It gave me shivers hearing Mayor Mitch Roth say that one of his top priorities was to bring the film industry to Hawaii Island. My experiences with that industry veer on catastrophic — a horse that should never again leave the barn.
About 25 years ago, sections or even whole public beaches were off-limits to the public for the filming of the doomed TV series “Wind on Water.” Some closures went on for days. Structures were built — some large enough to be seen from our house 1,800 feet above the coastline, some illegal, and some that are now rubble falling into the rising sea. Even swimming and surfing were banned. In a sensitive coastal area, jet skis and other water craft zoomed around making noise, fumes and trouble for people and endangered sea life.
Residents fought that abuse, but NBC likely went away only because its project failed. If it hadn’t, public officials might’ve continued to let them have control of public beaches, and we might still be watching our limited coastlines (including Waipio Valley and Kiholo Bay) usurped by corporate players that don’t pay a cent to use those resources. In fact, NBC got paid in tax breaks in hopes that their trash series would bring more tourists to Hawaii’s increasingly impacted and crowded shores.
New Zealand busted open with “Lord of the Rings,” bringing hordes of tourists with it. Instead of caring about experiencing (and thereby helping to protect) the unparalleled beauty of native forests and other natural, cultural, and agricultural attractions, tourists flock to famed film sites looking for artificially created adventure. Multi-millionaire speculation, skyrocketing real estate prices, homelessness, and a sense that regular “Kiwis” will never again be able to count on enjoying their god-given right to have roofs over their heads are all becoming the new, Hollywood-driven reality in what was an egalitarian nation with a low quotient of American-style materialism.
The film industry is not, as industry apostles like to claim, “sustainable.” It uses land and resources and spits out what it can’t chew. A Fodor story relates horror tales of employee abuse in an industry wrapped in glamour and the promises of riches adding “… it’s an attractive location due in part to lax worker protections and less government oversight — the cumulative affect of this is a cycle of revenue and exploitation that there doesn’t seem to be any easy answer for, especially as the process for addressing it in New Zealand is being kept quiet.” And even small fry companies overstep boundaries — like when I was told to stay out of the shot for a music video while trying to access the ocean.
Mayor Roth: Please support more island-centric, less parasitic economic drivers so that Hawaii residents don’t have to hear “quiet on the set” in their public spaces ever again.
Janice Palma-Glennie is a resident of Kailua-Kona.
