Outside Pressures
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11:48 GMT on 30 March 2004
Somewhere around 1994 or 1995 screewriter John Briley came to speak at the University of Michigan, while I was a student. Of course I went to see him, and there were only one to two dozen people in the room, including him. He told some great stories, from his first screenwriting success with Children of the Damned right on through getting the Oscar for Ghandi, with some spectacular failures in between.
He spoke of being hired to adapt Dickens's Bleak House, a novel of some 900 pages, into a script of less than 180 pages, how he worked on it for over a year and, after the producer decided not to make it, how he bought it back so that no one else could ruin it. I asked him what the most difficult aspect of adapting such a long book was, and he said "You just named it!" Then he kindly answered my real question, speaking in general terms about combining characters, compressing events and plot, and cutting whole pieces of the book out of the story.
Briley also took time to mention two failures that, in script form, were hailed by everyone as superior works.
First up was his research into the legend of Pope Joan, a woman who disguised herself as a man and, eventually, became Pope. Which ended when she became pregnant, and a mob basically tore her to pieces. He wrote a script about this, treating the subject quite seriously, and a good director was hired. Liv Ullman played Joan. There were whispers among the production team that she would get the Oscar for her work.
But then the Producer stepped in. He wanted to put his own, individual stamp on the film. So he hired an editor who had mostly done Hammer horror films. The result was a serious drama cut like a Hammer horror film, so bad that, at the time Briley spoke, it had never been released in the US (except for nine days of its initial run).
Another example he used, without naming it, was The Medusa Touch. He said he was assigned to adapt an incredibly bad novel about a man with telekinetic powers. He completely restructured the story, so that throughout the movie the audience would never be sure if the powers were real or imaginary, and the climax would reveal that they were, indeed, real. Richard Burton signed onto the film because, according to Briley, "he just couldn't put the script down."
And then the Marketing Department got involved, using a tagline to sell the picture that destroyed all the suspense — "His mind could shake the world!" Briley tried to get them to rephrase to "Could his mind shake the world?" but they refused. The movie became a joke.
I have posted before on how many factors have to be right for a movie to even be good, and how if even one or two of them go wrong, the movie will likely suck.
But, alas, some fans of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings remain dedicated to picking out problems in Peter Jackson's adaptations, in lieu of realizing just how lucky they are that the movies are as good as they are.
So, let us look at this from a couple of angles, and realize just how incredibly lucky we all are.
In the 1970s, respected animator Ralph Bakshi attempted to adapt the entire trilogy as a cartoon. He was underfunded from the start and forced to release one film, approximately the first half of the story, when, among other reasons, he ran out of funds and his investors demanded a release.
The resulting film, The Lord of the Rings, is universally reviled.
Why? Here is but a small taste, courtesy of Nathan Shumate's Cold Fusion Video Reviews:
If the pace weren't bad enough, this scene highlights one of the other major recurring flaws here: A dissociation of setups and payoffs. Gandalf throws the Ring into the fire, then recounts its history, including the "One Ring to rule them all" couplet. He does not read this off the Ring; he recites it while striding around the room, gesticulating wildly. Which makes the heating of the Ring kind of pointless. (This is actually the second such scene; the first was when Bilbo called the Ring his "Precious," but since Gollum's own reference to the Ring hasn't been established, the unfamiliar viewer would have no idea why Gandalf reacted with such horror).
And heck, since we're dipping into the waters of the B-Masters Cabal, let us see what StompTokyo had to say on the issue:
Sure, we always thought hobbits were a little on the swishy side, but the foursome of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin do everything but sing a medieval rendition of "Y.M.C.A." Sam, in particular, comes across as a combination of Porky Pig, Jar Jar Binks, Ru Paul, and JM J. Bullock. The humans and elves don't fare much better, especially when you take into account the giant belt buckles and mini-skirt length tunics worn by Aragorn (who seems to have turned Native American when we weren't looking) and Boromir, whose horned Viking helmet sent us into hysterics. Did we mention that Legolas was played by Anthony Daniels? When one takes into account the fact that the story essentially depicts a bunch of men fighting over some jewelry, it's easy to see why Lord of the Rings held the coveted title of "gayest animated film ever" from 1978 to 2000, when The Road to El Dorado finally dethroned it.
But let us not stop there.
Before finding a home at New Line Cinema, Jackson and crew first had funding through Miramax and Bob Weinstein. After spending some $10 million on preproduction, Weinstein balked, put the project in "turnaround", and left the project stranded. (Turnaround means the studio won't make the film, but won't revert the rights back to the creators either, without being paid to do so. They are selling the rights to a movie they don't want to make.) Jackson had a severe time limit on shopping Rings around to other studios, I think it was two weeks.
Let's pause here, before the miracle occurred, and see what shape the project was in.
Weinstein didn't want to pay for three movies, so Jackson and crew had hashed out a way to make it two movies, to be titled The Fellowship of the Ring and The War of the Ring. Those scripts exist, and have been reviewed. If you hate what was cut and changed in the three movie version, ask yourself how much more would be lost in squeezing it into two movies.
