The hoard of the Rings

By PETER CALDER

In the two years since the first part of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of The Ring showed the rest of the world what many of us had known for years - that a rumpled, rotund, bespectacled, hobbit-like Wellingtonian by the name of Peter Jackson is a genius - it has become self-evident that the trilogy is the best thing for the New Zealand economy since refrigerated shipping.

It is, by any standards, an extraordinary achievement. We may be delighted - though we should not be surprised - that the person to out-Hollywood Hollywood half a world away from Hollywood, would be someone from a country which invented the can-do mentality.

Visitors to the Miramar headquarters where The Lord of the Rings was made must be impressed by the atmosphere of cheerful industry, but will also be knocked out by the staggering level of technical wizardry, ancient and modern. There they exploited the potential of a hand-held 3D laser scanner made by a Christchurch firm called Applied Research Associates, which allows digital artists to scan actors in costume on the set and create images for computer manipulation.

They invented a cunning camera mount that forced perspective so Ian McKellen's Gandalf towered over Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins. They created a special effects facility which was only the second in 30 years outside California to win the Oscar for visual effects. The whole project may be a testament to New Zealanders' ingenuity, but it's not of the number 8 wire kind.

If the achievement has impressed even those who - like me - thought the finished films flawed, it seems to have absolutely mesmerised some among us. Politicians looking for electoral advantage attached themselves to the project's coat-tails; provincial newspapers, such as those in Wellington, marvelled at the sight of stars walking their streets, shopping in their shops, eating in their cafes (the Evening Post fearlessly ferreted out the news that Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler had dinner together and ate salad: "Movie stars eat a lot of salads, I think," their informant offered); and everybody took it for granted that once the world's moviegoers had firmly located Middle Earth in the Shaky Isles, we could brace ourselves for the tourist flood that would swamp us with wealth.

Three years on, as Wellington prepares to host the world premiere of the trilogy's final part, The Return of the King, the reality is a little less spectacular.

Or may be. Who knows? No one.

Certainly not the Government's own number-crunchers. Statistics New Zealand tells us that visitor numbers in September were 148,400 - up 9 per cent on last September and the biggest September ever. But to look a little further is to find that Australia's September numbers were up more than twice as much, to 19.6 per cent (visitors to the set of the Matrix movies, perhaps). Even England's visitor count was up 5 per cent.

Tourism minister Mark Burton might have been on to it when he said the figures showed New Zealand's tourism business had made "a full recovery". The figures represented not a human tide unleashed by the adventures of a fellowship of warriors and hobbits, but a bounce back from the havoc wrought by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the global uncertainty caused by the so-called "war on terror" and the fear of flying anywhere brought on by the Sars epidemic.

To put it another way, the economic boom brought by The Lord of the Rings has turned out a bit like the bonanza that was meant to come from the America's Cup. That regatta may have been fabulous news for Westhaven chandlers, restaurateurs at Viaduct Harbour and the New World supermarket at Victoria Park, where the syndicates bought their groceries. But the cash-strapped small-business owner in Dargaville or the mortgage-laden clock-puncher in Mt Wellington might be forgiven for wondering whether the trickle-down evaporated while it was trickling down.

Who breathed easier when we won the America's Cup? Whose personal fortune has disappeared since we lost it? Hands up those who feel like they owe their current state of carefree affluence to Peter Jackson, Gollum and Gandalf.

It may seem like a cheap shot, but no words are cheaper than those of politicians seeking to beat up good news. When Prime Minister Helen Clark this month announced a raft of measures designed to boost the local film industry, she linked the initiative to the benefits that have flowed through the Weta studios in Miramar and into the economy.

"Film and television are powerful media," she said, an observation so achingly banal that no Hollywood script editor would have let it past. "The way in which they project and brand New Zealand has considerable value beyond the earnings generated by the companies in the industry.

"For example, Lord of the Rings not only brought significant offshore investment to New Zealand and created new jobs and opportunity, but also had tremendous promotional value for tourism and the wider economy. On a smaller scale, Whale Rider's success is also very positive for New Zealand overall."

The very language of the utterance - it is full of weighty but ultimately insubstantial words like "considerable", "significant" and "overall" - is a clue to its conceptual bankruptness. For the fact is that no one has satisfactorily quantified the benefits to New Zealand that have flowed from The Lord of the Rings.

The Film Commission asked the Institute of Economic Research to provide data on which it might base an informed assessment of the effects of the films on the domestic film industry and on selected areas of the economy. But its May, 2002, report raised more questions than it answered. The Herald's economic commentator Brian Gaynor described the 71-page report, which cost an estimated $100,000, as "an incredibly disappointing document".

The study was prepared for the Film Commission, whose chief executive, Ruth Harley, "used the report to gloat about her organisation's involvement in the international blockbuster", Gaynor wrote. "It draws a number of vague conclusions, particularly on the movie's impact on inbound tourism, [but] unfortunately, makes no mention of the substantial cost of the project in terms of tax breaks, estimated at $217 million."

