This weekend I finally had a chance to watch the 1995 mockumentary Forgotten Silver by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes and found it quite fun. I had some trepidation about this because I wasn’t sure how this joke would play out for a full 60 minutes. It only took a few minutes before the story of New Zealand’s greatest filmmaker captured my attention.

Early on, the subject of the biography, one Colin McKenzie, develops a process to create film stock using eggs. One dozen eggs yields one minute of film. Sure enough his quest to make a feature length film gets him arrested for stealing 2,000 eggs. That’s an independent filmmaker I can relate to! Peppered with appearances by Leonard Matlin, Sam Neil, and others, the part of Colin is played by Thomas Robins, who went on to play Déagol the unfortunate fishing buddy of Sméagol’s in Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King. This film caused a little stir when it came out in New Zealand because it seems no one told the viewers it was all fake. Oops.

This is an enjoyable piece and the recreated old film sequences are faboulus.