Embassy Theatre

This is the Embassy Theatre — the only custom-built nineteen-twenties cinema still operating in New Zealand. Designed by Llewellyn Williams, it opened on the thirty-first of October, nineteen twenty-four, as De Luxe Theatres, seating one thousand seven hundred and forty-nine. It was renamed The Embassy in nineteen forty-five.

For eighty years, it's been showing films. But one night made it legendary.

On the first of December, two thousand and three, the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was held right here. Wellington City Council had underwritten a four-and-a-half-million-dollar renovation specifically for the event, on the condition that ownership of the building transfer to the council. They essentially bought a cinema so hobbits could walk a red carpet.

And the city turned out. Over a hundred thousand people packed into Courtenay Place and the surrounding streets. The red carpet ran the length of the boulevard. Peter Jackson — who grew up in the Wellington suburb of Pukerua Bay and built his entire filmmaking empire in nearby Miramar — reportedly took thirty minutes just to walk the carpet. At the time, it was one of the largest public gatherings in New Zealand history. For a movie premiere.

Wellington's film industry grew up around Jackson. Weta Workshop was founded in Miramar in nineteen eighty-seven by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger. Jackson joined in ninety-three. Weta FX, Stone Street Studios, Park Road Post — they're all within a few kilometres of where you're standing. Taika Waititi grew up here too, studied theatre at Victoria University, and met Jemaine Clement at uni. The two of them shared the Billy T Award in nineteen ninety-nine before going on to make Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows, and — in Waititi's case — a Marvel film. Wellington isn't Hollywood. It's something weirder and smaller and more interesting than that.