My post from last week about Tom Cruise’s fall from grace will go off the home page of this blog with this entry, but this one is related: Peter Jackson’s news that he will produce a remake of The Dam Busters, to be helmed by first-time director Christian Rivers, could not be better timed.
   Our seventh form physics teacher, Doug Bell, was a bit of a movie buff, so we had to watch the original movie for class, as well as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
   More important is the fact that Hollywood is moving away from its big-star names, something that Jackson had tapped into from an early time. My friend David Patin put it well when we were chatting in Paris, before The Fellowship of the Ring was released: ‘Jackson picks actors whom you have seen, but you are not quite sure where. That draws you in.’ Naomi Watts fell into the same category, though admittedly the remakes of The Ring films were higher-profile.
   It may have been borne of necessity, but the way Hollywood managed to make money from his Lord of the Rings trilogy without having major stars could well have heralded its distancing from the likes of Cruise. And, as I wrote on the 25th, it is part of a larger trend.
   One can bet that the new Dambusters will have names that are big, but not Tom Cruise-big; and that Jackson, once more, will remind us that he was the single man that changed the face of the New Zealand economy.
   To the world, Jackson signals that ‘New Zealanders are not in to worshipping stars, or Aucklanders, for that matter; the movie business Down Under is in the business of making movies’—something I wrote last week.
   Here, he is a man who ignored the government telling him to go to heck and that his idea of turning Miramar into a world-class movie production centre was a joke. By doing that, film is as big an industry as forestry in New Zealand now, in a country where earnings of NZ$2·6 billion is a lot for a four million population. This country owes him.
   One man made a difference—which should tell all New Zealanders that the word can’t, so beloved of this government, is a load of bollocks. The politicians, the public bodies, the civil servants, the institutions and the establishment all failed against one man’s dream and vision. The parallels with the Dam Busters’ story should be noted.

Del.icio.us tags: establishment institutionalization Hollywood film movie film industry movies Peter Jackson New Zealand economy Tom Cruise Dambusters The Dam Busters remake vision leadership Christian Rivers Posted by Jack Yan, 23:27  permalink

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