiths and the idea of giving all the Orcs digitally enlarged eyes like Gollum.

Local actors including the steadfast Jed Brophy (whose involvement with Jackson goes back to Braindead), Craig Parker (who would play the elf Haldir, as Frodo) and Peter Vere Jones (from Bad Taste, as a touching Gandalf), perform choice segments from an animatic of the entire film — something else that had displeased Miramax. Familiar passages from The Council of Elrond, Moria and Mount Doom relayed over cycling storyboards. The scores of Braveheart and The Last of the Mohicans are used throughout.

The footage is so thorough and ardently mounted it became the prototype for Jackson’s vaults of DVD extras. This wasn’t a desperate plea it was a fully strategized battle plan.

To complement the video, Taylor’s team provided a set of their finest maquettes to accompany Jackson. Something meaningfully tactile that would hopefully serve a better purpose than the sculpture of King Kong sent and then retrieved from Universal.

The idea was that when they got to LA there would be a slew of meetings with their dog-and-pony show raring to go. However, they landed to the news only two meetings had actually been confirmed.

On the other side of the Pacific, Kamins had been burning a hole in his contact book trying to get Jackson through the door. To give the studios a taste of how serious a proposition this was, how good. But he was drawing blank after blank; it was terrifying.

Notoriously, Decca turned down the Beatles, nearly every publisher in London passed on Harry Potter and Western Union spurned the chance to spend $100,000 on the patent for an ‘interesting novelty’ called a telephone. History is littered with bad calls. But in Hollywood commercial misjudgements are an inevitable side effect of the business where every movie is a swing at a curving ball; you can only hope to hit more often than you miss. In Hollywood, as screenwriter William Goldman immortally pronounced, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ However popular the book might be, The Lord of the Rings held no guarantees. It was too long, too tricky and — cue: siren — too expensive. Add in Harvey’s prohibitive conditions and Kamins knew he had a hard sell on his hands.

But he hadn’t counted on the politics. The obvious objections weren’t even raised. That Jackson didn’t have the track record to support this kind of venture. That fantasy struggled at the box office. That this sounded like Willow or Labyrinth. ‘It wasn’t any of those things,’ says Kamins. This was an industry-wide jeremiad against the viability of Tolkien.

Paramount was developing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the bestselling children’s fantasy by Tolkien’s friend and peer C.S. Lewis. They felt they were tonally too close (a nonsense). Lewis’ book would eventually be adapted by Walton Media and released by Disney to capitalize on Jackson’s triumph.

Disney was already in the middle of things with Harvey and had spurned, or been denied, the chance to be involved.

‘Regency was interested.’ Kamins is referring to independent production house Regency Enterprises, run by the billionaire and former Israeli spy Arnon Milchan — another colourful character in the echelons of Hollywood. With distribution deals at Warner and 20th Century Fox, they can boast hits as varied as JFK, Pretty Woman, and LA Confidential. Milchan had gotten as far as approaching his partners at Fox to say he was keen.

‘What’s Saul Zaentz’s involvement?’ Fox had shot back.

‘Well, he gets a fee,’ Milchan responded carefully. ‘He doesn’t get a credit, but he gets a fee and a participation on the back end.’ Wherever they went the basic terms of Zaentz’s deal with Miramax would still stand.

Kamins shakes his head philosophically. Where once The English Patient had opened doors, now it was slamming them shut.

‘Fox had fumed, “If he gets one nickel, we’re out.”’

The year Fox walked away from The English Patient, Zaentz had given the keynote address at the American Film Market. Even though the film had been revived with Miramax, this turned into a twenty-minute denunciation of the evil empire, Fox. How they hated movies, hated filmmakers and were anti-artists.

‘It was a rant,’ says Kamins, ‘a very public rant.’

So Fox was out. And Regency.

Amy Pascal, the head of Sony, openly told Kamins she didn’t care for the scripts. ‘I don’t know if there was more to it, but that’s what we were told.’

After The Frighteners and King Kong, there was baggage with Universal. They were better to hedge their bets by going back through their old friend Zemeckis. He could surely relate: every studio in town had turned down his pitch about a teenager who accidentally travels back to the 1950s, before Universal agreed to make Back to the Future. Sadly, they weren’t buying now. Recent history couldn’t be rewritten.

