Public Address - Hard News (Home)

The Michael Moores | Dec 19, 2002 11:20

There are many men named Michael Moore in this world. There's the former (briefly) New Zealand PM and head of the WTO; the maker of Bowling for Columbine and The Awful Truth, and my American friend and correspondent James Michael Moore.

I actually thought that last one was the victim of the horrifying visit from the Feds (offence: thoughtcrime, citizen) described in this story on Scoop, from a private citizen whose email, critical of the American president, was intercepted without his knowledge. Fortunately, it wasn't my Mike, although the parallels - age, maritime background, liberal politics - are spookily similar. But, he told me yesterday:

"I have to admit that there have been dozens of articles, postings and even my own observations that I have not sent to you because of the very concerns that your shared article so strongly illustrates. Though it is 2002 and not 1984, I am living in Winston Smith's world ..."

The United States of America is one messed-up and scary country at the moment, and I defy anyone to tell me different in light of this story. Even those steadfast deniers of reality, American conservatives, are starting to get the fear, according to this story from Salon.com (which I can see on my Salon Premium account, but you might not be able to). To quote one passage:

"Right now, the one issue uniting civil libertarians on the left and right is Total Information Awareness, a Pentagon program being run by Poindexter that aims to create a centralized grand database of Americans' credit card purchases, medical histories, education records and other information. Through mining such data, the government hopes to discern patterns that will help catch terrorists. The problem, of course, is that to do so the government has to gather and sift through private information on millions of innocent citizens."

Matt Talbot was kind enough to send me through a couple of startling URLs from Amazon.com. This one for Uncle Fester's Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture and this one for Jack B. Nimble's The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories. Both are listed as popular in - you guessed it - New Zealand. They rank 8001 and 99,454 on Amazon's overall sales chart - and numbers 19 and 9 respectively in sales to New Zealand! Good grief …

Donald Holder from the PR company 141 took issue - on Peter Jackson's behalf - with my comment yesterday to the effect that Jackson's slinging off at Film Commission chairman Barrie Everard for claiming more credit than he was due for freeing up Grant LaHood's Kombi Nation from the rubble of Larry Parr's Kahukura Productions was petty.

He pointed out that LaHood paid $20,000 of his own money to get the film back from Kahuhura's liquidators, and cannot release it until the debt to Jackson's company The Film Unit (between $180,000 and $270,000 depending on how you count it) is repaid. Everard says he did talk to liquidators and asked them to split out LaHood's film rather than try and do a deal for all four of the movies caught up in the collapse. I have no idea who has a larger purchase on the truth, but it hardly seems worth the vitriol.

Donald also sent me the press release in which Jackson announced that Everard and Commission chief executive Ruth Harley would not be welcome at the Two Towers premiere. I quote some of it below:

"Grant LaHood should be applauded for managing to extract his film Kombi Nation out of the Kahukura liquidation mess. To date the Film Commission has invested $745,000 of taxpayers' money in Kombi Nation, so they clearly thought it could return a profit. They have a responsibility to complete the film, and sell it. Is that not their job? They should be giving immediate support to Grant to get his film finished, including clearing outstanding debts. He should not have to jump through more hoops …

"Instead Barrie Everard has stated LaHood can make an application in the normal way if he needs further assistance from the Film Commission. Barrie Everard's attitude demonstrates how fiscal irresponsibility and vindictiveness have become the order of the day of Everard's approach as Chairman of the New Zealand Film Commission.

"Grant has done nothing wrong. Through no fault of his own the movie he directed was sent into liquidation hell due to the ill-judged actions of the NZ Film Commission. He has since waged a single-handed campaign to attempt to have it released and sold. Grant is exhibiting a responsibility that has eluded the Film Commission."

LaHood, anyone would agree, has been put in a horrible position. But it is not the Film Commission preventing his movie being released, but Kahuhura's creditors - principally, The Film Unit. The Film Unit's debt is not with the Film Commission, but with Kahukura. If the Commission was to do as Jackson suggests and cover his bad debt in return for the release of Lahood's movie, then it would be morally - and possibly legally - obliged to cover the private debts of all Kahukura's creditors (including Inland Revenue). That, according to Everard, would amount to about $1.5 million. And the next time a film company falls over, does the Commission wade in and sort out its creditors too?

So it's not as straightforward as Jackson's angry press release indicated. I wonder, too, why relatively little blame seems to be allocated to Parr himself - if you talk to little guys in the industry, it's him they're angry with, and rightly so. Jackson's dislike for the Commission, it must be said, goes back a lot further from this incident. By some accounts it dates from an episode when the Commission pulled funding from a Harry Sinclair film project in which Jackson was involved. You'd have to ask someone who was there, I guess.

