The lost footage of ‘42
Back in 2007, Story Inc was commissioned by the Historic Places Trust (now Heritage New Zealand) to make a tiny exhibit at Old St Paul's Church - to commemorate the United States Marines whose colours hang in the rafters.
In 2009, that exhibition "A Friend in Need" won the Sgt Wm Genaust Prize for a documentary featuring the United States Marine Corps.
In 2011, I went to Quantico, Virginia, to attend the prize-giving dinner. I was seated next to Sgt Norman T Hatch and his aide-de-camp, Susan Strange [more about this fortuitous meeting in this blog from 2017].
Steve introduces the film ahead of its premiere in Paekākāriki. Photo by Bob Zuur.
Norm recognised the National Film Unit footage I'd used opposite the interview segments and complimented me on the 2-screen format. Only then, Norm revealed that he'd been a cinematographer for the Marines and had filmed in New Zealand for 11 months!
It was all raw camera footage - never edited. After the battle at Tarawa, dreamy pictures of New Zealand life were yesterday's news. By the end of the dinner, Susan and I had agreed to search for the films... if they still existed.
Norm died in 2017. He was 96. I retired from Story Inc.
Later that same year, Susan had discovered 29 camera rolls and 747 still photos in the vaults of NARA and Quantico.
The Kāpiti US Marines Trust secured funding from the US Embassy to have the films and photos digitised at 4k resolution (from the original film stock where possible) and eventually - in 2019 - I received a hard drive with all the material on it.
We'd planned all along to hand the footage and stills over to Ngā Taonga so... on my own at first... I worked up an idea for a three-screen exhibition to co-incide with the 80th anniversary of the Marines in NZ and Ngā Taonga's online release in the National Library.
Gripped by history: The audience at one of the 80th anniversary film screenings. Photo by Bob Zuur.
I wrote a script using only the exact words of the photographers who had captioned all of the photos. Their innocent, sometimes hilarious descriptions of life in New Zealand underlined the fact that these were images of us, taken by foreigners, as we were in 1942 and 1943.
Kāpiti US Marines Trust joined with me and applied for funding from the Lottery Grants Board. They said yes. I got the crew together. Guy from The Dive Productions for editing and Jeremy Cullen for sound design, Marc's team from Toulouse for the technology. Easy.
Then the world fell apart. COVID and riots at Parliament, all that stuff.
In the end, 80 years and one week after the first United States Marines arrived in New Zealand, I got to show Norm's films - on 3 screens - in Paekākāriki, where 25,000 United States Marines lived and trained for 18 months before going on to war in the Pacific.
Banner image from ABC News.
Steve La Hood is a film and television maker and one of the founding directors of Story Inc. He is retired and lives in Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast but still dabbles in creative passion projects.