John Barnett: entrepreneur, visionary and patriot

It was a shock to hear that John Barnett, a key figure in the New Zealand film and television industry, had died last weekend, aged 80. "Barney" was a remarkable man - a dynamic entrepreneur, but always personable and gifted with a formidable brain. I wrote the following profile of him for The Listener in 2013:

There’s probably not a living New Zealander who hasn’t been exposed to something John Barnett has had a hand in. If they haven’t watched Outrageous Fortune, they’ve seen Whale Rider, Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale or Shortland Street. They may even have a fuzzy recollection of a 1974 children’s television drama series set around the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.

In the New Zealand film industry, only Sir Peter Jackson packs more heft than the man known to everyone as Barney. But Barnett was making films – successful and often courageous films, such as Beyond Reasonable Doubt – when Jackson was still working as a photo-engraver at Wellington’s Evening Post and shooting movies at weekends with a hand-held 16mm camera.

Of the 10 New Zealand films that have been most popular with domestic audiences, four (Whale Rider, Sione’s Wedding, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted and Sione’s 2: Unfinished Business) came out of the South Pacific Pictures studios, which Barnett has headed since 1993. Footrot Flats, another in the box office top 10, was Barnett’s too, but was made before his association with South Pacific.

He has also nurtured a string of successful home-grown TV drama series. South Pacific’s studios in suburban west Auckland are a veritable conveyor belt, cranking out TV drama – Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, Go Girls, Nothing Trivial, The Almighty Johnsons – on a scale unmatched by any other New Zealand company and by few even in Australia.

And before movies and television, there were other ventures. In 1971, Barnett was one of a group of audacious young investors who rescued the business paper National Business Review when it was on the brink of collapse. (The paper’s still going today, although under different owners.) He adroitly guided the career of humourist John Clarke during Clarke’s Fred Dagg era and for a time managed pop singers Sharon O’Neill and Mark Williams.

He has been called the godfather of New Zealand film and television production – an overused term, but apt in Barnett’s case. People don’t exactly queue to ask favours of him at wedding feasts, as in the movie of that name, but he carries such weight in the industry that his patronage can make the difference between an idea coming to fruition or vanishing without trace.

Now his career is moving into a new phase. Last year Barnett, 67, handed the chief executive’s baton to his protégé Kelly Martin, former TV3 programming director. That was followed last month by an announcement that he had sold his remaining 40 per cent stake in South Pacific to his British partner, All3Media. But he remains the company chairman and still turns up at the Henderson studios a couple of days a week.

Industry observers wonder what he’s up to. As former Shortland Street producer Caterina de Nave told The Dominion Post, Barnett’s not the sort to go home to his pipe and slippers.

He confirms that he’s working on projects that he wants to see through to completion, and he mentions plans to expand into Australia. There are one or two ideas for new films, too, but he’s coy about details. As he puts it, announcing the impending arrival of a baby is never as exciting as presenting the baby itself.

His explanation for the changing of the guard at South Pacific is simple. He wanted a succession plan, and now the key elements are in place. Too often, he says, good companies fold the day the founder retires or dies.

Barnett didn’t establish South Pacific; it was created by the privatisation of the old drama department at TVNZ in 1988. But he has effectively made the company his own since taking over. And in hallmark Barnett style, he has left little to chance.

Forming an alliance with a British distribution company (initially Chrysalis, which was later acquired by All3Media) was an important part of his long-term thinking. All3Media is Britain’s biggest independent TV production and distribution company, so has marketing clout that a little-known studio in a far corner of the planet could never acquire on its own. But Barnett also ensured he had the domestic market covered. “One of the reasons Kelly Martin is the new CEO,” he says, “is that she had 12 years of programming at TV3, so she knows what the [New Zealand] broadcasters are looking for.”

There’s nothing to suggest, then, that South Pacific’s overwhelming dominance of local television and film production – a cause of resentment among some of Barnett’s competitors, even those who like and respect him – is at risk.

ON ONE LEVEL, Barnett – the son of British Jews who migrated before the Second World War and settled in Auckland – can be seen as the classic show business entrepreneur: an astute spotter and nurturer of talent, a shrewd negotiator and a clever strategic thinker who’s always a couple of moves ahead of the game.

