Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit
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She's lucky it remained above minimum wage, TBH. Actors of my acquaintance who've worked on that production have said that, once you account for the agent's cut and the various deductions for ACC, your margin above minimum wage can be getting down to "read an acting contract through it" degrees of thinness.
I believe (from having heard things here and there from people who know) that the reason it's not such an issue is that most people on set are working much much longer than 8 hours a day. It's still a good example of relatively poor conditions, though.
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Are you suggesting that the good citizens of Matamata start walking around on their knees and speaking a strange tongue?
lol. Not quite. Though that could be fun to see.
I am sure there is ample imagination in the town--as well as a couple of good cafes.
Nice bar I went into.
A couple of good cafes won't make people stop for long - especially if the good cafes are just like every other good cafe in any other town.
I'm talking more about shop facades, themed accommodation, maybe even a town crier or something...
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as Edison might have said, our unions discovered something important - how NOT to negotiate. If this forces them to sharpen up, and stop relying on tired rhetoric in their battle for worker conditions, to do the diligence, to understand the issues, to seek wide support, etc, then that's been a very valuable lesson for them.
I agree, their naivety was embarrassing, a shambles that turned into a cluster fuck. I hope Equity is having a really good look at itself, its leadership and its associations with our Aussy cousins. They seriously need a better script writer.
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Yes, but it would've been a wider-ranging change than just something done for The Hobbit.
Indeed, and for that reason, hardly fair to hold The Hobbit to ransom over. You're talking about changes that would affect virtually every industry in NZ, something that needs serious debate.
She's lucky it remained above minimum wage, TBH.
Every week I keep wondering when the slave revolt is going to happen. It's not like they haven't got an excuse, they're asked to strip off every episode, engage in some pretty damned rude sex scenes, and scenes involving sexual violence. Is there a commitment to method-acting on that set?
Funnily enough, the most exploitative shows I've ever seen tend to be live theater, where performers get paid squat to do extremely difficult and skillful (and risque) work. This is the small budget stuff, funded by grants, organized by amateurs, attended mostly by acquaintances. These people would dream of even having a contract, let alone a union. I don't see that as a model for how our creative industries should work and see big budgets as mostly upping the standards for workers.
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And the production was? Spartacus. The one that has never heard a peep from the actors' unions.
I think some questions have to be asked about that.There are indeed. But can we please rise above "the President's husband is a director" crap and look at how many Auckland AE members have had work of some sort from it? I think it was more about "don't shit in your back yard" than corrupt cronyism, except they thought it more than okay to shit in Wellington's back yard, as they wouldn't have been expecting much in the way of day player roles from Te Hobbit.
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themed accommodation
You will find that at Raglan (teepees) and Waitomo Caves (planes, trains and even a hobbit hole or two).
Still, some motels I have stayed at recently (including one in Epsom on Saturday night) seemed like they were designed for hobbits--except that hobbits probably weren't responsible for the condom wrappers under the bed!
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From Stuff
Screen Production and Development Association chief executive Penelope Borland said it would start negotiating with Actors' Equity on minimum terms and conditions for actors.
Warm fuzzies. Ain't it great. We're all winners and grinners.
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except they thought it more than okay to shit in Wellington's back yard, as they wouldn't have been expecting much in the way of day player roles from Te Hobbit.
Actually NZAE had a crack, in its oddly unproductive way, at Outrageous Fortune, The Cult and This Is Not My Life. Which makes the free ride for Spartacus -- an actual non-union production that pays shitty wages -- all the more puzzling.
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Re: Jackson's promotional video. Just show the Hobbits on a NZ road trip
The short film has already been done.It's called "Bogans"
Starts out in my old garage. -
And once again urgency rears its head so that National can expedite the resolution of a "problem". How many unintended consequences can there possibly be in ramming through a law to clarify, supposedly on a strictly sectoral basis, the employee/contractor distinction? I mean, it's only one of the biggest issues confronted by the ERA and they still have to decide each case on the specific facts.
National couldn't even get the law right on trying to disenfranchise all incarcerated persons, and one would've thought that that language would be moderately straightforward. Now they're dicking around with a complex aspect of employment law literally overnight.Fucking awesome.
This pretty much sums up how I feel at the moment, so I'm going to repeat it in it's entireity.
I'm decidedly more than "queasy" about this. It sets a bad, bad precedent.
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And the production was? Spartacus. The one that has never heard a peep from the actors' unions.
I think some questions have to be asked about that.
I think you need to be careful about "you protested about Y but not about X, and X was first/worse etc" arguments.
