by Brian Sibley
Whatever the disappointment experienced by the crew, it was worse for Peter Jackson: ‘He was,’ says Richard, ‘clearly heartbroken.’ After riding high on expectation, he had seen his first professional film indefinitely postponed before filming had even begun.
It was one of the most disastrous days of my professional life. Jim and I met with the crew at lunch. Jim did all the talking, telling them that, hopefully, it was just a delay; that we were going to try and get the money together and do what we could; but we were having to send everyone home because we couldn’t pay them any more.
Somehow, I knew that, for me, this was a historic day. I thought, ‘One day this will be a memory and it won’t be as disastrous as it is at the moment…’ I had a camera, so I took a photo of Jim addressing the crew: I wanted to make sure I had recorded the memory of that day for posterity.
That memory would return, several years later, when Peter experienced another such catastrophic day in his career, but Peter’s determination to remember the bitter taste of defeat in a way that most people only wish to relish the sweet flavour of success, shows maturity, self-awareness and a sense of fortitude that would see him through many vicissitudes in his later film-making career.
Braindead had crashed and burned. That afternoon, straight after the meeting, I went back to Stephen and Fran’s flat; we were totally destroyed and sat there thinking, ‘Oh my God, what do we do now?’ Then, fuelled by the feelings of rejection and failure, we looked at one another and said, ‘Let’s make The Feebles as a feature film!’
After all, a Japanese distributor at Mifed had expressed an interest in a feature-length version of the spluppet project and twenty minutes of footage was already on film…
The events of the next day have taken on mythic status and are told by many of the participants with varying detail but a consistent desire to associate themselves with what was clearly a significant development in Peter’s unfolding career.
Early in the day, unbidden and without pre-arrangement, people began to turn up at Peter’s little home in Seatoun: first one, then another (the order varies slightly depending on who is doing the telling), until a crowd of twenty or thirty people were packed into the two-room bungalow: Cameron Chittock, Jamie Selkirk, Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger, Fran and Stephen, Jim Booth…‘We all had the same thing in mind,’ recalls Cameron. ‘How can we turn the disaster around and turn it into something positive?’
The Feebles with its tale of ‘the lives and loves of the puppet world’ seemed the perfect solution.
There were, of course, questions…The New Zealand Film Commission had already declined any involvement with Meet the Feebles – which had resulted in its being personally financed by Peter, Cameron, Stephen and Fran – but, ironically, the man who had refused that investment was Jim Booth, and not only was he no longer at the Commission, he was now Peter’s producer! What’s more, he had good contacts with his former colleagues at the Commission, who would need to be brought on board to help fund the project.
A more pressing issue was the script: the Commission would need to see a script – to know that the twenty-minute squib about puppets behaving badly could realistically play out at the length of a feature film. Peter began the process by brainstorming with Cameron, who recalls: ‘We took a walk along the beach in Seatoun to shoot the breeze, thinking of more and more characters that could be introduced through the film to keep the story developing and interest alive…I came up with every outrageous character I could think of without expecting Peter to take them seriously but, a few days later, they were part of the film script!’
Cameron went away and started furiously building more puppets and would come in with sketches and ideas – such as a duck who was a ‘quack doctor’ – and we’d decide if we were going to work them into the script, give them a name and settle on their personality. We’d say, ‘The elephant looks a bit sad and depressed and looks like someone who might be called Sid…’
Rather than come up with characters and then get Cameron to draw them, his drawings led the whole process: we’d work back from Cameron’s drawings, figuring out who the characters were and what their role was in The Feebles show. Then Danny, Stephen, Fran and myself would work day and night on writing them into what needed to be a ninety-minute script.
We figured out that in order to have the film completed for delivery to the Japanese at Mifed, we had three weeks to write the script, and needed to be shooting three weeks after that!
In this organic manner, Feebles grew in length while its texture of gross and grotesque detail became more complex, ranging from the
Here, and on the next few pages, are a few key members of our Feebles team: Cameron Chittock – Cameron carried on designing and building new puppet characters for the feature length version.
satiric addition of a (literally) fly-on-the-wall paparazzi, constantly feeding off the Feebles celebrities’ dirt, to the calamitous storyline following Heidi Hippo’s addiction to Black Forest gateaux, her declining career and her waning relationship with the obnoxious Bletch. This full-blown tragedy dramatically concluded with a failed suicide attempt and an apocalyptic revenge on the world, which – in a torrent of blood and bullets – shows that ‘hell hath no fury like a hippo scorned!’
The script also contained occasional flashbacks that are among the most stylishly realised sequences in the final film: a smoky, black-and-white memory of Heidi’s early career as a nightclub singer, with the once-svelte hippo crooning a Billie Holiday-style number by avant-garde composer Peter Dasent (formerly of The Spats and The Crocodiles), who scored Feebles and Peter’s next two pictures, and which wittily captures the period mood while foreshadowing Heidi’s later pie-and-cake obsession:
You want a slice of the action, but you’re not actin’ very nice.
