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