But perhaps more important than that, he’s also a patriot who believes in telling New Zealand stories to New Zealanders. He persevered for 17 years before bringing Whale Rider to the screen and, early in his career, took a substantial risk making Beyond Reasonable Doubt, based on British author David Yallop’s book about the Arthur Allan Thomas case.

His latest project, the film White Lies (like Whale Rider, based on a story by Witi Ihimaera) is a period drama about a Maori medicine woman. It’s probably too low-key to be another big box-office hit, but Barnett thinks it’s a story worth telling.

The hard-headed side of Barnett’s personality, the one with an unwavering eye on the bottom line, is the one that asks of every new programme or film idea that comes across his desk: who’s going to watch this? “It has to be more than a bright idea,” he says.

“Who’s the audience?” is a question that the Film Commission, the state funding agency of which he has been both a member and a trenchant critic, hasn’t asked nearly often enough in the past, Barnett maintains.

The commission has a new board and management now, following a damning report co-authored by Sir Peter Jackson in 2010, but Barnett says for many years it was “badly, badly served”. Of the 150-odd New Zealand films made in recent decades, most with commission funding, he reckons 90 should never have proceeded. “They never had an audience.”

Some of those failures cost the taxpayer millions and earned as little $40,000 at the box office. Several were made by first-timers who never directed another film. “It cost three to four million to find out they were no good.”

The commission, he says, was prone to capture by arty filmmakers who would hang around its Wellington office. “They [the commission] would think, ‘This person looks like an interesting director – we’ll back him’.”  Barnett says no one thought to ask who would be interested in watching the finished product.

His own preference is to make a film about a subject that audiences are already familiar with. Eighty thousand people had read Whale Rider, the novel, before it was transferred to the screen – “you already knew who the audience was on day one.”

Similarly, Sione’s Wedding (which starred comedy performers the Naked Samoans, well known from the animated series bro’Town) and Footrot Flats had a head start at the box office because both involved performers or situations people could identify with.

With television it’s different. TV programmes can be targeted more precisely than films, Barnett says, and a TV network has the advantage of being able to promote a new show to the particular audience it wants to attract. But it’s still hit-and-miss. “You have to think about the channel that you’re on and the audience that’s going to watch,” Barnett says. “Would Game of Thrones work on TV1? I don’t think so.”

The broad brief for new programmes, he explains, comes from the client TV networks. A new show can attract New Zealand on Air funding only if it has a network willing to screen it.

Outrageous Fortune, for instance, came about because TV3 wanted something for an 8.30pm midweek timeslot, skewed to a female audience. Scriptwriter Rachel Lang came up with the concept of the feral West family after she heard on the radio that the median annual wage for women was $14,000, which got her thinking about how a family could be held together on so little money without resorting to crime.

Outrageous, as it’s known in industry jargon, ending up running for six series and selling in several overseas markets. A well-placed industry source told The Listener it was initially intended as a stopgap series whose success took everyone by surprise.

BARNETT is neither fazed nor affronted when it’s put to him that some industry players complain that South Pacific gets favoured treatment from funding agency New Zealand on Air. 

Such allegations are hardly surprising. Since 2004, South Pacific has received more than $128 million from New Zealand on Air for drama series of six episodes or more, compared with the $48 million allocated to its competitors. But Barnett has heard it all before and has a well-rehearsed answer.

“Every drama, every slot, is contestable. Everyone can pitch for it. You can’t get any money from NZ on Air unless a broadcaster has said, ‘We’ll broadcast this’.

“So we pitch to the broadcasters, and other people pitch to the broadcasters, and for some time the broadcasters have liked what we’ve pitched. But they haven’t only liked what we’ve pitched. I think if you talked to them they would say we deliver on time, we deliver on budget and we deliver to an audience.” Other producers do the same thing, he adds pointedly, “to a lesser degree”.

Committing to a drama series is a big risk for the networks, Barnett says, “and they’re happy with what we’re doing.”

He also argues that South Pacific ploughs a lot of money back into the industry: $8 million in the past two years on writers alone. “That’s more than three times what the Film Commission spends.”