This, of course, is the great unspeakable, a subject widely drowned out by the cheering about the Rings' success. With the exception of the Listener's Gordon Campbell, who anatomised the way the films' financing was structured, the fact that it cost us about as much as we earned from wine exportslast year has escaped mention. Those who bring it up are looked at askance, like embarrassing guests at a party. The words "tall poppy" are mumbled.

Certainly Finance Minister Michael Cullen won no friends for mentioning it. Cullen took the Finance portfolio after Labour's election victory in 1999 and found himself presented, fait accompli, with the tax deal hammered out between Rings producers New Line and the previous National Administration.

The arrangement, which Campbell outlined in painstaking detail, in essence allowed New Line to set up a tax-sheltered local company to make the films and buy the finished product from that company. Cullen grudgingly left the scheme intact, largely because he wasn't sure he had the power to tinker with it. But the man whose economic ideology is as tinder-dry as his wit remarked ruefully - and without hyperbole - that it would have been cheaper to buy every New Zealander a ticket to each film in the trilogy.

That $200-million-plus cost to the tax base is relatively easy to quantify. What is harder to reckon is what we got back. A nation's image is a slippery object to grasp, and the extent to which a given event contributes to it is extraordinarily hard to gauge. Who is to say that a film about orcs and hobbits set in a fantasy-land but filmed in New Zealand does more to contribute to our worldwide visibility than, say, an All Black victory (say what?) or David Lange talking up our nuclear-free stance in an Oxford Union debate with Jerry Falwell?

Well, Paul Voigt for one. The Investment Manager (Screen Production) for Investment New Zealand says he and his colleagues tracked all mentions of New Zealand in the United States media in the six months after the release of the first film and calculated an EAV (for "equivalent advertising value") of $20 million to $25 million.

He becomes a bit vaguer when we start discussing methodology. Does a rave review from the New York Times, for example, rate a higher value than one in the Cleveland Plain Dealer? And does a bad review count for negative advertising value? "It's an inexact science," Voigt concedes. "But it's an indication."

He quotes cab-drivers in San Diego - home of the last American defence of the America's Cup - who'd never heard of the yachting regatta but who, when he tells them he's from New Zealand, instantly say "Lord of the Rings".

It's an indication all right, but it's hard to know how it stacks up against a conversation I had with Ed Harris, who played the string-pulling Christof in The Truman Show. I mentioned the excitement here about the upcoming opening of the Rings, part two.

Why the excitement, he wondered. I explained that the films were made here. There was a long pause.

"They were made in Noo Zealand?" he whistled. "Is that a fact?"

It's only an indication, too, of course. Harris, a genuinely down-to-earth, hardworking artist who rejects the notion of himself as a star, is hardly a Hollywood powerbroker. But if the Guardian's review of the first Rings film says our "stunning landscapes are the modest star", the New York Times and Chicago Sun-Times reviews don't contain the words "New Zealand". And it's worth wondering whether the throwaway comments of a couple of San Diego cabbies constitute a sound foundation on which to base an international marketing strategy.

For an international marketing strategy it is. The Government is spending $4 million on promotional campaigns associated with the final Rings movie. More than 60 journalists - most specialising in business, tourism or lifestyle - are being flown in from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Asia. They'll be put up at flash pubs, wined and dined. They'll go fishing and rafting and swimming and sightseeing. They'll be impressed, and they'll say as much in print for their legions of readers.

The aim, says Voigt, is to "leverage to the max The Lord of the Rings as a focal point" for their writing.

Voigt argues that without the three films - in particular, the December 1 world premiere in Wellington - it would have been hard to attract the same press attention, although it's difficult to imagine a skiing, wine-drinking or whale-watching holiday down here would be hard to sell to jaded journos from crowded Northern Hemisphere cities. In any event, the value of having all the world's press attention focused on us at once is at least debatable: having New Zealand on every newsstand, station and TV screen for a week may not rate the same EAV as a spread each month or so for a couple of years.

In short, no one can sensibly dispute that the press exposure this country has received (and will receive) thanks to The Lord of the Rings will be valuable. But by the same token no one, it seems, can reliably quantify that value.

That ignorance is officially admitted by the setting up of a Screen Production Industry Survey, which was unveiled along with the announcement this month of measures aimed at boosting the local film industry. The survey, a collaboration between Statistics New Zealand, NZ Trade and Enterprise and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, will seek to provide "an understanding, in economic and human terms, of the size, value and contribution to the New Zealand economy of [the screen production] sector."

The announcement - by the Prime Minister who had just got through hailing the "significant" and "considerable" value to us all of the Rings project - noted "the severe limitations of existing data", and added that the first stage would involve "clarifying the questions to be answered". It's a laudable aim, but it is also an implicit official admission that nobody really knows what they are talking about when they rejoice in the value to everyone of the film biz.

