By Brian Sibley
HarperCollins, NZ$49.99 | Reviewed by Chris Knox

AUTHORISED biographies. They do have that inevitable bipolar kind of feel about them. Yeah, it’s great that the author has complete and unfettered access to the subject of his work, but damned if that doesn’t so often lead to the saccharine pits of hagiography. The sound of tongue licking arse can be most distracting.

This fat volume is somewhat typical. Full of fascinating insights into the working of Peter Jackson’s mind, it also fails to address any of that organ’s shortcomings. British writer Brian Sibley does not mention the legal stoush between our subject and New Line Cinema over unpaid fees, despite many dozens of pages spent enumerating the legal struggles to get the JRR Tolkien trilogy up and running. That the latter shows Jackson as a David valiantly battling Goliath and the former as a – worst scenario – greedy and petulant post-Oscar prima donna is, I am sure, irrelevant.

There is a brief mention on page 508 of Christopher Lee’s well-known displeasure at his non-appearance in the third Lord of the Rings movie, but our author immediately leaps to Jackson’s defence with exclamation marks flying. Then hands over to the director, who quickly wraps up the controversy with his own spin.

Nobody has a bad word to say about Our Pete in this book. None of the hordes sacrificed in the early days of LOTR – this pivotal moment gets two sketchy paragraphs – and none of the allegedly stressed-out and ill-paid technicians who laboured so hard on the beast get a word in edgeways. Now, maybe, PJ is a saint who can do no wrong – certainly, Sibley would have us believe this – but couldn’t we have just a little of the dark side?

Then there’s the sloppy scholarship, the easily fact-checked mistakes and careless generalisations. Here’s both in one sentence from page 142: “Zombie pictures are as old as popular cinema and Bela (‘Dracula’) Lugosi had starred in what was probably the first of the genre: White Zombie, made in 1933.” Make that 1932 and please acknowledge that by that date “popular cinema” had been extant for three decades!

Or this on page 175: “...a notorious motorbike gang, known as the Mongrel Mob...” The Mob, bikers? Really?

So that’s the bad news.

The good news is that Sibley’s access has given us a pretty definitive account of the evolution of Jackson as an artist. The book’s subtitle very carefully extinguishes any expectations of a tell-all about the man’s private life and those of you who want that will have to wait till David Hartnell/Brian Edwards/Paul Holmes/whoever decides to do the digging.

This is a book about how a childhood passion, a brace of hugely supportive parents, an inspired imagination and a dogged ability to make things work may result in a person who can shift the world with the smallest and most basic of levers. To follow this working life is to glory in the force that inhabits those rare individuals who are able to do what would be impossibly daunting to the rest of us. Sibley mounts plentiful evidence to truly embrace this small, mousy man as some kind of hero.

Bad Taste and LOTR get the lion’s share of the coverage and that is how it should be. The man’s first labour of love and his undoubted masterpiece each took four years of his life and need every column inch devoted to them. Suffice to say that the director’s career is well and clearly charted.

A melding of Ian Pryor’s less-reverential 2003 Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings and this book would make for a better – balanced view of this important local entertainment history. Pryor’s tome boasts four useful appendices – including the obvious filmography – and a bibliography; Sibley’s has none of the above, but has a couple of hundred more pages, many more photos, and is indexed.

Real fans will need both. The more casually interested reader will be – mostly – happy with Sibley.