Quistis Skywalker sends us two articles from the Malaysian press:
The first is an article in the Malaysian newspaper The Edge’s weekly supplement, Options. The second is from Galaxie, a local entertainment magazine from a column called Suzy Says.
Gone to Pot by Kam Raslan
-What doesn’t Harry have that Frodo Baggins does?
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Lord of the Rings are both adaptations of books, both trilogies(sic) and both big, big budget productions. But one is better than the other.
Harry Potter
I didn’t read the book myself so I enjoyed the film. Those who did read the book found it a fairly workaday Hollywood holiday flick directed by the uninspiring Chris Columbus who not only discovered America but also directed Home Alone. The producers presumably gave him the job because he was thought to be able to direct kids well. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where the film falls down. The child acting has a certain charm but does not have the zing that Steven Spielberg seems to be able to draw from children. Having said that, the movie did manage to avoid the mawkish sentimentality that usually blights a Spielberg production.
But the kids are backed by some of the best character actors in Britain, although none of them are expected to push themselves too hard. Alan Rickman (the ladies’ choice) is darkly menacing and Maggie Smith is as good as ever. I can never decide if Richard Harris is a very good actor or a very average one. He apparently took the part in the movie only because his granddaughter threatened to never speak to him again if he didn’t. She’s a big fan of the books.
What I didn’t like about the movie was the fact that it was so damned noisy, The music only stopped on four occasions and only then for about a minute. These would be act breaks and it’s a moviemaking habit perfected by Spielberg. Wall-to-wall music makes me fall asleep. I fell asleep during one of the noisiest bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well as the interminable pod race sequence of the execrable Phantom Menace and I had to fight back yawns during Harry Potter. (QS: And all of them had their musical score done by John Williams)
Throwing in copious amounts of music is a cheap trick. Music excites an emotional response and moviemakers try everything to augment the visuals. Unfortunately, it negates any chance of emotional or pacing contrast because everything is blanketed in a wall of sound. This doesn’t matter much these days because of the advent of the action movie where there is no contrast, merely a desire for a constant adrenal rush.
This first Harry Potter movie is not destined to be a classic children’s picture. It doesn’t deserve repeat viewing and all because it’s made-to-measure Hollywood. But at least it was set in its original English context and not transposed to the US as Spielberg apparently had wanted.
Lord of the Rings
Peter Jackson is a much better director than Columbus. Lord of the Rings was his project as opposed to Columbus, who was brought in as a director for hire. And it shows. There is a palpable love for Tolkien’s mythic world of hobbits, elves and men and there is also a great love for the epic landscapes of Jackson’s native New Zealand.
The themes of the original books have been copied so many times in films like Star Wars, countless Playstation games and thousands of fantasy adventure books so it could now feel all too familiar. It is to Jackson’s credit that he has made it accessible as action-adventure and yet remained true to its spirit of legend.
Credit also to the actors. Elijah Wood is particularly good as the innocent and somewhat reluctant hobbit hero Frodo Baggins. Hobbits are supposed to be short so Wood would have been rarely, if ever, able to act on set next to actors like Ian McKellen or Viggo Mortensen who play normal-sized people. (QS: Guess he didn’t know about the forced perspective trick. ^_^)
In fact, this was a very beautiful, subtle and seamless use of special effect computer graphics. Motion-controlled cameras can repeat the same movement precisely so that the action filmed can be layered on top of each othr. This, the old fashioned use of very tall or very short stand-ins for over-the-shoulder shots and a very compelling storyline meant that this reviewer didn’t even notice many of the special effects until the second viewing.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings as an English myth to rival other European legends such as Wagner’s Germanic tales. He taught mythology at Cambridge and used his knowledge to give his story its mythic quality. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is written for children and plays on the fears and fantasies of the young and innocent in this suburban age of broken homes. It is perhaps unsurprising that Lord of the Rings should be a richer film although Columbus could have played the emotional core of the Harry Potter story better. Spielberg would have. ET is as much about the break-up of the family as it is a fantasy adventure. Harry Potter skims over these aspects as just so much exposition or plays them for laughs in its headlong rush for the usual disposable excitement.
Lord of the Rings is a beautiful film. As somebody near me in the cinema said during one scene, “Wah, cantik!” (QS: That’s Malay for “Wow, (it’s) beautiful!”) How often does that happen these days?
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Suzie Says
Bored of the Rings? Why should you be?
While everyone else is recapping their Top 10 movies/Top 10 TV shows/Top 10 celebrity divorces of the year, I’ve decided to recap my Top 10 Tolkien books of all time, which is a difficult task because he only wrote three.
I’ve long held the dubious honour of having read every single fantasy book since I was 18 years old, except Tolkien. But there’s a story behind it. When I was six, I picked up The Silmarillion, which is the weirdest, most ungainly, most boring fantasy book ever to be written, hence I was turned off from Tolkien for a good 27 years. And because the movies were due to be out, I gritted my teeth and bought The Lord of the Rings, which comes in three books, because if it comes in one, it would have been thicker than a phone directory with all the Chins in Hong Kong.
I was about to be proven right by my Tolkien phobia, when– in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book– the first 250 or so pages turned out to be as exciting as tea with an earthworm. I felt like I was reading Alice in Wonderland: The really prolonged director’s cut, with all its Mad Hatter-like characters (Tom Bombadil, who sings nasty trees to sleep), it’s myriad hobbit relatives who seem to proliferate like ghastly rabbits, and a quest to destroy the Ring that never seems to get started because everyone was too busy singing songs and recounting stories about dead people to each other.
And then– something happened. When I got to the part where the fellowship was formed at the council of Elrond, I was hooked because they added so many other interesting characters to the mix. From then on, the story becomes more interesting as the nine members of the fellowship moved through peril after peril, from Moria to Lothlorien.
Book 2 (The Two Towers) had incredible battle sieges and a great villainess — Shelob the Spider. Book 3 (The Return of the King) had a heartbreaking story of two jilted people: Faramir– Boromir’s brother, forsaken by his father, and Eowyn– Princess of the Rohan whose love is unrequited by Aragorn. The pace never slackens then. But only if you can get through the first 250 pages. But what of the much hyped, much Hotlinked, much Burger King tied-in spectacle of the movie?
Improvement
I know Tolkien die-hards will rip me from limb to limb for this but I think Peter Jackson, the director, possibly improved on Tolkien in his movie. J.R.R. Tolkien was an Oxford professor who specialised in Norse mythology. He was the world’s leading expert on Beowulf, an expertise which comes in handy in feeding the world’s millions, for all the good it might do.
Because Tolkien was a mythos professor, he borrowed elements from English, Norse and Germanic lore, especially language, names and types of entities (elves, dwarves) to put them into his book. He has been credited for being ‘the One’, the father of fantasy, who started it all.
Nevertheless, he wasn’t totally original either, as the ideas have all previously existed in myths. But it’s OK not to be original. The greatest movies are not original. Star Wars was far from original. Raiders of the Lost Ark was not original. The Matrix (which shares the same producer with TLOTR) is not original. Gladiator borrowed heavily from Spartacus and Roman history cliches.
Whimsy
Nope. Tolkien, while being a great storyteller, simply isn’t a very good writer. He has two different writing styles in the books, almost schizophrenically so. Aragorn’s adventures are written in archaic prose, where every paragraph begins with, “And so, Punitha, Galaxie’s editor, harked upon her minions, and bade them enter. ‘Hear thee well,’ she intoned, ‘For mine tidings are grave. Verily, I say unto you, thine bonuses will be withheld.'”
Frodo’s adventures, on the other hand, is written almost in whimsy, like Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. The events that take place in the Shire read like a darker version of Mr. Meddle. Tolkien is concerned that we, the reader, must be ascertained to know every single aspect of hobbit life, including whether they are able to cut their toenails through those toe hairs. Which is why he managed to make the first 250 pages of a great epic like TLOTR monumentally dull. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great, great story, rich with characters both noble and evil, racial discrimination and epic battles. In my opinion, Peter Jackson simply told it better.
