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Not sure if anyone here is a fan of the New Zealand "cozy mystery" series The Brokenwood Mysteries (set in a small town in the heart of NZ wine country), but it's latest season includes an episode titled Exposed to the Light, where a developer tries to make room for his new planned complex by starting a fire with nitrate films in the vintage Brokenwood Empire Theatre he wishes to replace.

The fire in question happens at a screening of a fictional classic black & white feature The Wind From the South that was dubbed "New Zealand's answer to Gone With the Wind" with a bit of a nod to Cinema Paradiso along the way.

Of course, the fire doesn't remotely look like burning nitrate, but that would be expecting a lot from a TV series production, and would probably be too much of a safety hazard to pull off anyway.

The show is on the Acorn TV platform if you have access, worth a look.

My wife and I watched that episode last week. I made the comment to her at the time that the cannisters containing the film had be 16mm because of their thickness alone. 35mm cannisters were much larger, I thought. I may be wrong, but I also didn't think those in the show looked like 35mm cannisters, nor the film 35mm. It WAS, however, an interesting show, if a bit convoluted.

It did feel a bit like two stories jammed into one (I was hoping the aging film star in the wheelchair would turn out to be a murderer) but I guess they have to fill 90 minutes somehow (a few episodes have felt like an hour's worth of story stretched out to an hour and a half).

The script was by one of the actors on the show, Roy Ward who plays the Reverend, who's only got a couple of writing credits. It kinda shows here.

Sorry to nitpick, but it is season 07, episode 05.

https://acorn.tv/brokenwoodmysteries/se ... the-light/

I've been a fan of Brokenwood for some time, so I re-watched the relevant scenes near the beginning of this one because I didn't remember whether the nitrate films had started the fire, but yes one can was open. They did look like 16mm size.

Not to give too much away but I was glad the goofy projectionist wasn't the culprit.

It's overall a good show with a lot of well played, often amusing semi-regular characters, though I noticed this season that some of those actors were either missing or in more limited roles, perhaps due to Covid concerns? I do recommend watching the different seasons.

Apparently the real thing was used for a sequence in FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE (1927). Although the films may have been worn-out 'spares', they may well have included films which went missing later...

silentfilm wrote: ↑

Mon May 17, 2021 8:28 pm

Sorry to nitpick, but it is season 07, episode 05.

https://acorn.tv/brokenwoodmysteries/se ... the-light/

Nitpick away! My brain did some abstract math (I knew it was the penultimate episode, and I thought there were 7 of them, but I was thinking of the number of the series) instead of just looking at the episode list.

We've certainly noticed the absence of some characters this season, I imagine COVID-19 may have played a part in that, but also Pana Hema Taylor who plays the show's reliable jack-of-all-trades has been busy with his regular role on the current NZ crime dramedy Westside, a prequel to the long-running series Outrageous Fortune, detailing the activities, criminal or otherwise, of the notorious West family. We're watching both series, concurrently (Outrageous Fortune wrapped production a while back), on the free Tubi platform on our Roku, which has an unusual and unpredictable lineup of movies and series. It also started hosting seasons of The Brokenwood Mysteries, for those who don't get Acorn TV.

And apparently, Neill Rea, who plays Brokenwood's main character, Detective Mike Shepherd, is barely in the final episode (which is the actual episode 06), perhaps due to commitments in his other line of work as a casting director (there were delays in getting the season up and running, and he was also working on another NZ crime drama, One Lane Bridge, which we also watched and enjoyed on Acorn).

We've been watching a number of NZ TV series of late, including Nothing Trivial (romantic comedy drama centred around a team that gathers for a weekly pub quiz) and The Almighty Johnsons (about a group of NZ men and women who turn out to be modern-day reincarnations of Norse gods ... weird concept, but it works). The country must have a small acting pool, we keep seeing the same actors turn up on all of these shows, but it's fun seeing them interact in different ways.