Being a Tolkien fan is all about the reading experience

It occurred to me the other day that I could probably be classified as a bit of a Tolkien fan. I’ve been soaking up Tolkien’s books ever since I was about 10.

I had to pose in the entrance of the 2012 Hobbit Artisan Market in Wellington …but that’s the limit of geek, for me.

I must have read The Lord Of The Rings a dozen times or more. The Hobbit as often. I have the maps, I saw the movies, and I went to the exhibition of movie props.

But I wouldn’t call myself a total Tolkien fan. I don’t dress up in the costumes – you know, green cloaks that render you invisible against green grass, green rocks, green water, green sky etc.

My copy of The Lord Of The Rings is from three different editions. Nor do I collect memorabilia, or go to Armageddon comic-con gatherings to ogle merchandise and be photographed beside the guy who swept the studio floor on alternate Sundays while they were shooting out-takes for The Return of the King.

It is a limited kind of enthusiasm; and I also view what Tolkien did in a literary sense with a suitably critical eye; he wasn’t perfect, and he wrote a lot of stuff the hard way.

So what is it, for me? Well, it’s the reading experience. Tolkien created a world that became real for the reader. He did it by description – if you open The Lord Of The Rings at virtually any page, you’ll find evocative descriptions of the settings – the sounds, the smells, the feel.

He did it by depth; his world was rich with its own mythology and history, rich with culture, with language, with peoples of all kinds, all of them carefully described.

Not actually Rohan. Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse, in the top of Lindis Pass.

He did it with scope; his themes struck chords with the very heart of western thinking, western mythology, and western culture; epic battles between good and evil, between right and wrong. Clear-cut, scarcely shaded in any greys.

And he did it by giving us heroes we could identify with – not Aragorn, who was the archetypal mythic  hero; but the hobbits, who were ordinary, everyday folk. Effectively, people like us – people who we could identify with and journey with, who became heroic.

A message of hope, swathed in all the things that speak to our sense of culture, right, wrong – and place.

That’s why I like Tolkien. Have you read his books? What draws you to them – for you, is it the reading experience, or something else?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more writing tips, humour geekery and other stuff.

A small eternity watching ‘The Hobbit’: a personal view

On the weekend my wife and I went to see The Hobbit.

The Hobbit is one of my favourite books, Jackson is one of my favourite directors, and we live where it was made – there has been a buzz around Wellington for years. Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings – all three parts – was stunning. It was stunning as a story, stunning for Jackson’s deft handling of an epic canvas. Stunning for its effects.

Gollum in Wellington airport passenger terminal – a marvellous example of the model-maker’s art.

So we had plenty of build-up for this one. And in many ways it did not disappoint. The actors were superb. The effects were brilliant. The set dressing was astonishing. The attention to detail was incredible. I wasn’t worried that the movie bore only passing resemblance to the book, either. Movies are different media – they require different handling, especially this time. Jackson has taken Tolkien’s low-key story of a quest for treasure – explicitly, Bilbo’s hero journey – and turned it into a nine hour epic. That meant it had to be significantly deepened.

Weta’s 10-metre high Gandalf above the Embassy theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington.

There was just one small problem.  Nothing happened other than a relentless bang-bang-bang succession of chases and (literally) pit-falls.  The movie was about half over when my wife whispered in my ear. ‘Are we there yet?’ We weren’t. Eventually the end credits rolled. ‘Well,’ my wife said. ‘That was awful.’  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s three hours of our lives we won’t get back.’

What happened? To me, the main problem was that it hadn’t been deepened enough – or properly structured. The existing Hobbit plot was stretched, thinly, across a three-hour movie-scape in which other material seemed to intrude, sometimes for no obvious reason. It opened with a loving, nostalgic reprise of The Fellowship of The Ring, which didn’t seem to do anything for the plot other than add fan-fic style ’completeness’. It took over an hour for the story to actually get going, and then, as my wife put it, the thing felt at times like a succession of out-takes from The Fellowship of the Ring, slung into a bucket. I got the impression, at times, that I had been watching The Hobbit re-written as rather mediocre fan fiction.

That diorama from another angle.