Now back to that miracle. Jackson shops LOTR to every studio in Hollywood in the space of two weeks, meetings up the wazoo. He pitches the two-movie concept, shows a bunch of design work already done, makes his case to everyone. Everyone says "no thanks."
His last meeting, on the last day, is with Bob Shaye of New Line Cinema. It's a long shot. New Line is best known for low budget horror (they spawned the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise). They are not known for nine-digit budgets, blockbuster epics, or Oscar bids.
Shaye hears the pitch, then sits silently, inscrutable. Finally he asks "Aren't there three books?" Jackson avers that, indeed, there are. "Then why are you pitching only two movies?"
That, folks, is the miracle by which we got three movies.
The initially announced budget for the entire trilogy was $150 million, which was never serious. The rumor mill puts the final budget for all three at about $300 million, not including marketing.
When you're gambling $300 million of somebody else's money, their first concern is that you will return that investment. And, like it or not, Tolkien fanatics alone will not be able to rack up that kind of dough for the studio. I am sure, I am absolutely certain, that some of the hated changes Jackson made were made for the studio, whether at their request or in preemptive strikes on his part. That is something to keep in mind.
Will Duquette has responded to my previous post on these issues with an analysis of his own. I wish to address only his main point, which is this:
But that's not the real reason I complain about the Faramir sequence; I complain about it because it ends up with Frodo in Osgiliath and seen to be there by a Ringwraith. This simply makes no sense.
First, Jackson is ridiculously bad at conveying how large a place Middle Earth is. The battle scenes in The Return of the King, for example, make it look like Minas Morgul is about ten miles away from Minas Tirith; in fact, it's about fifty miles. Having Frodo take a detour to Osgiliath without paying any real time penalty for it is typical.
But OK; grant that the distance is negligible. What's unforgiveable about the sequence is the scene in which the Ringwraith confronts Frodo. As I recall, Frodo is standing on top of a wall, completely exposed. The Ringwraith has very likely seen him before, at Weathertop; but would definitely sense the Ring anyway. You can't tell me that the Ringwraith wouldn't have stooped on Frodo like an owl on a mouse and carried him off to Mordor. Pffft. End of story. Dramatic, yes—but also, absurd and nonsensical.
Regarding distances, I actually got the opposite impression. I felt that RotK gave a pretty good sense of the distance between the two cities. The armies of Sauron march from Minas Morgul to Minas Tirith in what seemed to me to be about two days, but the editing could be interpreted in more than one way. The way that Shelob's Lair is intercut with the Battle of Pelennor Fields confuses the matter a bit, but one way or another, a goodly amount of time passes, and more passed for Frodo and Sam's journey from Osgiliath to Minas Morgul.
Also, if I am remembering Middle-Earth Geography correctly, Frodo and Sam are much further north of Minas Morgul when captured by Faramir than Osgiliath is west of it. The detour is not a time penalty, but brings Frodo closer to his goal.
And the "unforgiveable" element?
I feel that the writers — Peter Jackson, his partner Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens — have been upfront in dealing with the criticism directed at them, especially in their commenataries on the Extended Edition DVDs. In order to let them defend themselves, I have transcribed a few portions of their commentary from The Two Towerss (all square brackets and emphases mine):
BOYENS: We had a very good reason, which was that once we knew, very early on, that we weren't going to be able to fit Shelob into Film Two [...] we needed to drive Frodo and Sam's story toward some kind of climax. For all those people that sort of had a problem with this, I think you need to just play out this story in your mind without [the 'Frodo in Osgiliath'] sequence for Frodo and Sam and you'll see, suddenly, how their story lacked dramatic tension, it lacks urgency.
[...]
JACKSON: I mean, there was never any possibility that Shelob could go in this story because the intercutting of Helm's Deep with Shelob was just never going to work, and I think when people see Return of the King, and see that whole sequence playing itself out up to Shelob, you'll realize why none of that could really fit into the end of The Two Towers. It was just too much.
BOYENS: Once we made the decision that Faramir was going to have a much more difficult decision than he does in the book, [Osgiliath] was always where we were going to end up.
WALSH: But Frodo's descent into despair, and his desire to present himself, if you like, to the enemy, I mean [inaudible] to the Witch King when he appears at Minas Morgul, which is in the book, it's just a very small part of [the novel] The Two Towers, it's only a small passage, but that's really what inspired this sequence here, and in that sense it's true to it. It's just been made much larger.
BOYENS: It's. A. Slight. Departure.
WALSH: There were decisions we had made with The Two Towers that we made two or three years prior to finishing the film. And some of them were quite radical decisions, like the elves arriving at Helm's Deep; that was not a decision we could reverse.
JACKSON: Because we shot so much footage.
WALSH: There were too many elves at Helm's Deep.
JACKSON: We were locked into it.
WALSH: Yeah, we were locked into it. There were decisions we made about Faramir that, if we'd had more perspective and time, maybe we would have tried different things with his story.
