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.

I caught an interesting story on “All Things Considered” yesterday. Three young men, Isaiah Saxon, Sean Hellfritsch, and Daren Rabinovitch, have started a combination subsistence farm called Trout Gulch and cutting-edge animation company called Encyclopedia Pictura in the San Francisco area. One of them described it: “We’re building a Twenty-first Century hobbit village.” The reporter on the story, John Kalish, remarks, “Describing this place as a hobbit village isn’t that far off the mark.”

Physically the resemblance is loose at best. There’s a photo on the NPR website showing one of the “grass huts” that trio have built for themselves, with a solar panel next to it to run the inhabitant’s laptop. Of course, not all hobbits live in holes; some live in houses, but they probably don’t much resemble the one shown. The group raises crops and has a herd of goats to provide cheese. Encyclopedia Pictura has made innovative, prize-winning ads (only for products the trio would use themselves) and a Björk video (imbedded in the abridged transcription of the story on the website).

One thing that struck me is that neither the interviewee nor the interviewer felt it necessary to explain what a hobbit village is or why environmentally friendly farming might be a hobbit-like thing to do. I guess hobbits have penetrated the culture to the point where it’s not necessary.

The dual projects did strike me as having a certain Tolkien-inspired tone. Tolkien never said he was against progress or technology as such. His complaint was about things like pollution, destruction of trees and other plants, and the coarsening of modern culture by machines. I suspect he would approve of a pair of projects like Trout Gulch and Encyclopedia Pictura. Saxon, Hellfritsch, and Rabinovitch don’t say that they were directly inspired by Tolkien’s work to take such an approach to living and working, but it sounds quite possible. The farm’s website is here, and the production company’s here.

Back in March of last year, I reported that the Wellington airport was planning to put up a “Hollywood”-style sign on the side of a green-zone ridge on the western side of the Miramar peninsula proclaiming “Wellywood.” At the time there were some legal rumblings from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Apparently those have come to nothing, and the airport is going ahead with the plan (according to Stuff.co.nz). Back in 2010, 44% of local residents surveyed by Stuff.co.nz approved of the idea, and there was a mixed response in general. Now the overall attitude seems to be that the sign is crass and unnecessary. Positively Wellington Tourism’s spokesman is among the few approving: “One of the things for Wellington is that the world talks about us, and the sign is a mechanism for that.”

The idea is that planes landing at the airport will give those on the left side a view of the sign as they arrive in the city. On days when the wind dictates an approach from the south (over the water), the sign would not be visible.

I personally think the sign would be a good idea. My own memory of that ridge is going through the gap in it by taxi numerous times and being greeted by signs warning dog owners that poison had been put down to reduce the local possum population. “Wellywood” would be a considerable improvement on that!

The New Zealand Herald has posted a brief story revealing that the producer of the Spartacus TV series is having trouble finding enough crew members in the country. Why? Peter Jackson has hired about 500 of the top behind-the-camera film talent in the country.

Producer of TV’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Rob Tapert said he had recruited crew members from Australia, Canada and Eastern Europe because Jackson “sucked up” local talent, according to OnFilm Magazine.

Tapert has found it particularly difficult to find Kiwi make-up artists and stunt performers.

The labor disputes of last year seem to have put the production a little on the defensive:

3 Foot 7 publicist for The Hobbit Ceris Price said most of the crew had worked on Lord of the Rings. “They are here because they want to work on our production. It’s a free world,” Price said.

In Chapter 10 of The Frodo Franchise, I discussed the “up-skilling” of filmmaking talent in New Zealand during the production of LOTR. Before that shoot, there were very few trained make-up artists and stunt performers, let alone sound mixers and other technicians. There are a lot more now, but when a few major productions requiring similar specialties are filming at the same time, foreign talent still needs to be brought in.

New Zealand’s Channel 3 ran a brief story on events in Wellington, and it’s now available on YouTube. The opening mentions the spy photos on TheOneRing.net that I linked to yesterday, including, as the news-reader puts it, pictures of Martin Freeman as “Bilbo Braggins.” Security guards have taken notice, according to the story, and actors now have to go about with hoods and umbrellas to avoid the intrusive telephoto lens. (Of course, with Wellington’s year-round changeable weather, there could be other reasons for those hoods and umbrellas.) It’s difficult for the security to stop high-angle telephoto pics, since there’s a high ridge of public green space sitting right by the Stone Street Studios. That’s where I took my photos of the facility for my book (including one used here).

