Homeward Bound:
Gandalf and the Hobbits reach Bree and find that while things aren’t quite right, Butterbur seems much the same as he goes on to explain what’s gone wrong. Of course the companions can’t stay long. The hobbits are anxious to get home to a troubled Shire, but for one of them there will be no homecoming. To Frodo the Shire will never again be a place where he can find rest.
Gandalf goes off to have a chat with Bombadil, and tells the hobbits that “You must settle the Shire’s affairs yourselves, that is what you have been trained for”. So now the four Hobbits that set out from the Shire are all that’s left of the company. “It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.” Merry says. “Not to me,” Frodo answers “it feels more like falling asleep again.”
What do you think about how Butterbur reacts to the news that the companions bring? What do you think Gandalf wants to talk to Bombadil about? What does Frodo mean when he says it feels like falling asleep again?
Join us in #thehalloffire as we take a look at Homeward Bound – Chapter VII of the Return of the King.
Upcoming Topics:
November 22-23: Durins Folk – Appendix A of the Lord of the Rings.
November 29-30: The Scouring of the Shire – Chapter VIII of the Return of
the King.
Times:
Saturday Chat:
5:30pm ET (17:30)
[also 11:30pm (23:30) CET and 7:30am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat:
7:00 pm (19:00) CET
[also 1:00pm (13:00) ET and 3:00am (03:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast
CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
AET = Australian East Coast
Do you have a possible topic for Hall of Fire? Drop us a line at
halloffire@theonering.net
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Our old friend Ringer Spy Taniwha chimes in with this news about grandstand seats for the RoTK red carpet parade for the premiere.
Grandstand seats on sale for LOTR red carpet parade
Wellington City Council today announced that limited seats on grandstands alongside the red carpet for The Return of the King world premiere parade on December 1 are available to members of the public.
“The Council wants to make sure Wellingtonians and other members of the public have a chance to be part of the action. To this end we’re making grandstand seats available for purchase and running several draws and competitions over the next two weeks for people to win free grandstand seats,” Deputy Mayor Alick Shaw said.
Grandstand seats are on sale now, for $100+GST (NZ) plus booking charges through Ticketek offices nationwide.
Revenue generated from the sale of grandstand seats will go towards offsetting the cost to Wellington City Council of hosting the world
premiere.
More information on the grandstand seats and the red carpet parade is
available at www.wcc.govt.nz/lotr.
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You may have noticed that my esteemed colleague Maegwen and others have been posting on the front page more often that before. They all do wonderful work and I’d be lost in space without them. The reason I’ve been away from my computer is due to a few pressing situations that need to get taken care of before Christmas. Car shopping with my father is never an easy task. He wants to look at every dealership in Montreal before he signs on the dotted line, but I love him for his tenacity. Seb, Khoba and I are working on the Montreal Trilogy Screening with Alliance Atlantis and New Line, lets just say a bucket of worms has been opened and we’ve been hard pressed to seal it shut again. And the last issue is something near and dear to us all….Saruman getting axed from ROTK.
This last issue is what has really kept me away from my inbox lately…over 1000 emails are pouring in to me daily these past few weeks. November and December have always been busy months on TORN but this is week’s news has really got the net buzzing. So why am I stressed over it? Well mainly because all the emails have the same tone to them, the same general sense of anger and tension that can be really draining to read about until the late hours of the night. So I’d prefer to stay away for a while and let it die down.
The problem is it’s not going away, and there really is nothing we can do about it, really.
For me, this whole Saruman situation started as a rumor fed to me via instant messenger. ‘Hey, I heard 2 major characters are going to be cut from ROTK’, said the anonymous stranger whom I never met. I asked where he’d heard this before, he tells me Moriarty and the AICN folks are talking about it in their chatroom. He claims they are waiting for the actors to be told before they break the story. I thought ‘dubious news, at best’, and decided not to pursue it. Imagine the flack I’d get if I posted about this, and it turned out to be false? Well unfortunately it didn’t…and now we all know that the seven-minute scene with Saruman and Grima Wormtongue has been removed from ROTK.
Let’s put aside the rumors that Christopher Lee didn’t know until he read about it on AICN. Lets put aside the rumors that Peter Jackson informed Christopher Lee via email. Lets just look at the facts. The scene was cut because it destroyed the flow of the film. It was not added to the extended edition of The Two Towers because at the time of creating the EE for TTT they thought the scene would remain. So it turns out that we shall only see that scene in the ROTK:EE release, due out in another year from now.
This is what has caused the uproar, fans want to see the entire sequence in the theatres. Fans want to see the story arc complete, and the fall of Saruman (literally and figuratively).