Kamins goes on. They tried Roland Emmerich, who had used his newfound clout to set up a production company called Centropolis, but he claimed not to like the scripts either.

‘So that left us with New Line, because Peter had a longstanding friendship with Mark Ordesky, who worked for Fine Line, their arthouse division.’ It was tenuous, but they were desperate. ‘And we went to PolyGram and Working Title.’

Both agreed to listen to Jackson’s pitch.

They flew to Los Angeles troubled less by turbulence than a growing sense of dread, and landed to the news that a baggage handler at LAX had dropped one of their flight boxes and a precious maquette of Treebeard had smashed on the tarmac.

‘We just felt like fate was against us,’ recalls Taylor.

First came PolyGram (who had distributed Braindead in the UK) represented by their British production arm, Working Title. ‘I believe it was Eric Fellner and Liza Chasin from Working Title,’ says Kamins. Stewart Till, the CEO of PolyGram, the man with the power to greenlight the films, wasn’t at the meeting but had read the screenplays. Kamins had them delivered to his hotel room and Till had given his corporate blessing to Working Title to pursue the project if they were as keen as him.

Led by the charming, savvy producer Fellner, they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic; but he had no idea they were one of only two last-ditch possibilities. ‘Really? We got no sense of that,’ he says, remembering a very impressive pitch. Being able to handle those beautiful maquettes left a real impression. ‘God, if we’d only done it,’ he laughs. ‘But we were never going to be able to. At the time, it was two films, and I think Jackson wanted $180 million. We just weren’t in a place to do that. PolyGram just didn’t have $180 million dollars to put into a project.’

In fact, PolyGram was in the process of being sold (it finally folded in 1999) and couldn’t make any commitments until the sale was done, let alone one of this magnitude. Realistically, it was going to be two to three months before they could properly talk.

‘We have seven days,’ replied Jackson.

The yo-yoing of hopes kindled then dashed was taking its toll. Dread was sliding into despair. Why keep subjecting themselves to such disappointment?

‘New Line was the only other meeting we had,’ he says. ‘At that point I really was like, “Let’s just do our New Line meeting tomorrow and go home.”’

*

In 1986, Mark Ordesky was in the direct-to-video business, sourcing lucrative shockers for B-movie distributor Republic Pictures: ghoulish Z-grade stuff like Witchboard and Scared Stiff. But even they thought he was nuts for suggesting Bad Taste. Ordesky had been gobsmacked after the New Zealand Film Commission had sent him a copy of Jackson’s splatter-happy debut and, undaunted, took the tape with him when he moved to New Line.

‘I became this kind of Peter Jackson partisan,’ he enthuses. ‘Whatever was happening, that was my solution to it.’

Slight, with tightly cropped hair and an unwavering gaze, Ordesky is a likably upbeat soul who doesn’t see the worth in hiding his insecurities. He is like a recovering Hollywood addict. He openly frets and fusses, always the butt of his own stories, but nothing can disguise his quick, deprecating wit and, especially, his passion. You could bottle the stuff. He would deny it, always crediting Jackson, but that passion truly counted when it came to adapting The Lord of the Rings, a book he revered. When Jackson was introduced to Ordesky’s mother, she told him about the Alan Lee posters her son had on his wall.

Sure enough, Ordesky had been a Dungeons and Dragons addict as a kid and his dungeon master, who he held in great esteem, had presented him with a box of required reading: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and a ‘bunch’ of Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis and Jack Vance. He ended up reading The Lord of The Rings before The Hobbit. And it took hold of him deeply.

‘The idea of a small person, which I was and remain, taking on this great journey appealed to me in a very profound manner.’

Ordesky got into the film business by fittingly circuitous means. As a student, he had written a novella called Lines that had been picked up by TriStar. Not, he insists, for any great literary merit but because of its double-act of a grizzled old hack teaming up with a callow student journalist to solve the murder of the campus drug dealer. They had Gene Hackman and Matthew Broderick in mind. It never got made, but it did get Ordesky a job as a script reader at TriStar, which convinced him writing was not his calling.

