Beast stomps to top of Jackson's list

By GREG DIXON

First it was furry hobbits, now it's a big, hairy ape.

Hirsute film director Peter Jackson's obsession with hirsute creatures went beyond doubt this week with the announcement he's remaking the 1933 horror-adventure classic, King Kong.

With a reported $200 million budget - around a third of that for Jackson's lauded, nearly completed The Lord Of The Rings trilogy - Kong is scheduled for a 2005 release and is another monster boost for his reputation.

It's also evidence the boy from Pukerua Bay has been monkeying with us.

Even before The Fellowship Of The Ring opened in December 2001, Jackson said his next project would be more modest.

"I'm definitely going to make some smaller films next because I'm making a big movie now, I'm making the biggest film that I ever want to make," he said before Fellowship's premiere.

And recently Jackson's partner and Rings' Oscar-winning co-writer Fran Walsh told America's Daily Variety that, while the pair wanted a bash at Kong, their next film would be similar to their 1994 art-house hit, Heavenly Creatures.

It would have been pleasing for the country's most famous director actually to make another New Zealand film. Kong, like Rings, will be shot here using mostly local crews but hardly rates as an indigenous story.

The rumoured next project for the pair was an adaptation of As Nature Made Him, the controversial biography of David Thiessen, a American man given a gender reassignment as a child by New Zealand-born doctor John Money.

A more human, less special effects-driven story, it would have provided Jackson with a challenge quite different from the spectacular Rings - and moviegoers a break from his computer-generated beasts.

But it seems the 41-year-old director's history - not to mention an offer he couldn't refuse from US film studio Universal - means Kong has stomped out other options.

Remaking it was a boyhood daydream, apparently, and he almost got his shot in the mid-90s before the studio canned the idea.

"No movie has captivated my imagination more than King Kong," he fizzed in a statement this week. "I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old. It's been my sustained dream to reinterpret this classic for a new age."

It'll also funnel a great deal of dosh into what appears another sustained Jackson dream: an entirely self-contained, George Lucas-like studio of his own in Wellington.

Jackson, now a multimillionaire, has invested great wads of his Rings pay cheques into developing a $30 million state-of-the-art, go-to-whoa film production facility in what Wellingtonians like to call "Wellywood".

After buying the former National Film Unit in 2000, he last year began building a new studio at Miramar near his other studios and his special effects outfits, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital.

He reportedly expects the whole thing to be humming by mid next year - just in time for you know what.

So Kong, while feeding his boyhood fantasies, is just the sort of big-budget project he needs to justify his investment - and to keep his multi-Academy Award-winning effects boffins, like Weta's Richard Taylor, in well-paid, high-tech work.

Would a small, low-tech film do that? No.

Kong will also give another welcome hoist to the New Zealand economy, which by March last year had swallowed $352.7 million from Rings, according to an Institute of Economic Research report.

There will be more jobs, too. Between 1500 and 2000, reported the Dominion Post, devoting nearly its entire front page to Jackson's coup, even mocking up a picture of their hero in a giant ape's paw with what passes for Wellington's downtown in the background.

Unsurprisingly, the director won't be using central Wellywood as a double for New York, the setting in the film's final reel. Instead there will be a mock-up of the Big Apple on "someone's farmland", the director told the paper in his only New Zealand interview.

What he didn't say was whether Kong has come here with or without a tax break like the one provided for Rings - the very incentive that Jackson recently told TV One's Sunday current affairs programme was essential if New Zealand's screen production industry is to compete internationally.

Finance Minister Michael Cullen's office confirms no approach has been made for a tax break for Kong.

But in all likelihood, thanks to that Oscar-winning cash-cow Rings, Jackson's kudos in Hollywood means it'll throw money at him to make anything here, tax incentives or no.

Jackson also kept mum on his Kong's look, confirming only a 1930s setting.

The original, made by RKO Radio Pictures and starring Fay Wray as Ann Darrow, has been designated by the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress as one of the 100 greatest films and a national treasure.

So you could say Our Peter is mucking with film history - but he's not the first.

A 1976 remake produced by Dino De Laurentiis (Conan The Barbarian), with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges, tanked at the box office after a critical savaging.

De Laurentiis made another attempt in 1986 with King Kong Lives (with Terminator star Linda Hamilton), while the Japanese have made a fistful of cult Kong pictures since the 30s, often involving a death match with Godzilla.

Indeed, it was a 1998 Hollywood version of Godzilla - a turkeyzilla it turned out - and a so-so remake of the Kong-like Mighty Joe Young (first made in 1949) the same year,that cooled Universal on a Jackson version the first time around.

A draft script of Jackson's first attempt can be found on the internet at http://tbhl.theonering.net/films/king-kong-p.html

While it will undoubtedly be heavily revised, the draft suggests he'll be sticking closely to the original's plot, involving a film crew's visit to Skull Island, home to Kong and vicious dinosaurs.

The draft makes Ann Darrow a wannabe archaeologist rather than the original's down-and-out film extra, while her love interest and saviour Jack Driscoll is a former WWI pilot rather than a ship's first mate.

Instead of the original's relatively quick romance, Jackson's Darrow and Driscoll form a love-hate alliance similar to Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in the 1984 blockbuster Romancing The Stone and Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the 1951 classic, The African Queen.

The draft opens with a World War I aerial dogfight (interestingly, Jackson is a warbird collector), includes more savage dinos but does finish with the original's now classic closer: "It was beauty killed the beast."

Let's hope Jackson ends Kong's recent history by not doing the same.