Fifth Avenue Forum

The original LOTR trilogy - in EE form - remains the crowning achievement of cinema imo. Filming 3 epics of that scope simultaneously, inventing new technologies to make it happen, remaining as faithful to the original text as they could.... it's just so amazing.

Yarns!

So one of my good friends that I ran with back in the day was the creative director at New Line home video at the time; the first thing she worked on was the EPK for the DVD release of Se7en, which they sent out to the media in a plain brown box with tufts of blonde hair sticking out. The artwork/design/packaging for the LOTR EE DVDs was 100% her conception. Like, she was the one who personally pitched getting Alan Lee to do exclusive pencil sketches for the inside of the DVDs. (He may have submitted about ten or so other sketches that were unused, the whereabouts of which remain........... well......... I'll just say I made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt at liberating a scroll containing an unknown number of them in 2001) I was part of a group of like half a dozen or so of her friends who were her 'technical consultants' for the trilogy.... we were largely responsible for the inclusion of the maps in the EE set, because my friend's boss didn't see the value of including them, and we were all like "do you realize that Chris Tolkien drew the Maps for the books? That John Ronald plotted the books around the geography??? The Maps are a character!" blah blah blah.... we made such a stink that the exec eventually saw the light, and so the little fold out map that comes with the DVD/BluRay in the EE is there in part owing to yours truly. We were supposed to get credited as advisors for the EE discs, but then Peter Jackson promised to give credits to all of the members of TORN and so my little group of nerds got bumped.

Over the course of several moves of house they have been battered and broken, but as recompense for being excluded from the credits of the EE DVDs, my friend gave me the final production samples of the Argonath bookends that were included with the FOTR release. They were one-of-a-kind at the time, and all the more so today because the hands and heads have been knocked off over the years.

When Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement first came to the US to do a showcase (for Fox TV) as Flight Of The Conchords, I got to go see them at a small theater (30-ish people), which was the first time I heard the song Albi The Racist Dragon. After, we took them out to the Derby in Los Feliz and spent the night drinking and talking about music and New Zealand while listening to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. They were almost painfully shy and quiet, but the friend they brought with them to be their sort of road manager was very boisterous and a total hoot in his denim jacket. They stayed at a hotel on Highland down the street from the Hollywood Bowl, and when we took them home the three of them were crammed into the back of my friend's 4Runner, Brett in the middle.

Also, there is a photo of a drunken me (which I do not have a digital copy of) with Sala Baker (the stuntie in Suaron's armor during the prologue of FOTR) on New Year's Eve at a hotel in Santa Monica waving a bottle of vodka around as if that's just what you do.

You can definitely see the advantage of remastering the fx in 4k, if they didn't do that, it would have looked so bizarre. They did this the right way.

Also, I have been going down some serious Tolkien rabbit holes on YouTube the last week or so.

Also, I have been going down some serious Tolkien rabbit holes on YouTube the last week or so.

I am probably going to hold off because I already have about 5,000 pages of books I still need to read from my previous Amazon binge, but really want to read this:

Amazon Studios' The Lord of the Rings television show is going to cost all the gold in the Lonely Mountain.

The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Amazon will spend roughly NZ$650 million – $465 million in U.S. dollars – for just the first season of the show.

That's far above previous reported estimates that pegged the fantasy drama as costing an already record-breaking $500 million for multiple seasons of the show.

His time on set was not without incident. Just last month, Beattie got his third knee reconstruction surgery, a consequence of having blown both knees while filming the movies. “The surgeon was asking me how I got those injuries, and I was like, ‘Well, I was battling Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep,’” Beattie says

Lord of the Rings’ uncredited Gimli double did the work, and has the tattoo to prove it
https://www.polygon.com/lord-of-the-rin ... hip-tattoo

His time on set was not without incident. Just last month, Beattie got his third knee reconstruction surgery, a consequence of having blown both knees while filming the movies. “The surgeon was asking me how I got those injuries, and I was like, ‘Well, I was battling Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep,’” Beattie says

But a week later, he says, he was told that he actually couldn’t be given the screen credit, due to “movie politics’’ and “concerns about preserving the illusion that is Gimli.”

But a week later, he says, he was told that he actually couldn’t be given the screen credit, due to “movie politics’’ and “concerns about preserving the illusion that is Gimli.”

Mission accomplished because I had no idea that JRD was basically never Gimli. What bullshit.

But a week later, he says, he was told that he actually couldn’t be given the screen credit, due to “movie politics’’ and “concerns about preserving the illusion that is Gimli.”

Mission accomplished because I had no idea that JRD was basically never Gimli. What bullshit.