‘My true skill was recognizing great talent in others and being able to articulate and advocate,’ he says. That, and the balls to stroll into New Line, past the receptionist and ask round for a job. To get him back out of the building he was offered the chance to provide notes on a script called The Hidden. Fortunately, he liked the alien invasion movie as much as CEO Bob Shaye and was hired. This was before his brief spell at Republic, and he would return to New Line, his tape of Bad Taste to hand, as a story editor and began to frantically push this guy named Jackson.

In light of his inability to get Bad Taste on the map, Ordesky had actually written Jackson a fan letter. Something along the lines of, ‘Hello, you don’t know me, but I have failed you. I loved your film, although I failed to convince my bosses. But someday I’m going to be a big player in the film business and I will not fail you then.’

The director may have been blissfully unaware, but at New Line Ordesky was championing him for Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 and pushing Braindead 2 (Jackson’s zombie comedy had eventually been released via Trimark in America under the braindead title Dead Alive). Finally, when they were looking for a suitably bloodthirsty talent to revive the flagging Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, Jackson was commissioned to write a script with his Meet The Feebles co-screenwriter Danny Mulheron.

‘They were friends more than anything else,’ observes Kamins. Jackson would stay on Ordesky’s ‘ratty-arsed sofa’ on his earliest visits to LA, and they would sit up all night playing Risk. Even if it eventually landed in turnaround purgatory, Ordesky still adores Jackson’s ‘meta’ take on Freddy Krueger.

‘The film was set several years in the future,’ he explains eagerly, launching into a description of A Nightmare On Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover, the Freddy movie that never was. When the film begins, no one takes Freddy seriously anymore, therefore he’s no threat. Springfield teens now go to sleep on purpose, mainlining sleeping pills to enter the dream world and beat up on him ‘Clockwork Orange-style’. The heart of the movie was a cop who gets put in a coma in an accident and must contend with a resurgent serial killer.

‘What was really great was that the whole movie took place in Freddy’s world,’ says Ordesky. In other words, it would entail the creation of an elaborate fantasy universe … New Line were impressed enough with the Jackson-Mulheron script to subsequently ask Jackson if he would be interested in working on their Freddy Versus Jason concept, but he declined.

When it came to his Tolkien pitch, Jackson didn’t need to dance around Ordesky. He gave to him straight. ‘We’ve got a four-week window before The Lord of the Rings goes ahead without us,’ he informed his friend by phone. Could Ordesky lay the foundation at New Line before they rolled into town with their presentation? Could he get them a meeting?

Ordesky could hardly breathe when he replaced the receiver. ‘Literally when the call came, I knew what pure faith was. I felt that with my love of Peter and my love of The Lord of the Rings that this is why you get into things.’

Not that Ordesky’s enthusiasm prevented Kamins from cooking up some Hollywood gamesmanship. He kept delaying the meeting, implying Jackson was busy meeting other studios. In reality, with little to do, he and Walsh would head off to the movies, catching The Mask of Zorro and Saving Private Ryan. The process was becoming surreal, they were so primed, so aware of how little time they had, only now they were drinking Big Gulps in Santa Monica matinees as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Not for the first or last time, their New Zealand pragmatism marvelled at the strangeness of Hollywood. So much of it depended on the pretence of something. It was a fantasy world.

After what Kamins considered a suitable lapse of time to fool their prospective producers, the meeting was scheduled.

‘So it was Peter, Fran and me, and it was Marty Katz, who was still the producer of record at the time,’ reports Kamins, listing the attendees of their fateful meeting. ‘And then it was going to be Mark Ordesky and Bob Shaye from New Line.’ Despite Ordesky’s fervour and Kamins’ games, they still weren’t being taken too seriously. New Line’s influential Head of Production, Michael De Luca, was in London visiting the set of Lost in Space, a clunky attempt by New Line to warm up a science-fiction franchise.

