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Filler Episode - Forgotten Silver
344 Plays3 days ago
M's having voice issues, so Josh records a short episode on the NZ mockumentary "Forgotten Silver" to keep you happy until we're ready to record normally. Learn how Peter Jackson and Costa Botes fooled a nation, even though it seems like they didn't really mean to.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:07
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Ian Denteth.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. ah Dr M Denteth, I believe, is in Auckland, New Zealand as we speak, but um last I heard has laryngitis, which, as you can imagine,
00:00:44
Speaker
throws ah throws ah a monkey wrench into the process of recording a podcast. So until they are feeling a little bit better, I thought I would just put out a quick one of one of those quick little filler episodes just to keep you going until we're able to record a proper episode.
00:00:58
Speaker
And I've done the thing, as this has happened a few times over the over the years we've been doing this podcast where I'll see so something will occur to me and I think, oh, that could be an interesting thing to talk about just randomly for no good reason.
00:01:12
Speaker
And then I start looking up, at looking up information about it and realize that actually it's
Forgotten Silver: Overview and Anniversary
00:01:18
Speaker
incredibly appropriate. i I've sort of, you know, had ones in the past where it's been like, oh I remember that's an interesting guy. Maybe we should talk about him. And then I look it up and realize that the date that we're recording him is like the 30th anniversary of his death or something. It's.
00:01:33
Speaker
<unk>s It's a little bit weird. and so I've done it again because I was ah long story. I was reminded of Richard Pierce, New Zealand's earliest aviator, one of New Zealand's earliest aviators. And that reminded me of a documentary called Forgotten Silver, which is related to Richard Pierce. We'll find out why shortly. And i thought, oh, now that's that's kind of kind of um conspiratorial. Again, we'll see why.
00:01:59
Speaker
maybe Maybe I could just just do a quick quick fuller episode on that. And then I looked it up and realized that this year is the 30th anniversary of the airing of Forgotten Silver. And indeed, last week, last week, according to the day I record this, a special restored screening of it was shown at the New Zealand International Film Festival, which I somehow neglected to notice. Or maybe I did.
00:02:22
Speaker
Maybe I had noticed that it was being shown, and that's why it popped into my mind again so freely two days ago. But any at any rate, for whatever reason... I'm going to talk to you today about a documentary called Forgotten Silver.
00:02:40
Speaker
Now, if you're a New Zealander and and not too much younger than me, you've probably heard of Forgotten Silver. um It was a documentary that aired on October the 29th, 1995.
00:02:54
Speaker
ah That was a Sunday, and that's important because... The time slot that it screened on on TV One, the the the the first of the state-run TV channels in New Zealand, at that time on a Sunday night, that was that was the Sunday theatre time slot. It was when they would usually have serious sort of dramas or things like that.
00:03:16
Speaker
And so this time slot was one of many things. which gave this documentary documentary ah quite a sort of serious ear to it. Now, it's a documentary that was directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes.
00:03:31
Speaker
Apparently, Botes came up with the idea to do this documentary in the early 90s, later mentioned it to Jackson, and the two of them worked on it together. Now, this is
The Fictional Achievements of Colin McKenzie
00:03:39
Speaker
1995. Peter Jackson had not done the Lord of the Rings films yet, but he had just the year before done Heavenly Creatures, which was the film that really sort of got him international attention. Prior to that, he'd been doing a lot of his sort of as his splatstick horror films. And Heavenly Creatures was now the serious film, which was also Kate Winslet's big break.
00:03:59
Speaker
And so he was now becoming sort of internationally regarded as actually a serious ah quality director. ah The documentary is presented by Jackson himself, who, as we'll see, claims to have a personal connection to its subject.
00:04:14
Speaker
um It's a documentary about films and filmmaking. It includes interviews with Sam Neill, who was and I'm pretty sure still is, the the biggest name New Zealand actor in the world, and again 1995, this is not long after Jurassic Park.
00:04:29
Speaker
It includes interviews with Leonard Moulton, the famous film critic and film historian. um Interviews with a plucky young producer by the name of ah Harvey Weinstein.
