Whatever It Takes

I have an image from John O’Shea’s funeral. It was a big event at the Embassy Picture Theatre. This memory is not of the great witty and erudite speeches. It’s a picture of John Reid at the back of the casket, when the task of the long carry-out to the street and the waiting hearse. He was at the back, holding on like a man would hold a caber that he was about to toss, his shoulders taking the whole weight. At various times as the manoeuvring occurred around doorways he would’ve been taking on all the heavy lifting by himself. And yet again John Reid has done the heavy lifting in the seven-year research and writing of this brilliant book ‘Whatever it takes’ – Pacific Films 1948 – 2000 - the life and work of John O’Shea.

The book might’ve been called ‘how we became who we are as a nation’. Through the local cinema O’Shea suggested a New Zealand that wasn’t quite there yet, but by holding the mirror up Broken Barrier became, to the surprise of the distributors, a box-office hit. They were queued around the block.

I was there from the 70’s onwards and I thought I knew this history but John O’Shea was about living in the future and where Pacific was heading, not where it had been. So a lot of what I have read is new and revealing. Reid’s book catches this forward momentum brilliantly, the detail is exquisite. A business, a family and a deal here and a movie there. It’s a book about a very busy life. It’s captured a sort of New Zealand version of ‘From Easy Riders to Raging Bulls’ quality.

At the core of this story is what John O’Shea had told us, as he laid out our tasks in the Pacific Films tea room when he would discuss “What it was to become a Pakeha”. Those early days of TV with the NZBC deals to make commissioned programs that went beyond the thinking of the day. We planned documentaries that might challenge the politic or open a can of worms. How the next production might be scuttled by the vagaries of the next commissioning editor at the NZBC or an experimental series like Shoreline that had its first season clumped together and was deliberately scheduled to screen at an unsuitable time slot in early evening in the height of summer so it was bound to fail. Or the way the Tangatawhenua series found Pacific Films and Barry Barclay, and as they say: the rest is history.

1948 – 2018. That’s 70 years. Essentially the beginning was two men catching the train with limited funds (200 pounds) from Wellington to Mahia to make Broken Barrier.

They gather a few locals around them and quickly coached them into how to push the dolly and hold the reflector – Roger Mirams and the less experienced O’Shea wrestling with the culture and the weather.

The book captures the real passion of their work and gives us a snapshot of the post-world-war times of the entrenched racism that informed the way this country looked at itself.

If you walked from the Majestic movie theatre in Willis street to the Embassy you walk past 24,700 cinema seats. New Zealand was movie mad and had the highest number of seats per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Seventy years doesn’t feel very long and in reading this book you marvel and appreciate how far we have come as a film and TV industry.

In the second half of the book my life catches up with the story when I joined Pacific Films fresh out of college in 1972.

I didn’t have an appreciation of the history and, decades later, when it comes to Te Rua (the New Zealand shoot) I have more than a bit of skin in the game. But in reading the details I was still discovering stuff I thought I knew. John Reid has done a fantastic job of researching all the moving parts and making the read a rollicking yarn… it’s a page turner.

At the core it’s about the inside workings of a man who was not only a deal maker but a profound thinker. And you can read how the moving parts of the deal are sometimes at odds with the movie or the idea.

Thankfully O’Shea was a hoarder and all the production records and private correspondence were there for Reid to find in archives. Brilliant.

Reid captures that moment through O’Shea’s eyes of the late 70’s when the lawyers and merchant bankers entered the film business as the new producers and the deal drove from the front of the bus. O’Shea was not so in agreement with this focus on the wealth gathering part of this new way.

And he was wary of the bureaucrat being in the funding body that was being created.

The creation of the NZFC, and then how later O’Shea was moved to one side. Rather than fight them on the home turf, he opened a Pacific Films office in Europe. O’Shea hated being called a veteran or a legend, as it suggested a man that was ready to be put out to pasture.

In the 70’s Pacific Films is winning Feltex awards with documentaries made by Tony Williams.

Williams’s work proved to be very popular, “However, it negatively impacted with the new order at the NZBC” - “It was one thing to disagree about a programme, but quite another to go ahead anyway and produce it in such a way that clearly outshone the efforts of their adversary – especially if they wanted further funding”.

This is a book about how we got here, the divide of town, country and city, Māori and Pakeha. A nation in growth. John O’Shea wrestling with the authorities, his own staff and ideas and directions in a constantly changing landscape of this growing and evolving movie and TV business.

It’s an epic tale. Great work John Reid.