This piece first appeared in The St Austin Review
Myths and Movie Magic
The Lord of the Rings and Hollywood
By Dwight Longenecker
Evelyn Waugh famously hated Hollywood, and without doubt
the hobbit-like Tolkien would also have been horrified by
the brash vulgarity of tinsel-town. One wonders what he would
have made of it all if he were transported from the quiet
quads of Merton College to the world of stretch-limos, stretched
smiles and over-stretched egos which is Southern California.
Some years ago C.S.Lewis’s love life was given the Hollywood
treatment, and now Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has
finally been given a coat of Hollywood gloss. Apparently
the Tolkien family are not terribly happy about a cinematic Lord
of the Rings, but it is no good turning up a snooty English
nose and lamenting the fact that moguls and movie stars have
got their hands on Hobbitland. The book belongs to the people.
It has been massively popular from its first publication,
and much to the consternation of the literary un-intelligentsia,
it has been voted the twentieth century’s most popular book
over and over again.
The Lord of the Rings is perenially popular because
Tolkien actually succeeded in his wonderfully eccentric vision
of creating a myth for the English speaking people. Myths
are supposed to be popular for goodness sake. Hoi
polloi always like a good story, but there is more to
it than that. In a society where religion is de-based the
religious capability of myth comes into its own. The Star
Wars films have had the same mytho-religious effect.
So, for example, I heard of one sad soul who sits down to
watch Star Wars every Sunday morning. That Tolkien’s
myth has been adopted and adapted by Hollywood may dismay
the purists, but I think it should be applauded. The films
have attracted an awesome budget and will convey the story
to a whole new generation, and in this way the myth’s ‘intimations
of immortality’ will continue to echo through our cultural
wasteland.
But how did the Lord of the Rings find
its way to the screen? In fact, Tolkien himself never objected
in principle
to the story being filmed. At the end of the 1960s he sold
the film rights to MGM, and as early as 1957 when the idea
of an animated version was first proposed Tolkien was agreeable.
He wrote to his publisher, ‘I am quite prepared to play ball,
if they are open to advice.’ However, the conventional opinion
in Hollywood was that the epic was simply too complex and
the inhabitants of Middle Earth too impossible to realise
visually. Eventually the rights were bought by producer Saul
Zaentz. Zaentz managed to get an animated version made by
director Ralph Bakshi in 1978, but the project to make two
films encompassing the whole story was aborted half way through,
Bakshi’s cartoon was panned by the critics and it dropped
out of sight.
Part of the problem in filming Lord of the Rings has
been the difficulty in re-creating Middle Earth and its creatures
realistically enough. Only with the development of CGI (Computer
Generated Imagery) have the orcs, elves, dragons, sorcerers
and hobbits been able to come to life in a believable way.
The young New Zealand director Peter Jackson had used CGI
to great effect in earlier films in the mid-90s and knew
what magic could be devised using the computers. Jackson
convinced Zaentz to yield the rights to Tolkien’s work, then
he struck a deal with film financier Bob Shaye who said he
would only finance the project if Jackson made three films
and did the job properly. The deal was for $270 million.
It is easy to be shocked by
such a huge amount of money being spent on movies, but
one has to be realistic. The films
promise to be an excellent cinematic rendition of the masterpiece.
If the job was going to be done it is right that it has been
done as well as possible. It is true that such vast amounts
of money might have been used for ‘better’ purposes. But
it is also true that through the films Tolkien’s deeply Christian
myth will permeate the imagination of a huge audience of
ordinary people. As C.S.Lewis argued, through myth great
religious truths can be communicated in ways that disarm
the audience. The myth-maker can ‘steal past’ the religious
prejudices that destroy the ordinary person’s ability to
feel the truth of the Christian revelation. The Lord of
the Rings film trilogy may be expensive, but it will
touch the lives of a huge new audience. The fact that this
audience will be composed largely of young people may help
to achieve Tolkien’s aim of influencing our culture for the
better in a way that is deeper and wider than he ever could
have imagined.
Dwight Longenecker
used to be the film critic of The Universe. He has published
three religious
books, written several screenplays, three children’s books
and a novel.
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