You want a slice of the action, but you don’t wanna pay the price.
You’re gonna end up in traction, if you don’t take my advice.
You want a piece of the pie, but you don’t want to share with me.
You want a piece of the pie, but you never get nothin’ for free.
You better watch what you say, ’cos that ain’t my recipe…
There are also a series of flashback scenes telling the tale of Wynyard the Frog’s days in Vietnam, complete with heroics under fire and torture in the jungle at the paws of Vietcong mongooses given to subtitled outbursts of communist ideology which spoof Platoon and any number of other Vietnam war movies and, with its game of Russian roulette, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.
‘Everyone made their own unique contribution to the process,’ says Cameron, ‘but Fran’s vital input was in insisting that the film needed straight characters who could provide a sympathetic contrast to all the insane, horrible, dirty, ugly characters!’ Thus were born Robert the Hedgehog, ‘a naïve young chappy from the back blocks with a dream of making it big in showbiz’ and Lucille, ‘a pretty young fur seal’. Their romance would provide the antidote to the rather more sleazy goings-on between the Feebles veterans…
Before any Commission funding was in place, Cameron was busily building puppets with the unpaid help of Richard and Tania. It was soon clear that the original footage that had been shot between the completion of Bad Taste and Peter’s trip to Cannes was unusable.
We had created new characters, changed the design of others, and it was all filmed in an entirely different space (the upstairs rooms of the Campbell brothers’ house) and with different sets and lighting. Not a single frame of that footage ever appeared in Meet the Feebles – and it remains, to this day, its weird, bastard, alternative twin!
Jim Booth contacted Mack Kawamura’s company, Compass International, in Japan who confirmed their interest in Meet the Feebles and a further distribution deal covering the remaining world markets was made with Perfect Features in London. By 17 February 1989, less than one month after the collapse of Braindead, the Film Commission were considering a weighty document containing a budget, a script brea
kdown, pages of Cameron’s engaging character sketches (which seriously belied the character’s despicable habits!) and preceded by an emotive aide-mémoire from Jim Booth:
‘The Commission has to invest in the future of the New Zealand film industry – particularly at this time of crisis.
‘Peter Jackson is a good investment – if not our best investment.
‘This project involves some of the best young, yet proven writing talent in New Zealand – Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair.
‘The film-makers have jumped through all the hoops. With their own money they have developed the script, made the puppets, gone to the world and found at least a third of the money.
‘The project can be delivered to Mifed in October.
‘What more can be asked for, at this time, for $457,000?’
If nothing else, Meet the Feebles promised to be a lot cheaper than Braindead.
Desperate times call for desperate measures and when it came to meeting with the Film Commission, everyone pitched in to sell the idea:
There was a strong cultural awareness at the Commission, so Stephen, who speaks Maori, opened for us with an impassioned twenty-minute speech in fluent Maori! Throughout the monologue, everyone in the room looked very sombre, but I think there was probably only one person who actually understood what he was saying. Still, quite a way to start!
The Film Commission finally agreed to finance Meet the Feebles. After all, Bad Taste had sold well and generated a lot of international interest and the money involved was much less than would have been gambled on Braindead. There was doubtless also a feeling of wanting to support and encourage Peter following the collapse of that project.
However, whether articulated or not, there were certain anxieties that would quickly find expression over the weeks that followed. There were those at the Commission who had been decidedly unsympathetic to the horrors of the Braindead proposal and there
Jonathon Acorn – an excellent puppeteer who performed several characters.
was, no doubt, a degree of nervousness about Jim Booth as the producer of a film that had not only failed but had done so with $300,000 of public money.
Then there was the subject of this new project: even before they had read the full script they knew that the ‘Feebles Variety Hour’ was peopled by debauched, degenerate, dissolute characters who were into sex, drugs and violence. Only later would such ingredients become the cause for alarm when the explicitness became manifest and, as was inevitable with a Peter Jackson project, more extreme even than had been hinted at in the original scene breakdown.
No one seems to have wondered whether a film demanding the complex interaction of marionettes, glove puppets and costumed characters, as well as the deployment of a great many special effects, could be pulled off in what was to be a seven-week shoot.
For Peter and the team, however, getting the go-ahead to start work on Feebles seemed, at least at the time, an opportunity to get busy and get working…
The project was an extraordinarily democratic venture with everyone – from the runner to the producer and director – being paid the same weekly wage of $600. Richard Taylor recalls, ‘Tania and I were young, enthusiastic and keen as mustard. There was a wonderful camaraderie, a real feeling of equality, a sense of everyone muckingin together. It was an incredible experience for any new film-maker.’
