Jackson King Kong team 'stingiest' ever

Peter Jackson (third from left), with a total film budget of around $200 million, is accused of being "stingy". Picture / Mark Mitchell

If there was a best penny-pinching film category in Oscar awards King Kong writer, director and producer Peter Jackson's team would be likely winners, according to the New Yorker.

The 80-year-old magazine has said the King Kong producers could be named as some of the "stingiest" ever.

A recent issue carried a report on the New York Historical Society that looked at some of the odder requests from the public, including an approach by researchers of King Kong seeking plans of the facades for every building on the stretch of Fifth Avenue featured in the movie.

According to the report, the library's interim director Nina Nazionale suggested the request might best be fulfilled at the municipal archive where copies of photographs could be ordered for US$40 ($55.20) each.

"The researcher said, 'Forty dollars is expensive'," Nazionale told the New Yorker.

Nevertheless, Jackson has come a long way since first directing the classic - his favourite movie - when he was 13 years old with a Super 8 camera, a set made of cardboard and bed sheets, and his friends as characters.

Thirty years on, he has replaced the cardboard diorama with a stylish movie set in Lower Hutt which replicates parts of New York in the 1930s, has top-shelf actors and a total film budget of around $200 million.

Previous reports have said Jackson was using several photographs of the period from the US Library of Congress to recreate New York, along with blueprints and historical records.