The power of celebrity
Steve Kilgallon finds out how an artist and a kids’ TV presenter (plus a German entrepreneur) corralled 99 other celebrities into a charitable cookbook.
Arenowned artist, a children’s television presenter and a German-born entrepreneur who got married in a supermarket sit drinking coffee in the artist’s studio in central Auckland. None of them knew each other five years ago. ‘‘There is a lot of serendipity at work here, I have to tell you,’’ says the artist, with a smile.
These three musketeers – Dick Frizzell, Erin Simpson and Christian Kasper (he’s the one you won’t have heard of, who held his nuptuals somewhere between the oven chips and the free-range eggs) – have collaborated on the celebrity cookbook to end all such ventures and in doing so, become firm friends.
Cooking for Change ,tobe released in August, will boast recipes from a total of 101 celebrities (well, 100 plus Sunday Star-Times columnist Grant Smithies), with everyone from Helen Clark (beef risotto) to Jordan Luck (pasta salad) and Sam Neill (shepherd’s pie) to the Topp Twins (a roast) offering up their favourite feeds.
It’s a story of what you can do when you live in such a small place: a story in which Simpson could be in a North Shore Post shop and hear that Suzy Cato was a fellow regular, and leave a note asking her to become involved (it worked).
A story where Frizzell could meet Roger Donaldson in a Ponsonby cafe to pitch the idea to him, and then bump into Hilary Barry, Dave Dobbyn and Anika Moa in the same establishment and have the same discussion.
But for how they all came to meet – and conceive of such a venture – you must tiptoe into that contorted conversation about the point where creativity and commerce collide and how the struggling artist can earn a crust.
‘‘Once upon a time, there was the art racket, and nothing else,’’ begins Frizzell, leaning back in his chair and smiling devilishly. ‘‘And the artists hated the commercial artists, and they hated the fine artists, and I know this because I used to be both . . . there was absolutely no overlap.
‘‘So I started using my commercial art experience to make a point of difference in my high art experience . . . I invented a space for myself which I called the interface between high art and commercial art, which I defined as the space that I worked in. And I had it to myself until Billy Apple jumped up and said ‘I used to be a commercial artist too’. I claimed it, and turned it into a virtue.’’
Frizzell had worked for Bob Harvey’s advertising business, and his early breakthrough came from producing Warhol-style reimaginings of tinned mackerel, with his wife and friends appearing at the launch dressed as mermaids.
He persuaded his Radio Hauraki DJ mates to plug his shows, made up his own posters and stuck them up around town, printed T-shirts, had performance artists at his openings, and taunted the establishment with the line: ‘‘You don’t get far without PR’. And yet, he insists, ‘‘I didn’t have the nous to move beyond that’’. For example, he says, Christchurch Art
Gallery sold hundreds and hundreds of a poster of his most famous work, Mickey to Tiki, but it took Kasper to suggest they made more, and sold them more widely.
So while the art world saw Frizzell as a quite commercial proposition – and not always with sympathy – that wasn’t how Christian Kasper viewed it. A qualified brewer who emigrated to Dunedin to work at the Green Man brewery, he began messaging (‘‘stalking’’) Frizzell through Facebook, a campaign sustained enough to pique Frizzell’s interest.
They met at an exhibition, and Kasper began pitching his ideas. ‘‘He reminded me that everything I had ever done in my life, I owned the rights to, and why wasn’t I doing more with it?’’ Frizzell says. ‘‘So his great concept was putting the work to work.’’
The first idea was an iPhone cover, which thanks to an appearance in an Air New Zealand flight safety video (directed by Frizzell’s son, Josh), sold out within a week. From there it was an ‘‘onslaught’’ of ideas, posters, clocks, cushions, corporates; and then, of course, the cookbook.
Kasper talks of 150 products, 200 retailers, and 20 ‘‘partners’’ to their various ventures. On the day we talk, their afternoon will be spent presenting to a real estate agency’s annual conference.
A cookbook was not territory unfamiliar to Frizzell: he had done the artwork on The Great New Zealand Cookbook, but this time he was to be more pivotally involved.
So thus began the long, slow labour of persuading New Zealand’s most famous to write down their favourite recipe, pose for photos and film accompanying video clips. It’s about here that Erin Simpson, who sounds as if she was going through a bit of a quarter-life crisis, became involved.
Simpson, who presented more than 100 episodes of the teenfocused The Erin Simpson Show was looking to kick her career on and had turned to the business incubator service Icehouse for advice. ‘‘While the show had my name on it, it wasn’t mine. But when that finished, I had the rights to my name – so what do I do with the power of my name?’’ she explains. ‘‘I thought ‘who does that best well in this country?’ and Dick was the prime example of what you can do with an image.’’
The Icehouse explained that Frizzell had a business partner – Kasper – and so, she says, she did to Christian what he had done to Dick: hound him until he agreed to chat to her. Simpson’s website, which retails iPhone covers and screen-print T-shirts and talks about demographics and has a testimonial from Jason Gunn, suggests their influence has rubbed off. ‘‘I don’t pretend to be an amazing artist like Dick, but I have an image and a following and it’s what you can do with that,’’ she says.
As Simpson hung around, soaking up advice, her contact book meant she became their unofficial fixer.
There was a snowball effect: Taika Waititi got them Valerie Vili, 660 singer Matiu Walters (whom they flew to Dunedin to pose at the now-burnt out 660 Castle St house where the band formed) was in with the contemporary music crowd, Helen Clark they got through Frizzell’s sister, Rotorua mayor Steve Chadwick. There were some issues around overprotective agents, and some initially enthusiastic contributors needed harassing into acting. ‘‘I have spent a lot of time sitting on my arse here writing emails to celebrities and nagging them,’’ Frizzell says. ‘‘Anything to flatter or to cajole them . . . I told one of them to s... or get off the pot. That was dramatic.’’
It’s been a long slog. The cookbooks are now on the boat from China and there’s an air of satisfaction – and a suggestion that there’s more collaborations to come. ‘‘The three of us work so differently and we have different skillsets, but bring the three of us together, and we’re very powerful,’’ Simpson says.
It works, says Kasper, speaking broadly of all their ventures, because they are mates, ‘‘it’s not just this cold hard, ‘here’s a spreadsheet, what’s on the bottom line’.’’ Frizzell is such a mate now he took a starring role in Kasper’s snap 2014 wedding to Jennifer Chou in Dunedin Countdown, pretending to be a wine merchandiser (Pua Magasiva performed a shopping-trolley dance and Tiki Taane busked on guitar).
The trio have fronted all the money, they say – with some sponsorship assistance – but once costs are covered, depending on sales between $6.50 and $10 from each copy will go to charity. It’s a better return, suggests Kasper, than in many such ventures.
Frizzell begins talking about connectivity, and ‘‘that Irish pop punk guy’’ who put on a gig (he’s talking Bob Geldof and Live Aid, by the way). Kasper tells a story about extracting a recipe from Don McGlashan, and putting him up in return when he was down for a gig. Simpson has drawn perhaps the clearest conclusion about what the whole process has taught them: ‘‘People say it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. But it’s not, it’s how you treat people.’’
Cooking for Change is on sale from August 26, at bookshops, and online at pottonandburton.co.nz/c4c for $49.99. Profits go to the Cooking 4 Change Foundation and to be distributed to the charities Auckland City Mission, Leukaemia & Blood Cancer NZ, Paw Justice and the Starship Foundation.
‘He reminded me that everything I had ever done in my life, I owned the rights to, and why wasn’t I doing more with it? So his great concept was putting the work to work.’ Artist Dick Frizzell