This is how I think the movie improved on the book:
The pacing:
As I’ve said a million times, the first part of the Fellowship of the Ring (or Book One) is dull, dull, dull. The movie skips through all these unnecessary parts, compresses time like a DeLorean (because the first part takes almost 20 years where Frodo inherits the Ring when he’s 33, and lives in unknowing bliss until he is over 50. At the time of the Party, Merry and Pippin were still toddlers) and sets Frodo off without fuss. Before we know it, we’re at the Council of Elrond. (For examples of books with great pacing, read Harry Potter.)
Deleting Tom Bombadil
This is one character who completely jarred me and set me off tone in the book. He’s supposed to be an ageless immortal kind-of-wizard who has a wife called Goldberry, who rescues the hobbits from a hungry tree. He reads like he’s straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Oh, he also sings a lot. Putting Tom Bombadil in the movie would render it most uncool to eight-year old non-musically inclined boys.
Expanding the role of women
TLOTR was written before 1960s, before Gloria Steinem and Jackie O and Madonna’s cone-shaped bras, where women were considered not that important in fantasy books. Arwen Undomiel is mentioned in one page only in the first book. She did not, in the book, save Frodo from the Dark Riders (that thingie with the horses and the river was aptly done by an elf called Glorfindel, who was also omitted on celluloid and Elrond himself), uh, actually, in the film, it was done by special effects, but you get my drift. Galadriel also has only a cameo role. And there’s another blonde woman, Princess Eowyn of Rohan, who will appear in the second book, who has a bigger role to play than either Arwen or Galadriel put together. All in all, these women make up, gasp!, a remarkable 0.2% of the story.
Today’s fantasy writers find this sacrilegious and have sought to include women in very prominent roles, sometimes even dwarfing that of men (Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series).
Continued Next Fortnight: More on how the TLOTR movie improves on the book. And how the book is better than the movie in some aspects.
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Ringer Spy Sony Mouse sends along these articles from the latest issue of SFX Magazine. Take a look!
Read the text here (a BIG thanks to Elisa for getting this down to us!):
Good Hobbits
The four furry-footed thespians relate how LOTR changed their lives.
Being three-foot-six tall, with pointy ears and hairy feet, may not seem like an enviable job. Especially when it involves being in New Zealand, away from family and friends, for 15 months. Plus 12 to 14 hour days, often in remote locations, with new physical skills to learn and scenes that had to be repeated twice because of the problems of scale.
But the enthusiasm that bubbled up from the four actors when they spoke about their experiences was scarcely containable. Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins), Sean Astin (Sam), Billy Boyd (Pippin), and Dominic Monaghan (Merry), interrupted one another, topped each other’s stories, laughed at one another’s jokes and, most of all, heaped praise upon the man with the singular vision to pull it all off: Peter Jackson. Indeed, Elijah Wood was so keen to play Frodo, bearer of the Ring, that he couldn’t wait for the director—who had been seeing a lot of British actors for the part—to start in Los Angeles. Instead, he persuaded some friends to film his own audition, then sent the videotape to the man himself.
“They wanted to put me on tape in a casting office,” explained Wood, “but I thought that would be a bit sterile. I wanted to convey my real passion for this role, and for the film, in my own kind of way. So I found a costume, learned a few passages from the book by heart, went out into the woods near my house, and got my friends to film different scenes from all sorts of different angles.”
It was a risky strategy, especially given that Frodo, far from being a squeaky-clean Luke Skywalker-type, is an extremely complex character, both morally and psychologically. But Elijah Wood was alive to those dangers, and made sure he included the full spectrum of Frodo’s personality: “The scenes kind of ran the gamut. There was something from Hobbiton, when Frodo meets Gandalf for the first time in the beginning. And something from the end, when he’s all that’s left, and all that he can see is the Ring. So basically it was Frodo all sort of innocent and lovely, and then completely gone at the end.” This was part of what appealed to Wood, the sense that his character would develop over the three movies, and would be a very different Hobbit at the end. “Frodo runs this amazing arc, in which he goes from being this innocent, curious adventurer at the beginning to being a very flawed and conflicted character. And the challenge of creating that arc was intriguing to me.”
Being of tender years, the actors were not of the generation that read Tolkien’s book as a matter-of-course, but their parents sometimes were. Dominic Monaghan’s father, a die-hard fan, bought him The Hobbit for his thirteenth birthday, and The Lord of the Rings the following Christmas. Even so, he found it hard to immerse himself in the all-enveloping world of Middle-earth. It was something he only managed later, while traveling back and forth on the train to London for auditions. Sean Astin admitted he’d only tried to read the book once he’d been asked to audition for the part of Sam, and even then somewhat selfishly, to see which scenes featured his character. Billy Boyd, was another one who didn’t read the book properly until he knew he had the part. And, like Astin, his perspective was skewed by knowing that he was to play Pippin.
What hooked Elijah Wood, who had never attempted to read the trilogy, was reading the script. “It just took me into another world. It freaked me out. I remember driving home after reading it and I was expecting Orcs and things to be following me.” Something similar happened during filming, when Elijah Wood was shooting a scene with Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf. “It was just a pick-up of a scene, but suddenly I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m listening to Gandalf and he’s telling me about the history of the Ring.’ And I’ve never done that before. But there were many moments like that in the film, because everything was portrayed in such a realistic way. Every actor became their character.”
The final word on the experience of playing Hobbits, however, goes to Dominic Monaghan:
“Hobbits have a real innocence. They love wholesome things and they enjoy good food, good living and great company. They are people who embrace life. All four of us were like Hobbits at the start of the process, we’re probably more so now.”
National Elf Service
Being an immortal isn’t easy, as Liv Tyler and Orlando Bloom tell us.
For their round-table interviews, the actors were grouped roughly by species: all four Hobbits grouped together, two wizards and a Dwarf, two human warriors, and two Elves: the immortal Princess Arwen (Liv Tyler) and sword-wielding Elf warrior Legolas (Orlando Bloom).
The two young actors’ real lives could not have been more different. Tyler, the 23-year-old veteran of more than a dozen movies (including Armageddon), five Cannes Film Festivals and myriad interviews, was relaxed and confident. Bloom, by contrast, tended to blurt out his answers, often interrupting his fellow interviewee. His over-excitement was understandable, however, since this was his first Cannes and his first press junket. Tyler had simply been offered her part, her striking, angular beauty peculiarly suited to Elven pointy-ears. The less-experienced Bloom had to audition for his first leading role, and heard he’d got the role two days before he left drama school. It goes without saying that Bloom was thrilled to secure his part in The Lord of the Rings…and movie history. “To have been given the opportunity to portray someone like Legolas was exciting and terrifying at the same time, because he is so far beyond any being that you could imagine. Elves have super-human strength, reflex speed, and sensory awareness. They’re these incredible angelic spirits, who create and appreciate great beauty.”
First and foremost, however, Legolas is a warrior, so Brit Bloom had two months of preparation in New Zealand before shooting even began. “I started off with archery, I rode about 20 different horses, I had physical training in the gym, and I had to learn the Elvish ways of speaking and fighting. Their fighting is based on ancient European and Asian martial arts, so I had a trainer who taught me how to use the blades. I also did a lot of movement training, because movement is my way into the character.”
Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures being one of her all-time favorite films, Liv Tyler never thought twice about playing the Elf princess Arwen. Also, in an unashamedly “girly” way, she loved the idea of the “incredibly powerful, special love” between her immortal Elven-princess Arwen and the love-struck, mortal human Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).
Inevitably, there had been suggestions that this romance, which does not form an integral part of the trilogy as such, had been brought to center-stage by Jackson and his co-writers solely to “up” the lovey-dovey quotient. But Tyler was quick to point out that this wasn’t the case.
“At the end of the third book, there’s an appendix called Aragorn and Arwen, and that’s what the whole thing is based on. So although you only see Arwen a couple of times in the book, at the end of the third volume, Tolkien summarizes and tells the whole story of these people. So that was all Tolkien. It wasn’t made up in any way; it all came from that.”