Finally, it was Shaye, sleek and coiffured like an ageing prince, upon whom their tattered hopes were hanging. Co-chairman of New Line (with Michael Lynne, who was based in New York), only he remained with the power to greenlight their two-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

In many, less conspicuous ways, New Line was a more influential and versatile indie than Miramax. They courted audience approval not headlines. They had found cash in kudos, bringing foreign masters to American audiences, such as Robert Bresson’s Au Hassard Balthazar and Eric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. But it was the company’s pioneering line in low-budget horror that set it apart, and made it so successful. Shaye and Lynne were behind such seminal gore as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. They were known as the ‘house that Freddy built’. In more recent times, they had lined the coffers by diversifying into action, comedy and action-comedy hits like The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Rush Hour and the Austin Powers trilogy. Upholding their kudos with Oscar nominations for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and critical appreciation of David Fincher’s serial killer hit Seven.

Charismatic and prickly, mercurial and driven, in his late fifties Shaye was a complex soul. Unlike Harvey, there was no subterfuge, no games; he told it like he saw it, wearing his heart on his sleeve. He could be moved to public tears. But he wasn’t predictable or tame. This former New York hipster and art collector was a filmmaker at heart who once shared a prize with Martin Scorsese from the Society of Cinematologists for a surreal 1964 short entitled Image. Started in 1967 with $300 of his own money, working out of his New York apartment with a piece of plinth for a desk, there was something homemade about New Line.

Says Ordesky, ‘He had a true artistic streak.’ But it could be a double-edged sword. He was quite prepared to slay dreams if he felt they had no reality.

To his chosen ‘sons’, like De Luca and Ordesky, the paternal Shaye preached a gospel of experimentation and escaping claustrophobic studio thinking. Or as he put it, with his knack for a telling aphorism, ‘Not smoking from the Hollywood crack pipe.’ In fostering talent, could they ‘spot someone one or two stops before the station’?

‘In my own small way with Peter Jackson, I did,’ claims Ordesky. Indeed, the Kiwi had barely found his seat on the train.

Picture the conference room of New Line’s headquarters at 116 N. Robertson Blvd, since vacated when they were subsumed into parent company Time Warner. Well appointed but unremarkable by Hollywood norms: boardroom table, designer chairs, state-of-the-art VCR, television, water and coffee. Did they offer tea?

‘The first thing that happens is Bob Shaye is not there,’ recounts Jackson.

Ordesky came into the room, his face ashen, to announce that, ‘Bob would like a private word with Peter first, then he’ll come look at the video.’

Putting on his game face, Jackson got up to go, a lead bar in his stomach. Ordesky could feel everyone looking at him for some kind of response. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Had the bad news arrived before they had even started?

‘Mark had warned us Bob Shaye was a plainspoken guy,’ notes Kamins. ‘We could be six minutes into this thing and he might just say, “Stop the tape, we’re done. It’s over.”’

All they could do was wait for Jackson to return.

Jackson remembers feeling sick as he entered Shaye’s office. He knew New Line’s kingpin a little from his Freddy Krueger days, but hardly well enough to second-guess his motives.

Shaye looked at him kindly. ‘Listen, I’m happy to spend an hour with you looking at this film that you’ve got for us,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to realize that it’s probably something that we’re not going to want to do.’

Jackson had no idea how to respond.

Walsh only had to look her partner in the eye to know what had happened. The jig was finally up. All Jackson could do was go through the motions. Like an out of body experience, he watched this version of himself calmly return to his seat and his artwork and his maquettes, only pride and forward momentum keeping him afloat.

It was Ordesky who loaded the tape and pressed play.

He knew this was only more pretending. Yet even now, as those thirty-five minutes of endeavour unspooled, Jackson couldn’t yet jettison all hope. He too was an addict of the Ring, lost in denial, and every now and then he would glance at Shaye, just to see. ‘But there was no expression, no comment, nothing …’

He remained as inscrutable as a cat.

Well aware the odds were stacked against The Lord of the Rings, Kamins had not been idle. He knew they needed a backup. While struggling to hawk their Tolkien opus around town, he had actively been looking into other projects for Jackson. Projects that could keep the Weta dream alive.

While balancing on his Lord of the Rings high wire, Jackson had taken other calls. ‘There was a lot of enthusiasm for me directing the next Bond movie,’ he grins, a lifelong Bond enthusiast contemplating 007’s alternative universe. Kamins tells the story of an early initiation watching Thunderball while his new client talked him through nuances of SPECTRE set decoration. ‘It was the Pierce Brosnan one,’ recalls Jackson, ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ Barbara Broccoli had loved Heavenly Creatures and asked to see The Frighteners.

