Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  This 1996 Kong script was written very much as our idea of what a ‘Hollywood’ movie needed to be. Reading it again, several years later, was very informative. The action scenes were still entertaining enough, but we hadn’t yet learned several valuable lessons from The Lord of the Rings–lessons about the value of emotional truth and depth in our characters.

  It was a testing time: Peter and Fran were under enormous financial pressure and driving themselves hard on Kong. During this period, Fran gave birth to their second child, Katie, and was still working on the King Kong script whilst in hospital. As Peter and Fran progressed the script, Weta started work on designing the special effects for the film: sculpting maquettes for the dinosaurs–including an impressive realisation of one of the action set-pieces in which Kong battles with three carnivorous Alosaurs (later to become three Tyrannosaurs), which was an homage to the prehistoric visions of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen and an indication of the dynamism that was clearly going to be a feature of the new Jackson interpretation of Kong’s story. These maquettes were a prelude to the next stage of the film’s development, which involved creating digital dinosaurs and a CG Kong.

  Three months passed and the date for the American opening of The Frighteners approached. Describing the film, Robert Zemeckis wrote, ‘The Frighteners doesn’t fall into a particular genre–it’s a mixture of mystery, horror, comedy and suspense. The movie explores the folklore and mythology about psychics, ghosts and the afterlife, and is quite unlike anything ever seen before.’

  The fact that the film was not easily categorised was actually to prove something of a difficulty, as was the fact that, whilst it had been expected to get a PG-13 certification, it was eventually rated R, restricting the audience to moviegoers over the age of 17 unless accompanied by an adult.

  Something which might have worked to the film’s advantage had it opened, as originally intended, on the last day of October, now proved a disadvantage:

  It was planned as a relatively low-budget, $26million Halloween movie. There were no great expectations of it; it simply had to go out there and do its thing at the time of the year when people were expecting to see horror films or thrillers.

  As it was, the sometime-Halloween movie had become a mid-summer movie.

  Bob Zemeckis had been very enthusiastic about the idea because he had previously released summer films to great success. He said, ‘There’s a risk, but the rewards will be great if the film really, really hits a nerve; and, in summer, you’re gonna have much bigger box office than you’d ever get at Halloween.’ So Fran and I were sort of swept along with this and didn’t really feel that we had the power to say that we thought it was a bad idea.

  To make matters worse, the advertising campaign didn’t seem to help ‘place’ the film or target the audience. A suitably teasing teaser poster –a white sheet with what appeared to be a menacing skull face pushing against it from behind with the tag-line, ‘Dead Yet?’–unimaginatively became the film’s eventual release poster.

  The poster did nothing to sell the film when it went on release, because it didn’t tell you anything about the picture. It felt as if Universal was only giving half-hearted support to the movie as they’d already gotten cold feet about the whole idea of opening it in summer; as if they themselves had realised it was a bad idea, but had locked into the date and couldn’t really change it. And so things started to feel a bit wrong…

  Just how wrong they were soon became clear. It was bad enough that it was to follow in the wake of the phenomenally successful opening of Independence Day, which crashed onto the movie screens in the week of the 4 July Independence Day holiday; what was infinitely worse, and what sounded the knell of doom for The Frighteners, was the fact that its opening day, 19 July 1996, was seriously upstaged by another opening–that of the twenty-sixth Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

  When we realised that our opening day was that of the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Games–and it wasn’t something we were told by the studio, we discovered it for ourselves–we had suggested to Universal that it was going to have an impact on box office and that everyone was likely to be stuck to their TV watching the opening and then the games themselves. But the people at the studio had said, ‘No! We don’t think so; our research would indicate that’s not the case…’ And I just thought, How the hell do they know? There had only ever been three Olympic Games held in the United States in one hundred years! So where did their research come from?

  Reviews proved to be mixed, with the Hollywood Reporter declaring it ‘whiz-bang moviemaking’ while the New York Times described it as ‘a technically impressive horror-comedy-romance in desperate need of a story editor or a cold shower.’ It was for Peter another valuable lesson in the ways of Hollywood.

  The Frighteners went out with only a half-hearted effort from Universal and got off to a really bad start when movie-going that weekend dropped some 30 or 40 per cent across the board, because of the Olympic Games.

  But I guess it taught Fran and me a real lesson about marketing films and the critical importance of release dates, posters and campaigns. It also showed us how, strategically, a film can essentially be buried, which is what we ultimately felt happened to The Frighteners. It was dumped on the wrong day in the middle of summer because they thought it was much more of a comedy–another Ghostbusters–than what it turned out to be. It was never going to make a huge amount of money because it was genre and it was quite dark and twisted. At Halloween it might have been a different story…

  Reflecting on this learning process, Ken Kamins observes, ‘Every time Peter would have a negative experience, he’d try to figure out how, on the next movie, he could work towards a situation where he and Fran either had actual contractual rights to be consulted or established a relationship with the studio where they would want them to be a part of the process. Peter’s secret is that, whether or not he contractually has any rights of control or approval, he always functions “as if” on the basis that, “If I act that way then, perhaps, they will treat me that way!”’

