Full disclosure: I stand to make a (tax free!) killing if this goes ahead.
We only bought the land to take friends fishing and hunting as the land is of such a low quality it isn’t even worth farming. It is difficult to convey how remote that neck of the woods actually is.
Academic Bardsley really has no idea what he’s talking about.
If you had the money and desire to get into the movie business it would be fairly straightforward to do so. The cost of making a movie from “go to whoa” would be around $10 million. If you had the money yourself or had lightened the wallets of gullible investors, there would be nothing to stop you from starting tomorrow. Except you would be making life enormously difficult for yourself when it came to getting any cinema chains to actually show your movie. There are dozens of other movie “producers” out there also seeking venues to run their films and chances are nobody would buy yours, so the movie would never get a cinematic release.
But there is another way.
Instead of spending $10 million why not spend, say, $25 million and guarantee it would be widely released in numerous chains of cinemas all over the world? How would that be possible, you ask? Simple: get a star to be the lead actor. For $10 million you can make your movie with a cast nobody’s ever heard of, but for $15 million more you can get Leonardo DiCaprio.
It may surprise you to learn, dear reader, that it really is as simple as calling Leo’s agent in Los Angeles and offering DiCaprio $5 million to sign the contract, $5 million on the first day of shooting, and the final $5 million when filming is completed (and a letter from your lawyer saying they have the money in an escrow account) – and he’d have signed on by the weekend. In due course, DiCaprio would happily fly to New Zealand to star in your movie.
Once he’s signed the contract it is considerably easier to get cinema chains to sign up and agree to show the movie; they don’t know you from a bar of soap (hence your $10 million movie is unlikely to amount to much), but they know who he is (and your $25 million movie is, therefore, likely to be a success).
The point I am making is that if you’re going to undertake a major project you ought to do it properly and not try and bluff your way through on the cheap, then realise what a complete stuff up you’ve made when it is far too late.
For several months there has been a lot of fuss regarding the truly bizarre idea of turning Lake Onslow, in Otago, into a battery to provide electricity during the occasional drought.
As someone who owns 800 acres of land near the lake, I strongly suspect nobody involved with this idea or the feasibility study – such as Megan Woods MP – has ever been there to take a look at the place. Evidence of this is the hilarious observation “…and there is a line of pylons over Onslow now...” (oh boy!); akin to suggesting because my car has four wheels there’s no reason why it can’t be used as a logging truck.
Although I have been discreetly sounded out as to whether $3 million for my land (I paid $900,000 in 2015) would be acceptable (and it’s better than a poke in the eye!) there is a duty as a ‘good citizen’ to say this ludicrous project is the equivalent of the $10 million movie, sans star.
A far better idea (equivalent to having DiCaprio or Brad Pitt as the star) is the one involving Lake Taupo. It’s a far bigger lake, with far more water; it is in the general vicinity of, you know, where people in New Zealand actually live; would cost less, and be far easier to bring onstream in due course.