Greetings everyone! Leo here, live from Los Angeles the day after The Two Towers: One Party-party! And what a party it was! The Hollywood Athletic Club was stuffed with folks from all over the world celebrating the succes of The Two Towers at the Oscars this year an the athmosphere was great!
From what I have gathered from all the other TORn staffers who are here in LA the party went down without any problems and pretty much everyone seemed to be having a good time. The Athletic Club was divided into various sections which were all named after locations from Middle-earth. Meduseld was the main hall in which Master Of Cermonies Quickbeam (complete with fiery hair and all!) was entertaining the crowd and keeping them informed about all the stuff going down in other rooms. The Oscars could be seen on screens all across the Club and during the commercial breaks Quickbeam went on stage, did his thing and did it very good as well!
The various other rooms such as Mordor, Fangorn Forest, Helms Deep and the Black Gates were occupied with random other important stuff such as food (you can’t forget about the food during a party like this!), the TORn store, the raffle and silent auction room (we’ve been raffling off stuff that was truely amazing) and of course the live music from Vit Sit something (I’m sorry guys, I’m doing all of this from memory, I’ll get it right next time) and Emerald Rose later that night!
So let’s get down to the really juicy stuff; who were there?? Apparently our party was the One Party on the top of everyone’s list this year, and we got a group of VIP’s that any party would be jealous of! Not two metion the fact that we got two Oscars present at the party!
From the top of my head I’ve seen cast-members John Rhys-Davies, Craig Parker (Haldir), Bruce Hopkins (Gamling), Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Sean Astin and Andy Serkis. The crew from The Two Towers also had a very strong representation with Barrie Osborne leading the pack, followed by the Oscar-winning SFX team with Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Randall William Cook and miniatures-god Alex Funke and the Sound Editing guys Ethan van der Rhyn and Michael Hopkins who also brought their Oscars. Also present but sadly enough without an Oscar were the Art Direction guys Dan Hennah, Grant Major and the amazing Alan Lee and the guys from the Sound team Mike Hedges, Hammond Peek, Chris Boyes and Michael Semanick who were all great fun the hang around with! To top it all off we also had Jean-Claude van Damme present! Okay yeah I guess you didn’t expect that either…
All in all it was a great night, everyone seemed to be having a great time, especially Bruce Hopkins and Craig Parker who mingled with the fans for a good while. The absolute highlight of the night was when everyone was up on stage; Sean Astin was talking to the crowd and introducing everyone. Peter Jackson got on the phone from New Zealand telling everyone how sorry he was that he couldn’t make it this year and that he hoped everyone had a great time. If someone happens to have a fairly good transcript of the stuff PJ was saying on the phone email it to leo@theonering.net so I can get it online for everyone to enjoy! Barrie Osborne was handed the Golden Gandalf which is TORn’s equivalent of an Oscar and he really, really loved it (you can come pick one up next year PJ!) and Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd joked around with the crowd for a while.
That’s pretty much the stuff I can think of right now, more reports and of course pictures (ach… hissss.. picturesessss) will undoubtedly find their way online in the next few days so be sure to keep your eyes open for that. For now this is all from LA, untill the next writing,
leo