Structure is everything with fiction – novels and movies alike. In the specific, to me the main over-arching plot, leading to the ‘big boss’ battle at the very end – was Azog’s quest for revenge. This was a new element, not envisaged by Tolkien. Unfortunately, Azog kept turning up to intensify danger or push chases along, without real build-up or tension – more melodrama than drama. But in any case, the whole thing needed a more epic plot to match the scale of movie, the scale of effects, and the scale of the settings; and Tolkien’s legendarium has many gigantic elements that could have been brought in – from the origin of dragons as corrupted Maiar and servants of Morgoth, to the full back-story of Sauron deceiving the elves into forging rings.

The other problem was tone. It came across to me as an awkward juxtaposition between Jackson-style slapstick – not much related to Tolkien’s gentle brand of intellectual humour – and deep, dark seriousness, which the plot elements didn’t quite match.

To me the strength of the 1937 Hobbit novel was tightness and the fact that the magic and wonder of Bilbo’s world unfolded for us as it did for Bilbo. Along the way we watched Bilbo grow as a person.  All was presented with Tolkien’s gentle humour and pitched for its reading audience, initially his children. Tolkien’s characters were also discomfited by ordinary problems, such as rain and storms, which we can all identify with. It led them into adventure with trolls and goblins. The ordinary became the extraordinary – but one we could share because we had been led gently into it. I got none of that feel with the movie.

I am a huge fan of Tolkien. I am a huge fan of my fellow Wellingtonian, Sir Peter Jackson. But this movie didn’t do it for me.  The Gollum riddle game, which was truly masterful, went some way towards redeeming the whole. But not far enough.

What did this movie do for you?

In post-scriptum, we found succour on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrKXH1CeXck

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Write It Now, Part 2; more on kindness; and picture inspirations from earthquake-hit Christchurch.

What’s your favourite model? A tribute to Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi

What’s your favourite model? It’s a question one answers with care when it comes from your wife. ‘Thunderbird 2,’ I said cheerfully.

Thunderbird 2 was the heavy-lift rescue aircraft of Gerry Anderson’s iconic 1960s series Thunderbirds. To this day I have memories of watching it on a black-and-white TV. I was four.

Anderson died today aged 83. And he has, I think, left an indelible mark on pop-culture, certainly for the generation brought up with his sci-fi TV shows.

As a kid I was glued to Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, UFO and Space 1999. And so was everybody I knew. We got them later than everybody else, here in New Zealand, and what I didn’t know was that back in the swinging 60′s, Thunderbirds were hip. Anderson and his first wife Sylvia were the darlings of the London set. Even the Thunderbirds call-sign ‘F.A.B.’ echoed the moment. What did it mean? Nothing, according to Anderson – it was a reference to the in-word of the day. Fab(ulous).

All was done with models, mostly in 1/72 scale, often using kit parts, and with 1/3 scale puppets rigged with solenoids to make the mouths move in synch, a technique Anderson dubbed ‘Supermarionation’. Even the live-action shows UFO (which tackled adult themes and was edgy for 1970) and Space 1999 pivoted on top-rate model-work and special effects. The man responsible was Derek Meddings, and to my mind his work still stands up today, the UFO ‘moon’ effects, particularly.

The imagery is iconic – here’s ‘Brains’, in-show inventor who built the nuclear-powered Thunderbirds rescue aircraft – break-dancing in a recent advert .

Anderson’s future was a heroic, optimistic world of engineering marvels that made anything possible. Nuclear power was a boon. What’s more, in the “2065″ of Thunderbirds, interplanetary travel was a rarity and humans hadn’t reached Mars – something, I suspect, that will prove more prescient than we think.

For the rest - well, reality hasn’t co-operated. But we can’t fault the optimism. Or the pleasure Anderson gave to generations of children – and adults.

Have you seen these shows? What impact did they have on you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Soaking up the down-town party buzz on Hobbit premiere day

It’s been Hobbit party time today in Wellington, and I took a walk to party central – Courtenay Place – early afternoon to check it out.

Probably Bert and Tom, I think. Two of the three ‘life size’ trolls. Cool.

Yes, THIS is the red carpet laid out for the stars…later…

Don’t do anything orc-ward,’ my wife told me when I left the house. We have lame conversations like that quite often.

