Rob Inglis presents a solo dramatisation of
THE LORD OF THE RINGS
By JRR Tolkien
A compressed version of the trilogy
Actor Rob Inglis will be performing “The Lord of The Rings” at The Shaw Theatre at 3pm on Sundays July 7,14, 21 and 28. In a compressed version of the trilogy, concentrating on the mission of Frodo and Sam to destroy the ring of power, he portrays seventeen characters.
” ….a feat worthy of Heracles. I marvelled at the stamina…But there is a deeper courage in the adaptation. He refuses to over simplify, and shows a respect for Tolkien’s work I find remarkable.” JENNY SMITH in AMON HEN
“A miracle” is how The Scotsman critic described the show when it was first launched at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Mel Gussow of the New York Times, called it “an epic adventure”. Rayner Unwin, Tolkien’s first publisher, described the performance as “A bravura achivement…he never looses the flavour of the original”.e
It took Inglis a year to compress the one thousand and eighty pages down to a two hours’ show. Since then he has made a 54 hours’ recording of the trilogy unabridged for Recorded Books, New York, recently released by Harper Collins. He has also recorded “The Hobbit” and for his stage version of it received the Edinburgh Festival Times ‘Best Solo’ Award.
With The Royal Shakespeare, National and Cygnet Theatre Companies Rob Inglis has played Dr Faustus, Falstaff and doubled as the ghost and Claudius in the Theatre of Cruelty’s “Hamlet”. He recently played Dr Jahuda in a UK tour of “Hysteria”. In the first London season of “Oliver!” he played Mr Bumble, and was The Miller in the musical version of “The Canterbury Tales”. Screen work includes Professor Doom in the BBC TV’s “Wizbit” series, and Zefirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth”.
Not suitable for younger children.
The Shaw Theatre, The Bernard Shaw Park Plaza Hotel, 100-110 Euston Rd,
NW1 2AJ www.shawtheatre.com
3pm Sundays July 7,14,21,28.
Box Office 0207 3876864
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From: Smokering
This morning I went with my two big sisters to a lecture at the Hamilton Museum (in New Zealand), on ‘Chemistry and The Lord of the Rings’. Needless to say, we didn’t come for the chemistry! We arrived nice and early, and the speaker got there about 30 minutes later. But we had good seats! The place was packed and I was happy to see that there are indeed geeks out there, large as life!
The guy speaking was called Norman Cates (Kates? I didn’t see his name written down), and he said he’s been a LOTR fan for 20 years. Richard Taylor got him his first job in movies as a special effects guy and he’s spent three years on LOTR, half each on prosthetics, makeup etc. and on digital effects. He was really nice and was wearing a Weta T-shirt with a picture on an orc on the back.
Norman showed us a clip he’d made himself of short clips from all the sci-fi films that had influenced him, set to music. I caught glimpses of Star Wars (of course!), Alien, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyessey, Thunderbirds, Men In Black (I think!), and several other clips I didn’t recognise.
There was a table up the front with a red cloth covering some bulky stuff (the announcer joked that there was a hobbit underneath!), but he talked a bit about the various glues and polymers and resins and so forth that were used in the film industry. And how lead-based makeup used to make people go insane, and many other interesting but non-geeky facts. He showed us how to make some green slime, which was fun, and he said that he’d used a similar kind of thing to make the lava needed for LOTR. He had to mix up one and a half tons of orange slime! Apparently he used some kind of a big machine normally involved with sucking sewage out of drains or some such foul notion, but I didn’t quite pick up on all that. He did say it got very very slippery around all the slime! Seeing as there wasn’t THAT much lava in FOTR, it seems we have some good goop to look forward to later on Mount Doom…
Norman also mentioned a type of glue, Pros Ande, which is often used in films. It’s so strong you can stick a false ear or whatever on someone and it will stay for six weeks! Medical people use it sometimes to give people temporary false ears if they’ve lost them in accidents. (The ears, I mean!)