Dozens of writers, actors, producers, directors and production crew have honed their skills in the Henderson studios, mostly on the set of Shortland Street. That gives South Pacific a formidable base – call it critical mass – that’s hard for smaller competitors to match.

For all the murmurings about South Pacific’s dominance, Barnett says he enjoys a good relationship with other producers and is quick to applaud when someone else pulls off a challenging project – as with rival company Screentime’s Siege: The Real Story, last year’s docu-drama about the 2009 Napier shootings in which police officer Len Snee and gunman Jan Molenaar died.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it provides South Pacific’s bread and butter, Barnett defends the New Zealand on Air funding model.  State subsidisation of the private sector may have been eliminated in virtually every other field, but he says New Zealand drama simply wouldn’t get made without help from the taxpayer.

An hour of television drama typically costs $600,000 to make, several times the $100,000-$150,000 of advertising it generates. Without state funding to cover that deficit, the TV networks would simply buy imported drama (average cost: $40,000 an hour).

“If that happened, you wouldn’t see any local programming,” Barnett says. “So the intervention of NZ on Air, as the agency that ensures New Zealand stories and faces are seen, is critical.”

Moreover, he thinks the NZ on Air model is “pretty well flawless”. Of roughly $1.4 billion that has been invested in programming over the past 20 years, he calculates that only about $3 million worth hasn’t found its way onto the screen. “That’s a pretty good hit rate, better than most government departments.”

This is not to say he thinks existing television arrangements are perfect. Like many in the industry, Barnett is unhappy about the dominance of Sky TV and thinks the pay-TV company should never have been allowed to acquire exclusive rights to broadcast major sports events that, in other countries, have to be available on free-to-air channels.

Barnett likes the Australian system whereby a 10 per cent levy is charged on all imported shows broadcast on pay-TV channels and invested in local production, but he doesn’t see it happening here. “I don’t think anyone will roll them [Sky] back on sport or put a local production impost on them. That horse got out of the stable quite a long time ago.”

At the same time, he acknowledges that Sky is astutely managed, and he admires the ability of its lobbyist, Tony O’Brien, to keep governments onside. Barnett also concedes that Sky has increased its commitment to local production, particularly in sport, and offers something “new and exciting” in terms of programming. “There is choice now that we never contemplated.”

Barnett still shakes his head in astonishment that TVNZ sold its cornerstone shareholding in Sky in 1999. “If they still held 35 per cent of Sky, TVNZ would be in a markedly different place now. As it is, they are playing catch-up.”

The state-owned network, he says, has not been well-served either by political appointees on its board or by successive broadcasting ministers. He thinks it should have been privatised a long time ago, but it’s now probably too late.

THERE’S another side to Barnett, a more philosophical side. In thoughtful moments he talks about the liberating effects of living in a small country in the middle of the ocean, “where you can stand on the foreshore and there are no impediments.  There’s no other country just across the river, nothing close that you look at and think, ‘Gee, those guys are bigger than me’.”

That isolation, he theorises, not only gives New Zealanders a different world view, but encourages them to think that anything’s doable; there are no limits. He suspects this is what made Sir Peter Jackson believe in his ability to do things on his own terms, even when confronted by the power of Hollywood.

Mind you, the flip side is that for 100 years we didn’t believe we could have a culture of our own. He recalls that when New Zealand television screened the first locally made drama, Bruce Mason’s The Evening Paper, in 1965, reviewers and letter-writers fretted about what non-New Zealanders might think of it.

Barnett has also thought about whether being Jewish has influenced him (he’s active in the Auckland Hebrew congregation) and has concluded it has. He says he grew up being conscious of difference and able to see things from a different perspective.

That appears to have made him sensitive to issues faced by minority cultures – a theme of films such as Whale Rider and the more recent South Pacific production My Wedding and Other Secrets, in which a young Chinese woman had to deal with her parents’ reluctance to accept her white fiancé.

“We’re still a very assimilationist society,” Barnett observes. “We want people to be pretty much the same.” He says most people who saw the documentary Banana in a Nutshell, which inspired My Wedding and Other Secrets, couldn’t understand why the main character’s parents were against her marrying a European.

“Her parents wanted her to retain her Chinese culture. That’s something I’m absolutely familiar with. I looked at that documentary and thought, ‘That’s a Jewish story’.”