By CATHERINE MASTERS
In 1991, actress and writer Liddy Holloway lay down on her bed to tuck into a good book.
The book was Whale Rider, and she could not put it down.
She says she laughed, cried and felt inspired. From page one, she could see it would make a great movie.
After she had finished, she got on the telephone and called the author, Witi Ihimaera, to ask if he would let her take it to someone in the film industry.
She ended up working with Ihimaera over the summer and together they wrote two draft scripts, based on the book but introducing new characters and developing relationships.
More than 10 years later, Holloway is about to take the Film Commission to the High Court.
She says she had a contract which has not been honoured and she did not get a writing credit on the now-famous film, which is making Hollywood history with the Oscar nomination of its 13-year-old star, Keisha Castle-Hughes, as the youngest candidate for a best-actress award.
The commission's chief executive, Ruth Harley, says it has no power to give her a credit.
She also says the company that eventually made the movie, South Pacific Pictures, does not accept she even has a claim.
Its managing director and Whale Rider producer, John Barnett, said yesterday that Holloway was just one of many people who worked on the script early on and he doubted very much if she was entitled to anything.
"Niki Caro wrote our script. [Holloway's] work was never used."
Holloway, a veteran of New Zealand's television scene who was a regular on Shortland Street and is still often recognised as Alex McKenna - married to clinic boss Dr Michael McKenna and mother of Rachel - these days pens television scripts and is currently writing a play.
She says she is miffed not to get a Whale Rider credit, but emphasises that her court action is more about getting a contract honoured.
The contract gave her a writer's credit and a percentage of the producer's net profit.
It could be worth a reasonable amount of money, but she is not sure. That would be for lawyers to sort out.
She accepts that writers often work on projects that get turned over to other writers, but she says the finished work has many similarities to her scripts.
So what happened? Well, things got a bit messy, she says.
After she first read the book, she went to see Mr Barnett and the late Murray Newey of Endeavour Tucker to see if they wanted to turn it into a film.
They loved the idea and she was contracted to work with Ihimaera - and was paid for that work - but the contract also contained the other clauses.
Endeavour Tucker was deregistered, the film rights to the book lapsed and South Pacific Pictures took them up.
Holloway says the Film Commission would not provide development funding to South Pacific Pictures unless the company undertook to repay the development money already given for Whale Rider.
"South Pacific Pictures had to repay the development moneys already paid to Tucker, in return the Film Commission required Tucker to assign all its rights to any existing screenplays and contracts to the Film Commission. The Film Commission then assigned those on to South Pacific Pictures, so it was complicated."
Suddenly she was not on the project any more and that was not a big deal, Holloway says.
She says it happens in the film world.
Many writers will work on a film, and she was later told that no one had seen a script with her name on it and that they had started over from scratch.
But two years ago, when a copy of the shooting script "fell into my hands", she thought "hang on," a lot of the script was familiar - but she had no credit.
She has a list of 42 points of similarity between her and Ihimaera's original scripts and the final film.
"Much of the dialogue had its genesis in the first two scripts. In fact some of it was identical in one or two places."
Holloway contacted the Film Commission to ask it to explain but says that for a year it did not reply.
When it finally did, it wrote saying her contractual rights had been "extinguished."
She says she has no idea what that even means, but thinks the commission did not respond because it hoped the problem - her - would just go away.
Dr Harley, however, says that if Holloway has a legitimate claim, it would be South Pacific's responsibility.
This is why the commission sought a three-way mediation discussion but this did not work out.
"South Pacific Pictures does not accept she has any claim at all and therefore wouldn't come to the mediation, so there was just no sense in us going," Dr Harley says.
Holloway says she has wanted mediation for a long time but the matter should have been sorted out 18 months ago when she first contacted the commission.
It was not her timing that the matter has become public now, just as Castle-Hughes has been nominated for the best-actress Oscar.
For the record, she says there are no sour grapes.
"I've heard people say, 'Oh, this is sour grapes', and I think it's very odd. You know, in what regard?
"I celebrate Whale Rider. I loved the film and I absolutely celebrate Keisha's nomination. I mean, she gave a superlative performance. I sobbed along with the rest of the cinema.
"It's not about that. I was a writer with a contract about a film and my contract wasn't honoured. That's what it's about."
Herald Feature: Whale Rider
Script-rights row sour sequel to box-office hit
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