10/31/22
Newletter144
The Crack of Dawn
I had the great pleasure of working in New Zealand for eight years, 1993-2001. When I first arrived to make Hercules I had on old acquaintance living and working at the very bottom of the country in Dunedin. To give you a sense of where this is located, if you want to go to Antarctica (you need permission), you fly out of Christchurch, which is about 100 miles north of Dunedin. My buddy, Dart (or “The Dart”), was working as a chiropractor down there and had three offices: one in Dunedin, one in Clinton, and one in Gore. My initial 1st assistant director, Charlie Haskell, is from down at the very bottom of the country, and he’s a character. Charlie made all of his own clothes, and had a scrapbook filled with photos of him drinking the local beer in about 50 different countries, all while pulling up his shirt and exposing his beer belly. Charlie and I were on 2nd unit, and Charlie made it very clear to me right away that even though I was the director and he was the 1st assistant, it was his 2nd unit, not mine. Since Charlie was a very good 1st AD and didn’t interfere with my job, I quickly acquiesced to it being his 2nd unit.
On my first break, I flew down to visit Dart in Dunedin. The plane stopped in Wellington, where Peter Jackson’s special effects company, WETA, whom we were working with, was located. A Weta, by the way, is a grasshopper the size of a shoe. The animal wrangler, Horace (who mainly wrangled horses), had a Weta and put it on my arm – a three-pound grasshopper with nasty looking hooks on its legs. I was struck dumb in horror. Horace grinned and said, “So that’s how you get him to shut up.” Anyway, below the bottom of New Zealand is Stewart Island. I took a hydrofoil out there. If I recall correctly, Stewart Island is six miles square, doesn’t have 100 inhabitants, and is entirely a bird sanctuary. It was a lovely, magical place.
My one souvenir, which I’ve since lost, was a pen made of Kauri wood. The New Zealand Kauri trees were the third largest trees in the world, after Sequoias and Redwoods, and the inhabitants of the country cut them all down. There are about ten of these magnificent trees left, and I saw them. Guess what? They’re magnificent. The only way you can get Kauri wood now is to reclaim it from old houses, which is where my lost pen came from, I suppose.
New Zealand used to be the exclusive home of the enormous flightless birds called Moas. Moas were bigger than ostriches, and there may have been as many as 2.5 million of them. The Māori people of Polynesia immigrated to New Zealand in the 1300s, thus making them the “indigenous” people, and within 100 years had eaten all the Moas. Can you imagine? For 100 years if anybody got hungry they strolled over, hit a slow-moving Moa over the head with a stick, and had a hundred pounds of meat. After three or four generations of eating nothing but Moa, the Māoris were probably happy to see them go. If I may make a big generalization – and there are about a million Māori people in the world – they are a great people. Smart, attractive, funny – terrific actors. And they got to eat all the Moas. It was the white British immigrants who cut down all the Kauri trees to build their houses. The white people were not indigenous, or “native,” because their boats arrived 400 years later.
The Māori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa, meaning, “Land of the long white cloud.”
I stayed at the Pan Pacific Hotel for six months – think of it, six months in a hotel – across the street from the Aotearoa Center, a nice concert facility. I walked past the side of the building many times. On the door is a brass sign that says, “Egress.”
And that’s the whole story.
The Crack of Dawn
Aotea Centre, Josh