Could this be the greatest film ever made? Nigel Floyd talks to the cast and crew.
Approaching on foot, we round a bend in the path and the round castellated tower comes into view. All around us on the grass were gaily colored stalls and tents, some of them only partly constructed. Preparations were underway for a celebration. A party to mark the one hundred and eleventh birthday of the highly esteemed Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, perhaps? No, this was not Hobbiton; it was the Cannes Film Festival press junket for Peter Jackson’s three-part film adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s perennially popular fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings. Rumor had it that some of these Hobbit-themed constructions were the actual sets from the film’s opening scene, shipped in specially for the occasion from Three Foot Six studios in Wellington, New Zealand. No expense had been spared, and though it was only make-believe, the effect was still magical.
The film’s set designer was also on hand to supervise the assembly of the sets. Most striking of all was the fact that they were deliberately over-sized, forcing humans to perceive the world as Tolkien’s diminutive Hobbits—average height three-foot-six—would have experienced it. Had the beer tent been open, one would have had to reach up over the bar to order a drink, peering up from below as a frothing mug of ale was handed down by the cheery landlord. If anything could transport you to Bree, this was it—if it hadn’t been for the clement weather and friendly, expectant faces…We’d been brought from Cannes to the gates of this chateau in a modern motor coach. Now we were being transported to Hobbiton by the vehicle of our imaginations.
Shepherded by our hosts, we climbed the stone steps and entered through a pair of large wooden doors, into a gently sloping garden with a view of Cannes, and the distant azure sea. Even when we were corralled by myriad PR persons into the area set aside for the al fresco press conference, the buzz of anticipation continued. After years of speculation and internet rumors about New Line’s $270 million adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, we were going to hear concrete facts from the mouths of those actually involved in making the three two-hour films. Even the most jaundiced and blasé among us were aware that this was a privilege granted to few, so our calm professionalism was tinged with more than a little childish excitement.
The previous day, our appetites had been well and truly whetted by an exclusive screening of 28 minutes of footage from the trilogy. We had not, though, been the very first to see them. That privilege, quite rightly, had been reserved for members of the cast. While queuing outside the Olympia cinema, with our special security passes slung around our necks, we had caught a glimpse of Elijah Wood, Liv Tyler, Sir Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, and sundry other actors as they emerged from their screening and ducked into waiting limos. Judging their reactions was tricky, but their smiles seemed to indicate that they were more than happy with the results. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the stunning impact of what we were about to see.
Inside the auditorium, the atmosphere was tense but electric. Even New Line executive Mark Ordesky’s formal introductory speech was enthusiastic, his corporate style not quite disguising the excitement he felt at revealing his company’s most ambitious project. Then Peter Jackson ambled on. A short, bearded Kiwi bloke with tousled hair and little round glasses, his modest physical presence utterly belies the stature of his talent, and the monumental challenge he and The Lord of the Rings crew faced during the lengthy, hectic and sometimes harrowing shooting schedule. Because, for all his genuine humility, this is the man who directed the blood-soaked Braindead and the emotionally-devastating Heavenly Creatures; the film-maker New Line Cinema confidently entrusted with $270 million of their money; the director/writer/producer who, without ever raising his voice or losing his temper, oversaw a grueling, 274-day shoot that finished on the very day it was supposed to.
Yet Jackson’s typically self-effacing introduction to the jaw-dropping footage was as low-key as one could imagine. He explained that what we were about to see was some scene-setting, followed by snippets of story designed to introduce the characters, and finally a continuous “14 minute lump of action”, complete with a score composed by Howard Shore. When the images finally flashed onto the screen, what immediately struck one was how seamlessly Jackson’s team had solved the myriad problems of scale.
For example, the scene in which the tall wizard Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen) towers over the diminutive Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm). Clearly the actual disparity between the two actors had been exaggerated CGI trickery. But how, within the same frame, was Gandalf able to hand Bilbo his wide-brimmed wizard’s hat? Before we had time to ponder this mystery, tiny figures were trudging across snowbound mountain vistas, evil-looking Black Riders were thundering across the screen on horseback, Frodo and his fellow pointy-eared Hobbits (Sam, Pippin, and Merry) were hiding by the roots of a giant tree, and fearsome Orcs were brandishing weapons. The scale of the spectacle was breathtaking; the level of visual detail astonishing; yet Jackson’s inspired visual imagination had remained true to Tolkien’s original literary conception of Middle-earth.
Then came the fluid “14 minute lump”, the impact of which far surpassed that of the previous snippets. Suddenly, we were plunged into the Mines of Moria, as the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring traveled deeper into its dark, labyrinthine tunnels. Journeying alongside Frodo (Elijah Wood) on this leg of his epic journey were his three Hobbit companions: Sam (Sean Astin), Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd)—plus Gimli the Dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), Legolas the Elf (Orlando Bloom), two human warriors, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Boromir (Sean Bean), and their mentor, Gandalf. Ambushed by scampering goblins and attacked by a giant cave-troll, the members of the Fellowship survived by the skin of their teeth. Their escape looked uncertain as they negotiated the stairs of Khazad-dûm, the edifice collapsing beneath them as they leapt from one teetering column of rock to the next. As we left the cinema, drained but exhilarated, there was no doubt in my mind that we had witnessed movie-making history.
Ringmasters
The bigwigs behind the film reveal how it all came to pass.
At the Cannes press conference for The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was flanked by his co-writer Philippa Boyens, producer Barrie Osborne, executive producer Mark Ordesky, and Richard Taylor, whose New Zealand-based company, WETA, was responsible for the film’s multi-faceted visual effects. Inevitably, initial inquiries concerned the origins of the project.
Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh had started thinking about The Lord of the Rings while filming The Frighteners in 1995, but at that time the film rights were owned by producer Saul Zaentz (The English Patient). Using their first-look deal with Miramax, Jackson and Walsh persuaded head honcho Harvey Weinstein to buy the rights. But Miramax was reluctant to commit to several films. Jackson and Walsh stuck to their guns, feeling that over-compression was what had defeated previous attempts—including Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated version—to bring the epic to the screen.
The breakthrough came later, when Jackson and Walsh met with Bob Shaye of New Line: “We originally thought of doing two movies,” explained Jackson, “but in our meeting with Bob Shaye, he said: ‘It’s three books, it should be three films.’” After some exploratory trips to New Zealand, New Line decided that Jackson and his team could deliver and adaptation of LOTR that would justify their colossal investment.
With characteristic boldness, Jackson and Walsh asked playwright Philippa Boyens to help write the screenplay. It helped that she loved the source material, but the prospect was still a daunting one: not only was this her first movie script, there were three to write.
“I was actually a huge Tolkien fan, so I was really nervous about reading Peter and Fran’s 90-page treatment. I couldn’t see how it could be done. But it was compelling, a real page-turner. At first I was overwhelmed, and then I got excited. The challenge was to stay as faithful as we could to the books, and make it a gripping cinematic experience.”
With more than one hundred million copies of The Lord of the Rings sold, and nearly two million hits on the movie’s website, Jackson and his collaborators were all too aware of the feverish levels of anticipation, plus the potential for fan-by sniping. “There are going to be people that have different ideas on things,” acknowledged Jackson, “but you can’t make a film by committee. We had to take our own decisions. It’s not a movie made for fans, but it is a movie made by fans.”
So Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens trusted their own gut feelings right from the start: “You have to go on your instincts, because even with three movies, we couldn’t include everything. One of the rules that I put into my head was that a lot of people had read The Lord of the Rings, so what we should be making was a film that’s faithful to the book even for people who remember it from 15 years ago.”
“People that are totally obsessed fans are obviously going to see major things that we had to lose, or work our way round. But we’ve tried to make sure that all the key events and characters are included. Obviously, we’ve been very careful—because it’s a complicated book—to tell the story in a way that’s accessible to people who know nothing about The Lord of the Rings.”
