Forgotten Silver
Written and Directed by: Peter Jackson and Costa Botes
Starring: Thomas Robins, Beatrice Ashton, Peter Corrigan, Sarah McLeod

The thing I love most about New Zealand director Peter Jackson is that no matter how many big budget blockbusters he directs, he’ll still be the same scraggly-looking horror movie fanboy he always was. Many people know that he got his start by creating absurdly gory b-movies like Bad Taste and Dead Alive (aka Braindead), but there’s another fun little flick among his filmography that still hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. At least, not outside of New Zealand that is.

Forgotten Silver caused quite a stir when it was first released in New Zealand back in 1995. The 55 minute feature was a made-for-TV documentary about an unknown filmmaking pioneer named Colin McKenzie. As narrator Jeffrey Thomas tells the story, Peter Jackson’s mother’s next door neighbour discovered a stash of old films of McKenzie’s work. Jackson had the films analyzed and restored and was astonished to find that McKenzie’s tragic life story put him on the map with many of the all time cinema greats.

Many New Zealanders were extremely proud to find that one of their own had been such a pioneer in the world of film. Of course, that explains why they were absolutely livid when they found out afterwards that the entire film was fake! That’s right, Forgotten Silver is a mockumentary in the truest sense of the word. Jackson and his co-director Costa Botes created it as an elaborate hoax that does not even wink at its audience for the entire duration. And for this, they took a lot of flack in the New Zealand press.

There are a lot of reasons why the movie was able to fool people so completely. First of all, there are interviews with real Hollywood personalities talking about Colin McKenzie with reverance and respect. From Leonard Maltin to Sam Neill, there are some big names that conspired with Jackson to play along, many improvising thoroughly convincing diatribes about McKenzie’s importance to film history.

Secondly, the techniques that Jackson and his co-director Costa Botes employed to create a genuine look for the movie were superb. For some of the oldest footage they were able to succesfully simulate the appearance of aged and degraded film. Also, Jackson and Botes (who are clearly hardcore film nerds through and through) were able to draw from their vast knowledge of film history and imitate with perfection the tone of silent films like Charlie Chaplin slapstick (”Stan The Man”) to biblical epics (McKenzie’s ultimate masterpiece “Salome”). It also helps that the style of the documentary itself plays out in exactly the way you’ve seen a million times before, with amazing triumphs followed by overdramatic disasters, and a running subplot where Jackson and Botes take an expedition to search for the long lost location where McKenzie shot Salome.

The actors that played the actual subjects of the movie were all unknowns and were extremely convincing in their performances. Thomas Robins, who plays Colin McKenzie himself, hadn’t had any major roles in his career up to that point (he still hasn’t, with the exception of playing Deagol in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King) although he does have a resemblance to Six Feet Under’s Michael C. Hall.

Now all this might give the indication that Forgotten Silver is a rather dry attempt to create an authentic looking A&E-style biography about someone who didn’t exist. While the movie is indeed a little dry at times, it is still quite funny if you are in on the joke. And to be honest, if you’re not in on the joke there are definitely absurd moments that would make you question the validity of the film. I mean, come on, could someone really have invented a steam-powered film projector? Or built a huge city-sized film set all by themselves? You can’t help but laugh at some of these things. The movie has an almost Forrest Gump-ish quality as Colin McKenzie is seen participating in a number of different eras of film history and even getting involved in world events like the Spanish civil war.

Forgotten Silver was released on DVD before but up until now it was very rare and hard to come by. Anchor Bay has done us all a favour and re-released the movie in a new version that includes an audio commentary track with Costa Botes and a slew of deleted scenes. There is also a 21 minute documentary entitled “Behind The Bull” that includes some interesting things like excerpts from hate mail the TV station received as a result of airing the documentary. It’s also quite amusing to see some of the actual locations that they used in the movie, for example, how they turned a monument in the middle of a city into a dense jungle environment.

While Forgotten Silver isn’t for everyone, if you’re into mockumentaries, dry humour and film history, you’ll definitely get a kick out of it. It’s further proof of Peter Jackson’s versatility as a director and his genuine love for the medium. — Sean