A pretty exciting thing happened at one point, when he said that his one claim to fame was that he’d made all the elven ears and wizard noses in LOTR! In fact we all burst into applause then and he looked really embarrassed! He also animated the orcs and so forth in the big shot of Orthanc, which was great because I mentioned I liked that shot and he was able to go, “Oh, I did that!”
He was talking about latex and gelatine and stuff, and mentioned that once Legolas was out in the rain for half a day and his ears started dripping! Then he pulled out a box of actual eartips, some anonymous hobbity ones and an eartip of Arwen’s! The hobbity ones were big and clunky compared to Arwens tiny delicate pointy eartip, it was weird. And then Norman showed us a three-toed foot glove which he’d made and you could put on your hand (for what reason, I know not!), and a plaster cast of someone’s head and a nose-cast (but not of the wizard’s noses, he said). And then the crowning glory were two hobbit feet! Which looked REALLY realistic, and it was quite obscene seeing him talking away flapping a foot idly on the end of his wrist! Anyway he asked for questions in the end, so I’ll put down some of them.
Someone asked, were the actors happy to have to have so much makeup on?
Norman laughed and said that John Rhys-Davies, in particular, hadn’t known how much makeup there would be beforehand. And he developed an allergic reaction which made Norman really worried that it was his gelatine causing it. But it turned out to be Rhys-Davies’ skin so he was blameless!. He said people were mostly okay with all the makeup, though. Personally Norman liked Rhys’Davies’ face and thought that in a way it was a shame to cover it all up with prosthetics, but that was PJ’s decision.
Which led someone else to ask, how do the actors protray emotion under layers of prosthetic makeup?
Norman said that part of the art was finding the right thickness of makeup, so they could still get some kind of an expression out there, but that sometimes you just had to overact.
Then someone wanted to know how many times you could use the prosthetic feet?
This was interesting because I’d always heard only once, but Norman said you could get two or three uses out of them if you were careful–the first time for closeup shots, and then getting further and further away. After all, as he pointed out, at a certain distance they could be wearing blocks of wood on their feet and it wouldn’t matter!
Someone then asked how much the hobbit feet cost, and he wasn’t quite sure but he said he went through about 155kg of gelatine. And brandishing a hobbit foot he said “One of these is worth about $200, and that’s not counting the labour!” At which point I abandoned any sneaky plans for going up to him afterwards and saying gushily, “Oh, MAY I keep one of those quaint feet for a souvenir, Norman dear, you must have hundreds of them…”
There were a couple of other questions–did the actors have individual ear molds (yes, they did), and how did you put the ears on (‘very carefully’, he said!). And he showed us some chain mail which was made of plastic. They’d got a plastic piece of tubing and sliced it into ring, and some poor guys had to sit and join them all together (not him, he said gleefully!), and then metal was electrodeposited on. It sounded really authentic when he shook it (at least, from my rather limited knowledge of chain mail!), and looked great. Anyway I was bursting to ask a question, but another lecture was about to begin so the table of ears and casts and goop and feet was deposited outside along with Norman and the more eager of us fans!
I got to touch the feet! They were surprisingly thick at the bottom, more than a centimetre thick, and they felt rubbery and to tell the truth, rather gruesome. And inside one of them was written a number and ‘Pippin’s’. I got to touch one of Pippin’s prosthetic feet!! I haven’t had such a thrill since I held a genuine spinosaur tooth, and this was miles better of course!
And I touched and looked at Liv Tyler’s pointy eartip. And a lot of anonymous hobbit ears. And there was a silicon mould labelled ‘Smeagol’s fingers’ which did look like there had been finger holes in one side, but they were covered by plugs of silicon so I couldn’t make head or tail of it.
And the chain mail turned out to feel great too, and close up I could see they painted it reddish like rust and even greenish in places to make it look really genuine. It was amazing. I even touched the goop for the heck of it, and it was definitely… squishy!