While clear storytelling was essential to the films’ success, it had to go hand-in-hand with visual spectacle. The beauty of New Zealand’s landscape provided many locations, but the creatures, costumes, armor and weaponry had to be made from scratch by a dedicated army of designers and skilled technicians. Drawing upon the work of conceptual artists John Howe and Alan Lee, Jackson and his team strove to create what producer Barrie Osborne called: “a singular Tolkienesque brushstroke.” To do this, they bought the entire visual effects operation under one roof. WETA’s Richard Taylor, visual effects designer on all Jackson’s films since Bad Taste, gets an incredible multiple credit on Rings, as Creature, Miniature, Armor, and SFX Supervisor.
“On our biggest days,” Taylor explains matter-of-factly, “we had up to 500 people in full prosthetics and armor, and we regularly had seven of the nine leads in full prosthetic makeup. During large-scale battle scenes, there might be six second-unit filming crews operating simultaneously.” Yet one clear vision determined the look of the production, and if there was ever any doubt, Taylor and Peter Jackson simply returned to the “bible”—a copy of The Lord of the Rings that was always on hand. “At no time did Pete say: ‘This is going to be my vision, put this book aside.’ It was always: ‘Return to the original source material’.”
Taylor aimed for a gritty realism, immersing the actors in a muddy, grungy world where they literally had dirt under their fingernails: “Our general philosophy was that, at all times, no matter how fantastical we chose to make the settings and creatures, we must ground them in reality. Because then the audience would be that much more accepting of the fantastical.”
Jackson, too, fought shy of the word: “fantasy”, which he felt was inaccurate and misleading. “We treated The Lord of the Rings as a historical film,” he explained. “We felt that Tolkien spent a large part of his life creating a mythology for Britain, which was essentially a pre-history. Just as you would if you were making a film about Rome, we did research into the world of Middle-earth. We read his books and all of the writings, and it became real. This really happened, these people went through this, and we’re trying to dramatize that.”
The story goes that in a radio interview, author Robert Heimlein was asked, “What is science fiction?” “It’s what I say it is,” Heimlein replied. Some people took that as arrogance. I think he meant we may not be able to determine the boundaries of sf, but we know it when we see it. Exactly the same applies to fantasy. It’s just a case of employing the duck test. You know: ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
But to be sure we understand each other, I’ll attempt a rough working definition. Fantasy tends to be set in worlds that resemble historical periods, typically with a medieval flavor. These worlds are more likely to be feudal than democratic. The laws of physics as we know them aren’t necessarily obeyed, because magic often features. But the magic will have its own rules, consistently applied. There a good chance that dragons, elves, unicorns, ogres and other fantastical creatures will busy themselves as freewheeling heroes and heroines, wicked queens, noble princes and the like. Characters will invest lots of energy in seeking things, be it their destiny, a treasure hoard or a supernatural McGuffin that promises to avert disaster. In this they will be opposed by the forces of Evil, occasioning much swordplay, mighty battles, and magical combat.
Of course, the above doesn’t begin to embrace contemporary fantasy, magical realism, anthropomorphic fantasy or the many other diverse branches. But unless we’re careful we can be sucked into the argument that all fiction, being an artificial construct, is a form of fantasy. That way lies madness. What’s generally referred to as sword and sorcery, heroic fantasy or high fantasy—the greatest exemplifier of which was JRR Tolkien—is what we’re talking about here.
The roots of fantasy are as old as humanity itself, and undoubtedly first found expression as fanciful tales told around campfires. Every civilization, extant and extinct, had their epic stories of heroes and gods. The hierarchy of deities populating ancient Egyptian mythology; the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Apollonius’ adventures of Jason and the Argonauts; Virgil’s Aeneid; Arabian fables; Celtic myth; the Anglo-Saxons’ Beowulf; Icelandic sagas—all contain elements still common in fantasy fiction. It’s a lineage traceable through the ages, from the 12th century romances of Arthur and Merlin, to Edmund Spencer’s 16th century confection The Faerie Queen, to the seeds of the Goths in the mid-18th century and the birth of the novel.
The 19th century saw what might be called the first golden age of fantasy, and it manifested in many different ways. It included the baroque works of such authors as William Morris and George Meredith, the folkie whimsicality of Washington Irving and Mark Twain, the colorful adventures of H Rider Haggard and the brooding supernaturalism of Robert W Chambers. Even Dickens, utilizing vengeful ghosts to hammer home his moral tales, could be said to inhabit a slice of the fantasy section. Children’s fantasy bloomed, with Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and E. Nesbit’s The Book of Dragons. And let’s not forget the scientific fantasy of Frankenstein and the dark fantasy of Dracula.
It was at about the point where the 19th century shaded into the 20th that fantasy began to take on something of the appearance we recognize today. Edgar Rice Burroughs gained an enormous audience for his Tarzan novels, a series firmly in the “lost race” strand of fantasy, and L. Frank Baum’s many Oz books cornered the idiosyncratic end of the market. Lord Dunsamy, AA Merritt, Talbot Mundy, Clark Ashton Smith and others emerged as writers of a kind of proto-fantasy that would evolve into the form we know today. But arguably fantasy owed much to the advent of pulp magazines, which saw their popularity soaring in the early years of the new century. Titles such as Argosy, The Thrill Book, and perhaps the most celebrated pulp of all, Weird Tales, did much to fashion the genre. Weird Tales, in particular, was instrumental in launching the careers of a number of writers who would shape the genre, notably Conan creator Robert E. Howard.
Howard may not have invented sword and sorcery, but he was its greatest champion and most prolific producer. Apart from Conan, he introduced the heroic characters King Kulf, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Moen and Turlogh Dubh, and his influence on the field remains considerable. But he saw little recognition in his lifetime. In 1936, already displaying signs of instability and devastated by the death of his mother, Howard shot himself. He was 30 years old. The following year an English academic published an unregarded little children’s book called The Hobbit. But like Howard, Tolkien’s fame was a long time coming.
A plethora of other fantasy pulps appeared in the wake of Weird Tales, among them Fantastic Adventures, Terror Tales, Strange Stories and, in 1939, the short-lived but seminal Unknown, edited by John W. Campbell Jr., the man behind the SF field’s most respected magazine, Astounding Stories, the last 39 issues of Unknown (Unknown Worlds for the last two years of its life), can truly be said to have changed the face of fantasy fiction. L. Sprague De Camp was a regular contributor, along with Jack Williamson, Robert Bloch and a host of other name writers.
Perhaps most importantly, in terms of the kind of fantasy we’re discussing, Unknown published Fritz Leiber’s first story, “Two Sought Adventure”, the debut outing of his characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The pair defied expectations. Fafhrd’s huge frame and barbarian heritage was belied by a quick intelligence; Gray Mouser was a slippery pipsqueak with often slower wits. They could act amorally, but invariably came down on the side of right. There was humor in their relationship—sometimes to the point where they approximated the Laurel and Hardy of fantasy—though darkness and exotic peril were equally present. They were rounded, imperfect, human characters, with real desires and prejudices, and their ongoing adventures resulted in a huge leap in sophistication for heroic fantasy. Leiber, a major figure in both SF and fantasy, continued to write about Fafhrd and Mouser, constantly refining them, right up until a year or two before his death in 1992.
It’s probably fair to say that fantasy made no great strides in terms of public recognition in the 1940’s and `50’s. It lived in quiet places, simmering in the dying pulps and the digest magazines that succeeded them. There were occasional appearances of mostly reprint fantasy in book form from small presses like Shasta, Gnome and Fantasy Press, and a handful of American fanzines kept the flame burning. Basically, this was preaching to the converted.
But to say the 1950’s were subdued as far as fantasy was concerned isn’t to imply that nothing of significance happened. In what has to have been one of the longest gestation periods in literature, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had begun to build his imaginary universe shortly after World War I. Merton Professor of English at Oxford University until his retirement in 1959, throughout the `40’s and `50’s Tolkien read drafts of his narrative to C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, the four of them having formed a society of Christian writers called the Inklings. This culminated in the publication, in 1954-55, of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The Earth didn’t shake. A decade passed before anything happened.