On the other side of the ridge is the airport, and the “plane-spotters,” who use cell phones to alert the filmmakers when planes take off and land, stand atop the ridge. As fans know, such spotters were used for LOTR, and now they’re obviously in place for The Hobbit.

The story goes on to cover the re-opening of the 1930s Roxy movie theatre, including footage of Peter Jackson in his Rocketeer outfit and of Ian McKellen getting off some quips before officially cutting the ribbon.

The website Middle-earth News interviewed Jack Machiela back on March 8, but I just caught up with it. Jack lives in Wellington, works as a guide for Wellington Rover Tours, and runs the informative Noldor Blog. (I wrote about Wellington Rover Tours for Chapter 10 of The Frodo Franchise, having interviewed its founder, Jason Bragg.)

Jack talks about celebrities he has met around Wellington, his favorite Rings locations, and where to get a good cup of coffee or a sandwich in the area.

Maybe there’s not much news leaking out about the Hobbit filming, but the news from Wellington is picking up. Stuff.co.nz reports on the re-opening of the renovated Roxy Theatre, a 1930s movie house in Wellington that was given its makeover thanks to a group including Jamie Selkirk and Tania Rodger.

Three Dwarves–Steven Hunter, Adam Brown, and Graham McTavish–and a Hobbit, Martin Freeman, flank PJ (Photo by Keven Stent)

Among the 300 invited guests were Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis, the mayor of Wellington, and two cabinet ministers. Ian McKellen cut the ceremonial ribbon and pointed out that he was the only guest present actually born in the same decade when the theatre was originally built. (Ian is vintage 1939.) A mysterious guest costumed in a vintage Rocketeer outfit  turned out to be none other than Peter Jackson. (I would guess that the costume is from his own extensive collection.)

The Dominion Post has published a lengthy, fascinating story on the changes in the communities on the Miramar Peninsula since Peter Jackson’s filmmaking empire was created. It’s available online at stuff.co.nz.

When I was doing my research on the LOTR back in 2003-2004, Miramar was a sleepy little area of modest houses, aging shops, and aging factories and warehouses that got turned into production facilities. (The Stone Street Studios were formerly a paint factory, and Weta Workshop set up its motion-capture studio in an old ice-cream factory.) On sunny days when I had a long gap between interviews, it was a pleasure to walk around on the central flat area or climb the steep path up over the ridge that separates Miramar from Seatoun, the eastern suburb facing out over Chaffers Passage (the body of water leading to Wellington Harbour) and the mountains beyond. (In the photo below, the ridge is in the distance at the left, and the mountains across the strait are visible beyond.) more »

The coverage of the SXSW Film Festival on Cnet includes an interview with Frank Rose. He’s the editor of Wired and author of the new book, The Art of Immersion, which he describes as “essentially about how the Internet is changing storytelling.” For it he interviewed, among others, James Cameron back when he was working on Avatar.

Rose points out that Cameron’s team and its new technology built on the breakthrough work for The Lord of the Rings:

He took what Peter Jackson and his crew had done with Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” and scaled it up dramatically. That was one character, with sort of like hand animation. And Cameron scaled it up in dramatic fashion to do dozens of characters that way, and, by the way, used the same people to do it.

The “same people,” of course, being the CGI experts at Weta Digital.

Eventually, I suppose, CGI and performance capture will evolve far enough away from LOTR that the connection to Gollum won’t be mentioned as much. But he was the first really convincing digital character, and his place in the history books is assured.

Tom Cardy has begun blogging for the Dominion Post under the title “Wellywood Confidential.” The first post is a meditation on the notion of the country’s capital also being the center of the film industry. He traces the first use of the term Wellywood back to August, 1998. That makes sense, given that that was the month when New Line announced that it would be producing the film. Of course, it had been in pre-production about 18 months by then, but then-producer Miramax had kept the whole thing a secret. Relatively few people knew about it, and there probably wasn’t any talk of “Wellywood” any earlier.

Naturally Cardy credits LOTR with having transformed Wellington into the thriving production center it has become.