For the majority of Lord of the Rings fans, December 19th was the payoff for a wait that spanned almost three years. However in the back of most people’s there was an underlying doubt, not over the quality of the film itself but how the average movie-going, non-Tolkien fan would take to the Fellowship of the Ring, a motion picture that tried to cram 1,500 pages of information into three hours. Judging by the success of the film both critically and in the box office, it seems that somehow, by some sort of magic, Peter Jackson managed to pull it off. Or did he?
This weekend, the Hall of Fire crew are discussing the Friendliness Of FotR To Non-Fans. For Peter Jackson, one of the biggest challanges was to on the one hand satisfy the hardcore fans on one hand while not alienating casual movie fans on the other. How could he achieve this? Well, it started with cutting down the subject-matter by making some changes to the storyline, most infamous of which was the axing of Tom Bombadil completely from the movie. Also many scenes were edited out to keep the film down to three hours, most noticeable of which was the sequence within Lothlórien. In doing this, PJ walked the fine line between criticism and praise in an attempt to give the film a balance.
And the question is, did he achive that balance? Despite these changes, did Peter succeed in making the Fellowship of the Ring more comprehensible to the common man? Or were his attempts badly judged, diminishing the power of the story itself? Is it possible to bring such a book like Lord of the Rings to the silver screen without some of its contents going over non-fans heads? And if so, how would you have gone about the job differently? All these questions and more will be asked this weeked as we focus on the directorial process involved in bringing the Lord of the Rings to life.
Place:
#thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast
CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
AET = Australian Eastern Time, Australia’s East Coast
Questions? Topics? Send ‘em here.