Up to the 1960’s, mainstream publishing was more or less unaware of fantasy as a discrete category. The unlikely catalyst that changed this state of affairs was a noisy dispute between two leading American publishers. In 1962, Ace Books exploited a technical loophole that meant some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels were, in effect, out of copyright. They published Burroughs’ Pelucidar books, and some of his one-off novels, in paperback. Rivals Ballantine Books, regarding themselves as Burroughs’ official publisher, hit back the following year by issuing the entire Burroughs canon, including all the Tarzans, in attractive uniform editions. For several years, as the dispute smoldered on, millions of copies of the author’s works flooded the market, helping to stimulate a taste for fantasy adventure. But this was only a curtain-raiser.
In 1965, Ace put out the first paperback editions of the three volume The Lord of the Rings. Because their right to do so was again in contention, this became known as the “pirate” edition. Once more, Ballantine considered that they had the moral, if not legal, high ground, and within a few months had their “official” editions in the shops. A whole new generation of mostly young readers, many of them students, discovered Tolkien for the first time and loved him. In less than a year, Ballantine sold a million copies of their editions. Ace moved in excess of 100,000 copies of the “pirate” version before having to withdraw from the fray. The Lord of the Rings, a classic example of a “sleeper,” if there ever was one, was instrumental in opening the floodgate.
Every US mass-market publisher got into the act. Lancer Books reissued Robert E. Howard’s works, as edited by De Camp, with ravishing Frank Franzetta covers. Ballantine launched its highly successful Adult Fantasy series, in which Lin Carter selected classics of the field for reprint. New work was commissioned, fresh writers began to emerge. The genie was out of the bottle.
From the `70’s to the present, fantasy has grown to the point where the field is so fecund and far-reaching it’s difficult to keep a handle on it. Recent estimates put its share of the UK book market at around 14%, with an even higher proportion in the US. What accounts for this astonishing escalation of a genre that barely existed 30 years ago? As I’ve argued elsewhere in the past, I think there are several reasons. One is the comfort factor, the appeal of a form that offers some kind of certainty in our increasingly perplexing, morally ambiguous, overly materialistic culture, particularly in these troubled times. I see nothing wrong about the desire to engage with a literature that deals in fundamental issues of good versus evil. Nor do I see it, as some critics do, as a kind of reactionary, anti-rationalist impulse. It’s no rejection of science to want to escape occasionally into landscapes of pure imagination that don’t necessarily depend on accepted logic.
Another reason for fantasy’s popularity, in my view, is that it’s reached a level of maturity where it can convincingly tackle topics relating to the real world, and do it with the kind of assurance that used to be the sole province of science fiction. And that brings us to the always contentious argument that science fiction is “just” a branch of fantasy. Which of course it is: a rationalist branch. But maybe we should consider the proposition that fantasy is now outselling science fiction—which it is, by a head—because it’s doing what sf used to do so well, and it’s doing better? If it was nothing else, science fiction was always the literature of ideas. It had innovation, it could be satiric, questioning, and even inspiring. Occasionally it was actually subversive. Science fiction has had a lot to tell us about our present condition, albeit dressed as far-flung futures or alternate worlds. It still does, but to a much lesser degree. The torch is passing to fantasy, a literature that at its best addresses ideas and emotions.
Modern fantasy, the latest incarnation of storytelling’s most enduring form, has become a broad church, comfortably embracing talents as diverse as JK Rowling, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Robert Jordan, David Gernmell, Terry Brooks, Robert Holdstock, Storm Constantine, Terry Pratchett, Freda Warrington, Tom Arden, Peter S. Beagle, Joy Chant, Louise Cooper, Charles De Lint, Stephen Donaldson, Philip Pullman…and any number of other names from a long list that readily comes to mind. There can be a timeless quality about the finest fantasy that doesn’t necessarily apply to science fiction, so that not unusually an epic saga from five centuries ago may be more readable than a 40 year old science fiction novel.
I cut my teeth on science fiction, read acres of it, and given the chance I still write it. No doubt it will be on the up again. But for now it might not be a bad thing if it withdraws to figure out a new direction. Meanwhile, fantasy is emerging from the shadows where it’s languished too long as a bastardized sub-genre. Stand back and let the once poor relation take a bow.
Two Wizards and a Dwarf
Christopher Lee, John Rhys-Davies, and Ian McKellen Give Us the Gossip
In striking contrast to the young, medium-sized actors who play the Hobbits, Sir Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee and John Rhys-Davies have the gravitas and presence that come with age, height, and experience. It’s easy to see why McKellen and Lee were cast, respectively as the good wizard Gandalf and his corrupted counterpart Saruman. What takes some swallowing is the idea of the robustly built Rhys-Davies as Gimli the Dwarf.
Asked whether they had read The Lord of the Rings prior to filming, their contrasting personalities were immediately apparent. McKellen admitted, apologetically, that he had read only The Hobbit. Lee, whose patrician tone and conspicuous erudition border on the arrogant, said: “I read it when it first came out, then waited for the second, and then the third. And now I read it every year, so that’s something like 45 years I’ve been reading it.”
Rhys-Davies, however, doesn’t mince his words. “I hated it. I struggled through it. I kept falling asleep in it. All I can say is, the film’s a lot better.”
Rhys-Davies bluff humor was equally apparent in his account of the rigors of filming. “My fondest memory is of being on the side of a hill and seeing two men carrying my armor up the hill, two ladies carrying my costume, a woman carrying my helmet, another carrying my boots, and then the armorers carrying the axes. And then they put it all on me and Peter Jackson said, ‘Now run after them.’”
Preferring to emphasize the positive, McKellen described a day on which he and eight other members of the Fellowship of the Ring were dropped by a helicopter onto virgin snow near the peak of a mountain. He had annotated his script to read NAR, actor’s shorthand for No Acting Required. Prophetic words indeed.
“There really was no acting required for that occasion,” he remembers, “because there we were trudging through snow about 12 inches deep, plodding up to a distant peak. At moments like those, you don’t think, ‘There’s a camera on that helicopter that’s coming around’; you’re on the journey. We were there in Middle-earth, at a time when human beings had only just arrived. In a world where there were immortal wizards, immortal Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits.”
As if that were not enough, the difficulties of scale that beset the entire production affected the actors in a particular way. “One of the things that was not so much tiring as tiresome,” said McKellen with an air of polite resignation, “was that because the Hobbits must appear smaller than the humans, each scene had to be filmed twice—once with me as Gandalf and Elijah Wood and the other actors as the Hobbits, then once again with their scale doubles, people who were the appropriate size. Then the scene had to be done again with the real Hobbit actors, Elijah and the others, but not with me. In those scenes, Gandalf was played by a very, very tall New Zealander, six-foot-eight. He was walking along the street in Wellington one day and somebody walked up to him and said, ‘Would you like to be in a film?’”
Nevertheless, McKellen was as gracious as ever, insisting that “You forgive it all when you see the film.” Christopher Lee, too, was unstinting in his praise. “I’m a great admirer or Tolkien, and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at, because it’s the very essence of Tolkien, which is something that people didn’t believe could be done.”
John Rhys-Davies had sensed something special when he first met the ensemble cast. “When I walked into the room and looked around, I was astonished. I thought, ‘Good God, he’s got to be Frodo, that’s got to be Sam, that’s got to be…’ You just looked at these unmade-up faces and you realized that you were in very safe hands; because if a director can cast that well, you know he’s done 80% of his job.”
Seeing the completed footage, the actors were able to see clearly how much digital technology—often the bane of their lives during the shoot itself—had contributed to the film’s extraordinary visual impact. Yet what most impressed Sir Ian McKellen was how director Peter Jackson had used the visual effects to serve the story line and the characters.
“Peter has taken this new technology, much of which was invented for this film, and put it at the service, not of something purely fantastic, but at the service of ordinary people, in extraordinary situations. What I like about his myth that Tolkien has created is that, although there is magic in it, and people can do superhuman things, their progress towards the destroying of the Ring wouldn’t be achieved without the particular characters of the people on the journey.
