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