book launch
Peter Jackson: Film Authorship in a Global Hollywood
by film critic, author, and professor emeritus, Barry Keith Grant
In his new book, Peter Jackson: Film Authorship in a Global Hollywood (Wiley, 2026), local film critic and author Barry Keith Grant examines Jackson’s career and his development as a filmmaker across the very different worlds of independent and blockbuster cinema.
From the low-budget productions of Bad Taste (1987) and Meet the Feebles (1989) to the global success of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and The Hobbit (2012-14), Grant considers Jackson’s distinctive style, recurring themes, filmmaking ambitions, and the changing conditions of authorship in contemporary Hollywood and the global media landscape.
Join Grant for a live, illustrated introduction to the book, including a screening of Jackson’s 1995 mockumentary Forgotten Silver (1995), New Zealand’s most notorious media hoax.
About the Author:
Barry Keith Grant is a film critic, author, and professor emeritus at Brock University, where he taught film studies for many years. An elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author and editor of numerous books on cinema, including Film Genre: The Basics (2024), Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology (2019) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) and the recently published second edition of his volume on Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series. A longtime member of the Niagara film community, Grant also wrote "In Camera” for the St. Catharines Standard for 9 years.
screening
FORGOTTEN SILVER
Dir Peter Jackson & Costa Botes | New Zealand | 1995 | 53m
This mockumentary by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes details the life of innovative—and fictional—filmmaker Colin McKenzie and presents some of his previously "lost" work. The movie claims that McKenzie, a director from New Zealand, made technological advancements in cinema years before their acknowledged emergence, and features interviews with film notables, such as critic and historian Leonard Maltin (Leonard Maltin), who attest to McKenzie's significance.
Sir Peter Robert Jackson is a New Zealand filmmaker, entrepreneur and visual effects pioneer. He is best known as the director, screen-writer, and producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and the Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. Other notable films include the critically lauded drama Heavenly Creatures (1994), the horror comedy The Frighteners (1996), the epic monster remake film King Kong (2005), District 9 (2009), the World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021). He is the fifth-highest-grossing film director of all-time, with his films having made over $6.5 billion worldwide.