“The story never twists on some magic, which is just a storyteller’s device; the storytelling is about human emotions that we all recognize. The drama comes out of recognizable human attributes, even though some of the characters are not human—their jealousies, their ambitions, their good nature, their vision of what the world could be.
“So this film would be nothing, despite its special effects, if it weren’t for a cast who were encouraged to really delve into themselves. And that’s why, so often, there was take after take after take, to get that believability of spirit.”
Ways of the Warriors
Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean on their warrior characters
The two actors who were clearest about their characters were Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean, who play the human warriors Aragorn and Boromir. They were equally clear about the fact that their characters don’t see eye to eye on the Ring and its awesome power. Aragorn respects and fears the Ring, whereas Boromir is initially against destroying it, because he believes it could be used as a force for ultimate good. But as the quest continues, Boromir is forced to change his mind.
“Boromir’s people have been in the forefront of the battles, keeping the evil forces at bay, acting as a sort of buffer zone,” explained Bean. “So through the generations, he’s become a very military-minded man who believes in strength and taking action. And that’s why his aim is to use the Ring against this evil force, rather than to destroy it. Boromir doesn’t understand the power, the magic or the implications, but towards the end, he says, ‘I didn’t know what I know now. It’s much more complicated, this power of the Ring.”
Mortensen continues for him. “Through his experiences in Middle-earth, Aragorn begins to understand other species that live there, to appreciate and value the Elves, the Dwarves and the Hobbits. In a sense, the whole trilogy is about alliances being formed, about people coming together against the coming danger. So there is no one heroic figure, because the success of the quest relies on the unique qualities of the nine who make up the Fellowship. It’s the group effort that counts in the end, because the Fellowship is only as strong as its weakest link.”
But with five different cultures involved, explains Bean, it’s not always plain sailing. “At first, Boromir is very doubtful we should be bringing all these different species along. I’m used to leading an army and all I’ve got is Aragorn, a wizard and this motley crew of Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits. There are many times when it seems like it’s going to fall apart, but ultimately they all know they have to stay together…It rests on these nine beings to save everybody.”
Finally, Mortensen speaks the two words that have been on everyone’s lips all afternoon: Star Wars. “Inevitably, people will compare Rings to movies like Star Wars, but I think that these characters are much more individual, original and fleshed out. Peter also went to great lengths to ensure that the relationships included all their unspoken doubts and fears. You really see that being played out, on their faces, in their actions and even in their hesitations. Star Wars was fun but it was more on a surface level: this character is good, this character is evil, whereas in The Lord of the Rings, you get those gray areas in between.”
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In response to yesterday’s mail, I’ve had a lot of e-mails from Ringers who seem to recall seeing an extended version of the Rankin/Bass movie ‘The Hobbit’ than the one on video. Never fear however, for there are always people out there who can shed light on a situation.
Here are just some of the people who mailed in wondering the same thing, and also offered some suggestions as to what Jeff was referring to.
I remember watching the show when it originally aired, and I have also owned it on VHS (two different versions) as well as the new DVD. There is definitely only one version of the animated film (although one of the VHS editions has some missing animation, due to the print being in bad shape), and Beorn is definitely not in it (and neither is the Arkenstone). I also own the “Deluxe” Abram’s edition of The Hobbit, illustrated with art from the Rankin-Bass film, and it’s true that Beorn appears in it. But the illustration is inconsistent with the rest of the art in both style and quality; it was clearly produced for the text only, along with a drawing of a Warg-skin and Goblin-carcass, because otherwise that chapter would have had no illustrations. Another interesting example of this sort of thing is the illustration of Shelob that appears in the old Milton Bradley board game of The Lord of the Rings. The art for that game came from the Bakshi animated film, but of course Frodo & Sam never got anywhere near Shelob’s Lair in that adaptation. Elentir
I too thought I had once seen a longer version of the Hobbit when I was a lot shorter than one. I could have sworn it had Beorn in it as well as more about the Arkenstone. Later when I rented the video and there was no Beorn in it, I figured I had just dreamed those extra scenes. Please if you hear any news about the existence of a longer version of ‘The Hobbit’, I too would die to have it. Although I’ve heard some people had less than kind words for the animated movie of the Hobbit (mbe orc talk, LOL) I thought It was just fine, a very nice way to introduce little kids to Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth. Bill
I was interested to read your piece on the possibility of a longer Hobbit video. I seem to also remember a longer version of the Rankin/Bass edition. It was broadcast on the Disney channel some years ago, and seemed much more complete than the version currently available. There was a scene with Beorn, which I distinctly remember, and the travels through Mirkwood were much longer, including the Black River incident. Hope this might trigger some memories for others. Mike
If you watch the scene where Bilbo exits the tunnel after talking to Smaug, as soon as he exits, there is a very bad edit that jumps to “There we go, there we go… always glad to help a friend…”(Thorin). In the television version, I DISTINCTLY remember watching him run about on the doorstep yelling “Extinguish me!!!.” I also seem to remember other, now deleted scenes from when I saw it on TV back around 1986. (Heh… even though I was only seven at the time.) I’d LOVE to know the answer to this one and get ahold of the full cut. Awful animation, but a lot of great voice actors and /some/ decent music. Christopher
Perhaps the person thought that “The Hobbit” and “The Return of the King” were the same movie. “The Hobbit” is 78 minutes long. Add in commercial breaks and its 90 minutes. “The Return of the King” is 97 minutes long. Add in commercial breaks and it’s 2 hours. They are mistaken, I think. Brett
I am fairly sure this person is imagining the existence of a longer version. I owned the soundtrack album when I was a kid, which was a two-record set with illustrated booklet, and I don’t remember Beorn being in it. I KNOW there was no Black River scene. There’s no way it could have been two hours – I seem to recall the original TV broadcast with commercials running only 90 minutes. I may see if I can get a vintage TV guide from the week of its original broadcast and see what the original run time was. Now I’m curious. Brian
Back in the 70’s the Hobbit was two hours long…the only reason I know that for sure is that I had the version that I taped myself, and in 1981, I worked in a rather Bohemian store that had lots of videos for that day, and we had a version on video about 2 hours long. It was also that long on CED disks (which were disks that came in large sleeves that weighed like 15 pounds a piece and they stopped making the players in , like 1987). I have The Lord of the Rings in that form as well, and it is longer than the movie that most people are familiar with (only by five minutes). It is also the original version, that is… ended with Gollum leading Frodo and Sam to Shelob’s lair, rather than ending with Gandalf throwing the sword up into the air, and riding off in to the dust, which was a change that was made after the film was out one month in theatres. I have NO IDEA where you would get these today. I taped The Hobbit on Showtime in the 80’s and ROTK, and those are different versions than are on video today…and I don’t really know why. It would have never come up except we had friends and their kids over for a slipover, showed the movies, and the parents said that their forms were different that they had purchased in the 90’s or currently. I can no longer watch my version of LOTR, because the CED player that I have no longer works (much to everyone’s annoyance). I have just recently been told that there is someone who may be able to fix it. I will have to look into it. That’s all the light I can shed on this situation…I hope it helps. Diamond T
Other ringers mailed in and pointed the finger at the illustrated book of the Rankin/Bass version of ‘The Hobbit’.