For one thing you want the wider public to give a shit about your struggle, and clearly that's the case with the Hobbit over Spartacus.
But for another, targeting one thing doesn't create any obligation to in the future or in the past target another similar thing. Laws should be fair, unions don't have to. If you're campaigning to change something I'd be more concerned about making it effective rather than consistent when there isn't a base requirement to do so.
The whole thing backfired, but I don't think the reason for that was because "oi, you didn't protest Spartacus".
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Still, some motels I have stayed at recently (including one in Epsom on Saturday night) seemed like they were designed for hobbits--except that hobbits probably weren't responsible for the condom wrappers under the bed!
I think that's the result of some hobbits that people have been referring to a lot in the past month:
"Fucking Hobbits!"
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Hobbits would never wear dingers. They are righteous folk.
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Do condoms come in hobbit-size?
How does proportion work when you're only three foot seven?
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I think you need to be careful about "you protested about Y but not about X, and X was first/worse etc" arguments.
In the abstract I agree, but I think that when you have the fact that the exact rhetoric that was being used (fallaciously) about The Hobbit by NZAE and its supporters is completely applicable to Spartacus, and that this isn't exactly a secret for the people who were making these claims, there is a case to answer for.
This isn't an abstract "You can't protest against the war in Iraq unless you also condemn all Muslim extremism worldwide" false equivalence, it gets right to the heart of what the purpose of NZAE's actions were actually meant to achieve.
(And for the record, I think the answer is "It's all the result of misjudged good intentions", but I appreciate that requires a certain amount of good faith in the intentions of the human beings involved.)
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Could you stomach one more piece of analysis? And from a Marxist, no less? I had been hoping that Scott Hamilton would wade in.
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Andre,
Yes. But the other possible explanations (and I'm not sure I've ever heard a reason why they targeted the hobbit instead of Spartacus) could relate to timing - they didn't feel they were ready - the belief that Spartacus as a production new to NZ was more likely to jump to another country than the Hobbit which has a history here, or plain tactics - target the big production which is going to have major NZ and international headlines.
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Re targeting the Hobbit vs Spartacus. My perception is that the leading NZAE protagonists didn't have the same history of working on Jackson projects as they did with Auckland-based projects. So I agree that it was a case of not shitting in your back yard, or in the case of Parker and Ward-Lealand, in your own nest.
Also Hobbit vs Spartacus - one had residuals.
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Or hobbit hurling?
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Could you stomach one more piece of analysis? And from a Marxist, no less? I had been hoping that Scott Hamilton would wade in.
What you said in your comments over there Giovanni. Word!
(But consider yourself told off by Chris Trotter - don't take it too hard!)
ETA: But what do I know? I'm just one of the:
smug smarmy Grey Lynn chardonnay pseudo-socialists
And that's so unfair! I hardly ever drink chardonnay!
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Roman Nose? That's Chinatown, Jake...
Polanski is shooting the film adaptation of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage in Paris...
...and in a further coincidence related to that, Hobbit cast member Mark Hadlow is currently appearing in the Chch Court Theatre production of this play...
I also note that Kate Winslet (who got a big break
in Jackson's Heavenly Creatures ) is in the Polanski
film version...
spooky?
Contag-ian? or dizzy-ease...Sorry, catching a case of Ian D here ;-)
Hmmmm, would a case of me be a punnet?
it sure wouldn't be a crate...
I can't even get a six-pack together!
;- )
The well tempered & rubbery pork sword...*Do condoms come in hobbit-size?
Condominimums?
*I've only just learned that a Bilbo was a sword used in former times, noted for the temper and elasticity of its blade.
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Isn't the person running sparticus like the husband of one of the key agitators in the whole hobbit debacle, which might suggest why it wasn't targeted..
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Re targeting the Hobbit vs Spartacus.
I don't think the self-interest argument works well - as Russell pointed out, other Auckland-based productions have been targets from Actors Equity/MEAA.
I'm sure there was (misguided) tactical reasoning about willingness to shift production and applying pressure on the largest player. Something more like that, anyway. Could ask Equity..
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I hardly ever drink chardonnay!
It's like swill to me. (Have I got that right? My English is, how you say, inelegant.)
(But consider yourself told off by Chris Trotter - don't take it too hard!)
Oh, it's a badge of honour. Always.
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Remember that Spartacus has been in a pretty tricky space for a few months-with Andy Whitfield's cancer and the uncertainty about how the production will proceed, I'm sure the last thing NZAE wanted to do was to be the final boot in the ribs to a struggling production.
...oh, wait.
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