He sent over a tape and never heard from her again.

Joel Silver, the ebullient producer behind the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films, pitched him Lobo, a comic-book series about an intergalactic bounty hunter. Closer to his tastes, Tom Rothman at 20th Century Fox, who he knew from their Planet of the Apes discussions, tempted him with Twenty One, the tale of a First World War hotshot who shot down twenty-one enemy planes in twenty-one days. Jackson was keen enough to show Rothman the biplane tests he had done for King Kong.

Jackson jokes that he could have been David Fincher before David Fincher. He was sent Fight Club first. He had read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button before Fincher got his hands on it. ‘If someone is going to pick up my rejects I am very glad it was him.’

He met with Kathleen Kennedy to talk about The BFG, the Roald Dahl adaptation full of big folk rather than little, since fulfilled by his friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg. He was certainly interested, but he had to be honest. Within three or four weeks he might be doing this other film. ‘We just don’t know yet.’

Kamins suspected that if The Lord of the Rings didn’t work out, especially after King Kong, Jackson and Walsh would have likely ‘taken their ball and gone home’ to New Zealand to pick up on that smaller, local career. Maybe Jackson would have revived those back-to-back Bad Taste sequels featuring Derek in space.

The video ended with a deafening click, and silence congealed around them. Ordesky was visibly squirming; if Shaye said no he’d already planned to chase after him to try and talk him round, risking his own standing at New Line. ‘I probably contributed to the sense of drama,’ he confesses. But Shaye didn’t get up. Instead he turned to Jackson and looked him in the eye. There is a sense of events switching into slow motion as a series of checks and balances are determined invisibly in the air — a recalibration of destiny.

‘Why would anyone want movie-goers to pay eighteen dollars when they might pay twenty-seven dollars?’ he finally asked, his face still betraying nothing.

Everyone tried to process what he was saying. Why were they talking about ticket prices? Had they started their own game of riddles?

‘So I don’t get this at all,’ Shaye continued, ‘why would you make two films when there are three books?’

Jackson was only becoming more perplexed. Did he mean they should only be doing one film? Were they back at the gates of Harvey’s ultimatum? ‘I’m like, what does this mean?’

Shaye still wasn’t finished. ‘Tolkien has done your job for you, Tolkien wrote three books,’ he pressed. ‘If you’re going to do it justice, it should be three movies.’

You could have heard a Mithril pin drop.

Ordesky can still picture Jackson’s face, seeing the wheels begin to turn. An incredible, unforeseen recalculation was underway. The director’s voice came out hesitantly, still not quite daring to believe, ‘Yes … It could be three films.’

*

While it’s a pleasure to remain here, basking in the glow of a dream-come-true now enshrined in Hollywood folklore, there was of course much more to it than that. Most immediately, the films certainly hadn’t been greenlit yet. According to Jackson, such are the thorny tracts of Hollywood business that it was hardly unusual that the fully ratified, ink-on-paper go-ahead wasn’t actually signed until about two weeks out from shooting. Elijah Wood was already trying his feet on.

Back then Shaye did at least switch onto a business footing. His voice a perfected blend of beneficence and caution, he began inching a trilogy forward. ‘This is very impressive, something that I wasn’t expecting it to be. I can see this. I want to show it to Michael [Lynne]. Can we keep the tape?’

They hadn’t wanted to leave the tape anywhere, but how could they say no?

‘I don’t know where you are in the process; I don’t care,’ Shaye went on, ‘but I can’t do anything until my partner sees it.’

It is strange to report that there was not a trace of euphoria as they filed out of the room. Jackson was too gun-shy for any kind of celebration. ‘You don’t emotionally invest in anything until you know it was a hundred per cent certain,’ he admits. ‘So it wasn’t euphoric, it was more like really?’