Courtenay Place is the main café district. It’s our equivalent of the Rue de Lafayette in Paris - only on fast-forward and micro-sized.

It’s often crowded – but the crowds this time were thicker than I’ve ever seen, the mood electric, happy, excited. People have been camping out since last night to get good places for the red carpet walk by the stars before the evening world premiere showing of The Hobbit -  An Unexpected Journey.

Hobbit food?

Crowds are expected to top 120,000 – 2.6 percent of New Zealand’s entire population, all jammed into a half-kilometre stretch of inner city street. That’s also a fair chunk of the population of greater Wellington. Special trains were laid on for everybody coming in.

Put another way, a proportionate crowd in the US would top 8.08 MILLION people, all going to this one event.

Blowing the dirt off the red carpet.

Now, which star do these people like?

But even 120,000 is a fair crowd, especially when they’re rammed into a linear kilometre (and where the public toilets at the southern end just got turned into a cafe).

That is why my wife and I decided not to go to the premiere street party. Jostling through packed people while failing to get a view isn’t our thing.

Besides, it’s being shown on national TV, live. A way better view, up front.

But I still wanted to soak up the buzz and feel of the event. So I went down early afternoon anyway to see what was happening.

For me it was just as important to get a feel for the emotion of it – for the excitement as it built – as it was to attend the moment itself. This movie has captured Kiwi imaginations in a fantastic way. More so than The Lord Of The Rings. It bas become OUR movie, OUR national triumph.

And I found the mood electric. There were people with Gandalf hats, people with themed shirts. People with signs. People waiting out the day in the sun – all of them happy, having fun, laughing, just having a great time.

It’s a lot more, for us, than just a movie of a great fantasy story made into a movie by a local boy-done-good. Why? I’ll blog about that in the next and – for the moment – final post on this very exciting local engagement with John Tolkien and his fantastic creation. And I have to wonder. What would Tolkien have thought of this? Of a whole nation taking to the streets in joy and celebration, because their imaginations had been captured by something he’d written? Food for thought.

Meanwhile – here are the pictures. Enjoy.

Even early afternoon there were lots of people. Some had been camping overnight.

Says it all, really.

Readying for the VIP’s and dignitaries.

A stage had been set on Kent Terrace – cleverly positioned to give the illusion of continuity with the Bag End door on the fascia of the theatre about 30 metres behind. Double cool.

Courtenay Place is also a main bus route – but not today.

Sneaking around behind Bert. Well, it was daylight…

I’m going to wait for the rush to settle down a bit before heading off to see the movie. I’m not sure whether with all the whistles and bells yet either. Kind of tossing up which cinema to go to. The Embassy – where the premiere is showing –  is set up for full 48 fps, the sound system, and 3D. But the seats are pretty uncomfortable. Um.

Are you going to the movie when it opens worldwide in a fortnight? I’d love to hear from you!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Some penultimate Hobbit excitement before the premier

I thought I’d share a final link-list of what’s been happening in Wellington today for The Hobbit premiere. The stars are in town, and so is a large media contingent from the US and Europe.

Hobbit stars Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis and others visited the ‘Zealandia’ wildlife reserve:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/8002657/Hobbit-stars-visit-Zealandia

The Hobbit stars and J R R Tolkien’s great grandson came into Wellington this morning on Air New Zealand’s Hobbit-painted Boeing 777-300:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/8003418/Actors-arrive-aboard-Hobbit-plane

Peter Jackson reveals that The Hobbit was nearly filmed in Britain after an industrial dispute here in 2010:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/8002222/Hobbit-was-nearly-filmed-in-Britain

Here’s an interview with Andy Serkis on being Gollum:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/7999763/Andy-Serkis-Getting-under-Gollums-skin

On Wednesday, 28 November, there’s a parade through central Wellington leading down to the premier at the Embassy cinema on Courtenay Place. And then it’s going to be all over. I’ll be back to my usual blogging topics after that. Oh, and hanging out to watch the movie… obviously…

Are you planning to go see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey? And when? How do you figure Jackson, Walsh and Boyens have adapted it?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

The spy and ‘The Hobbit’

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien fielded a few letters from readers about The Hobbit, after it was published in 1937.