  Despite the disappointment over the critical reception and financial performance of The Frighteners, work continued on King Kong: Peter and Fran delivered a second-draft script, sets were being designed, location scouting was taking place in Sumatra and Weta were beginning the complex task of building a CGI version of New York, circa 1933.

  Meanwhile, at Universal, people were getting worried…

  During 1996, Universal had been working towards the completion of their volcanic disaster movie, Dante’s Peak, only to find themselves in a race with Twentieth Century Fox’s more directly named Volcano. There are no rules in Hollywood when two similarly themed pictures go head-to-head, but it is usually thought best to try to beat the opposition and be first to the tape–before audiences decide that two movies with one plot is too much of a good (or bad) thing. Faced with just this situation, and despite being up to their budget-limits in molten lava, Universal decided to up the ante and pour sufficient money into Dante’s Peak in order to make sure it reached the cinemas first and that if any film were left a smoking crater it would be Volcano.

  Universal won that race with Dante’s Peak erupting in February 1997, two months ahead of Twentieth Century Fox’s rival attraction. Then, a year later, it became clear that another battle was on its way with, in addition to Kong, two other marauding monster movies destined to arrive in 1998. One was Columbia–TriStar’s Godzilla, the latest incarnation of the dinosaur-like creature that had rampaged through countless Japanese and American B-movies from the Fifties onwards; the other was RKO–Disney’s Mighty Joe Young, a remake of the third King Kong-style movie to come from the Merian C. Cooper–Ernest B. Schoedsack partnership in 1949, and on which Kong’s stop-frame animator Willis O’Brien collaborated with, among others, the young Ray Harryhausen.

  With both films racing towards a summer release in 1998, Universal were in the unenviable position of having a third monster movie on their hands that w
ouldn’t be ready to open until several months after Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young had done their worst.

  In the first few weeks of 1997, as Universal seemed to be getting increasingly nervous about the other two creature pictures, it began to feel as if the heart of this film was fading away. Fran and I were trying to figure out some way to do Kong quicker or to alleviate their fears, but there was no doubting the fact that the subject matter of these three movies was very similar and, therefore, nothing we could really say.

  Then Universal took a dramatic decision on the future of Kong. The final page of Peter and Fran’s first-draft script had read:

  For one last precious second ANN HUGS KONG’S HAND…he slowly topples back…disappearing off the side of the building.

  ANN SOBS with GRIEF…JACK gently takes her in his arms…she buries her face in his chest.

  EXT. FIFTH AVENUE–MORNING

  CROWDS are gathering to STARE at KONG’S BODY…we only see his HAND on the edge of frame.

  A POLICEMAN ushers people away…

  POLICEMAN

  Come on folks…it’s all over…

  Kong had plummeted to his death from the top of the Empire State Building and the latest movie to bear his name had, in the parlance of Hollywood, ‘fallen over’.

  We knew things were going wrong: they weren’t telling us anything yet, but we were starting to feel it. No one ever sat down and said, ‘Listen, you know, we don’t think that going ahead with Kong at this time is the best idea for us.’ It didn’t happen that easily, or that directly.

  Universal were making monthly ‘drawdown’ payments to WingNut in order that they could buy materials and pay the salaries of the staff already working on the film. In early February there was a seemingly inexplicable delay on the payment from Universal. It was a critical situation: without the drawdown there was no money with which to pay anyone.

  It was at this moment that Peter was required to head off for a European press junket to launch The Frighteners on a whistle-stop tour of London, Paris, Rome and Berlin.

  I was boarding the plane for London while the office was calling the accounting department and asking, ‘Why isn’t the money here? We have to have it. We’ve got people to pay…’ There was no real response, no answers. That is the way such things happen.

  ‘Rarely is there a perfect movie-making experience,’ explains Peter Nelson. ‘Rarely, even at the highest levels in the film business, do all the pieces–the financing and all the creative decisions–fall neatly into place on a movie. There is never really a moment when everybody can say with certainty: “This movie’s going to go forward without a doubt.” There is always some doubt that has to be overcome.’ Nevertheless, it was a bitter lesson to learn.

  Just twenty-seven hours later Peter was in London. Calls from Ken Kamins were scarcely reassuring. Lenny Kornburg, who had been the person to first approach Peter about King Kong and who had continued to champion the project, had been having meetings with Universal’s president of production, Casey Silver. Kornburg was telling Ken Kamins, ‘I think Kong is starting to haemorrhage!’

  I’m in a hotel in London late at night, on the day I arrived, and I’m talking with Casey Silver himself. Everything seemed to be doublespeak. He didn’t come out and say, ‘We just don’t think that we want to make Kong anymore…’ or ‘The time’s not right for Kong…’ or whatever. It was more a case of, ‘Well, you know, what we really want to do is just pause for a moment, in the development of the film…We think perhaps you should do some more work on the screenplay…That would be good, and then we’ll take a breath and we’ll wait till the script has gone to another draft and then maybe we can start picking it up again…’ But, of course, it was impossible because without any money we were going to lose everybody who was working on the film.

