Forgotten Silver (1995)

Directors: Peter Jackson & Costa Botes            Writers: Peter Jackson & Costa Botes
Music Score: Duncan Davidson                         Cinematography: Alun Bollinger
Starring: Thomas Robins, Jeffrey Thomas, Beatrice Ashton and Peter Jackson

One of the most impressive things in the special two-disc edition of the 1933 King Kong is the recreation of the spider pit scene by filmmaker Peter Jackson and his crew. The scene had been edited from the final theatrical print and was lost, but Jackson was able to put together a credible replacement that was almost as fascinating for how it was done as it was for the finished product. In reading about this reconstruction, however, I came across several references to Forgotten Silver, a TV film that Jackson did on a fictitious filmmaker from New Zealand named Colin McKenzie. It was made for a series of one-hour dramas presented on New Zealand television and it’s a wonderfully fun piece of filmmaking by Jackson and Costa Botes, a painstaking mockumentary wherein the two attempted to achieve something like the buzz that Orson Welles created when he performed War of the Worlds on radio in 1938. And this they did. They had a reporter that they knew write a piece for the newspaper as if the documentary were real. Jackson assumed that the hoax would be revealed in the meantime and that everyone would be in on the joke when it aired. But so many people were fooled that angry calls and letters flooded into the network, almost as if by creating this historical genius of their own and then suddenly taking him away was a terrible slap in the face to New Zealand.

The film begins with Peter Jackson being interviewed onscreen, telling how he lived only a few doors down from Beatrice Ashton as McKenzie's widow. It turns out she had a trunk in her garden shed containing films made by her late husband, Thomas Robins as the forgotten Colin McKenzie. The films turn out to be a treasure trove of cinematic firsts. By attaching the camera to a bicycle chain he was able to film the first moving camera shot. He also produced a sound film in the teens, but since all of the actors spoke Chinese it was a commercial failure. He and his brother then went to Tahiti to find a kind of berry that allowed him to film the first ever color sequences. But after a very funny trial for showing public lewdness, he embarked on a major production of the biblical tale of Salome. For this, he constructed a gigantic set in the New Zealand jungle that Jackson and his modern cohorts attempt to excavate. Once there, they discover the thousands of feet of film that the director produced for his film, and the documentary ends with the reconstruction of Salome and a screening that ends in a standing ovation.

What makes the film so tremendous is the attention to detail that Jackson brought to his spider pit sequence from King Kong. Still photographs of Robins as McKenzie and have an aura about them that is incredibly realistic. And even though they had the ability to take as many stills as they wanted, they limited themselves in the same way a historian would, so you see the same shots over and over. Jackson’s knowledge of film history, the way aging films look, the way shots were framed, as well as the specific style of documentary filmmaking at the time, all add up to a supremely satisfying spoof. Another thing that he and Botes did well was to start with small lies before building up to the whoppers. Even so, when one of the earliest of the films shows a Kiwi as the first man to fly an airplane, the zoom in on the newspaper in the back of a man’s pants pocket is just as ridiculous as when they do it on cop shows. The other genius move was to enlist film historian Leonard Maltin as well as actor Sam Neill and producer Harvey Weinstein for interviews that add another layer of verisimilitude. Forgotten Silver is an incredibly entertaining bit of whimsy, especially for film lovers. And the fact that someone like Peter Jackson can spend the money and time to follow his muse for a lark like this, makes me appreciate him all the more.