Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

What might have struck him as strangest of all, however, was that he had been left to his own devices. As long as he stayed put. New Line’s army of wedding planners weren’t going to let their prize catch wriggle free. They virtually put him under lock and key. Gandalf imprisoned on the roof of Orthanc.

Only hours before, with the eleventh hour disappearing in the rear-view mirror, had he completed his adaptation of TheLord of the Rings trilogy. With a running time of three hours twenty-one minutes, long even by his own extended standards — and even then he knew that fans would bemoan the loss of lovely sequences that wouldn’t be retrieved until the Extended Edition a year from now — The Return of the King was ready for its heroic debut. For the first time in five years, maybe longer, Jackson didn’t need to worry about his films.

There was no need to approve any fresh artwork from the peerless and tireless pencils of John Howe or Alan Lee; or clear an effects shot, a music cue, a sound edit, a costume alteration, a set that had sprung up overnight, a mooted location or schedule, a poster design, or indeed head to the edit suite, because when all else was done he always needed to head to the edit. No actors would need to call upon his wisdom; no lighting set-up or shot trajectory was open for discussion. No stunt team needed marshalling. No new script pages needed to be wrestled into submission; as he no longer needed to fine-tune the sometimes-cumbersome complexities of Tolkien’s world toward the dynamic world of cinema — to choose this path or that, often depending on which one smelled the better. Even those public relations folk, who had called upon him to speak to the press when he could least afford the time, were now busy elsewhere.

The constant background noise inherent in this awesome undertaking had finally been silenced — all he could hear was the crowd a few blocks away, cheering even the carpet sweepers.

Jackson was left alone with his thoughts.

He turned on the television and found a telemovie, whatever was playing. He can’t remember what it was about let alone what it was called; he doubts it was any good.

Lying there on the bed, some cheesy, low-budget melodrama in the background, his mind must surely have wandered back through the forest of days, the miraculous events and unaccountable toil that had brought him here to this moment of triumph and farewell.

CHAPTER 1 (#ud0df07ec-0781-5e41-97d2-67f3dccaa585)

Sillification (#ud0df07ec-0781-5e41-97d2-67f3dccaa585)

In June 1958, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien put pen to paper. Without letting his scrupulous English manners slip, he still made his feelings quite clear. The story, he claimed, swelling in his indignation as the letter wound on, had been ‘murdered’.

The year before, three American producers sounding not unlike a law firm from a film noir movie — Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax — had approached Tolkien’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, proposing a feature film of The Lord of the Rings. Having decried the ‘sillification achieved’ by the BBC in a 1955, twelve-part radio serial based upon his epic, written and produced by the poet Terrence Tiller (a close friend of Tolkien admirer W.H. Auden) — since lost to the mists of BBC deletion — he couldn’t see that dealing with a film version would be any less painful.

However, if not won over, he had begun to be persuaded that these filmmakers were at least responsive to the needs of the book. In the box of notes sent to the author’s house in the Oxford suburb of Headington, the trio outlined an ambitious mix of live action and animation running to three hours, including two intermissions, with the aim of shooting among the untamed expanses of the American landscape. Tolkien had been especially impressed at the quality of the concept art. How unlike Walt Disney it was, he noted appreciatively.

A few weeks later, as he had begun to read the story treatment, his heart had sunk. He simply couldn’t detect ‘any appreciation for what it was about’. Gandalf does not ‘splutter’, he contended, the Balrog does not speak and Lothlórien does not have shiny minarets. All moral import had been lost. The entire tone was childish, more of a fairy tale. And his book was most certainly not a fairy tale. The treatment did, incidentally, include Tom Bombadil.

His response goes on for several pages. Each documenting a significant narrative failing in the laissez-faire approach Zimmerman, the nominal screenwriter, had taken with the original text.

Wizards can be quick to anger.

Such a maladroit effort, if not rank trivialisation of Tolkien’s great adventure, is disappointing for fans of the genre. Not that the book wouldn’t suffer an arduous journey through a litany of scrambled attempts before it would be done justice. It was more that one of the prospective producers was meant to have had a keen respect for fantasy fiction.

