Kitabı oku: «Anything You Can Imagine», sayfa 3

He was there for the first showing of the remake of King Kong, a production he’d been following for months in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. But the cinema was still locked up and Courtney Place was as deserted as it would one day throng with delighted thousands as Jackson made his lap of honour in an unforeseeable future.

‘I kind of bought into the hype,’ he laughs — that boy was such a dreamer. ‘I convinced myself there would be crowds and crowds of people. There weren’t. And, like most people, I was disappointed by it.’

The film is a wreck. Big-talking mini-mogul Dino De Laurentiis, cut from similar cloth to Saul Zaentz, had boasted of using a forty-foot robotic gorilla that could scale buildings, but the technology had failed him and its motion was never captured. In the finished film it is Rick Baker in a suit. The modern setting, the absence of dinosaurs, the flat, un-wonderful ambience generated by journeyman director John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) bespoke of all that could fail in a film.

The disappointment of the King Kong remake would teach Jackson a valuable lesson, and he saw it six times. You must never forget that fifteen-year-old, too early, waiting in the cold.

The presence of Kong would cast a huge shadow over Jackson’s career, but even having finally made his own spectacular remake in 2005 (another long, wending, troubled journey to the screen), it is to The Lord of the Rings the fifteen-year-olds of all ages and sexes came back again and again, breathless in anticipation.

It was actually the year before he first saw King Kong that an eight-year-old Jackson began shooting films. With a growing interest in special effects already stirred by a steady diet of Thunderbirds, television’s Batman and the epochal moment his neighbour Jean Watson, who worked at Kodak, gave him a Super-8 camera, he also looked upon King Kong as much as a technical triumph as an emotional journey.

‘A year after we met, he showed me a Bond parody called Coldfinger that he’d made when he was fifteen or sixteen,’ remembers Botes. ‘He’d copied the editing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And he played James Bond himself. I thought, “This is uncanny — he actually looks like Sean Connery.”’

Jackson built a filmmaking career with his own hands. A fleet of homemade shorts, inspired by his love of King Kong, Ray Harryhausen and James Bond, would grow (or perhaps the word is mutate) into his first feature film — Bad Taste.

Made in fits and starts over four years, and because of day jobs, only on Sundays, Bad Taste began life as the short, Roast of the Day (the powerful tale of an aid worker encountering cannibal psychos in deepest Pukerua), and slowly sprouted into a feature film. Doffing a windblown forelock toward Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Jackson’s unhinged tale of a group of aliens plotting to turn humanity into fast food, would be a test of his native ingenuity and fortitude to rival that of The Lord of the Rings.

Roping in friends and colleagues from The Evening Post, cast and crew came and went over the ensuing years, written out then written back in again, Jackson more or less making it up as he went along. His parents provided the $2,500 to buy a 16mm Bolex camera. Everything else — prosthetics, special effects, Steadicam rig, props, alien vomit, stunts, acting — was homemade.

At one stage, Jackson, in the prominent role of the nitwit alien investigator Derek, would dangle himself upside down over a local cliff, a rope tied around his ankle the other end attached to a wooden post. Health and safety were for those who could afford them. He only hoped his friends would pull him back up again. If that post hadn’t held, The Lord of the Rings may linger to this day unmade.

‘It crushed all the nerves in my foot,’ he laughs; ‘it took about six months for the sensitivity to come back.’ Which might account for his nonchalance toward going barefoot on the roughest terrain.

Halfway through, they all went to see Robert Zemeckis’ thriller Romancing the Stone, then almost killed themselves replicating the sequence where Michael Douglas plunges downslope through the bushes.

Eight years later Jackson would be working with Zemeckis.

There were also times it tested Jackson’s emotional reserves. One Sunday, dropped off on location by his parents with all the props and costumes, no one else showed up. He just sat there all day. When his parents came to collect him at 5 p.m., he was close to tears. It was a lonely lesson in always working with people you could depend on.

Bad Taste would be his film school. And a film would emerge, half-crazed but hilarious, gurgling with its own outrageous pleasure at the raw act of creation. Following another arduous test of his patience, it would find distribution and stir up a cult following that exists to this day, hanging on to the hope that Jackson will eventually make good on his promise to make a sequel or two.

