Drama King

By TIM HUME - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 18/10/2009

John BarnettJOHN BARNETT poo-poos the term "mogul", and it's true the term doesn't sit quite right in any New Zealand context. But how else to describe his position in the world of local film and television?

A pioneer and 36-year veteran of the industry, Barnett has produced or executive produced four of the six most successful New Zealand films, including the Oscar-nominated Whale Rider, Sione's Wedding and Footrot Flats. South Pacific Pictures, his production company, makes 180 hours of local television programming a year, including Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, and Go Girls. Chances are your favourite local drama has made it to screen by being greenlighted and championed by Barnett, who presides over his diverse and ever-expanding media empire like a sort of
benign Antipodean Harvey Weinstein.

John Barnett
Photo: Michael Bradley

Physically, Barnett is dark, jowly, bearish, but less a Weinstein than a Karam. There is nevertheless a Hollywood flourish in the hybrid Lexus which he drives between his home in Ponsonby and his studio in West Auckland. The 64-year-old favours historical fiction (Anthony Beevor), and crime writers like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. His musical tastes run to jazz and 80s' easy listening. Politically, he says he "used to be a very active member of the Labour Party", and he reportedly counts Helen Clark as a friend, although these days wouldn't rule out voting for National. "A conservative's a liberal who's been mugged by reality," he says. He is an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Barnett's first business venture was a design company, although he was not a designer. He co-founded the National Business Review although he had no background in journalism, then broke into show business by managing John "Fred Dagg" Clarke. He has leapfrogged his way to success over the years by virtue of his impressive strike rate at picking winners in media or cultural milieus in which he has no particular fluency. His decisions, he says, have not been guided by profit, but by the desire to realise projects that have something to say.

Two years ago, for example, he took a punt squarely outside his musical comfort zone and bailed out then-struggling South Auckland hip-hop pioneers Dawn Raid. "I'm not out there in big shorts with my hat on back to front," he says (he is dressed in a smart blue shirt with a dark vest over the top). "But I was very happy to get involved, because they had done a great job in South Auckland. Their message was overwhelmingly positive."

A year later, Dawn Raid artist Savage released a single into the American market following its placement on the soundtrack of the hit movie Knocked Up. "[Dawn Raid co-founder] Andy [Murnane] called me up and said we're on the Top-100 on iTunes. He rang three days later and said we're in the Top-50. He rang a week later and said we're in the top-10."

Barnett took no credit for the track's remarkable second life – the song was initially written and released and made it to the top of the New Zealand charts long before his involvement in the company. But he was blown away by the incredible reach it gained online.  "I went on the net and saw all these parodies of `Swing' by skinny white girls on the east coast of the USA. How does that happen?"

NOW BARNETT is keen to do it again – this time, in the wild new frontier of social media. He does not use Facebook, nor does he tweet; the web is another environment in which the media entrepreneur has no particular pedigree. But he believes the project, his first real internet foray, has huge potential worldwide. The New Zealand-designed site, MyHeartwill, launches today in the United States and Australasia, and will roll out in the United Kingdom and Germany shortly. A "virtual safe box" in which internet users the world over can deposit their "emotional wills" – their trove of photographs, videos, letters – to be passed on to their loved ones, as a lasting emotional legacy, when they die.

On a projector screen in the Ponsonby offices of Satellite Media (a company half-owned by South Pacific Pictures, which in turn is about half-owned by Barnett), two handsome silver fox models are pictured pondering their laptop screen in a sleek designer apartment. A quavery-sounding Judy Bailey, wife of South Pacific's managing director Chris Bailey, delivers the pitch.

"Each of us has memories that are important, that we want to pass on to the people we care about. But here's the problem: items can be lost. They can deteriorate over time and be destroyed in accidents and natural disasters." MyHeartwill, Bailey says, offers "a way to keep our memories alive, safe and accessible, no matter how much time passes, what happens, or where we are in the world".