00:04:41
Speaker
Seemed a nice fellow, I wonder what happened to him. No, actually, apparently the the new screening of it that just happened last week this year at the Film Festival, the new remastered HD version of it, they actually cut Harvey Weinstein's scenes out of the film altogether.
00:04:57
Speaker
And I've seen an interview with Costa Botes who was not not actually happy about that. He was like, you know, I understand why they did it, but I don't think they should be rewriting the past in that way. But anyway...
00:05:09
Speaker
apparently and and another interesting note having spoken to Harvey Weinstein who obviously head of Miramax Peter Jackson had had worked with ah Weinstein said hey I could get Quentin Tarantino I'm sure he'd be happy to to say a few words about this as well and they kind of thought nobody really knows who Quentin Tarantino is do they because at the time I think he'd only Reservoir Dogs was the only film that he'd put out and and it would be a few months later suddenly Pulp Fiction would come out and he'd be a big star and they're like oh Maybe we should have got him to talk. But anyway, I have not yet actually said what the documentary is.
00:05:44
Speaker
And I'm wondering if I should... I think I should spoil this right at the start. It's a documentary. It's the story of a man called Colin McKenzie, who is New Zealand's greatest early film pioneer. Now, if you're a New Zealander, if you know about the film...
00:05:56
Speaker
then I'm not spoiling anything to tell you that the whole film is a hoax. It's a, well, I mean, we'll we'll discuss this at the end. Is it a hoax? if If it is, then that counts as being a conspiracy, I think. A conspiracy to... to to to pull this the sort of practical jokey hoax on the country.
00:06:15
Speaker
But it's questionable as to whether or not it was. These days it's referred to as a mockumentary in the lines of this is Spinal Tap or something like that. um But Peter Jackson and Colin Botis put this film together telling the story of a man called Colin McKenzie who Peter Jackson, the the set-up of it all is that Peter Jackson, who was in in the film as himself, says that This woman who turned out to it turns out to be Colin McKenzie's widow ah was a friend of his parents and at one point said, hey, your son Peter likes movies. I've got this old trunk of films here from my from my husband.
00:06:47
Speaker
And he looks through them and discovers these these incredibly significant artefacts of New Zealand's film history. And so in the movie, they go through the the life story of this man, Colin McKenzie, who was always obsessed with movies, supposedly built his first movie camera at the age of 12, where the old style, he was born, um according to the film, in the late 1800s and in the early nineteen hundreds um Started getting into making films. He sort of made his first hand-cranked camera, then made a motorized one that was hooked up to his bicycle, inadvertently creating the world's first ever tracking shot as he rode his bicycle along with a camera mounted on the front of it.
00:07:27
Speaker
Did other things like hooking one up to a steam engine. to to motorize it even more effectively. He made his own film stock out of flax, which he compressed to to extract cellulose from and then treated them with egg whites to make them light, light sensitive. And if you know anything about films and you're saying, hang on, that's not even slightly true. You can't possibly do that.
00:07:49
Speaker
That was the sort of thing that I think the filmmakers were expecting would give the game away straight away. But um as we'll see, it did not. um Other claims they make about Colin McKenzie in this documentary is that he both invented um film and sound, recording and playing back sound at the same time, making a talky picture, and also invented colour film stock before anyone else in the world had film.
00:08:13
Speaker
um And they explain, that in the documentary, they explain away the fact that that he was never credited with this because in in his instance, neither of them took off for no obvious reason.
Conspiratorial Elements and Historical Claims
00:08:25
Speaker
The film that he recorded sound on was one starring an entirely Chinese cast and all the dialogue was in Mandarin. So when the audience when it was screened to English-speaking New Zealand audiences, people lost interest straight away because they couldn't understand what was going on.
00:08:41
Speaker
The... um his His initial test in in the story of the documentary, he discovers a particular berry that can be used, the juices of which can be used to treat film stock and and produce colour pictures, which only grows in Tahiti. So he and his brother go to Tahiti to work on this, and he's able to extract enough to make sort of 20 seconds of footage.
