Anything You Can Imagine. Ian Nathan
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Stick with his ideas.
‘But you know that is not really the truth,’ sighs Jackson. ‘You’re lulled into thinking Harvey is the one you can talk honestly with. But the real truth is he is really tight with Bob. It’s an illusion.’
On occasion this Abbott and Costello routine would explode into full theatrics. For instance, after another of Bob’s ill-informed ideas, it was Harvey who slammed his meaty fist onto the table before storming out of the sweatbox. They watched his silhouette retreat down the corridor while Bob carried on regardless. Within moments Harvey’s silhouette, as unmistakable as Hitchcock, came back down the corridor clutching an Oscar. The one his half of Miramax had received for The English Patient. He burst back into the room and thrust it in front of Bob.
‘I’ve got one of these; you haven’t got one of these. So who the hell do you think is the smarter one? Shut up, Bob!’
Looking back with a less jaundiced eye, Jackson likens Harvey’s tricks to Tony Soprano or what it must have been like to work for one of the old, bullying Hollywood moguls, a Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Kohn, who would rage or weep to get their way. Everything had shifted into a different register, one of emotional extremes utterly alien to a New Zealand temperament. It was all so bipolar: tantrums followed by largesse.
During the darkest hours, as relationships fragmented, Harvey had called Ken Kamins and began to rant down the cell phone. Eventually Kamins got a word in edgewise, ‘Harvey, I just don’t want to hear this. I am with my wife giving birth.’
The next day a huge gift basket arrives care of Miramax.
Beneath all of Harvey’s volatility was a stealthy manipulation. As the mists began to clear on a workable structure for the two films, it became starkly apparent that $75 million was vastly short of what was required. Experienced Australian producer Tim Sanders, who had worked on The Frighteners, had come on board at Jackson’s behest expressly to draw up a budget. Realistically, he estimated the two films would cost $130 to $135 million. The news didn’t go down well with Harvey, who had already invested in the region of $12 million toward serious development costs. A fact, Jackson says, ‘that was driving him nuts’.
What Harvey wasn’t telling Jackson was that he couldn’t get Disney to let him greenlight anything beyond $75 million. He later claimed he had tried to entice them onboard as partners, but they turned him down flat.
Kamins isn’t so sure that Disney had been so dismissive. ‘I have since talked to [then Disney CEO] Michael Eisner and he tells me that he wanted to engage, but Harvey wouldn’t show him anything. Wouldn’t show him scripts. Wouldn’t show him artwork. Wouldn’t let him talk to Peter. I don’t know if this is history being rewritten by the different participants, but he claims that he had asked Harvey for the ability to talk to Peter and the answer was no. And so when the answer was no, it was kind of like well, “Okay, no to you too.”’
Harvey had even ventured to other studios in an attempt to offset the swelling costs. Whether it was the uncertainty of getting into the Miramax business, the pervasive scepticism over the viability of the project, or good old-fashioned schadenfreude, no one was buying.
In desperation, Harvey dispatched the ‘executive from hell’ to New Zealand charged with rationalizing Sanders’ estimates back to $75 million. Jackson had looked up Russ Markovitz’s credits and ‘it was all a bit bloody dodgy’. With loose ties to Dimension through risible straight-to-video horror sequels for The Prophecy and From Dusk Till Dawn, Markovitz aggravated one and all by showing scant interest in the movie but a great obsession with Jackson having a medical in order to be properly insured. His increasingly paranoid imagination concocting nefarious plots to bump off the director for the insurance money, Jackson kept coming up with excuses to get out of it, before flatly refusing. ‘It was a screwy time,’ he admits. After two months, the mysterious Markovitz returned to from whence he came and was never heard from again.
With better judgment, Harvey then sent down Marty Katz, a more genial, square-jawed old-Hollywood type fresh from trouble shooting on Titanic, who expended a lot of energy trying to get his Porsche shipped over from Los Angeles. Katz, who was an old friend of Zemeckis, got along well with Jackson. He was impressed by what they were achieving in Wellington and reported back to Miramax both his enthusiasm and the confirmation that, ‘If you’ve only got seventy-five million you can only do one film.’
In the end, his Porsche would never get to Wellington. Jackson, Walsh and Katz were summoned to the looming Orthancs of New York for a crisis meeting
‘That is when it all sort of went pear-shaped,’ says Jackson.
They were sat in the sweatbox. But there were no theatrics, no double-act. In fact, there was no Bob. Which was a very bad sign. Harvey was about to give them the benefit of his feelings and this time the fury wasn’t an act. Jackson had betrayed them. He had broken their agreement. He had wasted $12 million of their money. Wasted his time, squandered his good will. Now the director had to do what was right and make a single film of The Lord of the Rings of no more than two hours in length for $75 million otherwise he was going to get John Madden to direct it.
Courtly and intelligent, a similar man in some respects to John Boorman, Madden was the very English director currently finishing up Shakespeare In Love to Harvey’s satisfaction. The featherlight period rom-com concerning the famous playwright’s romantic distractions would soon give Harvey another Oscar with which to berate his brother.
Kamins recalls a more radical threat. ‘Harvey was like, “You’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it.”’
Mad as that sounded, there was no way to know if it was a bluff. At the time he took it as gospel: Quentin Tarantino’s fucking Middle-earth.
Harvey had already sent Jackson’s two-film draft to British screenwriter Hossein Amini, another talent in good standing at Miramax having adapted Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Amini remembers being baffled by the peculiar cover: ‘Jamboree, The Life of Lord Baden Powell.’ Turning the page, it evidently had little to do with the Scout Movement.
Amini was a huge Tolkien fan and had been following the rumours about an adaptation. Now, here in his hands, was the secret script for The Lord of the Rings. He knew nothing of Harvey’s ultimatum to Jackson that either Madden or Tarantino was waiting in the wings. ‘They mentioned it might need some work, but I couldn’t really see why. I read it and loved it,’ he recalls.
When Miramax suggested converting it into one film, Amini’s mind shot back to Bakshi’s animated effort. A single film version would do nothing but alienate the massive fan base. ‘I believe at the time budget was the biggest stumbling block,’ he says, remaining convinced he was a bluff to get Jackson to rethink his approach toward the single film option.
In the sweatbox, with New York indifferently getting on with life somewhere outside, Jackson had reached the same conclusion. His face taking on a Gollum-like pallor, his hands trembling, he refused to crack. He just couldn’t see how you could make a single film and still do justice to the book.
Harvey engaged the full orchestra of his fury, threatening lawsuits to get his money back once he had kicked them off the project and back to New Zealand.2
Says Kamins, ‘Harvey really didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And I think Peter was putting him in an awkward place. There was a mix of a lot of different feelings.’ Indeed, it remains a tricky situation to parse. Jackson had agreed to a $75 million budget, and his plans had vastly outstripped that. Channels of communication had broken down. But he was on a road that would lead to over three billion dollars and Oscars galore. While no one could have quite predicted that, Miramax’s voluble supremo had neither the foresight nor the means to back Jackson’s vision, and in his frustration was pursuing something inevitably inferior. Did he really believe in the single film option?
To Jackson here was irony as bitter as burnt coffee (and he is assuredly a tea man). When they had first come to Miramax, Harvey had actually screened