JACKSON: It's a process in which we arrived at the final shape of The Two Towers in a series of stages. It would have been preferable to have more time in preproduction to really revise the script two or three more times. But as it was, we shot a very early version of the script, comparatively. You know, we then looked at what we shot. We then decided that things were working in some areas, not working in others, decisions we'd made were either good or bad. We then looked at the bad decisions and we'd try to shoot pick-ups to try to rectify those; but you were sort of building on what you'd already done, and weren't able to clear the slate and start again, or you weren't able to look at it with a totally fresh point of view. You were having to adapt what you'd already shot.
First, they all clearly imply that they would have done something different with Faramir if they'd had more time. Jackson's comment about "two or three more drafts" is especially revealing — that's a lot of changes! But they went forward with something they themselves implicitly consider imperfect, because they were under enormous pressure, and because what they did have accomplished what they needed it to accomplish.
Now look at Walsh's comment about the Wraith. They based that scene on one Tolkien wrote (which appears in the third film). There are a combination of reasons it didn't bother me the way it did Will.
First, Wraiths cannot see. In the books, and even in the films, their sense of sight works only in the "shadow world" we see when Frodo puts on the ring. When he does not wear the ring, they cannot see him. They "sense" the ring, true.
But if their sense of the ring is so particular, why didn't the Witch King snatch Frodo at the gate of Minas Morgul???? He walks right into the lap of the Wraiths, and they more or less ignore him. If they miss him there, I have no trouble with the Wraith missing him in the Osgiliath scene in The Two Towers. He only could have seen and snatched Frodo once Frodo slipped his finger into the ring.
So, to me, this sequence does make sense, both in context of the films and in context of Tolkien's books. If I'm missing something big, here, please point it out.
(Also recall that the whole encounter is filmed in slow motion, stretching out the time of the confrontation from a handful of seconds at most to almost a minute.)
From the commentary over the second part of the Osgiliath sequence:
JACKSON: This is really inspired by a moment that's in the front of Minas Morgul, as you were saying Fran. It's like taking a moment from the book, and putting it in a slightly different place, and expanding it.
BOYENS: It's a very very powerful piece of writing, internally what's going on in Frodo is, uh, —
WALSH: — is when he says "We will die here."
BOYENS: Yeah, "we'll all die."
JACKSON: So it's just a slight departure. It qualifies as a slight departure here, which is good.
BOYENS: [Tongue firmly in cheek] We only ever do slight departures.
In context of the rest of the commentary, that "slight departure" business is a joke at their own expense. They know they took liberties, some of them huge, like the elves appearing at Helm's Deep, and that some fans are foaming at the mouth about it.
But still, in this instance, I believe it is only a slight departure, not the nonsensical piece of Hollywood spectacle Will takes it as. Again, I think I've addressed the objections (except possibly distances in Middle-Earth), so what have I missed?
While we're at it, let's have a look at Aragorn's false death in The Two Towers, which the commentary justifies for a few reasons: it brings jeopardy back to the central characters, since none of them die in this chapter; it brings out Eowyn's character a bit more; and it allows Aragorn to see Saruman's Orc army himself, and return with the news.
As weak as it feels, these are all good reasons, and there is one more I would add: It puts Aragorn through the wringer, allowing him to become the tired and wiser soul which, in the books, he was from the beginning.
(Oh, yeah, you want to talk about how wrong these films could have gone? Aragorn! He was originally cast as Stewart Townsend. Viggo Mortensen was brought in after filming had already begun, with no time to prepare! That one mistake could have sunk all three films. Count your blessings, folks, count your blessings.)
As to the elves at Helm's Deep, I maintain that was a brilliant decision, giving audiences unfamiliar with the books an impression of an important part of the history behind the books. Though they almost fumbled it by including Arwen.
Now, for a truly nonsensical decision, how about tying Arwen's "life force" to the existence of the One Ring in Return of the King? That is an example of raising the stakes unnecessarily, crudely, and against all logic.
So bray and moan all you want about Faramir, the hasty Ents, the lack of Tom Bombadil, the expansion of Arwen's role in the story, the color of Legolas's eyebrows, and whatever else. Fine. But for pete's sake take a moment and realize just how lucky we are that these movies are good. Show some sign that you realize they are, in fact, far better than we have any right to expect from Hollywood. Show some respect to Jackson and his crew for their unprecedented accomplishment.
Otherwise, if you caterwaul about how Gandalf's recounting of his resurrection proves that Jackson completely misunderstands Tolkien's christian faith, well, I'm going to dismiss you as ignorant. Because you are. You are faced with a pile of diamonds, and what you are doing is bickering about how you don't think a few of them have the proper cut.
Go ahead, discuss what isn't quite right, what you would have done differently, what you were unsatisfied with. But before doing that, I think you owe some thanks and acknowledgement to Peter Jackson. The odds were astronomically against him, and he could have easily screwed the whole enterprise up.
But he didn't.
(For whatever it might be worth, David Wenham, who plays Faramir, also had the starring role in Molokai, the last movie (so far) produced from a script by John Briley. Which means that, even without Kevin Bacon, I am but one degree removed from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Cool!)