00:09:00
Speaker
And his test footage, which is is supposed to be of sort of, you know vibrant red flowers on ah on a green-black background in Tahiti, keeps getting interrupted by topless Tahitian woman walking into the shot.
00:09:13
Speaker
And so when he takes it back and views it to his back as he's immediately arrested for obscenity, and so that they have things like that. um Now, the Richard Pierce connection is that he, again, and in the documentary, they say that he was on, ah they they discover this old film of his actually filming Richard Pierce's first flight.
00:09:32
Speaker
And even um more than than documenting this significant um event, they're able to zoom in with did digital enhancement of the restored footage. They're able to zoom in on a newspaper, which one of the men can be seen carrying.
00:09:48
Speaker
And from reading the date on that, they put it at the March the 31st, 1903, which would be put it nine months before the Wright brothers first flew their plane.
00:10:00
Speaker
which And and this this sort of ties into a bit of the history. I'm sure we've talked about Richard Pierce before. We must have when we were talking about the Tunnel Vision book, because that all tied into early early aviation in New Zealand.
00:10:11
Speaker
Richard Pierce was... Now, of of course, when it comes to things like powered flight... It's not like the Wright brothers were the only person in the world working on it. There was a bunch of people trying to get it going, and the Wright brothers had the distinction of being the first ones to make it work.
00:10:25
Speaker
But Richard Pierce was working on this stuff as well. And there's always been a little bit of con confusion because things weren't written down, things weren't recorded, and and there there weren't actually ah fictional filmmakers recording, capturing footage of this stuff happening.
00:10:41
Speaker
So there had been the suggestion that maybe Richard Pierce had flown before the Wright brothers did. but that doesn't seem to be there was talk of on march the thirty first nineteen o three of people seeing him flying around in this thing and from what i could gather that may have happened but it was more of a glider it wasn't it wasn't something that moved on its own power it was a plane that had to sort of be towed along to get it up into the air and then he could sort of steer it vaguely and Richard Pierce himself there there are letters like to um newspapers from him where he he specifically talks about the fact that the Wright brothers were the first one to achieve powered flight so that's all that interesting side note but anyway according to the film Colin McKenzie provided documentary proof that Richard Pierce was the first man to achieve powered flight
00:11:27
Speaker
ah But the story the story moves on through his his life and times. um He spent... The large part of the film is him producing this this passion project of his, which is a a story the story of Salome and John the Baptist as ah as a giant biblical epic, which...
00:11:44
Speaker
I think they they they intended that it was going to be, that it would show that he had made the first full feature movie in New Zealand. Although apparently, according to some other stuff I read, they they were surprised to find out later that ah the date that they put on his production of this film, which would make it the earliest film, earliest feature film in New Zealand. It turned out there was actually a real film had actually been made in New Zealand um before that.
00:12:11
Speaker
The Salvation Army apparently shot some, another biblical film for real, which even predated their fictional one, which was meant to be the earliest least one ever. um And so, yeah, the film that goes through all all his trials and tribulations trying to get this giant film made. um Another significant thing, his brother went and served in World War One and took one of Colin's cameras with him, capturing some of the only known footage of New Zealand soldiers serving in Gallipoli. His brother died in World War One.
00:12:40
Speaker
which which sent Colin into a depression and he disappeared for several years. Nobody knew what he'd done. And then when he came back, it turned out he'd spent that time building just the largest set ever made, which would be the the setting for this biblical epic that he was going to make.
00:12:55
Speaker
And so then part of the documentary, which was made apparently in this hidden valley out in the bush on the west coast of New Zealand somewhere, and part of the film is Peter Jackson and a bunch of other people trying to track down the location of this lost set and and and finding its ruins,
00:13:10
Speaker
in the middle of the bush out in middle of nowhere yeah it sort of goes into all the troubles he has funding these documentaries um he runs keeps running out of money so he has to at one point he does um gets work filming for a comedian who calls himself stan the man and basically accidentally um invents the candid camera genre as he surreptitiously films this guy pray playing annoying practical jokes on people and um eventually accidentally plays a practical joke on the Prime Minister at the time and gets beaten up by the police officers working for his security detail, which they then compare to sort of ah the first case of of of recording police brutality 70 years before the Rodney King tape.
