Anything You Can Imagine

‘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.’

CHAPTER 4

Words and Pictures

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.

Her mother, that singular influence, had given her a copy of Lee’s seminal collection Faeries, a gift she passed on to Jackson. There was an illustration of a ‘Gandalf-like character’ that, she says, ‘really lit Pete’s radar’.