  It was clear to Ken Kamins that Casey Silver had finally pulled the plug and he told Peter that Kong was dead. Peter was sitting in a London hotel about to start promoting his previous movie for Universal Pictures, which was becoming an increasingly unacceptable scenario. Ringing the WingNut offices in Wellington, Peter asked them to get him on the first plane back to New Zealand.

  I couldn’t sleep, so while I was waiting to hear about the flight home, I made more calls: I rang Ken and asked him to telephone Casey Silver– I lost all respect for him by this time because I didn’t think he’d been straight with us and I just couldn’t bring myself to speak to him in person. I just said, ‘Tell Casey I’m pulling out of the junket, I’m not going to go around Europe talking about The Frighteners; he’ll have to understand. I’ve now got people that aren’t going to be employed beyond the next few days and I’ve got to go home and try and sort out this mess that Universal have created for us.’

  ‘Peter was devastated,’ recalls Ken Kamins, ‘not just for himself but for all those people who were waiting for him in New Zealand who were excited and passionate about working on King Kong and who were now going to be crushed. So he turned right around and went home. It was, “Oh, my God! What do we do now?’”

  At eight o’clock in the morning, the day after hearing the news about Kong, Peter boarded a plane for New Zealand.

  I’d flown twenty-seven hours to London, straight through, in order to promote The Frighteners, had ended up not doing a single bit of publicity for the film, lost my next movie and, less than twenty-four hours later, was flying home again–all without having had a wink of sleep. I had a copy of The Lord of the Rings with me and I remember thinking I needed to take my mind off the problems we were facing and that this book might now be our only hope, so I curled up on the plane home, opened the book and started reading Tolkien’s prologue, ‘Concerning Hobbits’. But I’d been awake for hours and hours on end and was so totally exhausted that I only got through three or four pages before I fell fast asleep.

  Meanwhile, Richard Taylor had received a tearful telephone call from Fran passing on the news, which he then broke to the crew working on Kong: ‘We gathered the whole crew together in the area that is now our sculpting room, outside the lunch room, and we told them that the project was off. There were some tears and pretty sad people

  …’ Personal disappointments aside, the situation for Weta was extremely serious: ‘This was a desperate state of affairs,’ says Richard. ‘Universal had insisted that Weta Digital engage a large number of the people on a two-year contract and now they were dropping the film. We were in the unenviable position of having all of these contracts that we had to pay out. And Weta was still a fledgling company with a very small infrastructure financially, so we were left in a real quandary.’

  Over the past couple of years, Weta had kept themselves going by doing occasional work outside or between whatever films Peter was making: they had provided prosthetic make-up for the acclaimed New Zealand film, Once Were Warriors, as well as making props and make-up effects for various television shows and series including Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, Hercules and the Lost Kingdom and Xena: Warrior Princess. But the commitment to King Kong had prevented them from taking on any other major projects, and with that, work suddenly gone, there were now clearly going to be tough days ahead.

  I got off the plane in Wellington and went straight to Weta, and met everyone involved with Kong. It felt like a repeat of that lunchtime meeting when everybody had been told that Braindead had collapsed. Now, of course, there was no Jim Booth around, so it was down to me to explain that they were no longer going to be working on Kong; that we all had hopes that one day it would come back but, as of now, it wasn’t going to happen. I will never forget the tears that welled up in the eyes of sculptors and designers who had given everything to the project.

  ‘As sad as it was that Kong fell over,’ reflects Richard Taylor, ‘as with the collapse of Braindead, it turned out, with hindsight, to be fortuitous for Peter’s career and for all our careers.’

  It was now time to make a telephone call to the one other person who was a player in the game: Harvey Weinstein. Miramax had
a mutual investment contract with Universal as well as a back-up deal with Peter Jackson.

  ‘It’s never a bad idea in Hollywood to make a back-up deal,’ explains Peter Nelson, ‘because, despite the best of intentions, movies often don’t get made. We had set up a deal with Universal in order to energise the Kong project but since Universal had the right to say “Yea” or “Nay”, we also did something that, in the test of time, served Peter well: we made a back-up deal with Miramax. Shortly after Universal had said, “Okay” to the Kong deal we went back to Miramax and said, “Too bad, you guys just missed out! Sorry you didn’t get a chance to make Peter’s next movie…We’re now looking for one of the studios with which to make a back-up deal.” Miramax instantly said “No, it should be us, we’ll make a back-up deal with you for The Lord of the Rings.”

  ‘So we made a back-up deal and suddenly Peter was in the dream situation of having lined up his next two projects and would segue from one to another. And if, for any reason, Universal failed to make King Kong on the schedule that we’d set up, then Peter would automatically move on to making The Lord of the Rings for Miramax on the same kind of schedule. Boom! There would be “R & D” funding. Boom! He’d get script go-ahead and start working on it.’