00:13:49
Speaker
he has to he he he gets backing from ah an american backer who then loses all his money in the in the stock market crash and has to get uh funds from soviet russia who are interested in producing propaganda films and then the the stress of everything then tragically results in the death of his wife and their unborn child who was the main actress in his movie and and And he eventually being pressured by both the ah mafia people who had taken over the the debts of his previous American backer and the Soviet backers who have very specific ideas on how his film should be. He ends up, um he doesn't want his film ending up in anyone else's hands. So he then hides it.
00:14:31
Speaker
he He
Public Reaction to the Hoax
00:14:32
Speaker
buries it so it will never be found and flees the country. it goes to algiers ends up getting swept up in the spanish civil war and finally felt while while while filming for press in the spanish civil war ends up accidentally filming his own death as he as he puts his camera down to go help a wounded soldier but is then killed by fire himself And then then finally the film ends with with Jackson.
00:14:55
Speaker
ah They find, you know, finding his um his his lost city in the bush, which includes a hidden vault where they are are able to unearth the original footage for Salome and they return it, that they restore it and edit it together and then screen it in 1995, allegedly sort of just before this documentary aired to a rapturous audience.
00:15:17
Speaker
And that's the end of the documentary. And and even even right through to the end, if you if you read through the end credits of the film, it sort of credits the Colin McKenzie historical archives for supplying footage and his wife. I should say, of course, i said at the start, they all found this from McKenzie's widow, but his wife died. he He then remarried in Algiers. And so that that that woman was the one who supposedly supplied all the stuff. So it was amazing story and all completely fake.
00:15:44
Speaker
It was very, very well made. Peter Jackson was a big fan of silent film and had always been a little bit, um a little bit sort of, I don't know, depressed that whenever people tried to sort of recreate the look of silent film, all they'd really do would be put it in black and white and put some fake, fake scratches and hairs on the frame.
00:16:03
Speaker
um And so because by this time he had the the wetter VFX studio, um so they were able to sort of make this this footage look authentically like it had been shot in the 1920s with old old footage and were able to do background replacement type stuff to to to fake these massive sets that had supposedly been built for this this feature film and all things like that.
00:16:26
Speaker
And because of that, it all at all it all worked against them a little bit. when when i When I've seen documentaries, yeah there there are sort of interviews and stuff with them talking about that. Both both Peter Jones um and Costa Botis, they assumed everyone would twig.
00:16:43
Speaker
Peter Jackson actually assumed word would have got out before the documentary screened on national television because it was a massive production. Like, they had to to make a fake biblical epic.
00:16:54
Speaker
With this sort of, you know cast of thousands, or in this case, ah at least they had dozens of of extras for these scenes of this fake movie that they'd made. It it wasn't a small production. um And so Jackson assumed, like, they they they didn't say anything about whether or not they'd sworn people to secrecy and told them, you know, this is all going to be a prank and don't let on. But...
00:17:14
Speaker
Jackson assumed people would have mentioned, I worked on this fake documentary for Peter Jackson, and word would have got around and people would have known what it was, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Botas talks about, he he assumed that they would have given the game away within the first 15 minutes of this film. It would have been obvious that the the whole thing was ah was was a comedy, was a parody, that it can't possibly be real. When they were talking about extracting cellulose from flax to to make films or...
00:17:43
Speaker
like There are bits in it that are obvious gags. the The whole um when he gets when he gets tried for indecency because of accidentally filming bare-breasted Tahitian maidens, there's a whole bit about how it his trial the all-male jury takes 37 hours to deliberate during which they request multiple viewings of the film footage. And it's like, that's that's just a gag. That's an obvious joke, surely. But um a lot, a lot of people did not get the joke.
