Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) The Prophecy WPTZ & The Young Americans ENCACT & Boiling Point TNT
Elijah Wood (Frodo) Internal Affairs KJTV
John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) The Nativity FMC
Bruce Spence (Mouth of Sauron) Sweet Talker STARZ5
Sean Astin (Sam) Bulworth MOMAX
Christopher Lee (Saruman) The Man With the Golden Gun TBS & Taste the Blood of Dracula SCIFI & Scream and Scream Again
Bernard Hill (Theoden) The Mill on the Floss WVAN & Mountains of the Moon STARZ5
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Progeny Cinemax
Liv Tyler (Arwen) Plunkette and Macleane TMN

Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) The Passion of Darkly Noon MOMAX
Liv Tyler (Arwen) Cookie’s Fortune HBOSIG
Ian Holm (Bilbo) Alice Through the Looking Glass HBOF
Sean Bean (Boromir) Stormy Monday KXTX
Miranda Otto (Eowyn) The Jack Bull ACMAX
Elijah Wood (Frodo) The Good Son WNYW
Cate Blahcett (Galadriel) Elizabeth TMC2 & Oscar and Lucinda FMC
Ian McKellen (Galadriel) I’ll Do Anything HBOSIG
Christopher Lee (Saruman) The Longest Day AMC & The Truth About Women KUSK

Steve Coogan (Unkown) Alice Through the Looking Glass HBOF

Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Trauma SHOWB & Bride of Chucky TMN
Liv Tyler (Arwen) Plunkette and Macleane TMN

Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) Witness TNT
Ian Holm (Bilbo) A Life Less Ordinary KDKF
Sean Bean (Boromir) Airborne HBOZ
Ian McKellen (Gandalf) Apt Pupil TMC2
Bruce Spence (Mouth of Sauron) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome WLNY 55
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Progeny Cinemax

Liv Tyler (Arwen) That Thing You Do! VH1
Ian McKellen (Galdnalf) Alfred the Great TNTI
Sean Astin (Sam) Toy Soldiers HBOZ
Christopher Lee (Saruman) Private’s Progress TMC2
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Hidden Agenda TMC & Body Parts Cinemax
Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) Pushing Tin Cinemax

Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) Pushing Tin MAXS
Ian McKellen (Gandalf) Jack & Sarah RCN
John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) Perry Mason: The Case of the Murdered Madam KTBU
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Urban Legend TMC2 & Bride of Chucky TMN
Sean Astin (Sam) Bulworth Cinemax
Bernard Hill (Theoden) True Crime Cinemax

Christopher Lee (Saruman) The Oblong Box AMC
Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) Progeny Cinemax

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From: Stuff

No baccy ban for lord of the smoke rings

Hobbits and wizards will not succumb to political correctness in The Lord Of The Rings films – they’ll be smoking up a storm.

The Asthma and Respiratory Foundation is concerned, with executive director Jenny Shieff fearing the impact on viewers, especially children.

The films should be released from late 2001.

British actor Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf, said in a radio interview yesterday that the characters in the trilogy would smoke pipes.

Having the characters puffing away showed director Peter Jackson was remaining faithful to what was written by the trilogy’s author J R R Tolkien, Sir Ian said.

“I was wondering whether because of political correctness, people’s worries of the dangers of smoking, that in a film a lot of children are likely to see we’d be asked to cut down the smoking or not have it.

“Although it is pipe smoking, which if you don’t inhale is safer than cigarettes. However, the hobbits, played as quite young people in our film, are all smoking away on their pipes . . .”

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From Our Super Ringer Spy Glaurung comes our very first look at some armor!! It’s a Rohan Warrior Shield!!

The emblem in the middle is the rear quarter of a horse (4 in a circle).

There is a handgrip in the middle and a stirrup on the lower left quarter to allow protection while riding.

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The Oct/Nov issue of ‘Pavement’ has quite simply one of the best interviews I’ve seen with a Lord of the Rings cast member, in this case Sean Astin. This magazine is available in Australia and New Zealand; it’ll be a few days before I know whether we have permission to scan the whole thing.
Meanwhile, here are some of Sean Astin’s thoughts on his role, on acting, and on his experience with the Rings project.