It's also pleasing that they will spend two years working out what to survey and how to survey it; the data collection won't even begin until 2005. By that time, the Government's Large Budget Grant Scheme - a cash-back programme of extravagant taxpayer support for Hollywood studios - will have been running for two of its planned three years. It is something of an understatement to say that the cart is being firmly attached to the front of the horse.

The Large Budget Grant Scheme - widely known by local players as the "foreign devils" scheme - was a response to calls by local film-makers for more state support for the film production sector. Peter Jackson had led the chorus of derision when Cullen pulled the plug on tax breaks. He said he doubted he could have put the Rings package together without them. That assertion is hard to take seriously now that Universal has agreed to let Jackson make King Kong here - and to pay him a record director's fee and 20 per cent of the gross over US$400 million ($628 million) - without the assistance of the New Zealand taxpayer.

Nevertheless in July, the Minister of Economic Development, Jim Anderton, responded to calls from many film-makers - led by Jackson and expatriate Andrew "Shrek" Adamson - and set up the grant regime which will reimburse big-budget productions one eighth of the money they spend here.

Anderton described the scheme as "an encouragement to attract and maintain the net economic benefits of hosting and producing major film and television projects in New Zealand". Seen against the background of the admission above - that we have no idea what the "net economic benefits" are - that seems like so much cant. It also might be regarded as playing fast and loose with your money.

Interestingly the 12 per cent figure exactly matches a similar financial incentive offered by Australia, and the move is widely seen here as a response to anxiety that other countries were poised to become more attractive to other "runaway" productions, particularly with the increasing strength of the New Zealand dollar. Said one major producer after the announcement: "We offer 12 per cent this week and next week Canada offers 15. We're stuffed."

In the end, of course, value is not expressed only in dollar terms. The sight (and unmistakably New Zealand sound) of Richard Taylor, the creative designer and supervisor at Weta Workshop, picking up two Oscars in March last year, was as priceless as the sight of Anna Paquin gulping for air when she took the statuette for best supporting actress eight years earlier. It told us something about ourselves - or so we told ourselves - to see our own footing it with the best on a world stage.

Yet did it, really? The breathless excitement about the stars eating salad in Courtenay Place aside, there is something self-sabotaging about the way we are surprised when we succeed. We come from a land which has produced a century of world-beaters: the man who split the atom, the man who first stood on Mt Everest, one of the greatest operatic sopranos of her era. Yet still we react with aw-shucks bemusement when our excellence is acknowledged. We roll on our backs and purr when Sir Ian McKellen tells the British press he loved being here and that we are all very nice people.

We have every right to be proud of Rings, but we do its makers - and ourselves - a disservice if we are surprised by its success. But when all is said and done, the trilogy is more a technical than an artistic or cultural achievement. If that appears to damn with faint praise, it shouldn't. Many film-goers lament that so much of Hollywood's output is made up of the best films money can buy and megabytes can make. Judged as a piece of screen storytelling and by the criteria - the conviction of the performances, the rhythm of the narrative, the resonance of the story as opposed to the plot - it has, so far at least, seldom been better than average.

And that, it seems to me, is the nub of the question about what cultural benefit Rings may have conferred on the nation as a whole. Except to the extent that it showcased the extraordinary resourcefulness of Jackson and the people he gathered round him, Rings says nothing about who we are. But there would not be a person on the planet - among those who have paid US$40 million ($63 million) so far to see it - who would be in any doubt that Whale Rider is made in New Zealand and is about New Zealand. It is when our film-makers tell our stories that we get a priceless spin-off.

Yet in the land where they made The Lord of the Rings, Vertical Limit and The Last Samurai, it remains desperately difficult to make films. The announcement that the Film Commission's baseline budget is to be almost doubled is an encouraging token, but it does nothing to help those with a track record complete second and subsequent features.

Vincent Ward, one of a small handful of film-makers invited twice into competition at Cannes, has sweated blood to get the last few hundred thousand he needs to start shooting the period drama River Queen on the Whanganui. Ward, whose What Dreams May Come took US$200 million ($314 million) worldwide, has flatly said that the budget increase is of no benefit to non-novice local film-makers. They look to the separately administered Film Fund - which helped to finance Whale Rider and fully funded Gaylene Preston's Perfect Strangers, starring Sam Neill - which is getting no increase. Meanwhile the benefits of the Large Budget Grant Scheme don't trickle down to local productions because their budgets aren't large enough to qualify.

"It's a somewhat sad paradox," says Ward, "that the scheme helps foreign business but does nothing to help New Zealand film-makers tell New Zealand stories."

Anyone wondering what lasting benefit The Lord of the Rings might confer on us all might be inclined to agree.

* Peter Calder is a Herald film critic and the New Zealand correspondent for the American film magazine Variety.

* It's a Lord of the Rings weekend at nzherald.co.nz. Join us throughout this weekend for updates from Wellington as the city prepares to host Monday's world premiere of Part 3 in the Rings trilogy: The Return of the King.

Herald Feature: Lord of the Rings

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