But that doesn't let the Commission off the hook for the way it gave Parr money when he was clearly out of his depth, and clearly failed to perceive problems until it was too late. Or NZ Air - which gave Parr $4 million to make 26 episodes of a terrible TV series called Love Bites when he had no track record and clearly lacked the competence for the job.

The Commission's woeful estrangement from the industry it is supposed to serve must have played a role in what has happened here. Harley seems not to be much of a one for engagement. But Everard is, and if he gets burned down through this, it might be hard to find anyone better.

Anyway, Louisa Cleave has a good story in the Herald this morning.

And, yes, we saw The Two Towers last night at the Auckland premiere. It's quite different from film one - almost exhausting in its multiple narratives and concussive sounds and pictures. But it's just there - and that in itself is the most stunning thing.

God, does that make sense? Sorry. I'm still a bit dazed, having spent nearly two hours after the film finished stuck in town with a flat battery because somebody at the AA couldn't read a goddamn map. So the service guy went to the wrong end of Lorne Street, couldn't find us, and went home to bed.

And when an AA contractor, a tow truck, finally turned up, I had to sprint up the street to stop him driving off. Then the towie got toey because he felt I'd shut the door of his truck too hard.

"If you ever open my door again," he said, which seemed unlikely. "Don't do that again, mate. It's a $70,000 piece of machinery and it's only two years old."

For God's sake man, it's a tow truck. Bring on Christmas …

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Unhappy Endings | Dec 18, 2002 09:35

The stories of his surpassing patience and dedication are legion. He shepherded home one of the great movie projects with barely a cross word. So I suppose it's logical that there should be one issue on which Peter Jackson well and truly vents: and that is the Film Commission.

Film Commission chair Barrie Everard and chief executive Ruth Harley have been un-invited from the New Zealand preview of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at Jackson's demand. Ostensibly, the reason is the Commission's handling of the Kahukura debacle, wherein Larry Parr's production company ran out of money and collapsed, leaving a host of creditors (including Jackson's The Film Unit, which began the winding-up process by seeking to recover its $180,000) and four films in various stages of completion.

I don't know what the hell happened with Kahukura, not why it was given money in the way it was. But I can't help but feel Jackson's bitter feelings about the Commission go back a lot further than that. And they are shared by his partner, Fran Walsh, who brought a ludicrous lawsuit against The Listener for running a story about the local film industry by the fairly well-known freelancer Frances Walsh. Fran felt that people would mistake Frances Walsh for herself. The simple expedient of writing a letter to clear up any confusion apparently didn't occur to her. This gross legal folly, by the way, appears to have been abandoned.

The Commission, meanwhile, appears to have been sucked into a vortex, and the industry has been suffering for it. One senior producer I spoke to last week bemoaned Harley's "siege mentality" and her reluctance put the Commission's point of view on, well, anything. Is it a Wellington thing? Even Everard, whose appointment was broadly welcomed this year, appears to be sustaining some damage. (Although Jackson's beef against him - that he claimed more credit than he was due for hauling Grant Lahood's Kombi Nation out of the mess - seems silly and petty.)

Jackson's actions this week, sadly, won't do anything to remedy the situation. And the Commission seems ever more distant from the industry it is meant to foster. It's just as well those foreign-funded "service" productions keep rolling in. But would it be too much to ask for Harley to start talking to the industry and for people in the industry to take a more constructive tack if and when she does? The option of a competing film-funder, based in Auckland, to test the Commission's model (and its competence), is nice - but don't hold your breath for it.

Meanwhile, the government has moved against the P epidemic in the only way governments know how - by ratcheting up the law. Methamphetamine is to be upgraded from a Class B to a Class A drug. This recognises the social damage currently going on, but it probably won't work. Just as bumping up Ecstasy a couple of years back, in something of a panic reaction, didn't have any impact on its use. It's worth remembering that LSD has been a Class A drug in New Zealand since the 1960s - and for much of that time New Zealanders were the highest (so to speak) per capita users of that drug in the world. What will push P back to the margins - it won't go away - is the social sanction, and well-resourced treatment for dependence. It will become unacceptable and, one hopes, uncool.

This story is pretty interesting. Brazilian researchers say they have confirmed that the idea of race is not reflected in a person's genes. Race has no meaning genetically.

By the way, those luminaries who have not been un-invited to the Wellington Two Towers premiere tonight will be entertained afterwards by the inimitable Nice 'n' Urlich. They'll be using the same hired decks we had on Saturday at the Dubwise party. My God, what a small purchase on fame that is …

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Sign Off | Dec 17, 2002 09:12

So Ike Finau has been given one last chance to comply with the law and take down the signs in his Grey Lynn front yard.

And in line with the Green Party's increasingly common habit of swooping on Auckland issues, Nandor Tanczos has declared it's an outrage.