“As I was reading the books, I was reading them with an eye towards Sam, but he’s just got such a warm, honest, pure good-hearted essence. And that’s his position in the film and in the book. It’s to be a kind of barometer against which all of the adventure and evil is measured. Sam has an unfaltering moral compass. He always knows who he is. As all the different characters, with all their different complexities, change and evolve and grow or fail, Sam just is….good. He has a level of experience at the end of the trilogy that he didn’t have at the beginning that informs his goodness. It makes his goodness that much more admirable. It’s easy to be naive and innocent and good but it’s another thing to have been embattled and, despite all of the trials and tribulations of an epic adventure, to remain good of heart.”

Astin also notes that ‘a movie and its characters don’t have to be pure or improving but should contain some grain of truth….something contained within the film and the roles should be worth saying.’

He talks a little about how his career developed. The son of acting parents, he’s acted since he was a child; he also writes scripts and has directed very successfully too. The interview gives a sense of how Astin weaves every part of his life together, family, work, education:

“Trying to suspend family life while I worked would mean I ended up never living at all.” So his family’s been living with him in NZ.
Astin says he was first drawn to the Rings project by his respect for Peter Jackson; he’d not read the books. However, with a degree in History and English, it’s not surprising that his response to the books has been very insightful. His belief in Peter Jackson has been justified, and he comments ‘that Jackson did more than choose a cast that would do justice to the books, he chose a group of people that would mesh well.’

Despite spending at least 72 hours a week in each other’s company, amongst the cast he finds ‘there’s a level of fun, a level of joculariity, among people whose work is so respectable you want to put your dinner jacket on and be on your best behaviour.’ Onset this familiarity might erupt into sudden snowball-fights; offset the four hobbits have followed up a commitment to all learn to surf while in NZ!

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New Zealand Website Stuff posted a great new pic of the Minas Tirith set, located at the same Haywards Hill quarry in Upper Hutt, where Helms Deep was also filmed.

MINIS TIRITH?: Construction is under way again at Dry Creek Quarry near Wellington’s Haywards Hill in preparation for further filming the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Earlier this year the site was used to film battle scenes depicting the Helm’s Deep sequence. Now speculation Internet is that the new set is Minis Tirith, the chief city of Gondor.

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Many of you will have read the volume of Tolkien’s collected letters. Many of them dealt with the process of preparing the books for publication. A few days ago I was contacted by somebody whose father was one of those proofreaders with whom Tolkien corresponded. He kindly allowed us to post this:

“My father, Jack Liddament, was a proof reader for Jarrolds of Norwich in 1954 – coincidentally, the year I was born. He was given the job of reading LOTR and spent the best part of the year on the work. He remembers that many people thought at the time that the book was something of a curiosity and could not really see much of a market for it, but he thoroughly enjoyed it and felt it would be successful.

Proof readers are by nature fussy about accuracy and the correct use of words and my father was impressed by Tolkien’s own attention to detail. I remember him telling me that the scholarship underpinning the invented languages in the book made the story very powerful and added depth and substance to the work. He recalls that some of his colleagues at the printers saw fit to correct Tolkien’s use of “dwarves” for the plural of “dwarf” at the post-proof stage without consulting either proof reader or the author, which led to Jarrolds getting a pointed letter from Tolkien asking them to change the words back again!

As the proof reader, my father was expected to question any seeming inaccuracies or inconsistencies, marking them up on the printers proofs and then sending them to the author, who usually either crossed out the suggested changes or ticked them to signify agreement. Tolkien often went further than that, adding little notes and explanations in the margins of the proofs and enclosing small drawings and extra material. He sent my father a thank you note at the end of the work, saying that he was grateful for the effort that my father had put in at the proof reading stage.

My father continued working for Jarrolds through to his retirement about 15 years ago. Since then, he has pursued his own writing ambition in a very different genre – cowboy stories. Despite having never travelled further west than Wales, he has had five novels published and shows no sign of slowing down as he approaches 80.

He will be very interested in the films and will be keen to see how the power of the written language and the detailed mythology that Tolkien created transfers to the screen.”

Thanks to Martin for that!

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