Ian Nathan - Anything You Can Imagine

Shaken, Jackson managed to remain calm.

‘Well, I am telling you this, Harvey. We’ll do it. Get the rights and after Kong we’ll come back and do Rings .’

The phone went dead.

Kamins, aware they were gambling with an important relationship, admits that Harvey was in his rights to be angry. And, with Harvey, angry always meant apoplectic. ‘He had already agreed, in fairness to him, to suspend and extend the period of our first-look deal so that Peter could go and make The Frighteners . We didn’t have a movie in development with Harvey when The Frighteners was proposed. And Harvey understood it was an opportunity for Peter. So we sort of stopped the clock on the deal and then added whatever time he spent on The Frighteners to the end of the deal. Now we’re coming to Harvey and we’re putting him in a situation where he effectively has to bid for Peter’s services on his next film. The only thing we wanted to do was The Lord of the Rings. And Harvey didn’t yet have the rights.’

Feeling guilty that the first-look deal with Miramax was proving fruitless, and conscious The Lord of the Rings was still dependant on Harvey, it was Jackson who devised a solution that might placate the Miramax chieftain’s ego. It would be a plan that would turn out to benefit Miramax in another, unexpected fashion. Jackson was on the ferry back to Wellington, crossing the often-turbulent waters of Cook Strait, when it occurred to him to see if he could convince Universal to allow Miramax to co-finance King Kong . Indeed, Universal were interested in striking a deal.

Miramax would come on as a fifty per cent partner on King Kong and Universal would take a fifty per cent stake in The Lord of the Rings . That would surely keep Harvey calm, Jackson reasoned. But Harvey, wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, pouted that Universal was getting two films out of the deal while poor Miramax was getting only one. He had his eye on another treasure; there was a property he coveted that had been languishing at Universal. It was a script by Tom Stoppard called Shakespeare in Love .

Three years hence, Shakespeare in Love would be nominated for thirteen Oscars, winning seven, including stealing Best Picture from under the nose of the favourite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (which would have a major influence on Jackson’s battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings ).

Jackson shakes his head. ‘To balance this deal up, so it was two for two as it were, he got Universal to give him, without any investment or involvement, the film that would win all these Oscars.’

He lets the irony slip into his voice. ‘We were tangentially responsible for getting Shakespeare in Love made.’

*

In the foyer of Weta Workshop, still located where Park Road swerves decisively to the right and becomes Camperdown Road, sits a stunning bronze maquette of King Kong wrestling a T-Rex. The two creatures are so tightly entwined you have to get up close to trace where gigantic gorilla ends and struggling dinosaur begins. It sits there as both a monument to the talents of those who work within these bountiful halls, greatly expanded over years of profitable world building, and a salutary symbol of what it is to wrestle with Hollywood.

Through the latter half of 1996, as Jackson and Walsh got to grips with the script for King Kong , months of research and development went into the visual effects that were going to bring Skull Island to fetid and thrilling life. Yet more artists and technicians had been brought in from all around the world to this far-off island to bolster the ranks of the sister divisions of Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. They were over six months into manufacturing.

The Workshop’s famously loquacious head Richard Taylor takes up the tale. ‘We already had some animatronic creatures sculpted, and it started to get wobbly. We could feel this undertow of uncertainty.’ He suggested to Jackson he make a sculpture of Kong fighting a Tyrannosaur (and Jackson was not skimping on dinosaurs), which they could use as a presentation piece to Universal to try and ‘invest in them how exciting the moment could be’. Over the following two weeks he sculpted the very piece that now sits outside his office. Five weeks later it arrived at Universal.

‘They were excited by it, and, needless to say, they actually put it in their front foyer,’ he reports.

Four weeks after that the film fell apart.

Taylor doesn’t hide the amusement in his voice. ‘And Peter, in true Kiwi form, asked for it back. And we got it back.’ And there it sits, a warning to all-comers: you need to be resilient in this game.

Looking back from the vantage of having finally made his version of King Kong in the wake of The Lord of the Rings , the undoing of their first attempt is viewed by Jackson and Taylor as a lucky escape; the river of fate taking another turn. Beginning again from scratch in 2004, Jackson dusted down the 1996 script. He didn’t like what he read. It was the tone. It was too flippant, too jokey.

‘We were desperately trying to write an Indiana Jones type of film. It was lightweight, a silly kind of Hollywood script.’ The Lord of the Rings had taught him that fantasy must be treated as if it was reality not a movie.

‘I think ultimately we weren’t prepared to do justice to such an incredible story,’ concludes Taylor.

But it was impossible to be philosophical at the time. It was heartbreaking.

Things had started to fragment with the release of The Frighteners . Zemeckis’ instincts hadn’t served him well. The reviews were uncertain, and the film felt too autumnal and spooky to sit comfortably in a summer wiped out by Roland Emmerich’s defiantly inane mega-B-movie Independence Day . The fact their opening weekend coincided with the start of the Atlanta Olympic Games hardly helped.

Jackson and Walsh learned a great lesson not only about marketing campaigns but how crucial was a film’s release date. Thereafter, they would maintain an influence on a film right through to the promotional popcorn bucket.

The Frighteners flopped, eventually taking a little under $30 million worldwide. According to the ruthless cause-and-effect of Hollywood physics, you’re only ever as good as your last film, and Jackson’s lustre was instantly tarnished. Virtually overnight, the conversation changed once more. Who was this guy again?

Still devotedly banging the drum for The Frighteners , Jackson had flown non-stop to London in early 1997 to do some promotional interviews— the international release date had been delayed to regroup after the film’s failure in America, not that it did any good — from there he would fly to Rome and proceed on a European tour.

When he reached his hotel room the phone was already ringing. It was Kamins.

‘They’re pulling the plug on King Kong .’

Universal’s change of heart wasn’t only due to the failure of The Frighteners . Disney were putting out a (as it turns out ghastly) remake of Mighty Joe Young , the King Kong copycat from 1949, and now the all-conquering Emmerich had announced that for his next trick he was planning to remake Godzilla . ‘And Universal didn’t want to do another monster movie,’ laments Jackson.

How could he stay where he was, promoting a film for the very studio that put his next film so abruptly into turnaround? Moreover, he now had twenty or thirty staff working on King Kong and no salary to pay them. He had to figure out how the hell they were going to survive. Weta was back on a knife-edge.

He booked himself on literally the next plane home.