In regards to a longer version of the Rankin and Bass ‘The Hobbit’, I have an illustrated book of ‘The Hobbit using the Rankin and Bass illustrations from the movie. If I remember correctly it does have the Beorn Illustrations in it. Jeremy
I too have an edition of ‘The Hobbit’ with illustrations from the cartoon. Many of the illustrations are stills from the movie, but many were drawn later to fill in the blanks. Beorn IS shown in an illustration, but the artwork is clearly not from the movie. This doesn’t prove that there isn’t a longer version of the movie, but since IMDB lists the running time as 77 minutes and makes no reference to a longer version, I suspect the e-mail writer is mistaken. Steve
I am reasonably certain that there is no long version of The Hobbit. The photos of Beorn are from pre-production drawings. There are quite a few stills in that book that are not in the movie and the common denominator among them is that they are all of relatively poor (read: hastily rendered) quality. I believe that’s because they are storyboard or pre-production drawings. I’ve yet to see any evidence whatsoever that a longer cut of the movie exists. Jeff
I recall the book referred to. When the Rankin/Bass Hobbit originally aired, a large format hardcover edition (slightly abridged) version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit was released as a tie-in. It was illustrated mostly with preproduction images from the film, and additional drawings representing scenes not included in the cartoon. I assume that these extra images were created for the book’s sake. There are many illustrations that are not only absent from the film, but done in a style that is looser and more sketchy than the final designs. Bilbo, for instance has a mass of scriggly wrinkles under his eyes. Smaug is green, and lacks the furry red-fox appearance. There’s also a Lord of the Eagles wearing a crown, an arkenstone, and strangely an image of the ring itself with a diamond-stone on it. I’m certain that Beorn was never intended to appear in the film, or why else would the eagles deposit the dwarves at the very entrance to Mirkwood. These additional images were obviously either earlier design concepts, abandoned, or done deliberately to fill the narrative gaps in the novel. Joe
However, the closest thing we have to an official statement about this little mystery are two mails from two very different people involved with the Rankin/Bass movie itself. First, Marbpl sent in this e-mail she received from Rick Goldschmidt, author of The Enchanted World of Rankin Bass.
I am not a ‘Hobbit’ expert BUT I have found nothing in the archives saying it was released to theatres in another format. As far as I know, the DVD/video release is the whole thing and it was specifically made for TV.
Secondly, Joey sent in this e-mail which seems to be hold the key to this argument.
The “Long Version” in question does not exist– I am good friends with (snip), one of the sound engineers for both The Hobbit and RoTK. He was kind enough to dub for me copies of both movies in the early Eighties from the Rankin\Bass masters and also gave me original scripts from both movies. In neither the master tape, nor the script does Beorn exist. There are some parts in the script that were cut out of the final movie (the Stone Giants for one), but according to (snip), the audio was edited to it’s nearly final form before animation would even start.
So there you have it…make from all that what you will!
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For those of you who missed this interview back in December, TORN put up a transcript. Now thanks to Lisa we have a more accurate version:
From “The Late Show with David Letterman” (CBS)
[Earlier on in the show, when Dave is announcing who’s on the show]
DAVE: Elijah Wood is here this evening. (applause) He’s the star of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”. It opens December 9th (mistake!). This is gonna be another one of those blockbuster movies like the Harry Potter Movie.
PAUL: Oh yeah.
DAVE: It’s gonna be a huge, big thing.
PAUL: Oh yeah
DAVE: And he’s a kid, he’s only like 20 years old. Yeah, when I was 20 I had a paper route.
PAUL: Yes. (laughter and applause)
[Interview with Elijah Wood]
DAVE: Our next guest is a talented actor. He stars in the new epic motion picture “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”. It opens December 19th. Here’s Elijah Wood. (applause)
[Elijah comes out, waves to the audience and says “Hello” to them, then shakes Dave’s hand and sits down]
ELIJAH: (points to mug on the edge of the desk) Is this for me or is this for you?
DAVE: It’s all yours.
ELIJAH: Oh, cheers, man (takes a sip).
DAVE: How ya doin’?
ELIJAH: Very well.
DAVE: Good.
ELIJAH: Overwhelmed. This movie’s coming out; it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been a part of.
DAVE: Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll talk all about the film. You’re… I was right, you’re like, a kid, right? You’re gonna be 21? Is that right?
ELIJAH: I’m gonna be 21, yeah.
DAVE: Yeah, that’s a kid. (applause)
ELIJAH: Thank you, thank you. I’ve always felt older than I was, so finally I feel like I’m catching up with myself.
DAVE: Tell me about your early life. How did you begin in show business, that kind of stuff; where are you from, what’d you do?
ELIJAH: Uh, originally from Iowa, actually, um, and I….. (scattered applause)
ELIJAH: Oh! Are there people from Iowa here? Fantastic! Uh, and then I sort of moved to Los Angeles and started auditioning, and one thing led after another.
DAVE: You moved with your family? Is that what you did?
ELIJAH: Yeah, we all moved out together to pursue….
DAVE: And why did the whole family go to California from Iowa?
ELIJAH: Uh, basically for me and my brother to kind of pursue acting, and my brother got out of it early and I kind of kept going, so, here I am.
DAVE: It’s turned out pretty well, hasn’t it?
ELIJAH: Pretty well. I’m very lucky.
DAVE: And you did this movie in New Zealand, is that correct?
ELIJAH: I did. I lived there for 16 months, unbelievably.
DAVE: Wow.
ELIJAH: Yeah, it was a life experience.
DAVE: What was….
ELIJAH: It was truly profound.
DAVE: I understand it’s physically quite a lovely place, but other than that, what was it like? Just…were you there on your own?
ELIJAH: I was there on my own, had my own house, had my own car. So, aside from making the movie, I had my own life there, which is pretty incredible. And we got out some pretty crazy stuff. I learned how to surf while I was there, which is amazing, and did this thing called paraponting…
DAVE: Para… I’m sorry, what is the word? Para…
ELIJAH: Paraponting.
DAVE: Ponting?
ELIJAH: Yes.
DAVE: P-o-n-t-i-n-g?
ELIJAH: I…I think that’s how you spell it, yeah.
DAVE: I’ve not heard of that.
ELIJAH: You get a parachute and you jump off a hill and you kind of ride the uh… the air.
DAVE: Mmmm…. (scattered laughter from the audience, Elijah laughs)
ELIJAH: Exactly.
DAVE: You can also do the same thing by jumping out of a shnook. (laughter)
ELIJAH: A shnook. As… as…I was watching. (applause)
DAVE: Jump out of a shnook.
ELIJAH: A Chinook, as she was saying. Right. (applause)
DAVE: Uh, and the people in New Zealand have a real zest for life, they love that kind of dangerous stuff, don’t they?
ELIJAH: They do. They love bungee jumping, jumping out of planes, you know, snowboarding, that sort of thing. I didn’t do bungee jumping. I think I was a little too nervous for that. Admittedly.
DAVE: And, you were there, you say, a year and a half, and… and everybody got to know one another, and got along pretty well and you did stuff as a… as a family after a while…
ELIJAH: As a group, yeah. I mean, we really became a fellowship like that in the film.
DAVE: Mmm hmmm…
ELIJAH: Some of the best friends of my life, I made on this, so… it was pretty incredible.
DAVE: What kind of things would you do, when you weren’t shooting the movie, with your buddies on the film?
ELIJAH: Uh, well, we did the surfing… I got a, you know, a wetsuit and a surfboard, got involved in that. A lot of bars, went to a lot of bars, just… (laughter and applause, Elijah laughs) The local pubs, as you do. I got very ingrained in the English culture so, very familiar with that.
DAVE: And….and was there talk of everybody getting tattoos, did that happen? (scattered laughter)
ELIJAH: That did… that did happen. Uh, we became so close on the movie, as a fellowship, we felt that, you know, the experience and the profundity of the experience deserved to be branded physically.
DAVE: Mmm hmm…
ELIJAH: So we all went to a tattoo parlour about a week before we finished and got branded together, which was really incredible…
DAVE: Really?
ELIJAH: And Ian McKellen actually got a tattoo as well.
DAVE: Mmm, and…and uh, you…I don’t see it, but…and I don’t know if I wanna see it, but you…
ELIJAH: It’s…it’s here (points to lower right torso) so I don’t think I can show it.
DAVE: And then what…
ELIJAH: I don’t think that would be a good idea.
DAVE: And what…what is it? (laughter and shouts from the audience of “show it!”; Dave grins at them)
ELIJAH: It’s actually Elvish, which is the language….
DAVE: You got a tattoo of Elvis?
ELIJAH: No no…. (he laughs, and laughter from the audience). It’s…it’s Elvish, which is actually the language of the Elves.
DAVE: Oh, oh, oh, I see.
ELIJAH: And it stands for the…it stands for “nine,” the nine members of the fellowship.
DAVE: Was it painful, when that happened?
