TheOneRing.net alerts us to the fact that the LOTR official website has been redesigned in preparation for the April 6 release of the theatrical-version DVDs. Pre-orders are available.

So far there’s not a whole lot there, and maybe it will never grow large. I’m glad I still have my “Wizards” screensaver, acquired c. 2002, since all those and the other free downloads seem to be gone. (They did remain available for a long time.)

Not surprisingly, the old New Line shop is nowhere to be found. LOTR stuff is now sold on Warner Bros.’ online shop. There are still a few of the old franchise items on offer in the various categories–the Noble chess set and a half dozen or so of the Sideshow Weta figures and so on.

There’s also a link to the LOTR Facebook site. I’m rather glad that Facebook and Twitter weren’t around when I was researching the LOTR film trilogy and the internet. I’m on Facebook, but I’m barely active there, and I don’t tweet. In those days it was mostly Yahoo! groups and personal websites. Live Journal wasn’t even a factor yet.

I have to admit that the trilogy is slipped further back into history, but the franchise, however reduced, continues

Recently a gimmick has been popping up in the film blogosphere. You take three frames from a film, determined randomly by timing, and write something about each. A professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy, Nicholas Rombes, came up with the idea on his blog back in February. He chose 10, 40, and 70 minutes as the moments when he would grab a frame from Oceans Twelve and “analyze” it.

Now Dan North, who teaches film in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, has taken this notion and applied it to The Lord of the Rings film. Given the length of the trilogy’s parts, he writes about four for each.

You can find the discussion of Fellowship here, Towers here, and Return here.

North admits to not being a big fan of the trilogy, and he didn’t rewatch the films for this little exercise. Not surprisingly, there are errors, as when the Council of Elrond is said to be taking place at Lothlórien. One of his research areas is digital performers, so in shots of Gollum or armies of orcs, he tends to talk about the effectiveness of the computer graphics rather than the importance of the shot in the context of the entire film.

Through sheer luck, for Return his random frames included two drinking scenes: Aragorn’s toast to the dead soldiers from the Helm’s Deep battle and the hobbits drinking in the pub late in the film. North makes some cogent remarks and comparisons. Overall, it’s not my idea of real film analysis, which is the opposite of random in its choices of significant relationships within artworks. Still, some of what North says is interesting and worth checking out.

I just ran across an interview with Rod Perry, the creative director and co-president of The Ant Farm. That’s the company that makes a lot of the trailers for Hollywood’s big releases, including LOTR.

He makes an interesting remark about LOTR: “Perry recalls how relieved executives at New Line Cinema felt when the very first focus group — yes, trailers get focus-grouped, just like movies — for the trailer the Ant Farm made for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring responded enthusiastically to it.” Given how little finished footage those executives would have seen by then, I can imagine that they were relieved! Anyway, check out the interview to read about other trailers and the process by which they’re made.

Thanks to Paulo Pereira for alerting me to an interview with Viggo Mortensen conducted by Total Film Magazine. There’s an excerpt posted on its website. The announcement just says the full interview is in the “new issue,” which I suppose is either the February or March one.

The excerpt is entirely about The Hobbit and LOTR films. He expresses his willingness to play Aragorn in The Hobbit, if the character does figure in the script. It’s not unthinkable, since Aragorn is living at Rivendell at the time the events of The Hobbit occur. Of course, when Tolkien wrote the novel, Aragorn hadn’t been invented yet, so there’s no mention of him. According to Appendix B of LOTR, Aragorn would have been ten years old when Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves dropped by for a two week visit. Of course, that counts the 17 years between Bilbo’s farewell birthday and Frodo’s departure from Hobbiton. The film version of LOTR doesn’t have that 17-year gap. It’s not clear how long it takes for Gandalf to get to Minas Tirith, read the scroll, and get back to tell Frodo about the Ring. At any rate, assuming it’s less than a year, by the film’s chronology, Aragorn would be about 27 at the time when The Hobbit’s action takes place. Of course, that also assumes that Bilbo will be protrayed as 50 years old in the film, as he is in the book.

So, a young Aragorn could make at least a brief appearance. And with the new de-aging make-up and digital techniques that were used so effectively for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Viggo could be made to plausibly look 27.

Viggo doesn’t sound entirely enthusiastic about the idea, though: “I’m interested in principle, but I’d want to see it done in the right spirit of Tolkien.” Comparing the Hobbit project with LOTR, he adds, “I don’t know if it’ll be as big a circus in terms of several people writing changes at the last minute.”

Viggo also expresses his opinion about changes between The Fellowship of the Ring, which he sees as the most character-oriented of the trilogy’s three parts, and the other two, which he sees as more dominated by special effects. “You can’t argue with the films’ success, but had it been me, I would have focused less on the effects and more on the characterisations.”

He definitely approves of Guillermo as the choice to direct The Hobbit instead of Peter: “He’s strongminded, intelligent and probably just as stubborn.” Judging from GDT’s remarks in the interview I linked to the other day, Viggo may well be right!