The concept, explains Barnett, came from an Australian health journalist friend called Jill Margo who wrote a book about the need to create personal legacies – memories, thoughts and expressions – to leave behind for loved ones. Barnett, who has a girlfriend but no children, saw the potential for an online mechanism to deliver that content. The consummate dealmaker and manifester pulled together a team to execute the concept that included American new media dynamo Chris Adams, who had previously helped Facebook grow from about five million users when he joined the company to 150m when he left.

"I think a lot of good work that's made here never leaves New Zealand because the world doesn't see it," says Barnett. "People put it on the web thinking it will get hits but it doesn't work like that. I knew from the start I needed to get people on board who could make a difference."

Accordingly, the company plans to target its subscribers – primarily drawn from America's ageing Boomer population – through tie-in deals with retiree associations and similar groups. Users pay $US199 ($267) for a 10-year renewable subscription to the service, which allows them to upload videos, documents and other digital media in individualised "heartwills" – tailored messages for individual loved ones that the site will electronically deliver at a scheduled time – be it on the account holder's death, or at subsequent milestones in their survivors' lives.

It's a strong concept if consumers can get past the Kevin Roberts-style, Lovemarks-y name. Barnett won't say how much he has invested in the project, but it has been two years in development. "Every single person we've shared the concept with says the same thing – `I want to start one tomorrow'," says Barnett. "The desire to leave these legacies is something that applies in any culture."

His instincts have not always seen him right; a couple of his films in the 80s struggled for audiences while more recently, We're Here to Help, about one man's battles with the IRD, lost money. Films being "like children", he says, it hurts when they don't succeed. "They take so long to develop that the amount of emotional involvement you have is very high. If the audience doesn't go, you spend a lot of time in self-analysis: what did I do wrong, why didn't it work? But you can't wallow, you've got to get back on the horse, you've got to learn from every one."

WHICH IS a good philosophy to bear in mind for the hundreds of hopeful creatives that pitch ideas to Barnett every year when faced with a mathematically probable rejection. South Pacific, he says, has received 1300 pitches in the past three years, and optioned 30; 26 of those were from writers Barnett deals with regularly and two were from books he had read (many of his projects are adapted from pre-existing works in other media, as they "already have a connection with an audience") . It's not a closed shop though, he stresses, although don't bother buttonholing him in a restaurant about your screenplay. "I get people to submit it to us on paper – I don't take meetings with people if I haven't seen the material." He can generally tell straight away if it's a goer. "There's a visceral response."  And lose the robots. "If it's dark and sci-fi, I don't get it," he says.

Identifying products with mass appeal has been, above all else, the secret of Barnett's success. A trained marketer (he did not complete his degree at Victoria University, although was later awarded an honorary doctorate of commerce), Barnett is an unapologetic populist who has adhered rigidly to a formula of backing projects which "make a connection with an audience". "That is the essence of being a producer and it doesn't matter whether it's film or television," he says. "You want to pick things that people understand, wherever they are in the world. You may not recognise the accent, you may not recognise the face, but you understand the story."

The success of Whale Rider went a long way to disproving the notion that films set in New Zealand were somehow too specific to our location to be of interest to foreign audiences. Though set in a remote East Coast Maori village, he says, the film was really "about the role of women, about the role of power – is it inherited, or shared. People in Korea, people in South Africa said `That's about us'."

Similarly, Sione's Wedding, centred around a group of Samoan guys in Grey Lynn, has a broader appeal. "We've done a deal with a very big American producer who wants to shoot the same story in Irish Catholic Boston. Because he says it's about immigrants, it's about mothers who are strong, it's about priests who give the boys a hard time, it's about boys who misbehave."

Hardly the cinema of unease. Barnett says Sam Neill's point about the dark, brooding character of our films was relevant at the time, but that was a moment that has passed. "For a long time, Kiwis grew up thinking the edge of the island was where it finished," he says. "Now, they don't see any horizons."

His films reflect his positivity about this new cultural reality. "I know people want some truth, but actually what I think they really want is to go into a cinema and come out feeling good. For me, I'd much rather have love and laughter and triumph than tragedy."

www.myheartwill.com