On the downlow...
After delivering television hits such as 7 Days, Hounds, Coverband, the Downlow Concept has come up with its first feature film, Gary of the Pacific, writes Steve Kilgallon.
Jarrod Holt keeps a pile of rejection letters on his desk. ‘‘That pile never stops growing. It grows more the more work you get,’’ he says.
Two arrived last week – a rate he considers a mark of success, because it means even more work got pitched.
Holt, Ryan Hutchings and Nigel McCulloch have made the long-running news quiz 7 Days, the acclaimed series Hounds and Coverband, the new feature film Gary of the Pacific, and two winning 48 Hour Film Festival entries ( Brown Peril and Only Son).
They’ve been commissioned by the US network FX to write a comedy show. Their production company, the Downlow Concept, boasts one of those trendy minimalist whitewashed Auckland offices, with a functioning bar in the entrance hall and a giant plastic prop dolphin on the boardroom table.
It looks like a traditional, rather sickening success story. But the way they tell it is much funnier – there’s a lot of talk about the rejections and the fumbling errors along the way. Trying to drum up more advertising work by sending out bags of offal to various businesses with the phrase ‘‘do you have the guts to change’’ (result: two police complaints, no new business). Or when they met a senior network executive to pitch a documentary and the suit said ‘‘do you even know what documentaries we’ve made?’’, so Holt read out the titles from the awards on the shelf behind her back until she threw them out.
This week, Gary, their first full-length movie, is released. It has been nine years in the making. ‘‘But that was our own fault,’’ says Holt genially.
‘‘We didn’t know how to make a film. I think it was only at year five that we read a book on how to write a script. Our first script was written in MS Word and it was two people arguing on a beach, with seven montages of them playing beach volleyball, which we felt was a metaphor for their relationship’’. All that survived was the island location and the casting of long-time collaborator Josh Thomson in the lead. They now have four more feature film scripts at various stages of development.
The trio met at AUT, where they all graduated in 2000 with degrees in communication studies, majoring in radio (their course mates included television host Jane Yee, sports presenter Sam Ackerman and Herald journalist Rebecca Barry-Hill). Holt was working three jobs: checkout at Super Liquor, the midnight-dawn DJ shift on More FM, and alongside McCulloch as an autocue operator at TV3, who in turn had a second gig on Sky’s The Golf Show. Hutchings was the bar manager at student haunt Deschler’s, and making car-sales infomercials.
‘‘We could see the people we were working for were making good money, and some of the ideas were not that great,’’ says Holt. ‘‘We thought we might come up with some ideas of our own and we were in our early 20s, so it wouldn’t be too bad if it failed. Worst of all, we enjoyed it too much and became unemployable.’’
They began by renting a cold, cheap farmhouse in pregentrification Matakana, free from friends and distractions, loaded up on chicken two-minute noodles sourced from Holt’s radio job, and began to write.
The result was a colour-coded document, several hundred pages CHRIS MCKEEN long, showcasing their best seven ideas (including one show to be co-hosted by a kunekune pig), duly dispatched to Radio New Zealand.
Time passed. Eventually, their AUT radio lecturer called and asked if they had submitted some ideas to RNZ? Why, yes they had. And yes, they had forgotten to include their names, phone numbers and address.
Once the state broadcaster worked out who they were, they rejected every one of those ideas – even Millionaire Living, a sober documentary about the homes of the rich and famous which, with hindsight, they can see was fatally flawed (McCulloch, voiceover style, says: ‘‘this is an incredible room, I wish you could see it’’).
But, thanks to a visiting British radio guru who was advising the broadcaster to copy the proliferation of such shows in the UK, RNZ did want the trio to make them a comedy panel show. That was Off the Wire, which came six months into the Matakana experiment, enabling them to pay themselves $200-a-week each and garner the confidence to carry on.
and so followed the radio and TV pop music quiz Pop Goes the Weasel, and then, eventually, 7 Days, which was rejected multiple times by every New Zealand network.
‘‘It was a bit soul-destroying