Strange detours

Accumulating better work stories

I guess if you hang around the scriptwriting game long enough, and you’re of a mindset to give anything a crack, and you’re scared that if you say no to a gig then that will be that and you’ll never be commissioned to write anything ever again; if you’re all these things, as I am, then across time you wrack up some pretty strange work experiences.

And lovely ones.  And unexpectedly joyous ones.

So grab a cup of tea, sit back and relax as I disappear down memory lane, dredging up memories of the strangest – and most tangential – writing jobs I have inadvertently strayed into, across a selection of the litany of random decisions I laughingly call my career.

I once wrote Judy Bailey’s opening monologue for Telethon.  No idea what year it was or what charity was being pushed back then, but I was asked to give it a go and so the lovely Judy and I sat down and figured out the words that would persuade a nation to empty their wallets for a good cause.  From memory there was a lot of heart-string-tugging in a short space of time and Judy delivered it magnificently, in that Mother of the Nation way she trademarked.

Significantly less worthy was when I wrote the presenter’s script for possibly the world’s worst celebration of the life and works of ABBA.  To have a notoriously acerbic front-person, making funny ha-ha comments at ABBA’s expense, between clips of ABBA songs was, as it turned out, the very definition of ‘ill-conceived’.  And thousands of ABBA fans agreed. 

Stranger still was the script I wrote for a film that had already been shot.

To set the scene, let me say that this was the 1980’s, when strangeness was the default setting.  Back then our tax laws (or a loophole within) allowed rich people to put their tax money into films instead of actually paying tax and funding boring things like schools and hospitals.  Unsurprisingly a lot of really quite dodgy films were made in a short space of time.

Thus, it was not out of the ordinary that in the 1980’s I found myself watching a film about ski-bunnies cavorting round the South Island.  It seemed to have been shot without sound, save for a sequence in the middle involving Billy T James recklessly flying an aeroplane through our awesome scenery.  My job was to craft some kind of voice-over story for the ski-bunnies that would be crow-barred in, either side of Bill’s wacky comedy antics.

I remember that I wrote something, but I have no idea what.  I certainly remember that I got paid quite well for the script.  And I am certain not a word of what I wrote was ever used.

The film did eventually come out, as this….

Which can be found, in all its glory, here.  It says a lot about the era in which it was made, in my humble opinion.

Sometimes, however, taking an unusual turn on the journey can lead you to wonderful and enlightening places.

Mataku was an anthology series of Maori supernatural tales.  It was unashamedly the Twilight Zone of the tangata whenua.  I worked on the first series in, primarily, a script-editorial role.  I had skills in shaping stories for television, which is what I brought to the table.  What I got in return was an influx of knowledge from wonderful people like Carey Carter, Brad Haami and Ngamaru Raerino.  They (and the show itself) opened my eyes to a whole different way of story-telling.  It gave me skills I carry with me to this very day.

I remember the phone conversation I had with a production assistant, after the gig was done.  She needed my tribal affiliation for the media kit.  We agreed that Ngati Pakeha probably covered it best.

Yes, they were simpler times back then, but as I navigate my way through the world now, where culture and the right to tell the stories of any particular cultural group, has become something of a battlefield, I miss that simplicity.  Learning and teaching.  Teaching and learning. 

I’m still not sure what I’ve learnt from the Naked Samoans, my other main foray into the story-telling of a culture that is not my own.  The excellent art of creative procrastination might be a good place to start.

On the first series of bro’Town my strange/wonderful gig landed me the glorified and meaningless title of Executive Story Producer.  What this boiled down to was that the network was worried the Nakeds wouldn’t deliver the scripts on time to get all the animation done.  So I would go to the Boys and tell them to write faster.  Then I would go back to the network and tell them that the Nakeds were all over it, slaving away like demons.

Back and forth, I went.  I did other stuff too, but ensuring delivery was my primary function and eventually, almost on time, the scripts duly got delivered, so the animators could animate and the rest could became history.  And I made some very cool friends in the process. Even when they did drink almost all the wine Sam Neill gave us because he liked Sione’s Wedding.  But that’s a story for another time.

A story for this time is that after many years of existing within the belly of a beast I’m soon to rejoin the world of the gigging writer, free-ranging my way across The Industry. How this has come about is most definitely a story for another time, possibly far from now, but here and now this is me trying to remind myself that opening yourself up to new opportunities, saying yes to gigs you might normally pass on, can pay off in more ways than just financially.

And also, I guess, to send a message to the newbies out there, to think twice before turning down a gig, because you never know what might lurk behind Door B.