00:18:12
Speaker
Partly because, as I say, it screened in a time slot that was reserved for usually sort of serious works. Partly because he had these recognisable names, Sam Neill and Leonard Moulton especially.
00:18:24
Speaker
um I don't know if people knew who Harvey Weinstein was back then, um you know, giving, giving, giving credence to it. And partly because Jackson's effects work was so good that it looked, you know, all the, all the supposedly restored old footage looked quite authentic.
00:18:36
Speaker
So
Impact and Legacy of Forgotten Silver
00:18:37
Speaker
people bought it. So immediately, McKenzie was, was hailed as this great New Zealander. And, and according to Peter Jackson, you know, the next day film students, people in film school would be talking about him as though they'd known about him all along. And,
00:18:52
Speaker
supposedly the the national new zealand's national museum was getting in touch with peter jackson saying hey we'd love to do an exhibit of colin mckenzie's films or his equipment or whatever you've got can you send it to us and so so a few days later jackson and botas basically had to make a public announcement no no guys it's it's not real colin mckenzie doesn't exist it was our it was our it was it was a joke it was our work of satire um and a lot of people got very angry about that Like, i see I'm guessing most of it was simply people, you nobody likes finding out that they've been taken for a fool. Nobody likes being made to feel foolish.
00:19:30
Speaker
um And so some people got very angry and then some people were like, well, hang on, this was ah this was filmed with, you know, the New Zealand Film Commission helped fund this. So taxpayers' money went towards making fools out of all of New Zealand. That's not on. Apparently there was some...
00:19:45
Speaker
There were some very angry letters to the editor and stuff about how how Jackson and Botis should be arrested or who knows what. One one particularly unhinged person compared Forgotten Silver to to the Nazi propaganda of Joseph Goebbels.
00:20:00
Speaker
which I think that was the letter that that that prompted voters to reply to it saying, I bet you also wonder how Steven Spielberg managed to train those dinosaurs for Jurassic Park. All movies are fake, dude. But ah there were complaints made to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, none of which were upheld. But um there was there was a lot of complaints that ended up becoming quite a big deal.
00:20:22
Speaker
And, like, it's, I i mean, like I guess it's hard to say. I didn't watch it at the time. I should have set up the top. I never watched Forgotten Silver when it first came out, so I don't know whether or not I would have been taken in.
00:20:35
Speaker
I watched it again more recently. It hasn't been released on, like, DVD or anything, but Costa Botes on Vimeo um has has put a page up so you can you can pay, like, $5 to watch it if you want.
00:20:49
Speaker
So having seen it recently, like, to me, now in 2025, it seems like I watch it thinking, how could anyone have possibly got taken in for this? I mean, it seemed a little bit silly at the start. For for me, it was the bit when they... um ah the the Richard Pierce bit, where they digitally enhance the the person's newspaper to show the date, and they do the full sort of CSI thing of, you know, computer, enhance, enhance, enhance, and turn this this completely indistinct blob into completely legible text. I was like, come on, they must have... But then...
00:21:26
Speaker
I don't know, was CSI out in 1995? Maybe was possibly not an effect that people were used to seeing and seeing get ridiculed for how silly it was.
00:21:37
Speaker
I do remember i remember my parents watching it. And I remember my mum saying afterwards when it all came out, she was like, yeah, it did seem like a lot of it was just too convenient, that he just happened to be filming all these incredibly significant things and in New Zealand's history. I'm not sure Forrest Gump had come out at that point, but he was very much had a Forrest Gump quality to him.
00:21:58
Speaker
So, I mean, I don't know. It's impossible to know now that A, obviously, if you know anything about Forgotten Silver, you know it's fake going into it the first time you watch it. And B, we we have 30 years worth of media literacy of of knowing what what you what what is and isn't real when it comes to this sorts of thing. So maybe you couldn't do it. I mean...
00:22:18
Speaker
Certainly the um the the whole keeping a lid on it aspect. In 1995, Peter Jackson was assuming word would have got out about what they were doing. In this day and age, with with everybody carrying a cell phone with a camera on it and and internet information travelling around the internet at the speed of light, it seems like it would be impossible to pull off something like this. But who knows?