I learn from TheOneRing.net that some new photos have been posted on the “trilogytrail” page of Glenorchy Air’s website. They show the Edoras set on Mount Sunday under construction. Andrew Rutherford posted them and credits “a third party” for them. Readers of The Frodo Franchise may recall that I interviewed Janet and Robert Rutherford, the founders and owners of Glenorchy Air, which was involved in flying cast, crew, and equipment into some of the more remote locations on the South Island. They still operate the trilogytrail tour, which flies people over the spectacular mountains of that area, stopping at some of the shooting locations. There are eleven photos, guaranteed to arouse nostalgic feeling in Rings fans.

TheOneRing.net calls our attention to an article by Jonathan Dean, “The battle for Middle Earth [sic],” posted on The Independent online. It’s a very strange article, in that it contains no news whatsoever, and reads like the kinds of pro-and-con pieces that were being published and posted just after Guillermo Del Toro was confirmed to direct The Hobbit and its sequel.

Dean seems to be distinctly more a fan of GDT’s films than of Peter’s trilogy, and he drags out and dusts off some old quotations to suggest that it’s just as well that a new director has taken over. The subtext seems to be worries about whether Peter will allow Guillermo the necessary artistic freedom for him to create something as good as Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone. (I just watched the latter for the first time recently, by the way, and highly recommend it.) On the whole, the article is fairly accurate in its facts, though it places Peter’s lawsuit against New Line Cinema as post-September, 2006. It was actually filed in early 2005.

To me the interesting thing about this essay is not the actual content but the fact that its author or The Independent thinks that people are interested in the issue of why Peter elected not to direct The Hobbit and brought in GDT instead. It’s a slow news period for the project, and the whole question of the choice of GDT has long since been thrashed out all over the internet. The author makes it seem relevant by ending with references to some of the other big franchise films that are due to be released, all of them much sooner than The Hobbit. More evidence that the Frodo franchise is still news, I guess.

As if to confirm that, TheOneRing.net also links to the Washington Post’s online review of the 12-inch Gandalf doll–excuse me, collectible figure–from Sideshow. Its author, Joseph Szadkowski, says that his examination is “tongue in cheek,” but he’s clearly quite taken with this figure and its elaborate set of costumes and props. The text reads like something Sideshow itself would put out as publicity, and Szadkowski ends up exhorting his readers to buy it. More evidence as to how far infotainment has gone toward essentially being promotion for the franchises it covers.

I must say, the photo of the Gandalf figure confronting Sideshow’s Indiana Jones figure has the latter looking a little nervous. As well he might.

On June 8, Chris “Calisuri” Pirrotta, one of the co-founders of TheOneRing.net, was interviewed on the “Fictional Frontiers” program on WNJC 1360 am, Philadelphia. TORN has posted a transcript here. There are main topics of conversation. One is the history of TORN, including the three Oscar-night parties of 2002, 2003, and 2004. Much of this will be familiar to readers of The Frodo Franchise, since I interviewed Chris and some other TORN people for the book. Still, Chris provides additional information and a lot of details. He also goes over some of the main points of the recent Peter Jackson-Guillermo del Toro Q&A session.

I notice that Ian McKellen added a new “Bits and Bobs” entry to his E-Post on April 30. It has a few questions and answers relating to the trilogy. Ian’s previous update on the “Lord of the Rings” E-Post was on March 26, 2008–about two and a half years after the previous one. I guess he doesn’t get enough questions about LOTR these days to make up entire entries devoted to it worthwhile more than occasionally. Now that Ian has been confirmed to play Gandalf again, let’s hope he’ll eventually start an E-Post specifically for the Hobbit films. In the meantime, if you have any questions relating to the trilogy, try sending them in, and perhaps webmaster Keith Stern will be able to assemble another “Lord of the Rings” E-Post. Here’s the form to fill out.

Entertainment Weekly has a ranking of the top 25 fan websites, and TheOneRing.net is not only on it, but is up at number 6. Not bad for a site devoted to a trilogy that ended four years ago! Of course, now TORN is the go-to site for info on The Hobbit project, but I suspect the ranking was devised before the big news about that broke last week.

The TORN people were incredibly helpful when I was doing the research for The Frodo Franchise, and I’ve got a case study of the site in my chapters on LOTR and the internet. It’s great to see it getting this kind of recognition. Congratulations to the TORN team!

When I was working on The Frodo Franchise, I bought quite a few things on eBay. The thought was that I might need to photograph licensed products to use as illustrations. All the novel-related licensed objects that appear in the picture on page 11 came from eBay. I ended up with, to say the least, a lot of stuff I didn’t use in the book. Still, some of it is fun to have for its own sake and some is proving useful for publicity photos. Yesterday I got my picture taken for a local newspaper story. I was standing looking over the top of my Kia promotional standee. more »