Anything You Can Imagine. Ian Nathan
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think Jackson wanted $180 million. We just weren’t in a place to do that. PolyGram just didn’t have $180 million dollars to put into a project.’
In fact, PolyGram was in the process of being sold (it finally folded in 1999) and couldn’t make any commitments until the sale was done, let alone one of this magnitude. Realistically, it was going to be two to three months before they could properly talk.
‘We have seven days,’ replied Jackson.
The yo-yoing of hopes kindled then dashed was taking its toll. Dread was sliding into despair. Why keep subjecting themselves to such disappointment?
‘New Line was the only other meeting we had,’ he says. ‘At that point I really was like, “Let’s just do our New Line meeting tomorrow and go home.”’
*
In 1986, Mark Ordesky was in the direct-to-video business, sourcing lucrative shockers for B-movie distributor Republic Pictures: ghoulish Z-grade stuff like Witchboard and Scared Stiff. But even they thought he was nuts for suggesting Bad Taste. Ordesky had been gobsmacked after the New Zealand Film Commission had sent him a copy of Jackson’s splatter-happy debut and, undaunted, took the tape with him when he moved to New Line.
‘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’.