00:22:41
Speaker
And the irony of the whole thing, ah at the end of it all, when it was meant to be sort of a homage to filmmaking and film pioneers and and and sort of celebrating the spirit of this sort of thing, even even though it wasn't actually real, what it ended up doing was inspiring a whole lot of hatred and negativity to a couple of New Zealand filmmakers. Peter Jackson somewhat bitchily said that Colin McKenzie, had he existed as exactly the sort of people...
00:23:06
Speaker
ah this exactly the sort of person that that that Jackson's critics would have been ripping to pieces rather than celebrating. And its had Forgotten Silver been real, it would have been the most amazing thing and and fully celebrated.
New Zealand's Media Hoaxes and Viewing Options
00:23:17
Speaker
But as a work of fiction, it's complete trash. But that is the story of Forgotten Silver, possibly the most um prominent hoax in New Zealand's history. I don't know. Actually, another thing I should point out is that New Zealand did have a history of of funny little sort of fake documentary things.
00:23:37
Speaker
Not on that scale, but sort of the the April Fool's gag of of having fake news articles, or in particular, we had... possibly still have for all I know, a show called Country Calendar, which was about sort of farming in New Zealand, a big, big, big, big farming economy. So that was a, it was a sort of, you know, national show. And they were famous for their, their fake stories. They had ones of, which would usually go out for April Fool's Day of,
00:24:05
Speaker
There was one of a ah guy who had supposedly attached, like, electrodes in an aerial to his sheepdog, and then you had this footage of him with his remote-controlled sheepdog using, like, a an RC car controller to direct his dog around the field and things like that. Fred Dagg, um John Clark, the famous comedian, he basically started doing that sort of stuff.
00:24:26
Speaker
But... um But that was not enough to prepare people for Forgotten Silver. So like I say, if you're interested, it's it's a really, you know, it's it's a very clever piece of filmmaking.
00:24:39
Speaker
ah Just search for Costa Botes, C-O-S-T-A-B-O-T-E-S on Vimeo. And you can, for a very small amount of money, view it yourself.
00:24:50
Speaker
and And I think you probably should, because it's not actually it's not nearly as available as it probably should be. even though this year is So maybe this year, being the 30th version of it, they are actually finally going to come. But then now it's kind of too late, really. DVDs and Blu-rays are a little bit passé, I don't know.
00:25:08
Speaker
So Fimio might be your best chance.
Episode Conclusion and Reflection
00:25:10
Speaker
ah But that's all I have to say, i think, about Forgotten Silver. It's ah an interesting little story. and and in terms of the conspiratorial aspect of it, i mean, it was definitely a conspiracy in that it was sort of made in secret as a joke, but then it was kind of expected that everyone would get the joke.
00:25:30
Speaker
Although, actually, I didn't say one um one thing that does go into overtly conspiratorial. After Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's next film was The Frighteners with Michael J. Fox, which he shot in New Zealand. And at the time, he was making...
00:25:44
Speaker
forgotten silver he was actually under contract to Universal to be working on the Frighteners so he did have to keep his involvement in it at the time he was making it quite quiet to the point that at one point Universal sent us an executive down to New Zealand to see how things were going and Peter Jackson had to sort of hide from him at times to so he wouldn't find out that Jackson was also working on this other project at the same time So there was a bit of conspiracy involved in any case, which means it's all right for me to have been talking about it for the past 20 odd minutes.
00:26:15
Speaker
So ah that's a little filler episode for you, just to just to keep you going until Em's back on their feet and we can we can we can record a real episode for reals. So until then, I will just say...
00:26:30
Speaker
I'm still in two minds about the conspiracy you later thing. Like, you all get that it's a joke. Like, I'm meant to be doing it ironically, right? But the more the more I do it, the less ironic it sounds. but But I don't think we're at that point yet. So until next time, conspiracy you later.
00:26:53
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extenteth. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who is so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
00:27:07
Speaker
You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
00:27:34
Speaker
And remember... bees!