ELIJAH: REALLY painful, and…and….(laughter). Yeah. And the funny thing about that is…is I was asking various people who’d had tattoos if it was painful, and they were like “No no no, it’s fine, you’re.. you’re gonna be fine.”…
DAVE: Yeah… (he laughs)
ELIJAH: My GOD…. (Dave and audience laugh). Ridiculous. I’ve never been in so much pain in my life.
DAVE: And… and how long before you got over, where….whenever you’d take a shower….you… how long did it take you to get over “Oh, jeez!” that? (looking at his lower right torso).
ELIJAH: Umm…it…it… (he laughs and the audience begins laughing).
DAVE: O God, what is….you know where you got….you know what I’m saying?
ELIJAH: (putting his hand where the tatoo is) The….the “Oh! It’s there.”
DAVE: My God. Oh, it’s my thing, uh…yeah…
ELIJAH: I know…. I know. It took about… it took about a….a couple of months, I think. (Dave and audience laugh). I’m very proud of it, though. I still look at it when I get out of the shower.
DAVE: Yeah, and uh….(audience laughs).
ELIJAH: (looking at the audience) Sorry. It’s a little personal, I know…I know. (laughter and applause). Take a look down. Forever remember the fellowship.
DAVE: How long do you think you can go in a pool? Nevermind. (laughter and applause, Elijah laughs)
DAVE: Uh, and when is your 21st birthday?
ELIJAH: January 28th.
DAVE: Oh, you got a big celebration planned?
ELIJAH: Um, I’m…I’m thinking about going to Vegas. I think it’s time to go to Vegas.
DAVE: That’s…that’s the thing to do, yeah.
ELIJAH: Absolutely…we’re gonna uh…a prerequisite to wear suits, do the old Rat Pack thing, you know, bring all my friends. I think it’ll be good. Lots of debauchery (Dave laughs), lots of drinking. (scattered laughter). As you do.
DAVE: Now this…uh, this movie, as…as you talk about it, you’re very excited, because it…it looks like it’s gonna be uh….a very…and has been widely anticipated…
ELIJAH: Mmmm…
DAVE: … and decidedly so, and it’s gonna be an enormous film, so that must be a real thrill for you. Is it already making a difference in….in your life, your daily life?
ELIJAH: It’s…it’s kind of scary…
DAVE: Yeah.
ELIJAH: I’ve never been a part of anything quite this big before, so…yeah, a bit. I think, um, actually, while we were still filming, I came home a few times… people were already calling me Frodo, which is the name of my character. So it’s…it’s starting to have an impact.
DAVE: Mmmm hmmm, and…and is that all right with you, to be called Frodo? (Elijah and audience laugh)
ELIJAH: I’m very familiar with it. I’m…I’ve taken the character on as a piece of me, so….
DAVE: Yeah…
ELIJAH: That’s all right. You can call me Frodo. (Dave laughs) Go on, Dave, it’s okay.
DAVE: (laughing) All right, Frodo. (laughter and applause, Elijah laughs) Whatever you want. Now, let’s um…(reaches to the side of his desk to pull out the action figure wrapped in plastic)
ELIJAH: Oh, what do you have there?
DAVE: This looks like it uh…I think it’s your action figure, is that right? You…you can’t have a movie anymore without an action figure? (takes it out of the package and places it on the desk in front of Elijah) This just looks like a…a chess piece.
ELIJAH: Oh my god.
DAVE: Is that you?
ELIJAH: Is this from Burger King?
DAVE: I don’t…I don’t…you know I just…(audience begins laughing)
ELIJAH: Okay, but here, I have one question…
DAVE: …it comes with a deal here….(fumbling with package)
ELIJAH: Why is one foot invisible and the other not? What is that all about? You see this? (pointing to the action figure’s feet). Invisible foot….
DAVE: I assumed it was part of the movie.
ELIJAH: No, it’s not, actually.
DAVE: Does it….it goes on that thing there… you gotta… you gotta put it on the thing…(struggles to fit figure on its base)
ELIJAH: Oh dear.
DAVE: Some assembly required. (laughter from audience, Elijah tries to help him). I’ll get it. (pulls the toy to the middle of his desk)
ELIJAH: (leaning towards Dave) Put it…put it the other way, the other way around, I think.
DAVE: Just….please, Frodo.
ELIJAH: (puts his hands up and sits back) Alright. Alright. (audience laughs, applause) Just trying to help. (more applause as Dave struggles with the figure; Elijah laughs) You all right, Dave?
DAVE: It…it looks like he’s standing on a…a pork chop. I don’t know….(laughter)
ELIJAH: (laughing) It kinda does resemble a pork chop.
DAVE: Is that part of the story? There. (puts the assembled figure, on stand, in front of Elijah)
ELIJAH: There it is.
DAVE: Wow. That’s a nice piece of work, isn’t it? (laughter)
ELIJAH: Very nice.
DAVE: Now, do you get a little uh….a little taste of this, whenever they sell these things? Are you…do you get a piece of it?
ELIJAH: I…I do, I’m…I’ve actually….I went to New Line recently and said “I need to be on the mailing list. I want all the merchandise.”
DAVE: Wow.
ELIJAH: I don’t wanna be on eBay in 20 years having to search this stuff down. (Dave laughs) I’m a total geek for this stuff. I’ve been collecting action figures for years, so… it’s really cool to have my own figure.(Dave continues to struggle with the figure)
DAVE: Whoopsie….alright. I don’t know, I uh….
ELIJAH: Oh, come on, get it right! (he laughs, and audience laughs)
DAVE: Uh, let’s uh…let’s show them a little bit of the movie here. Do you know what the clip is we’re gonna see?
ELIJAH: I…I don’t, actually. (looking at Dave)
DAVE: Oh, come on.
ELIJAH: What…what is the clip?
DAVE: You gotta know what the clip is!
ELIJAH: (looking toward the cameras and the audience questioningly) What’s…what’s the clip?
DAVE: I don’t know, I’m not in the movie!
ELIJAH: Uh….it’s….. (he laughs, audience laughs)
DAVE: You gotta know!
ELIJAH: Oh, I think I’m being….I’m being….
DAVE: You were in New Zealand for a year and a half, for God’s sake!
ELIJAH: I’m being chased by a Ringwraith. That’s what it is.
DAVE: I’m sorry….
ELIJAH: I’m being chased by a Ringwraith, a Black Rider. It’s very scary.
DAVE: Okay, here we go, being chased by a Ringwraith. Here we…
ELIJAH: A Ringwraith.
DAVE: That’s right. Elijah Wood. Take a look.
[clip of “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” – hobbits being chased by Black Rider onto the dock at Buckleberry Ferry]. (applause from the audience)
ELIJAH: Run! (watching and referring to the clip)
DAVE: Wow. (clapping) There you go. All right, well listen, happy birthday.
ELIJAH: Thank you.
DAVE: Enjoy yourself in Las Vegas.
ELIJAH: Thank you.
DAVE: And uh…December twenty….first? Is that what this…
ELIJAH: Dec…uh…December 19th is the release of the film.
DAVE: December 19th, great.
ELIJAH: Yes.
DAVE: Well, good. I know it’s gonna be a big hit. Congratulations.
ELIJAH: Thank you very much.
DAVE: Thank you for being here.(they shake hands, cheers and applause)
ELIJAH: Thanks.
DAVE: Elijah Wood everybody. We’ll be right back with Stereophonics.(applause and music)
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Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn)
Liv Tyler (Arwen)
Ian Holm (Bilbo)
Sean Bean (Boromir)
Ian Mune (Bounder)
Martyn Sanderson (Bree Gatekeeper)
John Noble (Denethor)
Peter Mackenzie (Elendil)
Hugo Weaving (Elrond)
Miranda Otto (Eowyn)
David Wenham (Faramir)
Elijah Wood (Frodo)
Cate Blanchett (Galadriel)
John Rhys-Davies (Gimli)
Andy Serkis (Gollum)
Harry Sinclair (Isildur)
Sean Astin (Sam)
Christopher Lee (Saruman)
Bernard Hill (Theoden)
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue)
