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.’
When Philippa Boyens was twelve years old her mother presented her with a copy of the book that would change her life. She was partial to a vein of old-school, romantic fantasy, inspired by her time spent at school in England. Between terms, her family would tour the country locating the fabled seats of Arthurian history. Myths and legends fired her imagination.
Nevertheless, moons would wax and wane while The Lord of the Rings stared at her from the shelf, untouched. She had enjoyed The Hobbit, but she was wary of the sheer volume of its grown-up brother. Venture within those pages and she might never come out. Which, you could say, is exactly what happened.
‘I’ve got this memory of my sister having swimming lessons,’ she says, ‘and me sitting in the car and deciding, ‘“Okay, I’m going to start reading this thing.”’
It was like taking a deep breath then diving in.
‘Then I read it every year. I’m not joking, every year. It was my rainy day book.’ There were many wet afternoons in the New Zealand she returned to as a teen.
Boyens had loved C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels, fleet and quixotic, with evacuees finding snow-dusted enchantment at the back of a wardrobe. But Lewis wasn’t an obsessive like Tolkien. That is what moved her so deeply. How you could keep delving and there would always be another layer beneath. She lapped up the genealogy, the languages, how every person or place or antique artefact was reinforced in the appendices, and this great legendarium linked together like history.1 Only Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels came close.
She might refute the label of Tolkien expert that is regularly foisted upon her — often by a director swerving a tricky question. ‘I’m not an expert. I’ve met Tolkien experts. I can’t speak Elvish.’ Even so, while a teen, Boyens read Humphrey Carpenter’s eloquent biography of Tolkien, high-minded appreciation by David Day and Tom Shippey and the low-minded parody of The Harvard Lampoon’s 1969 Bored of the Rings, featuring Frito Bugger and Gimlet son of Groin. She would bring to the films an invaluable depth of knowledge and near-photographic recall of the professor’s sub-creation. She also had a real thing for the art of Alan Lee.