Significant to this tale were two key friendships that Jackson formed because of his Bad Taste. Richard Taylor, who along with his wife Tania was making puppets for a satirical Spitting Image-style New Zealand television show called Public Eye, had heard about this guy out in Pukerua Bay who was making a sci-fi splatter movie in his basement. ‘We really wanted to meet him. It turned out that his sci-fi movie was called Bad Taste. He was baking foam latex in his mum’s oven.’

Taylor would join forces with Jackson on his very next film, and begin his own journey toward The Lord of the Rings.

And this was when Jackson first met Fran Walsh. To be exact, he first saw Walsh on the set of the series Worzel Gummidge Down Under, the television offshoot about a talking scarecrow, for which he had been hired to do a few little special effects. She was one of the writers, but they hadn’t spoken. Then out of the blue Botes asked if he could show the unfinished Bad Taste to a couple of his screenwriter friends, he thought would appreciate it. They happened to be Walsh and her then boyfriend Stephen Sinclair. Walsh remembered being bowled over by how uninhibited the film was, and on zero budget.

She would volunteer her services to help complete the film, and would become not only the most important creative partner in Jackson’s life but the story of this book.

Completing Bad Taste, says Taylor, ‘Peter was bitten by the bug.’ Up until then he had thought he might get by in special effects. In New Zealand the thought that you could follow a career as a director was preposterous. But the response to Bad Taste was so powerful that it convinced Jackson this was his calling.

Jackson also committed himself to gore, and ruffling the strait-laced New Zealand film community. In 1989 came depraved puppet musical Meet The Feebles (shot in a rat-infested warehouse) followed in 1992, after a salutary false start, by Braindead, his blood-bolstered, period zomcom. The film that would take him to America — if only for a visit.

A career had been born in a deluge of sheep brains, farting hippos and a zombie baby named Selwyn. Middle-earth was another world.

‘When he finally made enough money to move into town,’ remembers Taylor, ‘it was into the tiniest house in Wellington. He bought the biggest television I have ever seen and we’d sit in his front room, dwarfed by this gigantic thing. When you stood up to make a cup of tea, there’d be half a dozen people out on the pavement, standing there watching the movie!’

*

There is one other adaption of The Lord of the Rings we have yet to mention. Indeed, it was the most comprehensive and meaningful adaption to date, one that is still held in the highest esteem by fans. It was also the only version of the book to provide any objective lessons — apart from what not to do — in how to successfully dramatize Tolkien, even though there was not a single frame to be seen.

This was, of course, the 1981 BBC radio serialization. Adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell with a fine-edged scalpel, trimming great swathes of the book without any discernible loss of the central story (it still runs to a considerable eighteen hours). They also retained a good deal of Tolkien’s dialogue, while carefully negotiating the demands of radio dramatization. Events that are reported in the book are transformed into first-hand scenes (a trick Jackson and his writers would apply). Even the battle scenes, inevitably reduced by the medium, have a dense, breathy, clanging atmosphere. All of it eased onward through the addition of a narrator (Gerard Murphy).

Above all, the vocal performances set an enviable standard: Michael Horden swings appreciably between avuncular and steely as Gandalf; Robert Stephens’ smoky basso makes Aragorn seem older, wiser and immediately kingly. Jackson would seek a deliberate resonance between the serial and his own films in the casting of Ian Holm as his Bilbo; Holm having made an impassioned Frodo back in 1981.

Having made his mark in Bakshi’s adaptation, Peter Woodthorpe would again provide the disturbingly funny duality of his Gollum. Disembodied, that needling, pathetic, hissing voice carries a note of pure heartbreak.

The seminal serial was responsible for bringing another generation to the book. But Hollywood had lost interest or grown weary of its numerous challenges. And for fifteen years the Ring lay forgotten, until it was finally picked up by the most unlikely director imaginable.

CHAPTER 2
An Unexpected Director

The English Patient was dying. Saul Zaentz had pleaded with the studio that they were in the process of forging art. He had protested at their shortsightedness. And he had resorted to good old-fashioned brinkmanship. They were only weeks from shooting, but 20th Century Fox were not backing down. Fox had bought the English language rights to this expensive adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel for a not inconsiderable $20 million (the full budget was $31 million, including $5 million of Zaentz’s own money) and were insisting it have a marquee female lead.