Ackerman is known as the godfather of geek. He had helped fashion the concept of the fan convention; arriving at the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939 clad in a ‘futuristicostume’, he effectively invented cosplay to boot. On a business footing, he served as agent for many of the great Fifties horror and science fiction writers whose imaginations were running rife beneath the shadow of the nuclear age (and the influence of Tolkien). Writers like Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Isaac Asimov, the latter of who would create the star-spanning Foundation trilogy.

In 1958, Ackerman began his lifelong tenure as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a lavish, bustling monthly devoted to genre movies. Within its awe-struck pages were features celebrating King Kong, the 1933 classic, including the discovery of a fabled shot of a spider lurking on the cavern roof that fans had thought to be the stuff of myth. It also curated the kind of pun-heavy vernacular that saw the letters page christened ‘Fang Mail’.

For Tolkien, used to the unhurried discussion of philological esoterica among collegiate friends and the woody scent of pipe smoke at The Eagle and Child, he may as well have been from Mars.

For Peter Jackson and those filmmaking peers who shared a taste for the fantastic and the macabre, kindred visionaries like Guillermo del Toro, Fantastic Monsters of Filmland would become a friend in the dark. Here was proof that there were likeminded, monster-mad souls everywhere. Without it they may never have discovered their calling. In his old office, the secret one behind the bookcase that contained his most prized memorabilia, Jackson had his collection of back issues proudly on display.

With a rakish, pencil-thin moustache, high forehead and large horn-rimmed glasses, Ackerman suggested Vincent Price playing an insurance salesman, and he would appear in many of his beloved B-movies. He also dabbled a little in film production. And, together with his partners, was the first recorded prospector to engage with Tolkien about a film version of his great work.

We should respect the fact that Ackerman was ahead of the curve. In 1958, The Lord of the Rings was only four years old. While selling respectably, it was a long way from the cult prominence that made it a fixture of late-1960s campuses across America. An unauthorised ACE paperback edition had wriggled through America’s insubstantial copyright rules in 1965 and sold in phenomenal quantities. Indeed, by 1966 it was out-selling The Catcher in the Rye at Harvard. Students formed Tolkien societies, dressing up as their favourite characters and feasting on mushrooms. A scholarly lapel was naked without badges exclaiming ‘Frodo Lives’ or ‘Gandalf for President’.

Once official editions were issued (through the paperback imprint Ballantine Books) Tolkien would taste remarkable success. This in turn led to conspicuous quarters of the literary establishment scoffing at something they saw as childish. Among academics, to express affection for Tolkien was deemed as ‘professional suicide’.

In 1956, in his sarcastic essay, ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs!’ Marxist critic Edmund Wilson called it ‘balderdash’.

Decades on, Germaine Greer claimed that the book’s popularity was like a ‘bad dream’.

Tolkien had never expected to start, as he put it, a ‘tide’. He only wrote the book for those who might like it.

Nevertheless, Frodo’s quest to rid the world of a magical ring by tossing it back into the volcanic fires from which it was forged had touched readers around the world. By 1968, three million copies of The Lord of the Rings had been sold worldwide. A 1999 poll conducted by Amazon judged it to be the Book of the Millennium. By 2003, once again much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, and perhaps catching a tailwind from Jackson’s films, a poll on behalf of the BBC’s Big Read named it Britain’s Favourite Read. According to recent calculations the book has sold upwards of 100 million copies.

Let us not tarry too long on the history of Tolkien and his literary genius. Reams have been written on the provenance of hobbits and the entirety of Middle-earth. Reams more will come. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892, where his father died when he was three, he was raised by his mother in the bucolic Worcestershire village of Sarehole (since consumed by greater Birmingham). She would die when he was only twelve, leaving him and his brother, Hilary, orphans. An early fascination with ancient languages and their mythological roots would lead to his creating his own, and eventually to an Oxford professorship in English Language and Literature, a journey interrupted by enlistment and the First World War.

In the dreadful lulls between fighting on the Somme (where Jackson’s grandfather also fought), and while recuperating from trench fever in Staffordshire, Tolkien began to conceive of the vastness of his fictional world, a world that would have its origins in the languages he had devised. He never felt he was writing fantasy but a form of history, a record that would reveal who might have spoken such words and where they might have lived. He saw his book as an attempt to recover a mythology for Britain, which lacked the equivalent lore to that of the Germanic, Nordic and Icelandic sagas he loved. Through a process he called ‘sub-creation’ grew a backdrop for his later books, a world of intricate construction: races, languages, myriad tales of wars and upheaval and a vast, vital geography against which it all played out.

