Too Bold for the Box Office by Cynthia J. Miller

Author:Cynthia J. Miller [Miller, Cynthia J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

III

Daring to Believe

7

Aching to Believe: The Heresy of Forgotten Silver

Scott Wilson

The “point” of the exercise was not to con viewers, but to give delight, and offer a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Kiwi ingenuity.1

As a result of this programme I am now going to pay my broadcasting fee in Monopoly money.2

On the 29th of October 1995, New Zealand’s state-owned broadcaster TV One offered its public the documentary Forgotten Silver as part of its “television of quality” series Montana Sunday Theatre.3 As the broadcast that closed the 1995 season, this was a documentary nestled among a number of admittedly higher-brow dramas that seemed to pass without question among the program’s estimated 40,000 viewers. The reason for this lay at least in part in the amount of publicity leading into this broadcast of a documentary that offered a unique revelation: hidden in New Zealand’s cultural past, it seemed, was a long-lost cinematic pioneer who, having been revealed by the work of Peter Jackson and fellow cineaste Costa Botes, now “deserves a place among the luminaries of early cinema, like Edison, Méliès and the Lumière brothers.”4 As a fundamental part of the lead-in to the broadcast, the New Zealand weekly television listings magazine The New Zealand Listener ran an article—“Heavenly Features”—that primed viewers to anticipate these remarkable findings while leaving some of the more impressive details for the documentary itself to reveal.5 Further to this and as part of its own celebrations of the centenary of cinema, the New Zealand public had been made aware of a drive by the New Zealand Film Commission to discover and restore lost and forgotten film footage, so discoveries and restoration were very much in the air when the time came to reveal Forgotten Silver to a public primed to accept such discoveries as entirely possible.6 Thus, the pieces of the Forgotten Silver story were in place, and the broadcast itself has subsequently entered both New Zealand broadcasting and mockumentary mythology.

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