Accepting Ralph Fiennes as the hero — if such a straightforward term could be applied to the emotionally fraught and morally elusive weft of Ondaatje’s novel — already spoke of a due deference to artistic over commercial merit. This was, they knew, a prestige project. Fiennes was so very English — although his character turns out to be Hungarian.

The Second World War romantic epic came endowed with a tricky structure. It told a story within a story, gradually regaled to Juliet Binoche’s free-spirited nurse, and us, by a burn-ravaged Fiennes languishing within the gorgeous grounds of a Franciscan monastery somewhere in the Tuscany countryside. His tale will sweep us all back to a Sahara on the brink of war where spies and cartographers muster and a great love affair ensues, all simmering in a grand manner not seen since the imperial heyday of David Lean. The kind of film, everyone kept saying, no one made anymore.

When it came to Fiennes’ romantic opposite – the fragile, conflicted, swan-like Katharine Clifton – Fox were thinking of Demi Moore, in the spring of 1995 box office gold following Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. Zaentz and his so very English director, Anthony Minghella, whose determination to steer his own artistic choices mirrored that of Peter Jackson’s, had set their heart upon Kristin Scott Thomas — more traditionally beautiful, more icy and layered.

Bill Mechanic, who was then president of Fox, later promised on his life that the Moore rumours were untrue. Minghella maintained that ‘Demi’s name was always mentioned’.

Whatever the case, the fractious production had reached an impasse. Actually, that was no longer true.

Fox had pulled the plug.

Rallying round the desperate project, already encamped in the desert, two of Minghella’s closest allies, director Sydney Pollack and producer Scott Rudin, put in a call to Harvey Weinstein, the influential co-founder and co-chairman, with his brother Bob, of the independent film powerhouse Miramax.

‘Harvey just stepped in and financed it one hundred per cent,’ confirms Jackson, who has been recounting the story as a matter of significant background.

Cynical Hollywood commentators, of which there are many, suspected that Miramax was already well aware the project was faltering, with Harvey ready and waiting for it to collapse so he could swoop in and save the day.

Akin to Zaentz, this was exactly the kind of project that fitted Harvey’s view of himself as both Hollywood player and indie king, as well as the philosophy of Miramax as a film company: sophisticated, literary, but with mainstream potential, and Oscar-worthy, always Oscar-worthy. Spinning gold on behalf of the inevitable awards campaign for The English Patient, Miramax’s gifted publicists spread a tale of the White Knight who saved great art from studio defilement.

Nominated for twelve Oscars (including one for Kristin Scott Thomas), winner of nine, and making $231 million around the world, The English Patient cemented Harvey’s reputation. By the mid-1990s, he was the new Selznick, but operating from New York headquarters beyond the borders of Hollywood. He wasn’t the kind of studio boss who would demand Demi Moore. He understood the needs of filmmakers. He could manage big, important films outside of the studio system. He also understood the marketplace and how to reach an audience. He could finesse, and he could bully. His methods, often cutting and re-cutting problem films — landing him the nickname ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ — he insisted were always at the service of the film. This was how, alongside Bob, he maintained Miramax’s great duality: cash and kudos.

Not that it was all about literary adaptations. If Minghella was his longing, romantic Sméagol side, then Quentin Tarantino, who wanted to storm the barricades of such strait-laced tradition as The English Patient, let alone The Lord of the Rings, was his expletive-spitting Gollum.

Between Miramax’s multiple personalities, you can also trace Harvey’s attraction to Jackson: the young Kiwi embodied that very schism. He was the director of Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and Braindead, giddy gore hound and natural wit, predisposed never to abide by the Hollywood playbook. But then he would produce something as finely tuned as Heavenly Creatures.

It is often claimed that the two poles of Jackson’s filmmaking pedigree are what made him so ideal for adapting Tolkien.

The English Patient had finally wrapped production in 1996 when Jackson called his long-standing manager Ken Kamins and casually asked him to find out who might own the rights to The Lord of the Rings. For a certain fee, databases can be consulted. In the litigious universe of Hollywood, it is essential to cover your back. Jackson had assumed they must be with Disney or Spielberg or Lucas. ‘They would all be locked up, as they say,’ he admits. ‘And we wouldn’t have a chance. So we really went into this with no expectations at all.’

