i'm a union woman

[jlh]

Oh my god, talk about taking your ball and going home (or leaving home, as it were). I'm just glad Mr. Urban spoke out about this earlier because I was worried he wouldn't, and that honestly would have dimmed his light a little for me.

Ugh, Peter Jackson, seriously, what is wrong with you? Getting good pay for actors will ruin the New Zealand film industry? Really? Or even better, it is already ruined beyond repair? Because yeah, that seems to really have kept people from ever filming in Canada and Australia, never mind the more expensive US.

Seriously.

Comments

[laughingmedusa]

I really thought Peter Jackson was a better guy than this. D:

[mardia]

Not cool, Peter Jackson, not cool. (And I don't even care for the LOTR movies! Blasphemy, I know.)

[jlh]

I haven't even seen them! And The Hobbit is the only one of the books I've read, and that was for school, in junior high. By the time my brother was like, you should read these books, I had read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was deep in my "no books about boys unless for school" period. I started reading it, then said, "are there any girls in this?" and he was like, "well ..." and I was like, "take them back."

I felt like I shouldn't see the movies without having read the books, but I'm never going to read the books, so I'm never going to see those movies. Also they all look like they're refugees from a third-tier '80s metal band, so there's no eye candy there for me at all, either. And the extended versions everyone wants you to watch, that's like 18 hours of movie or something you're supposed to watch in one sitting? No thank you.

[sistermagpie]

The best thing in a review of LOTR I remember reading was how they had cleverly distinguished all the races by giving them different hair from 70s rockstars. The men were Aerosmith, the elves were the Allman brothers, the dwarves were the roadies and the hobbits were Peter Frampton.

[jlh]

HA, I am so all over that! I guess that makes Viggo Steven Tyler and Karl Joe Perry?

[toby]

I don't have the link anymore, but I read a few days ago that the problem is not that Jackson doesn't want to pay the union minimum - he apparently pays significantly more than that - it's that he wants to negotiate with the actors individually and not the union collectively. Apparently this is actually required by law in NZ, but the union wants to change that. The article sounded like they want to use the movie for this political gain. While I don't necessarily disagree with the ultimate goal, I don't like the tactic personally.

[jlh]

I guess it's more the whole, "the industry has been ruined! no one will make films here again" thing. Like, say that unfortunately you can't make that movie there, if you need to, but the rest was OTT.

And you know, the whole "we'll pay more than you'll get from collective bargaining" is something that's been used to bust unions for a long time. I don't know that I'd necessarily call it political gain since it's pretty clear what they're trying to do, and often it takes a big profile stance to move things along.