Peter Jackson and the Airplane Thief

Some of the planes went to museums, others to very wealthy private collectors. Jackson, to this day, keeps many for his personal pleasure—and to share with his countrymen. For years, they flew regularly in air shows over Blenheim, on New Zealand’s South Island, and at the Hood Aerodrome, on the North Island outside Wellington. Jackson and DeMarco brought early aviation back to life in the skies above New Zealand—albeit without the bullet-torn bodies and deadly crashes.

As the choreographer and star of these shows—and as TVAL’s majordomo—DeMarco prospered. He occupied a light-filled, modernist-style house overlooking the teal waters of Wellington Harbor. He acquired planes and cars and a hangar with a nice apartment at the Hood Aerodrome. Now 58, Gene, as his friends call him, had an infectious rascality, a dark, windswept mane, and a winsomely boyish demeanor.

According to Chad Wille, a longtime American friend of DeMarco’s, Gene and Peter grew “very close.” Over the years, Wille says, Gene became “involved with the movie side of things as a friend of Peter’s, not just as an airplane guy.” Jackson, who is 59, trusted the airman enough to allow him to take Jackson and his two children aloft in the fragile airplanes. He loaned DeMarco his personal Aston Martin. On occasion, when DeMarco needed money, Jackson advanced him the funds.

Perhaps Jackson should have known that their collaboration was bound for a crash landing. According to close associates, he had been warned long ago about DeMarco’s past. The pilot, in fact, was a convicted felon in the United States, having admitted to possession of a stolen aircraft—just one in a trail of planes he had made off with.

TVAL isn’t far from Wellington’s Miramar neighborhood, home to Jackson and Walsh’s filmmaking businesses. I went there in October 2019. My guide, Lindsay Shelton, is the former marketing director of the New Zealand Film Commission. In that capacity he sold Jackson’s first four movies, including his breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures. The 1994 thriller showcased the first computerized fantasy scenes concocted by Jackson’s then fledgling company, Weta Digital. That film’s graphic sophistication, in time, would help land Jackson at the helm of the Lord of the Rings franchise.

Jackson chose not to move his productions outside of New Zealand and instead poured his earnings into Weta’s growing infrastructure. Shelton posits, “He created a whole new awareness that you didn’t have to leave home to be a success.” In the process, Jackson, for three decades, has drawn fellow directors, Rings-inclined tourists, and deep-pocketed aviation hounds to his Pacific outpost, doing wonders for the nation’s economy.

Filmmakers now travel to “Wellywood,” as locals call it, to make their movies at Jackson’s facilities. On their 12-building campus, Jackson and Walsh employ slightly more than 1,500 people from 52 countries. Among the scores of cinematic epics that have benefited from Weta’s animatronic-model makers, green-screen witches, and digital drivers are Avatar, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, three of the five top-grossing films ever made.

Keeping that fantasy-film machine humming, however, has required an endless stream of big-budget pictures. Jackson’s last fantasy offering to reach screens was the 2018 mega-flop Mortal Engines, which he wrote and produced. The film reportedly lost $175 million. His latest documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, is slated for release this summer, but without a recent blockbuster to draw upon, Jackson and Walsh have had to pull in their spendthrift ways. In September 2016 they sold their $80 million Gulfstream, and last December the New Zealand government approved the sale of a reported one third of Weta Digital, for an undisclosed “significant” investment, to Facebook’s first president and tech entrepreneur Sean Parker. (Weta has recently weighed on them further. According to news reports, in September a government ministry ordered an outside investigation of the firm after more than 40 former and current employees came forward to complain about the company’s “boy’s club” culture and widespread “toxic behavior.”)

Some of the blame for Jackson’s money woes can be ascribed to his filmmaking practices. He is a perfectionist, and tales abound of the lengths to which his studio will go to forge make-believe worlds that feel real. “Everything Peter and his colleagues do,” Shelton insists, “is done at the highest level of design and expense.” Jackson looked for that same commitment to authenticity and detail in his TVAL airplanes. And DeMarco delivered.

I have never met Gene DeMarco. I first saw his breathtaking flying work in the 2015 documentary The Millionaires’ Unit, inspired by my book of the same name, about a pioneering squadron of World War I aviators. (Over several months, DeMarco deflected repeated requests to comment for this story. Despite similar overtures, Jackson and Walsh declined to participate, citing ongoing litigation.) However, I have spoken with numerous people who know both DeMarco and Jackson, some of whom witnessed their relationship unfold and ultimately implode. Most preferred to remain anonymous because, as one source put it, “New Zealand is a small place.” The same can be said for the world of early-aviation enthusiasts.