Kamins didn’t take long to discover that thirty years after buying them from UA, the rights to both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings still resided with Zaentz. He might not be a Spielberg or a Lucas, but this wasn’t necessarily good news. Having had his fingers burned so badly with the Ralph Bakshi debacle, Zaentz had closely guarded the rights ever since.

It wasn’t as if since Bakshi no one had returned to the idea of adapting one of the most popular books of the twentieth century in the intervening years; they had simply come up against the Black Gates of Zaentz’s resistance.

If by some miraculous chance he was to agree, says Jackson, word came back that he would want to be attached to it. ‘That is just the way he was. He was a producer himself. But he tended to say no. He had done his Tolkien thing, it was a huge disaster for him, and he had lost a lot of money by the sound of it. He just didn’t want to know about it.’

They needed a backstairs route to the rights — a secret way into Zaentz, a chance to try and persuade him. And although he didn’t know it yet, Jackson already had the perfect guide. In fact, that guide was impatiently waiting for the director to call.

Within the parameters of a first-look deal he had recently struck with Miramax, Jackson was contractually bound to first test the waters on any new idea with Harvey Weinstein. And this was a staggeringly ambitious plan.

‘The idea was to do The Hobbit as one movie, then two movies of The Lord of the Rings,’ says Jackson. ‘Still as a package: you make The Hobbit by itself, if it is successful you then get to do The Lord of the Rings films back-to-back. A three-film thing.’

So the initial desire had been to adapt Tolkien’s books in chronological order, beginning with his first, younger-orientated Middle-earth novel: Bilbo, the Dwarves, and dislodging a fire-breathing squatter.

‘I could tell on the phone he was really excited right away,’ recalls Jackson, not yet knowing that this conversation would change his life.

The English Patient may not have yet been released but Minghella had wrought classical wonders with the strange book. Another attention-grabbing, epic production based on a tricky literary source, as directed by another of his self-styled discoveries, played right into Harvey’s view of himself as a promethean, David O. Selznick type for a modern Hollywood.

‘Who’s got the rights?’ he asked.

‘Well, it’s not going to be easy, Harvey,’ Jackson warned him, ‘because it is this guy called Saul Zaentz.’

Jackson laughs. ‘Harvey was the man who had saved The English Patient. We were talking to the right guy.’

If you put it in a script it would sound corny and contrived. No one would believe a word of it, but then so much of Jackson’s career has been decreed by what you would call fate.

Says Kamins, ‘It’s the big theme for him. He has always believed that fate was going to point him in the right direction.’

Jackson’s manager cannot think of a single conversation in all the time he has represented him where they have sat down and discussed what he should or shouldn’t do with his career. ‘Peter sort of functions by his own compass — that fate will deal him the right set of cards. And in this particular instance maybe more than any other, he was proven completely right.’

There are things that can be seen with the naked eye when you’re trying to achieve something in the motion picture marketplace and there are the things that lie hidden. You can’t ever see what’s going on behind the boardroom doors. The business decisions, the politics and agendas, the history, or the simple expediency that can come with good timing: all those invisible but significant factors that allow you to be able to do the unexpected. Otherwise known as fate.

‘Saul?!’ Weinstein boomed, his thick New York vowels reverberating down the transpacific line, more excited still by the chance to demonstrate the extent of his magical largesse: the beneficent Harvey, fulfiller of wishes. ‘I’ll call him straightaway. He owes me a huge favour.’

*

Print the legend, and the inception of Jackson’s great adventure occurred on an unspecified morning while The Frighteners was in post-production. He and Fran Walsh had got chatting about how to follow up their spectral comedy-horror. In spring 1996 things were moving for Jackson: he was now working on a Hollywood stage, with Hollywood budgets at his disposal, and to a large extent still on his own terms and staying put in New Zealand. More than ever, they needed to maintain their momentum.

‘So how about a fantasy film?’ proposed Jackson. Something like Ray Harryhausen once made, the spectaculars he had been whelped on: no irony, but a cornucopia of fantastic beasts. Only they would use the growing digital capabilities of their own visual effects company, Weta, to conjure them up rather than the chronically slow minutiae of stop-motion. Perhaps, Jackson suggested, something more classically swords and sorcery than the Arabian Nights or Greek myth that had been Harryhausen’s metier. He searched the air for an equivalent …

‘Something like The Lord of the Rings.’