As excited as Shaye was by the pitch, there was more to his interest in The Lord of the Rings than the thoroughness of Jackson’s proposition. The meeting couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. New Line was deep into a dry spell. Vacillating talent and spiralling costs had combined to scuttle sequels to their big franchises: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Dumb and Dumber and The Mask. They were hungry for a branded property with built-in sequels.

Indeed, Shaye’s energies had been focussed on an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. But in a not unfamiliar turn of events he had come to loggerheads with the rights holders. After a year and a half of development a lot of money had, as Kamins says, ‘walked out of the door’. Frustrated, Shaye had let the option lapse. This was no more than a month before Jackson walked in the door.

New Line’s chief had a more measured take on the meeting. He knew the proposed budget. He knew the financial structure of the company could handle it. Yes, they needed sequels. And here was an opportunity to have three years of ‘potential security and good business’.

Twenty-four hours later, Kamins’ phone rang. It was Shaye — Lynne had seen the tape. ‘We’re ready to start negotiating,’ he said and that was that.

The prosaic reality of Hollywood spoils the poetry of the occasion. Deal-making at its most mechanical would continue for months. Yet there is no doubt that it still took a mad flutter from a maverick studio like a PolyGram or a Miramax or a New Line to back the films. Shaye wasn’t a corporate soul. He viewed himself in a romantic, old Hollywood mould: David O Selznick stoking the flames of Gone with the Wind. Says Kamins, ‘Bob Shaye would look for ways to buck the system.’

Shaye felt his calling in Hollywood was to find a balance between art and commerce, cash and kudos. He was a frustrated film director trapped running the company. Whereas Lynne, with his well-tended beard, shining pate and tailored suits, began as New Line’s general counsel before becoming COO in 1990 and CEO in 2001. He was the sense to Shaye’s sensibility. He shored up the bottom line, steadying the boat if Shaye’s more mercurial style ever set it rocking.

If Bob was ‘dad’, the gag went; then Michael was ‘mom’.

‘Bob is an artist and intensely creative,’ says Ordesky. ‘The reason why he and Michael made such great partners is that Michael is incredibly sharp and business-like. They had known each other from college days. They could see through situations to the heart of an opportunity and find a way to structure that opportunity in a really compelling way. But Bob, even though he had a thoughtful process, was also a gut player.’

Like Miramax, New Line was an indie minnow swallowed by a bigger fish. Shaye and Lynne had offloaded ownership of the company to media mogul (and then husband of Jane Fonda) Ted Turner, who was subsequently swallowed by a whale. Time Warner, the media conglomerate that also operated Warner Bros., merged with Turner, sending a shiver down the New Line spine. Yet within the corporate hierarchy that emerged, Shaye and Lynne were granted far more autonomy than the Weinsteins. They could, within reason, steer New Line’s destiny.

Whatever the ultimate driving force behind Shaye’s great gamble on Jackson and Frodo, you suspect that an element of it was an opportunity to show up Miramax. Proof that he was operating on a studio scale.

In response, Hollywood thought that Bob Shaye was going to sink the company. New Line was risking north of $200 million on three films made back-to-back by the guy who had directed The Frighteners. If the first film flopped, you were left with, as Jackson put it, ‘the two most expensive straight-to-DVD films in history’.

Behind his natural Hollywood sangfroid, Kamins’ voice becomes intense: ‘If you watched Peter and Fran go through the entire process; if you looked at those maquettes; if you looked at the designs and the artwork; if you looked at this documentary. There was a level of seriousness and purpose of responsible filmmakers honouring the investment being made. But also that risk married perfectly with the cultural DNA of New Zealand, which is: we’re going to show the world that we can do what they can do.’

It was a sensibility that tallied with New Line’s underdog persona. The enterprise was so big and so daring that the risk involved almost felt hopeful. It said something about what was possible in this business. ‘I think we all sort of lived in that for the first couple of years,’ says Kamins.

Ordesky was more than aware that this was his company, his family, his job security, betting the farm on a mad venture. Yet not for a single second did he harbour a doubt that they had made the right choice.

‘I had known Peter as a human being for a long time. I had a conviction about him on a human level, about his stamina, about his brilliance. Not just his creative brilliance, his strategic and intellectual capacities to manage something so huge and with so many parts. And that gave me a certainty.’