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.
Jackson and Walsh strove to interpret what lay behind this dangerous dependency. Individually, Parker and Hulme may have grown into functioning members of society. Together some moral constraint went missing, as if they were spurring each other on, waiting for one or the other to say no.
Scrupulous in their research, Jackson and Walsh burrowed like detectives