Posts by giovanni tiso
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I see your shit, raise the fuck I exclaimed earlier this morning when his obit came up on Summer Report. A grievous loss. (And it has everything to do with media obviously. Have been thinking about Arts and Letters Daily, of which to be fair I wasn't an assiduous reader, whilst going through Lanier's You Are not a Gadget. It's the quintessential Web 1.0 design.)
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Seeing as he had qualified that "we" in the preceding sentence, this remark seems a little ungenerous.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Russell Brown,
Three Foot Six was a company formed for the sole purpose of producing the LOTR films and is listed in all the documents I can find as being 100% owned by New Line Cinema. Three Foot Seven seems to be constituted on a similar basis to make the Hobbit films. So, yes, Warners is "them" in that sense.
Yes, I see - and of course New Line is now fully part of Warners. Yet Three Foot Six is always referred to as "Jackson's company", isn't it? I mean whenever the Bryson case is mentioned in the media. Or alternatively, Bryson is referred to as a "Weta employee" (indeed Russell did so upthread). It's not making it easier to disentangle Jackson, Taylor and Warners I must say.
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Further 'clarifications' from Jackson. So apparently the blacklisting was what mattered because it scared Warners, but then Warners was appeased by the law change. Although the law change in itself had nothing to do with the blacklisting, and as far as I can tell wouldn't change the legal status of such actions in the future. But then according to Jackson the blacklisting was already illegal. The thick plotens, as they say in the movies.
So, to sum up:
"This is why Warner Bros lost all confidence in filming in New Zealand, because they had just witnessed how a tiny and capricious union, manipulated by an offshore agency, could bring a multimillion production to its knees – for no legitimate reason."
He said the Government's law change "gave the studio confidence that the film could made in New Zealand without the threat of unjustified ongoing industrial action".
He keeps talking about Warners as them, you know, other people. Yet we find out they bankrolled the legal team for an employment court action against Three Foot Six which is owned by... Peter Jackson. Right.
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In that email to Radio NZ, Jackson says that Actors Equity "had an agenda to unionise the film industry by using a grey area in employment law". That grey area presumably being what led to the Bryson case. Unless somebody would like to walk me through how it's a strawman.
In light of his public protestations at the time that it was a power grab from Whipp and all about the boycott, this clarification puts Jackson in a worse light if anything, it seems to me. But again, maybe I've missed a crucial step somewhere.
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That's right. What better time than after this latest exposure of Jackson's tactics to make Whipp the villain even more than he already was? I mean so long as we're really determined to prove to our transnational corporate overlords that we are subjects, not citizens, which I assume to be the object of the whole exercise.
Just to be clear, Whipp's demanding an apology to Jackson not for the deception, but for claiming today in an email to Radio NZ that the blacklisting was illegal and that it was withdrawn because Actors' Equity was facing a lawsuit for damages from Warners. If those claims too turn out in fact to be false, than I'd say an apology and a retraction are probably in order.
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And anybody who still thinks it wasn't about Bryson hasn't been paying attention, methinks.
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So long as you're not there to sell lamb.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Russell Brown,
OTOH, the employment law specialist I interviewed on Media7 thought the law did need clarifying
Another word for "clarifying" would be "tilting employment law in favour of the employers even more than it already is". Because really in this case it's hard to see how the clarification achieves anything other than taking away workers' rights, with no counterbalancing demands on the employers whatsoever. It certainly has the merit of being simple, but.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to nzlemming,
But "relevant" != "precedent" in any legal sense.
It wasn't a precedent in the sense that every film industry worker will henceforth be considered an employee until proven otherwise, no. But it was certainly a precedent in that a particular industry worker managed to satisfy the employment court that his boss - Peter Jackson - was treating him like a contractor when he ought to have treated him like an employee. The law change is aimed precisely at preventing this right to appeal to the employment court for EVERY SINGLE WORKER in the industry. Including the ones who aren't happy with it nor fleece IRD with extravagant expense claims. And if you say well it doesn't matter, because almost everyone is in fact happy with being treated like a contractor, then I'd have to ask - why change the law?