During the lead-up to Braindead, Richard had noticed that some of the seasoned professionals working on the pre-production of the film didn’t seem to give Peter the credit or support that Richard believed were due to the director, despite his youthfulness and limited experience. When filming began on Feebles, however, he noticed a marked difference: ‘Peter immediately took command and everyone grew to respect that we were working with someone who was really clever and really visionary. As sad as it was that Braindead fell over, the fact that it led to Feebles was so fortuitous for Peter’s development and for all our careers.’
Between scriptwriting sessions, Peter – with his passion for model-making – joined Cameron and Richard in producing puppets. ‘He was an excellent puppet-maker,’ recalls Richard, ‘although not experienced with the equipment we were using. We sculpted the puppets using a commercial sanding belt: it was very wide, very course and ran at about 10,000 revolutions per minute. By holding a block of foam rubber against the sander you could create any shape you wanted. However, it took care and practice to use the sander effectively and safely. Peter started work on a puppet of Arbee Bargwan – an Indian contortionist who disappears up his own bum – snipping out his first piece of foam and putting it on the machine with all the confidence with which he confidently does everything! The foam rolled under and his fingertips went straight onto the moving belt, sanding off the skin from all ten fingertips. He had to build the rest of the puppet with band-aids on all his fingers. It was very funny – sad, but funny!’
Despite moments of levity (however painful), filming Feebles proved gruelling and exhausting. ‘Making it,’ says Cameron Chittock, ‘was a nightmare!’
The film was to be shot in the railway shed that had been hired for the filming of Braindead and on which Jim still had a lease. It proved to be the ‘studio’ from hell.
Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger – I first met Richard and Tania in their tiny fume-ridden bedroom/workshop and immediately found some kindred spirits.
The disused railway shed was a former hangout of a notorious motorbike gang, known as the Mongrel Mob, and, if the area was insalubrious, then the interior was worse! ‘It was,’ says Peter, ‘an appallingly horrible place.’ For one thing, it was so cold that the team habitually wore three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants and two coats plus hats, gloves and scarves.
There were also health hazards: pigeons had got into the building and, in addition to quantities of pigeon excrement, the number of dead birds lying around – combined with a rat population and visitations by wild cats – had resulted in an infestation of fleas. ‘We suffered terribly from flea bites,’ remembers Richard Taylor. ‘I actually felt poisoned by them. We wore plastic rubbish sacks on our legs, wrapping them up around our knees and taping them on and then spraying ourselves with dog-spray in an attempt to keep the fleas at bay. It was shocking.’
‘Even some of the puppets became infested with fleas,’ says Cameron, ‘and others started to get eaten by the rats. It was insane!’ It also
The old rat-infested, pigeon-infested, cat-infested, flea-infested railway workshop buildings where Braindead had a false start and the Meet the Feebles feature was eventually made. Several years later, the new Wellington Sports Stadium was built right on this site. I can never watch an All Blacks test match there without thinking of the nutty time we spent on that ‘hallowed ground’.
puts the lie to the disclaimer at the end of the picture, which reads: ‘The producers wish to advise that no puppets were killed or maimed during the production of this film’! Indeed, as Peter would admit in a later interview: ‘I would not mind working with puppets again, but the way that we abused and treated them, I doubt whether they would want to work with us!’
Once the shoot began, Peter quickly realised that filming with the Feebles cast-members was going to be a laborious task:
The puppets were a technical nightmare. By the end of the first day’s shoot, on 23 April 1989, I was already half-a-day behind schedule. I had begun by shooting the scene where Heidi the Hippo tries to commit suicide by hanging herself but is so heavy that the noose breaks and she falls through the floor. It was incredibly arduous. Within a few days we were falling significantly behind schedule…
This was bad news. A schedule that was slipping by the day left the production in a vulnerable position, especially in view of the fact that a month before filming had begun Jim Booth had gone back to the Film Commission requesting an additional $37,000 to ‘enhance’ the production with some location shooting and the addition of mechanised puppets that would be able to ‘blink, twitch or otherwise convey emotions’.
Alarm bells rang. Jim’s successor as Executive Director, Judith McCann, appears to have suspected Feebles of heading for an overrun before filming had even started. Her response prompted Jim to reply, countering such fears and asking the members of the Commission to visit the studio in order to ‘obtain some idea of the extraordinary production being created down here on the smell of an oily rag’. He closed in conciliatory terms (‘I remain your humble and obedient producer’), but it was to be the beginning of an exchange of correspondence between Jim and Judith McCann which rapidly degenerated from good-humoured skirmishes into full-blown hostilities.
The anxieties at the Commission were rooted in their experiences with Braindead where additional sums of money had been provided without the film ever going into production. Jim’s application was seen as a potential ‘early warning signal’ that financial management of the Feebles project was not what it should be. This situation, combined with the fact that the explicit nature of the film suggested limited sales potential, was a discouragement to investing any further sums of money.