TVAL, with an annual budget of about $6 million during its peak years, amounted to a tiny corner of Jackson’s empire. And yet that was a lot of money for turning out just a handful of airplanes each year. Jackson paid DeMarco an annual salary of $125,000 for a job widely considered to be among the most desirable in the vintage-and-replica aircraft field.

Each of Jackson’s airplanes was a monumental project, requiring about 20,000 man-hours. DeMarco started with original plans and specifications. When they didn’t exist, he borrowed digital scanners from Weta Workshop, Jackson’s model-making and prop shop, to reverse-engineer vintage airplanes and parts. He used the scans, old photographs, and blueprints to measure the exact dimensions and positions of each fuselage nail, wing strut, gauge, tube, and piston on the original planes. TVAL would then remanufacture them from scratch, right down to the lettering on the logos. For the most part, the facsimiles looked—and flew—exactly like the originals.

Jackson took pride in his growing personal collection and enjoyed showing his fleet to celebrity guests who shared his love of aviation, among them King Abdullah II of Jordan and Britain’s Prince William. TVAL admirers also included a handful of well-heeled collectors and pilots. One of them, Jerry Yagen, owner of a network of for-profit schools as well as Virginia’s Military Aviation Museum, told me that he might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more just to buy a vintage airplane—and then almost as much to restore and keep it in flying condition. “I spend millions every year just to keep these aircraft airworthy,” he contends. You need money, lots of it, to fly such toys.

As a child growing up on Long Island, all Gene DeMarco ever wanted to do was fly. The son of a Pan Am flight inspector and flight attendant, he slid behind the controls at age 14 and reportedly soloed before he could drive a car. At 16 he bought a Piper J-5, a stripped-down, 1940s airplane—the equivalent of a surfer dude’s woodie wagon. At 17, so DeMarco claimed, he flew the Piper around most of the United States, hitting 32 states. People from DeMarco’s past talk about his raucous early years, citing his fondness for fast cars, leading to several crashes, and his firing from a hobby-shop job for stealing. The store’s retired owner wouldn’t comment on the thefts, but said about DeMarco’s legal troubles, “I’m not shocked by hearing this.”

What DeMarco couldn’t stand, from his teenage years onward, was being stuck on the ground. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he went to work for IBM but hated being confined to a windowless office. At trial, he told the High Court, “[I would do] everything I could to stay in an airplane and I did everything from fish spotting over the Atlantic Ocean for tuna [to] bear spotting in the Adirondacks.… I towed banners and did skywriting, among other things.” He also began building World War I-era airplanes, for which he found a ready market.

DeMarco moved to Florida, married young, and had a son. That marriage didn’t last, and he embarked on a life as an airplane vagabond, a barnstormer moving between air shows and airports, landing where he could find work on planes and fly them.

Starting in the mid-1980s, DeMarco spent most summers for the next two decades working as an airplane mechanic while piloting in the air shows at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York’s Hudson Valley. DeMarco helped put on performances that included original and reproduction early airplanes. To this day, the shows generally include earthbound slapstick-comedy routines—with old cars and trucks, damsels in distress, villains and heroes—all linked to a plotline involving the acrobatics going on overhead. By the late ’90s, DeMarco had become Old Rhinebeck’s head mechanic, chief pilot, and showstopper.

He cut a wide swath on the ground too. His coolness in the face of danger, aerial panache, and good looks proved irresistible to many women. They didn’t just flock to him, they sparred for his affection. Several people who knew DeMarco during his time at Old Rhinebeck told me about the time two women, each claiming to be his serious girlfriend, made a noisy scene at an area café. A few years later, during a New Zealand air show, he was in the cockpit of a parked Sopwith Camel when a stiff wind blew the flimsy plane on its nose. According to a newspaper account, two women came running from the airstrip sidelines to check on him and shortly fell to fighting over him.

DeMarco’s friend Chad Wille maintained and flew planes with him at Old Rhinebeck’s air shows, replacing DeMarco as chief pilot in 2003 after the stunt legend decamped to New Zealand. Wille recalls several instances “where a woman would look at Gene and a look would come over her face and it would kind of like be, Oh, it’s you. And they were gone.”