So we stood there for ages along with a few other diehards, talking to tis guy Norman. I hadn’t had a chance to ask any questions during the lecture, but now I asked if I could ask him something about ROTK, if that was allowed? He said “yes, but I may not be able to answer it” at which I made the appropriate of-course noises. And I asked if Frodo’s finger would be digitally removed or what? (Okay, not the most illuminating question but it’s been bugging me!) He said he’d actually had to make a stump, a finger-stump. And that he imagined it would be mainly done just by the camera angle and Elijah’s finger tucked back, but that they probably would have to digitally do a bit in places.
Encouraged by this, I asked him a whole lot of other questions. Had he met PJ? No, he hadn’t, he said regretfully. Had he met any of the stars? He said not really, but he’d spent a while with Orlando. They’d been trying to get his eartips right! He said most right-handed people tend to sleep on their right side, so their left ears stick out a little more, and vice versa for left-handed people. So when you try to put pointy ears on, everyone goes, “No, you’ve made one of my ears stick out may more than the other one!” And they had to sort that out. Did he go to the Oscars? No, he said, but they had a party while the Oscars were broadcast live on a big screen. Norman said he was involved with both the visual effects AND the makeup, so getting both Oscars was preety exciting! He joked he was still waiting for a portion of the Oscar, maybe a nose to commemrate his hard work on Gandalf’s and Saruman’s respective proboscises? I wanted to say something like ‘I wish you’d got Best Picture!’ but decided it would be just too, too tactless even for me! How did they get the hair in the feet? A weird process using yak hair and a barbed needle. He siad it took ages.
How many times had he seen LOTR? Only three! He said it was weird watching it because it didn’t look like a film, it looked like just a montage of shots–“Hey, I did that one!” and “Ooh, we could have done that shot a bit better” and so forth. So he found it hard to tell if it were actually a good movie. (I assured him it was!). Then this other geek who was hanging around starting saying he thought some bits were a bit choppy, like the Hobbiton scenes, at which I fumed silently while Norman said politely that in the extended edition, there would doubtless be more continuity. And someone asked if the moth Gandalf caught was computer-done or what, and he said yes, it was digital. I said without thinking that it was cute and he laughed. Honestly, we must have all looked like right idiots standing there starstruck and trying to ask questions at the speed of light! But he was incredibly ncie about it. He kept saying how it was such a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make LOTR, and how exciting it was for him.
He said Weta has been making the figurines, and also Muppets figurines! They’re all flat out, and working frantically to keep on schedule for TTT.
I said jokingly that I knew a lot of people who were worried the release date would be pushed into the future, and he laughed and said ruefully that more time would be nice, but not like he had any serious thought it was happen. A comfort!
Let’s see, what other gems of wisdom? I wanted to know what they used for the fake blood, like in Aragorn’s mouth during his duel with Lurtz. He dear guy actually gave me a recipe! One cup of golden syrup, two teaspoons of red food colouring, one teaspoon of yellow food colouring. Good to know! He did say that Lurtz’s blood would have been a different recipe, though, black stuff of some kind. I asked if TTT would have a prologue and he said he didn’t know.
Oh, and it was hilarious! He said there was a rumour that a guy from New Line had come to see TTT and watched it with his sunglasses on, and then complained the film was ‘too dark’! Anyway he eventually had to go, and we regretfully said goodbye–I said “Namarië” but I don’t think he heard me, which is just as well! He was really nice and what showed the most was his respect for Richard Taylor, and his dedication to LOTR. It was amzingly refreshing. So we left grinning like idiots and made our way into town for a very late lunch!
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Emma writes: I haven’t had a second to write anything up yet, but if you just wanted to say that there was a large continent of LOTR fans in attendance at the official Pride brunch honoring the grand marshalls and benefitting the Positive Resource center. Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) was in fine form, he seemed to be having a great time, a full report (including tomorrow’s parade) will follow tomorrow!