One of them was from fellow author Arthur Ransome, whose Swallows and Amazons series was in full swing that decade – charming camping and sailing stories set mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. They are still wonderful reading today, classic inter-war period pieces that put Enid’s Blighters in their place.

Ransome’s books sold like hotcakes – he was the 1930s equivalent of J K Rowling. Those stories also carry an innocent charm that belies Ransome’s darker secret.

He was a journalist, sent to Moscow in 1917 as correspondent for the Guardian. Here he ended up hob-nobbing in the highest circles of the Soviet administration. He played chess with Lenin and then romanced – and married – Leon Trotsky’s secretary Evegnia.

Arthur Ransome wearing his press corps uniform, public domain from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

When he got back to Britain in 1919, MI5 arrested him for being a Soviet spy. ‘What are your politics?’ Special Branch head Sir Basil Thomson demanded. ‘Fishing,’ Ransome allegedly replied.

But Ransome was actually a double agent, passing Soviet details back to MI6, who had recruited him in Stockholm in 1918. Alas, it seems MI6 failed to tell MI5 of the deal. Oops.

Ransome put all that behind him in the 1920s, retiring to the Lake District where he shortly began writing his childrens stories.

While Ransome was convalescing in Norwich hospital from surgery in 1938, he read an early edition of The Hobbit, and felt moved to write to Tolkien. His gripe? He disliked Tolkien’s use of the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ as the generic term to describe hobbits, dwarves and wizards. Tolkien protested; in Old English usage it was correct.

But it seems Tolkien did make Ransome’s recommended change in the second edition.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

A mashup o’links for Hobbit fans

Amidst a growing Hobbit frenzy I thought I’d list a few news stories that have been making headlines here in New Zealand. I don’t know how far these have got worldwide:

1. The Tolkien estate are suing Warner Bros
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/movies/news/article.cfm?c_id=200&objectid=10848954

2. Sir Ian McKellen’s thoughts on being Gandalf the Grey
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/7985801/Sir-Ian-on-Gandalfs-return

3. A story about Tolkien’s grandson and the price of fame
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/7973207/Downside-of-fame-for-Tolkien-family

4. Waikato university researchers will be using Google to study the impact of The Hobbit movie worldwide
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7969342/Researchers-study-The-Hobbit

 5. Matamata is preparing for a tourist boom. Hobbiton is nearby. A while back I saw Graeme Norton ridiculing  Elijah Wood on TV for saying Hobbiton was ‘real’. But Wood had been there. The town was made by Jackson’s production company out of proper concrete, 4 x 2 timbers and durable materials, complete with the mill and the Green Dragon inn. Now shooting’s over, it will be a tourist attraction.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/movies/news/article.cfm?c_id=200&objectid=10848911

6. Meet the dwarves
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10848833

7. A Radio NZ Journalist was dis-accredited, but since re-accredited, to cover the premiere
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10849177

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Underwhelmed by the middle of Middle Earth

As readers of this blog will perhaps have noticed from a few subtle hints, I’m a bit of a Tolkien fan.

Wellington has been in The Hobbit buzz for a while. It’s been dubbed the ‘middle of Middle Earth’. Visitors arriving at the airport walk underneath Gollum diving for fish; and the baggage conveyor door looks like Bag End. There’s a Nazgul rampant on horse in a bookshop down Lambton Quay. And a lot of other stuff.

Yesterday I hastened with She Who Must Be Obeyed to check out the Hobbit Artisan Market in downtown Wellington.

I had to go prone to take this picture. ‘Get up,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted. ‘People will think you’re dead.’

Yes, like a geeky Tolkien fan I had to pose in the entrance, such as it was – you could circle it, just like the door Aslan made to get rid of the Telmarines in .Prince Caspian’.

We were looking forward to this market. Well, She Who Must Be Obeyed was, I’m not entirely into ‘crafts’, evidenced by my idea of looking for an Elven cloak that could render the wearer invisible against green grass, green sky, green rocks, green water and green desert, etc. But there was promise of other stuff and I’m a bit of a sucker for Tolkien’s world. Not that I might have revealed this before.