Finau, a prominent member of the Water Pressure Group, has consistently flouted a local bylaw aimed at preventing visual pollution in residential areas. Nandor told the Herald he was concerned that the bylaw banned signs "for the purpose of making money, but not for the purpose of making political comment". He said he believed it was a breach of the Bill of Rights. This is extremely disingenuous of him.

The bylaw isn't there to curb free speech, but to protect residential environments. It allows a sign advertising a lawful use of a property - so the Buddhist Centre, an acupuncture practice and a home business that fixes computer printers, all in the same stretch of Warnock Street as Finau, may display a sign so people can find them.

This is merely sensible. What the bylaw prevents in residential areas is the forest of signage that has stood for several years at Finau's front fence. I am personally sick of walking my children past those unpleasant, aggressive signs.

Because there's little enough "comment" on Finau's loopy boards, and a good deal of defamatory abuse, almost exclusively directed at anyone on the centre-left (and therefore, to the right of the WPG). Thus, Bruce Hucker, Penny Sefuiva, Judith Tizard and Sandra Lee are all "liars" and must be "dumped".

If he actually got involved in local issues, instead of just putting his name on the Auckland Central ballot every three years, Nandor would know that the people being attacked don't deserve it. Nobody does, really.

The Herald's tireless local government columnist, Brian Rudman wrote a useful column on this issue last year, pointing out that councillor Sefuiva, too, had rights.

I wonder how keen Nandor would be to stick up for the principles of free speech if that kind of signage was used by, say, an anti-immigration group? Or what if it were Jeanette Fitzsimons who was subject to day-in-day-out abuse - for years - in a public place?

That's unlikely, of course. If you looked on the back of the Greens' local billboards during this year's election campaign, you would have found that they were recycled Water Pressure Group signs. The Greens aren't the first group to seek to use the WPG's undeniable energy and drive. They probably won't be the first to regret it either.

These people know no boundaries. I never agreed politically with the late Phil Raffills, and said so many times in Hard News. But what the WPG did in hounding the man, dying, at his family home, still appals me. And, of course, they then had the self-serving gall to file an assault complaint against him. You got the impression that nothing would have pleased them better than to have dragged a terminally ill man through the courts. Fortunately, the police told them to get lost.

The Water Pressure Group have shown no compunction about appealing to the law when it suits them. What they seem to be saying now is that there ought to be one set of laws for them - and one for everybody else.

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Festive Seasoning | Dec 16, 2002 09:53

So another festive weekend passes, it's Monday and the Christmas deadlines are piling up. The annual Dubwise Arrangements Christmas party was held on Saturday and, as ever, appeared to be a raging success. I can't maintain a forward diary or a decent contacts book and my desk is usually a mess, but by golly I can organise food and entertainment.

New Zealand won a cricket test while the party was in progress (on the third day of a match interrupted by rain and a feeble attempt at political protest), which was a pleasant surprise. The Herald is touting Shane Bond's stunning inswinger to dismiss Rahul Dravid as an early contender for ball of the century, which might be going a bit far, but it was certainly bloody useful. It takes a special bit of cricket to make a batsman as good as Dravid look like a plonker.

Some of us headed off to see DJ Qbert after the party. Well after, as it happened. I'm old enough to remember when the pubs shut at 10pm on weekdays (or, in Wellington, every day). You could get along and see a gig and be home in time for the late news and a cup of cocoa. You'd be turfed out of the Windsor Castle at 11pm on a Friday and start looking for parties. Not any more: Qbert, the headliner on the Scratch Tour, took the St James stage at 2.20am Sunday morning.

Just as well he was worth the wait. All the hype is justified: he's a freak, as technically precise as any classical musician and well clear of his turntablist peers anywhere in the world. The curious thing is, relatively few people danced; it was so much more compelling to just gaze up at the giant screen behind him, where cameras by his hands, above his head and even attached to his head turned the manipulation of faders and turntables into a spectacle of its own.

The crowd wasn't all revved up on Red Bull, of course, although there didn't seem to be that twitchy, P-smoking vibe that makes certain city nightclubs so creepy. Speaking of which, a reader drew my attention to this story on the rise of crystal methamphetamine in the alternative Wellington student mag, Lucid. It's informative and, given that it was published 18 months ago, quite prophetic.

Having dodged most of the seasonal ligs on offer, I'm excited that Fiona and I have landed tickets to the "Auckland premiere" of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the Civic on Wednesday night. Presumably we were invited because somebody rich and famous from the America's Cup crowd couldn't make it, but hey, it's a bit of fun. I'm guessing we'll be seeing the whole thing over again at the weekend, when the boys have finished school for the year and are fully expecting to see the movie at the earliest opportunity.

Nice to see Stephen Regelous, the creator of the Massive crowd-simulation software for the film, get a write-up in Wired.

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