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From: Melissa
I have these stills from a new movie Dominic Monaghan (Merry) recently did. The movie is called An Insomniac’s Nightmare and is a 30 minute indie flick. Dom plays a guy named Jack who is suffering from chronic insomnia. The movie details the delusions he has related to this insomnia. The movie was shot in NYC and is currently in postproduction. Those are the only details I have about it at this time. In a week or so I will have a direct link to a webpage for the movie I can send to you. The movie was written/directed and produced by Tess Nanavati.
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Written by A. O. Scott, NY Times
The two most lucrative movies so far this summer concern the perilous adventures of male teenagers, one in contemporary New York and the other long ago in a galaxy far away, struggling with the moral and physical burdens of their special powers. Over the winter, the box office was dominated by two rather similar young men, one at an English boarding school, the other in the meticulously mapped Anglo-Saxon dreamworld of Middle Earth. Together, these four movies, “Spider-Man,” ‘Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” have earned more than $1 billion in ticket sales in the United States.
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This is, needless to say, only a partial accounting. It leaves out overseas box office, DVD and video revenues, and the all-important merchandising of action figures, light sabers and round, black-framed eyeglasses. And, of course, none of these movies stands alone: “Attack of the Clones” is the fifth installment in a double trilogy that has been unfolding for 25 years; “Fellowship” is the first episode in a three-film sequence, the second part of which, “The Two Towers,” is to appear in December, and the Harry Potter and Spider-Man pictures have inaugurated franchises that will probably carry their heroes at least to the brink of adulthood.
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Perhaps more than ever before, Hollywood is an empire of fantasy. But despite the popularity of these movies – and despite the unmatched power of the studios to blanket the real world with publicity, advertising and media hype – Hollywood is not the center of this empire. It is, rather, a colonial outpost whose conquest has been recent and remains incomplete.
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The rapid evolution of digital technology has made it possible for filmmakers to summon up ever more plausible and richly imagined counterfeit worlds, free of clunky mechanical props and stagy costumes. But the origins of these worlds are, for the most part, to be found not on the screen but on the page. Of the four films mentioned, only “Star Wars” belongs solely to the world of movies. The rest are adapted from comic books and novels.
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Twenty-five years ago, the first “Star Wars” helped to transform moviemaking and moviegoing. It gave birth to the current era of blockbuster serials, intensive special effects and wide-release, critic-resistant summer popcorn extravaganzas. But the true genius of that picture was the way it opened mainstream cinema to a vital strain in American popular culture that Hollywood had until then largely ignored or treated with condescension. “Star Wars” tapped into an impulse that had been flourishing at least since the end of World War II in the pages of comic books and pulp novels, on television and in the nascent subculture of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. (Even today, the primary locus for fantasy scenarios in which lone heroes do battle with demons and bad guys in archaic or futuristic landscapes is not movies but video and computer games, which are open-ended and participatory in ways that even a boxed-set DVD version of a movie can never be.)
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The film versions of “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” undoubtedly follow in the footsteps of Luke Skywalker. It’s also evident that the pop explosion that “Star Wars” set off in 1977 would not have occurred without the equally explosive success, a decade earlier, of the one-volume American paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” and that the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon seized the fancies of late-’90s American schoolchildren much as “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” had captivated their parents.
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The juggernaut grows with each generation. Unlike virtually everything else in the irony-saturated, ready-to-recycle cosmos of postmodern pop culture, stories of this kind don’t seem to date.
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Fantasy literature, which in the broadest sense includes modes of storytelling from novels to movies to video games, depends on patterns, motifs and archetypes. So it is hardly surprising that the most visible modern variants of the ancient genres of saga, romance and quest narrative are so richly cross-pollinated and resemble one another. The central characters show an especially close kinship. They are, following a convention so deep it seems to be encoded in the human storytelling gene, orphans, called out of obscurity to undertake a journey into the heart of evil that will also be a voyage of self-discovery. Frodo Baggins lives quietly in an obscure corner of the Shire, oblivious to the metaphysical storm brewing in distant Mordor. Luke Skywalker dwells, like Dorothy in Kansas, in a dusty hinterland far removed from the imperial center of things. Harry Potter, in his suburban Muggle exile, bides his time shut up in a closet under the stairs, a prisoner of his beastly aunt and uncle. Peter Parker (Spidey) occupies a more benign and familiar modern environment in Woodhaven, Queens, and is cared for by much nicer relatives.