We found the market in the shadow of one of Wellington’s best streamline moderne buildings – the 1940 Post Office headquarters, now converted to apartments.

The giant ring marking the entrance to the market was on its lonesome in the corner of the park, attracting people wanting to be photographed. Ahem…including me…cough cough, I am not a fan geek, cough…

Possibly Smaug. Possibly not.

Apropos the foreshadowed glories within? Not so much. Even as a craft market, the place lacked wow factor for us. There were stalls selling food, with long queues. There were tents with people selling jewellery, figurines, wool and nicknacks.

There was a Weta Cave tent, selling Hobbit-themed 3D glasses, Dr Grordbort’s books, and a few odds and sods.

There was entertainment-for-kids with remote speakers blasting inane commentary across the park. A big screen was displaying The Hobbit trailers which we’ve had around on YouTube for the last millennium. And – uh – that was about it.

This was the best aisle of craft stalls. That’s also because it was the only aisle…

These people are all talented artists, no question – but something had come adrift in the way it was set up. We left after about half an hour and went to see the latest exhibition in Tracy Island Te Papa, the national museum.

Roll on the movie.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

My regular ‘Inspirations’ series returns next Sunday.

Checking out the venue for The Hobbit premiere

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

The Hobbit movie tipped my sacred cow. But then I got wise.

Does it bother you that Peter Jackson’s forthcoming trio of Hobbit movies probably won’t bear too much resemblance to the book. It worried me.

It’s impossible to miss The Hobbit around Wellington. A lot of it is to do with promoting stamps. Here, a procession of dwarves march around the podium of the New Zealand Post headquarters. Curiously, it’s directly over the road from the building Jackson used to house the Minas Tirith throne room set in ‘The Return of the King’.

I mean, it is obvious Jackson is telling stories that weren’t in the book – that charming, 240 page kids’ story. It didn’t feature Galadriel, Saruman, Legolas, or Frodo, or Radagast directly, or any other of the characters we know Jackson has cast. All of them are pictured in the Hobbit Companion movie tie-in hardback I leafed through the other day.

At 240 pages, The Hobbit would likely translate into about two hours of screen time. Not nine. Or ten.

It worried me. Had Jackson ‘King Konged’ one of my favourite stories? But then I  started reading John Rateliff’s two volume history of The Hobbit. It’s a good run-down of how Tolkien wrote – and opened my eyes to something. Tolkien never stopped revising. I knew he’d made some changes. But not to the extent revealed by Rateliff.

The process began early. Legend has it that Tolkien wrote the opening line on the back of an exam paper – a teaser. The serious drafting began around 1930 as a story for his children, by intent more an extension of his Father Christmas letters than part of the Middle Earth mythos. This first draft began, like the final version, with a party in Bag End; but the detail was different – including the names. His wizard was not Gandalf, but Bladorthin. His chief dwarf was not Thorin, but Gandalf.

We know this because Tolkien – mostly – kept the drafts. Sometimes they were written on paper cribbed from exam books. Often they were written on foolscap. Sometimes they were typed. Sometimes they were hand-written. Tolkien tinkered. He revised. He pondered. He mused.

The more crucial point is that Tolkien’s conception of The Hobbit continued to evolve, after it was published. He re-wrote parts to fit The Lord Of The Rings, particularly the Gollum riddle scenes. Those made it into the 1951 second edition of The Hobbit, changing and darkening it. Tolkien also wrote back-story and side-story, some of which appeared in the appendices of The Lord Of The Rings. Some – a version featuring the adventure as seen by Gandalf – was eventually published in Unfinished Tales.

In 1960, Tolkien began re-writing The Hobbit altogether, in the style of The Lord of The Rings. He abandoned this version after Chapter 3 – but here was the darker, adult edition of the tale. A few elements made it into the third edition of The Hobbit. And it is the spirit of this, I suspect, that Jackson has adopted. It is what Tolkien intended for the book.

We’ll see. I didn’t line up outside the Embassy theatre to get tickets for the world premiere. I’ll wait for the rush to die down.

What do you think? Do you get up in arms when one of your sacred literary cows is tipped by a movie-maker? Talk to me!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012