At that point, he had still only read it the once, when he was eighteen. It was simply what sprang to mind.

‘Well,’ Walsh replied, ‘in that case why not do The Lord of the Rings?’

Except it didn’t go like that. Not exactly. The reality behind the decision to attempt Tolkien was a lot more complicated and painful. The river of fate had many twists and turns to negotiate.

*

In the 1950s, Kamins, eldest of four New Yorker brothers, always played the dutiful son and did whatever he was told. This was the reason Jackson’s manager so loved the Marx Brothers of Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. He longed for their utter sense of anarchy, their disrespect for authority.

‘They managed to play by their own set of rules, which I never could,’ he says wistfully.

Short-haired and snappily attired (the opposite of his client), with a calm, observant, thorough manner, Kamins is a Hollywood man without the pretension. He sees the world keenly through his rimless spectacles. From his hardwood-floored, glass-walled, art-adorned eyrie that gazes down upon Sunset Boulevard, he has been Jackson’s eyes and ears in the movie-town since 1992. It is also easy to see why the Kiwi director has remained loyal to his Hollywood minder. Kamins is no mere facilitator or dealmaker; he is a great storyteller, who parses the madness of the film industry with wisdom and wry humour, and stood in the eye of the hurricane of the trilogy’s storm-tossed beginnings. There were times when the future of the project depended on Kamins’ gift for talking down dragons.

He openly admits the books had meant very little to him. ‘They were not, like, seared on my soul. I mean, I knew of them. But I was in no manner, shape or form an aficionado, or a hardcore fantasy fan for that matter.’

Rather than King Kong, Kamins is a ‘Godfather-fanatic’. Film class at college had introduced him to films like The Grand Illusion, Klute and Rio Bravo. That is where his tastes lay. He believed in his client’s project without it having to be a religious experience.

Out of college, Kamins had climbed onto the lower rungs of the film industry, reaching the nascent home entertainment business at RCA Columbia at exactly the time his mentor Larry Estes began backing low-budget film productions, laying off theatrical and television rights while retaining the video rights.

Under that paradigm they backed Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which had caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival. Every independent theatrical distributor had come running in. They ended up making a deal with Harvey Weinstein.

Using this business model, home video specialist LIVE Entertainment would back Reservoir Dogs and begin Tarantino’s journey toward the sun. Another promising indie named New Line Cinema also began to see significant profits care of its home entertainment investments.

It was while at the now defunct talent agency InterTalent, a few rungs higher in his career, that Kamins’ boss, Bill Block, couldn’t get a ticket to the Batman Returns premiere. Tim Burton’s shadowy superhero sequel was the seen-to-be-seen-at golden ticket of the week. In his frustration Block had glanced over the many invites, requests and pleas for representation yet to be cleared from his desk and a letter caught his eye. It came from an attorney. ‘Hey, I have this client. He’s going to be in LA. He’s holding a screening of his new movie.’

Block walked down the corridor and into Kamins’ office. ‘I’m going to this screening and you’re coming with me.’

It was called Braindead.

Jackson was stopping in Los Angeles on his way back from Cannes, where he had been endeavouring to sell the distribution rights to his great ode to the flinging of viscera. The film that a mesmerized Guillermo del Toro once claimed made ‘Sam Raimi look like Yasujiro Ozu’. While in town, Jackson was hosting a screening at the Fine Arts Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. Despite clashing with the big-budget antics of The Penguin and Catwoman, every agency in town was sending someone.

Kamins was impressed at the inventive use of effects in what was clearly a ‘modestly budgeted’ horror film. He certainly had never seen a hero lawnmower his way through a zombie horde. Indeed, it was the film’s sense of humour that spoke to him. The director was winking at the audience, egging them on. ‘Can you believe this level of madness?’

Kamins was reminded of the Marx Brothers.

‘I think that Peter unwittingly tapped into that same sense of anarchy,’ he says. ‘“I’m going to do things my own way. I’m going to challenge norms.” And I don’t know that I even understood it that clearly at the time. But it resonated for me.’

