Books
Hoodfellas
Why film academics Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell love blockbusters – especially Lord of the Rings.
Let’s agree that we’re deep in the third age. The second age of Tolkien fandom began in the mid-60s when cheap paperbacks of Lord of the Rings flooded the US market. As a junior high school student, Kristin Thompson was caught up in the Tolkien cult, but she was too young for its hippie associations – the ways in which Frodo and Gandalf came to stand for the counter-culture’s anti-materialism, its magical thinking, its opposition to war, its love of weed. The Beatles wanted to star in a Lord of the Rings movie. Led Zeppelin raided the books for lyrics.
More second age thinking: Village Voice film critic J Hoberman has reminisced about hallucinating a version of Lord of the Rings in the early 70s, with Richard Nixon as Gollum and the hobbits venturing out of the bucolic communes of Vermont. And if the second age came to a dismal end with Ralph Bakshi’s unwatchable animated Lord of the Rings in 1978, then the third began when Peter Jackson’s slick, energetic and bold trilogy opened in 2001.
And 40 years on from reading the paperbacks, Kristin Thompson is still a fan. Now she’s an honorary fellow in communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a frequent collaborator with her husband, David Bord-well, a professor of film studies in the same department (they co-authored the widely used film studies text, Film Art: An Introduction). In May, both Bordwell and Thompson were Hood Fellows at the University of Auckland. At the same time, Thompson was tidying up the New Zealand deal for her book about the Jackson trilogy, The Frodo Franchise.
“She’s Lord of the Rings 24/7,” says Bordwell, deferring to his wife. Thompson’s book is not a making-of but an impact-of, a thorough and impeccably researched analysis of how Jackson’s trilogy changed the nature of the blockbuster. How Jackson got on side with fan-based websites, developing new ways of marketing. How Jackson pushed the envelope in computer-based effects. How the films coincided with developments in DVD releases and movie-based games. How a new era of fantasy films has been inaugurated. How Jackson and New Line Cinema took an incredible risk and seemed – in reading Thompson’s narrative – to have everything go so right.
It has a feeling of inevitability now, but many thought New Line were out of their minds in 1998 when the deal was made with Jackson. Despite her interest in the books, Thompson was “rather dubious” until Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001. It was a risk on so many levels: fantasy was considered unbankable; there were no marquee names; it was being directed by a New Zealander with no commercial record. Thompson: “The Frighteners … I wouldn’t say it was a bomb, but it was not successful.”
So why did New Line go for it when Miramax – at the insistence of parent company Disney – passed? Because New Line boss Bob Shaye saw the franchise value. It was “pre-sold”, meaning that it already had market recognition, and New Line needed a new franchise after the profitable but exhausted Nightmare on Elm Street and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. The US/NZ exchange rate was good. Film labour in New Zealand was cheap and not unionised (hence the popular name among US crew for the New Zealand workers – “Mexicans with cellphones”). Three films could be made at once with only one start-up cost, meaning also that the actors couldn’t renegotiate salaries if the first film was a hit (actor Sean Astin was shocked to learn that his $US250,000 fee was for all three films).
Put like this, it doesn’t sound like a gamble at all. But there’s a history of beloved cult novels failing as movies – besides Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, there’s David Lynch’s Dune. “And Catch-22,” adds Bordwell. “There’s almost a rule in film studies: the better or more famous the novel, the worse the films are likely to be. The best films adapted from literature tend to be from mid-range literature, pulp literature, like The Godfather, where a masterpiece is made out of something no one would consider very promising material.”
With Lord of the Rings, suspicion lasted right up to the 11th hour. In a Wired magazine feature by counter-culture journalist Erik Davis, the point was made that “Tolkien enthusiasm is the champagne of fandoms” and that fans were always going to be hard to win over. So how were they won over?
“Even though the story was changed quite a bit to make it more accessible to a broad general public,” Thompson says, “part of what appealed to the fans was the design, the incredible work that Richard Taylor and Ngila Dickson and others put into it, and the fact that [Tolkien artists] Alan Lee and John Howe were asked to be supervisors of the design process. So much of it came out looking just like the descriptions in the book. There was this sense of capturing Middle Earth. And there are aspects of the film that are better than the book. Sean Bean’s Boromir, for example, is a much more interesting character than in the book.”
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