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All of these young men – and fantasy heroes are, overwhelmingly, men – discover themselves to be in possession of extraordinary gifts, and become, unexpectedly and sometimes reluctantly, the central figures in a struggle against absolute evil. Destiny has selected them for great things. Their episodic adventures lead them forward, toward a climactic confrontation with the enemy (foreshadowed in a series of battles with subsidiary forms of evil) and also backward into the mysteries of their own past and parentage.
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For all their ancient and futuristic trappings, fantasy stories speak directly to the condition of contemporary male adolescence, and they offer a Utopian solution to the anxiety and dislocation that are part of the pyschic landscape of youth. Freaks become heroes. The confusing issue of sex is kept at a safe distance; romantic considerations are ancillary to the fight against evil, and to the camaraderie of warriors. But ultimately, whatever fellowship he may have found along the way, the hero’s quest is solitary, his triumph an allegory of the personal fulfillment that is, in the real world, both a birthright and a mirage. The structure of fantasy calls for episodes of increasingly perilous action connected by passages of exposition, in which the necessary facts of history, geography and genealogy are revealed to the hero and, over his shoulder, to the audience.
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These moments, which often feature secondary characters in outlandish costumes delivering earnest, learned speeches – the Jedi elders in “Attack of the Clones”; the war council over at Cate Blanchett’s (Galadriel’s) place in “Fellowship of the Rings” – are routinely mocked by critics (not excluding this one) for their tedium and portentousness. Such derision, however, is precisely what separates the casual fan from the true adept (the latter being one who uses his esoteric powers to vanquish the former by means of angry e-mail).
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Any Muggle can thrill to a sword fight or a computer-generated aerial battle, but true wizardry lies in the mastery of arcane detail. It is obvious that much of the appeal of these chronicles lies in the possibility of vicarious heroism, of identifying with the unprepossessing, marginal, nerdy guys who turn out to be indispensable to the survival of the universe. The way that identification is sealed is not through imitation of their feats of cunning or physical courage, but by mimicking their progress from innocence to mastery, by acquiring a body of esoteric knowledge for which the books and movies themselves provide the raw material.
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In the United States today there are hundred of thousands, perhaps millions of people whose grasp of the history, politics and mythological traditions of entirely imaginary places could surely qualify them for an advanced degree. This learning is fed by quasi-official concordances, encyclopedias and other reference works, but these exist mainly to exploit a spontaneous process that takes place in classrooms and chat rooms around the world. The drive and discipline that leads 9-year-olds to school themselves in the institutional history of Hogwarts and college sophomores to analyze the diplomatic crises of the intergalactic empire might, it could be argued, be more profitably spent in learning something about the real world, but this criticism misses the point.
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Like all knowledge, fantasy lore is acquired partly for its own sake and partly for the social privilege it confers, which in this case is membership in a select order, like the Wizards or the Jedi or the Fellowship of the Ring, of which the rest of the world is only dimly aware and whose codes and protocols it will never know.
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The history of postwar American popular culture is to some degree a history of subcultures – communities of enthusiasts walking the fine line between ardor and obsession. These have come in all varieties: hot rodders, Barbie collectors, followers of the Grateful Dead. But the fantasy genres have been especially fertile breeding grounds for such communities of enthusiasm, from Trekkies to D&D players to the intrepid souls who camp out in front of the cineplexes where the next “Star Wars” movie will be showing. These fans see themselves not only as consumers of popular culture, but as participants in its making, which may be why the exemplary form of fantasy culture is not reading or movie-going but gaming, in which each player can be the hero of his own saga.
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