‘I always had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere, not of “inventing”,’ recalled Tolkien.

Philippa Boyens, who would work so closely with Jackson and Fran Walsh on the writing of the adaptation to come, always valued the ‘wholeness’ of Middle-earth. ‘That you can escape into something that feels utterly real,’ she says. ‘I like that obsession. I like all the detail.’

Laughing, she recalls that whenever any questions from the cast or crew became too entangled in the brambles of Tolkien’s mythos they were always fielded to Boyens as the trio’s Tolkien nerd. She always impressed upon her fellow filmmakers how much underpinned the books.

‘It’s such an immersive thing, because as much as he delved into and loved those languages, he loved them because of their connection with who the British are as a people. And that profoundly affected him, and that probably has a lot to do with his childhood.’

Watching the encroachment of industry and the concomitant loss of a tradition; the stark impressions of the battlefront that stripped bare notions of class; the devotion to nature (especially trees); learning; fine company; a dignified, if antiquated properness in his relationship with women: all were ingredients in the wholeness of the book. But deeper still, in Tolkien’s early loss of his parents, Boyens sees the loneliness of Frodo expelled from the childlike idyll of the Shire to venture into the adulthood of Middle-earth.

Composed first for his children, Tolkien would publish The Hobbit in 1937, a lighter, charming prelude to The Lord of the Rings, which would eventually follow in 1954. He never intended his second novel to be divided into three books, or considered a trilogy. This was a necessity brought on by soaring paper costs following the Second World War (another global conflict that overshadowed his writing). It was a single, epic story, over 1,000 pages in length, made up of more than half a million words.

His response to Ackerman and co. provides an insight into how the author generally perceived the idea of transforming his work into film entertainment.

Tolkien had visual sense. In among the treatment’s atrocities, he could appreciate, ‘A scene of gloom lit by a small red fire with the wraiths approaching as darker shadows.’

He revealed actorly qualities too. In the 1950s, disappointed by that 1955 BBC version, he recorded his own radio play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son, in the poem’s full alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. There is a little existing footage of him from a BBC documentary from 1968. He plays well to the camera: warm, curious and knowingly dotty, throwing in an occasional faraway look in his eye as he gazes off into the distance, perhaps to Middle-earth.

Even so, Tolkien didn’t regard movies, or drama in general, as legitimate art. We are left to wonder if Sir Ian McKellen’s wry Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen’s robust Aragorn might have swayed him, but he considered the idea of acting to be a ‘bogus magic’. It was pretending.

Nevertheless, as early as 1957 he had written to his publisher Stanley Unwin that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of an animated version of the book — evidently having no faith that live action would stand up to the exotic creatures and fantastical locations therein. In another oft-quoted letter to his publisher, in his qualified way he even welcomed the idea.

‘And that quite apart from the glint of money,’ he added, ‘though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.’

He was no fool about the business.

Tolkien reasoned, with a foresight that would have made him more adept at dealing with Hollywood than his quiet, donnish persona would suggest, that he could either strike a deal through which he would lose control but be correspondingly compensated financially, or retain a degree of control but not the fiscal win.

‘Cash or kudos,’ he explained to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter.

With few signs of either cash or kudos emerging out of granting a six-month option to Ackerman and his associates, as the biography succinctly puts it, ‘negotiations were not continued’.

*

From that enshrined afternoon when, bored by marking uninspired English papers in his Northmoor Road drawing room, Tolkien had turned over a sheet and quite from nowhere written the line ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ a river of events will flow and churn over the years toward a quiet backwater in New Zealand. Those of a mystical bent might call it fate.

But there was a long way to go yet.

Nigh on a decade had passed when, in 1967, Tolkien was approached for a second time about the film rights, this time for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

While he welcomed the financial security the popularity of the novel had granted him, Tolkien had grown guarded if not threatened by the side effects of his success. He had no interest in fame and its attendant adulation. Especially wearisome were those fans who arrived on his doorstep uninvited with all their infernal questions, which he patiently endeavoured to answer. He took to setting an alarm clock in another room. When it rang, he politely claimed this signalled another appointment. Unwisely still to be found in the Oxford telephone directory, he would get calls deep into the night from faraway readers with a poor grasp of time-zone differences.