There was a spate of lunches for Jackson that week. Held at jazzy, star-spotted joints like Spagos or Chasens where the would-be agents reeled off a blur of inane advice. Oh, you should do a Friday the 13th. Oh, you should do a Tales from the Crypt. Oh, you should do a Freddy movie. All they could see was Braindead the horror movie, Jackson the New Zealand Sam Raimi.

Theirs was the last lunch of the week. And Kamins took a revolutionary approach. ‘I remember asking him, “Well, what do you want to do?” And he said, “Well, Fran and I are working on this project about matricide. About these two girls growing up in New Zealand, a true story …”’

It was called Heavenly Creatures.

The next week, Kamins’ phone rang. Jackson’s chirpy voice came on the line: ‘Fran and I have had a chat. We would like you to represent us.’

Kamins wasn’t the first agent-manager of Jackson’s career. Shortly after finishing Meet the Feebles, he had ventured to Los Angeles and found representation with a good-sized agency and a very good lawyer in Peter Nelson, who has stayed the course to this day (and would be another important figure in the many, many negotiations to come). Nelson had sent out the invitations to the Braindead screening with the objective of landing Jackson fresh representation. As he put it, the previous agency had ‘fallen asleep’.

Speaking to Jackson over lunch, Kamins was impressed by how purposeful and business-like was this young director. ‘For somebody who did not grow up here, but who clearly was a fan of movies and had aspirations to be a filmmaker, I was struck by how not-awed he was by the town. He had a fearlessness or a blindness to the reality of what he was walking into. All of which seemed to serve him really well.’

*

Heavenly Creatures changed everything. Heavenly Creatures got Jackson out of the horror ghetto where Hollywood would be happy to confine him. ‘Oh, he makes those low budget splatter movies that have some humour in them.’ Typecasting, Kamins could see, that didn’t project ‘a vision that he could do bigger films’.

Disney had offered him a supernatural rom-com called Johnny Zombie, which he wisely turned down. It was made by Bob Balaban as My Boyfriend’s Back in 1993, and swiftly forgotten thereafter.

He had so much more to him than Bad Taste.

Jackson followed Braindead by winning the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival. Head of the jury David Lynch had quickened to a queasy portrait of small-town murder where schoolgirls turned out to be the perpetrators not the victims. There were further festival awards to follow at Toronto and Chicago, and nine New Zealand Film and Television Awards.

‘There was a sophistication to Heavenly Creatures,’ says Kamins proudly. ‘This was not a horror film in the traditional sense.’

Tellingly, in terms of the influence Walsh has had on the trajectory of both their careers, it had begun as her passion project. Jackson hadn’t even heard of the real-life murder case, and worried at first that the story was too grim to make a satisfying film.

In 1952, two New Zealand schoolgirls, more than a little emotionally maladjusted, fell into an intense friendship that spilled into a mania for one another. Their relationship was like an addiction. Threatened with separation, they conspired to literally dash the brains out of one of their mothers with a brick. For all the bloody mayhem of his career, this remains the most disturbing sequence Jackson has ever filmed. The shift in mood and moral accountability from Braindead is astonishing. They had shot in the footsteps of the actual scene of the crime in Christchurch’s Victoria Park. In truth, a few hundred feet further along the wooded path after Jackson had become unnerved by a lack of birdsong at the exact murder scene.

The Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme case shook the stiff veil of propriety that 1950s New Zealand had inherited from Britain. In fact, it tore it down. This was the scandal of its day, portrayed in lurid, tabloid details by the excited papers and true crime accounts; there was even a novel. Author Angela Carter had written a screenplay inspired by the events called The Christchurch Murder, which Walsh had read. When she and Jackson were developing the idea, two rival film projects were already underway: one produced by Dustin Hoffman, the other to be directed by fellow New Zealander Niki Caro (Whale Rider).

What makes the Jackson-Walsh script so evocative is the decision to concentrate on the friendship rather than the sensationalist furore of the court case. They were two schoolgirls, barely sixteen, with hints of lesbianism to their unnatural bond — until 1973 homosexuality was still considered a mental malady in New Zealand. However, Hulme (who as an adult was later revealed to be crime author Anne Perry) flatly denied this was so.