I went for a walk yesterday and checked out the Embassy Theatre at the end of Courtenay Place, in Wellington. It’s where The Hobbit premiere is happening, and this week a ten-metre high diorama was installed across its frontage. Cool.
It’s a classic 1920s theatre, a well known Wellington landmark. It was refurbished about ten years ago for the Return Of The King premiere. Now it’s going to open The Hobbit. I don’t have tickets, but I will be seeing the movie at some stage soon. I have to say, I was impressed with the diorama. Gandalf must be 10 metres high. There’s also a count-down board. And, for motorcycle enthusiasts, that’s the Harley Davidson dealership next door. Doubly cool.
There’s a good deal of Hobbit-related stuff going on around town at the moment, including a craft fair this weekend.
I’m also reading John Rateliff’s The History of The Hobbit at the moment, an annotated run-down of how Tolkien actually wrote the original book. Fascinating stuff, and it’s got me thinking laterally about how drafts work for writers generally – what’s involved and how it happens. There is a structure. More tomorrow.
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012
Thanks for sharing the photos of the Hobbit opening. Amazing. I’ll have to pick up a copy of The History of the Hobbit. Those books had such a great influence on me. I want to know more about the man and his creative process.
It’s a fascinating book, perhaps too detailed in many ways – Rateliff even describes the physical manuscripts, where inks changed, the nature of Tolkien’s pen-and-ink emendations (including where they are unreadable) and so forth.
[...] As readers of this blog will perhaps have noticed from a few subtle hints, I’m a bit of a Tolkien fan. [...]