Billy T: Te Movie number one at the Box Office
MEDIA RELEASE: 22 August 2011
Billy T James Still
Number One Billy T: Te Movie number one at the Box Office.
Ian Mune’s documentary celebration of New Zealand’s legendary entertainer Billy T James topped the Box Office chart for the weekend.
The weekend’s gross
box office of $273,133 also makes Billy T: Te Movie the
highest grossing opening of any documentary in New Zealand
apart from Michael Jackson’s This Is It.
The film’s distributor, Sony Pictures New
Zealand General Manager Andrew Cornwell, who has backed the
film from the beginning said, “This is a great result for
a local film celebrating the life of a much-loved
kiwi.”
Twenty years since his untimely death on August 7, 1991, New Zealand’s legendary entertainer Billy T James is celebrated in Billy T: Te Movie, a made-for-cinema documentary directed by Ian Mune. The film presents Billy T to audiences in a way they’ve never seen him before – on the big screen with present-day high quality pictures and powerful re-mastered sound. Big, bold, talented, lovable. And funny.
The production team and their digital wizards have taken the old Billy T performance clips and made them fresh and exciting. At the heart of the film is Billy T the musician, singer, comedian – the ultimate entertainer - on stage. Woven around him are comedy skits and other pieces of his work, contemporary insights and loving reminiscences from friends, family and colleagues, interviews with Billy from back in the day, and atmospheric film drama inserts.
For Mune, making this film was an opportunity to go back and get close to Billy, to look at the extraordinary gifts that made his audiences love him so much. “I hope this movie will honour the man I worked with - the broad range of his talent and the way he could adapt to any task within the entertainment business and be brilliant.”
Producer Tom Parkinson, who was responsible for putting Billy T on television in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, says making this film was only possible now that the technology exists for treating archival television and film footage to bring it into the modern world in terms of quality. “We’ve put the real Billy on the screen, enhanced with modern digital technology, so that we’re presenting an entertainment in the true spirit of Billy.”
Synopsis:
Billy
T: Te Movie celebrates the life of the
legendary Billy T James, New Zealand’s best-loved
entertainer. The film explores Billy’s extraordinary
talent as musician, singer, comedian, actor, writer and
artist . . . it even attempts to uncover the source of his
trademark giggle. With humour and love, the film tells of
Billy’s meteoric rise to national fame and his tragic
downfall into ill-health and financial collapse. Featuring
digitally re-mastered footage of Billy’s performances and
never-seen-before archival images, Billy T’s story is set
alongside interviews with his family, friends and
colleagues. Audiences will leave with laughter in their
hearts and tears in their
eyes
ENDS