An entire brigade of people flocked to an online petition site to sign up and voice their opinions, which is good to know. The last thing we want to see is a fan malaise effect, much like the stunned Matrix or Star Wars folks. We want LOTR fans involved…taking action, getting things done. The problem is that filmmaking is not a democracy. No matter how long a list, loud a voice, or detailed a complaint; it will not change the fact that this seven-minute scene will be cut. There is just nothing we can do about it.
Do we, as TORN, like the idea? Hell NO, I don’t see any one of the PTB’s or forum admins or writers who like it. Do we want the scene added to the film? CERTAINLY, ever since the entire spikey wheel photo was first released to the public back in 1999 I’ve been waiting for Saruman’s death scene…that is 4 years of patience!
But we as TORN also know when to let artistic vision take precedence over fan-based hype. As a large group we cannot rally around a cause that we think is none of our business to dictate, and is also rather moot. We know we’ll get the chance to see it on the DVD. We are also pretty sure that the Extended Version will be placed in theatres sometime in 2004 or 2005.
It has been a long-standing policy that we don’t post links to petitions on TORN. We like to have fun posting polls, but never a petition. The legality of an online petition is suspect at best. It is really something we don’t want to get into. We love fan-community building, not persuasion-by-numbers.
Petitions are made to raise awareness of a cause that a majority of people do not know about. The cause is usually something that affects a minority of people to some degree or another.
This is not the case here.
Here we have a large group of people trying to voice their numbers (numbers that Peter Jackson and his team know full well are HUGE) to have something changed to suit their own needs. We don’t think this shines a respectable light on LOTR fans. Quite frankly it makes us all look like a whiny bunch of babies.
Peter Jackson, an un-questionable LOTR fan, knows this isn’t fair. He’s not happy with the choice he has to make. But it must be done. We as fans of the films can voice our outcry with either posts on message boards or healthy discussions in chatrooms or with friends. The signing of a petition will not help the situation, and giving us a hard time for not linking to it won’t either.
There are a great number of horrible things happening in this world that we can pour our energy into, the editing of a motion picture is not one of them.
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A Ringer wrote in:
TVNZ’s Holmes programme had a special tribute to Cameron Duncan, the inspirational 17 year old film maker who lost out in his battle with cancer earlier today. It was the most emotional story I have ever seen. There was a tribute from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh who knew Cameron and had been keeping an eye on his career. I can’t remember the entire letter but two lines stood out – “We were proud to call Cameron Duncan our friend.” and “He would have grown up to become one of the great New Zealand Filmmakers.”[More] “
Cameron Duncan wrote and directed the ad for the Organ Donor Awareness Foundation. This is the charity that our Return of the Ringers party is raising money for. Cameron Duncan was an extraordinary young man and his loss is a loss for us all.
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Simon writes: This information comes direct from the Auckland Village Queen St Village Newsletter (14.11.03). The tickets go on sale from the the 20th of November for Megamembers. So, for those who want to book on this date, you will have to join the Megamembers club (it’s free!!) at their website www.village.co.nz. Below is what was actually printed in the newsletter:
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King – 18 December 03 (midnight screenings Wed, 17 December 03, & yes we will be showing Fellowship of the Rings & The Two Towers before the Return of the King opens). Tickets on sale to Megamembers only from the 20th of November.
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Wendy writes: I thought I’d just confirm that Christopher Lee did indeed show up and, apparently, had yet another event lined up after that signing. Busy days. He didn’t seem too dejected but I didn’t hear anybody mention ROTK to him. I didn’t either because I hadn’t yet seen confirmation of the rumours at the time.
I just happened to be shopping in London when I saw a poster announcing that Christopher Lee was signing his autobiography at Borders today.
So I joined the small-ish queue, discovered that there was a much bigger queue upstairs once you had gone past the “overflow”, and spent my lunch time queuing and queuing some more.
It felt really strange seeing him and hearing him talk in front of me once I got close. He might be 81 years old but he doesn’t look it and his voice can put you under a charm, just like Saruman’s.
When it finally was my turn, I approached nervously, said Hello and a few words. My French accent must have been leaking through as he asked me where I was from. Once he knew it was from Belgium, he started chatting with me in perfect French about how he knew French well but couldn’t understand Walloon (a Belgian dialect). We chatted like that for a minute or so. I was a bit overwhelmed by it all so couldn’t quite find anything to answer.
The evil man must have had me under a spell. 😉
Anyway, I bid him a good day and went on my way.
Funny how a boring shopping trip can turn out very different from what you had planned. Now on to read his autobiography. From what I’ve read so far, Lee seems to look back at his life and career with a serious dose of humour and derision.
Apologies for writing all that to you but I just had to share the experience. This has made my day. 🙂
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