The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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July 29 : 2011

Sharron Angle thinks she’s like a hobbit

Predictably enough, no one else does. The Tea Party’s members, as Alexandra Petri points out in a clever column in the Washington Post, are nothing like hobbits–apart from a shared taste for tea. As a devoted tea drinker myself, I suspect that the most of the Tea Party members have no special love for the beverage. (Just check out the teabags some of them use to adorn themselves and you’ll see what I mean.)

Petri compares the Tea Party with other races of Middle-earth and, being too ladylike to call them orcs, she says perhaps they are closest to Men, as exemplified by Boromir. I’d say that’s an insult to Boromir. Yes, he made a bad mistake, but as Gandalf suggests, he redeemed himself. Anyway, Petri has links to the main entries in this tempest in a Tea Party pot, including Angle’s own column on the subject, for those who are interested in the insane uses to which the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson are put to.

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    The Frodo Franchise
    by Kristin Thompson

    US flagbuy at best price

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    Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
    hardcover 978-0-520-24774-1
    421 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 12 color illustrations; 36 b/w illustrations; 1 map; 1 table

    “Once in a lifetime.”
    The phrase comes up over and over from the people who worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. The film’s 17 Oscars, record-setting earnings, huge fan base, and hundreds of ancillary products attest to its importance and to the fact that Rings is far more than a film. Its makers seized a crucial moment in Hollywood—the special effects digital revolution plus the rise of “infotainment” and the Internet—to satisfy the trilogy’s fans while fostering a huge new international audience. The resulting franchise of franchises has earned billions of dollars to date with no end in sight.

    Kristin Thompson interviewed 76 people to examine the movie’s scripting and design and the new technologies deployed to produce the films, video games, and DVDs. She demonstrates the impact Rings had on the companies that made it, on the fantasy genre, on New Zealand, and on independent cinema. In fast-paced, compulsively readable prose, she affirms Jackson’s Rings as one the most important films ever made.

    The Frodo Franchise

    cover of Penguin Books’ (NZ) edition of The Frodo Franchise, published September 2007. The tiny subtitle reads: “How ‘The Lord of the Rings’ became a Hollywood blockbuster and put New Zealand on the map.”