Forget that I'm fifty 'cause you just got paid

It is a dark moment in life when you find yourself in agreement with Fran O'Sullivan. New Zealand is hardly the only nation to screw up (Private Eye jokes about Boris Johnson saying the Delhi Olympics have set the standard London must aim for) but reading the Hobbit news is depressing - and I don't even like Tolkien. On the union side is an actor (no comment), an Australian (oh, clever) and a New Zealander who was involved in a previous legal dispute with one of the producers*. On the other side is one of the most expensive and precarious movies ever proposed: $500 million on sticks to make lightning strike a fourth (/fifth) time after years of rights wrangles during a financial recession. No studio needs to make The Hobbit: Twilight Eclipse cost $60 million and made $689 million, and its key sequence was three teenagers talking inside a tent. If you had asked your brain to pick a production to boycott it would have said "not that Tolkien one." Now in a world where movie budgets are never what they seem, the fate of millions rests in the hands of... the tax man.

(*I assume it's her. Unless - scarily - there are three of them.)

Postscript: In 2009, Simon Whipp complained to the Australian Courier Mail about the possibility of an American taking on the role of Mad Max:

"Performers have long held the view that traditional Australian characters should be played by Australian performers and immigration regulations reflect that," said assistant federal secretary Simon Whipp... "If the producers cast other than an Australian performer, it would be very disappointing."

In 2003 Whipp said Australia's media and cultural industries must be protected from foreign interference:

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance attracted a crowd of more than 250 to the Sydney Opera House on 6 October to draw attention to the threat to our culture and media industries if the government does not secure a cultural carve-out in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.

"It really is crunch time," said Simon Whipp of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, who fears the government's previous support for the exclusion of Australian media and cultural industries from the free trade agreement may be jeopardised if it surrenders its right to control future kinds of screen and cultural forms.

"A proposal which does not protect the right of governments to react to these changes as, and when, they happen will mean that future governments are not able to support and promote Australian culture as governments have to date," said Whipp.

That's the great thing about nationalism: one country is all you need.