Gift bag from the New Line Cannes party of 2001

Kristin here:

Two days after I returned from “Il Cinema Ritrovato” in Bologna, the “On, Archives!” symposium began here in Madison. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research turned fifty this year, and this was its celebration. It was held in conjunction with “The Symposium on Broadcasting in the 1930s.” I didn’t attend the whole event, but I dropped in to hear several of the film-related papers.

Among these was Susan Ohmer’s “The Archive in the Age of eBay.” Susan’s an old friend of ours. She wrote a book on the Gallup organization in Hollywood, studies animation, teaches and is an associate provost at Notre Dame, and is married to another old friend and colleague, Don Crafton.

Her topic intrigued me, since I first made my way onto eBay looking for items related to the Lord of the Rings film franchise, which I was researching at the time. It was tremendously useful, and I wanted to hear what Susan had to say.

She started by acknowledging how exciting it can be to work in archives, handling original documents and sometimes finding that smoking-gun piece of evidence you could never get from published sources. Plus for those of us who love books and libraries, just being in an archive can be very pleasant (apart from that darned “pencils only” rule and the occasional snippy archivist).

But, as she pointed out, going to archives can be expensive, given the travel and lodging involved. Moreover, one doesn’t always have the time to study the documents to the extent that one would want to. For some types of evidence, one solution is to acquire the documents yourself.

In Susan’s case, it was Big Little Books, and specifically those based on Walt Disney films and comic books. There were lots of these, but although some archives collect them, most have only a few of the titles. Susan realized that she could actually save herself money by buying them and be able to study them to her heart’s content. Since then she has acquired around ninety on eBay, and I’ll bet she really has saved money in comparison with what the research would have cost. (Moreover, if she eventually sells them for around what she paid, they research would have cost nothing beyond the time and trouble of following auctions, bidding, and paying.)

There’s more to this tactic than just saving money. As Susan said, there’s a pleasure in owning these objects and having the sense of having one’s own little private archive. Very responsibly, she has even invested in archival boxes to store her treasures.

Private collectors, of course, have always been played a valuable service in preserving rare or unique objects. Every painting or ancient artifact that we see in a museum with a “gift of” note on its label probably was enjoyed for years by its owners in their own home. Many a film has been preserved because some people collect old nitrate films. (Yes, nitrate prints do occasionally show up on eBay.) The same is probably true of just about any kind of cultural artifact.

For a long time I had vaguely thought of blogging on the topic of eBay and scholarly research, but I never sat down and thought the subject through. Susan’s paper spurred me to create a rough typology of ways in which one can find what one needs online.

1) The real things

Every now and then an old, original document that really should be in an archive surfaces on eBay. That’s usually because it’s signed by a celebrity.

I remember a few years ago running across a couple of letters from Fritz Lang. I don’t remember what they were about, but they were from the late 1940s and had to do with his work for producer Walter Wanger. I alerted our friend Matthew Bernstein, who had written an important biography of Wanger. He decided not to buy the letters, which as I recall were going for over a thousand dollars each. Devotion to research only goes so far.

Maybe some rich archive like the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas bought those letters. I suppose archivists keep track of such listings on eBay. If such an institution didn’t buy them, they’re presumably in a private collection somewhere. Similarly, I ran across a letter signed by Buster Keaton; something about renewing his MGM contract, I think. I’m sure such things happen fairly frequently. If an item with really important, unknown contents came online, including material that fit directly into someone’s research, he or she might decide it was worth buying.

But the point is, there are archival-quality historical documents sold on eBay.

2) eBay evidence

Even if one doesn’t want to buy such a document, one can read the contents and make a print-out or take notes. That has to be done quickly, since sometimes these things don’t stay around for long.

I’m working on a book on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels. There was an excellent volume of Tolkien’s letters published in the 1970s, but it doesn’t contain nearly everything that exists. Such letters come up for sale now and then, always at a high price. It’s fine by me if collectors wind up with these, but I want to get the information before they do. I have tried to make copies of every one I find, unless it’s just a polite reply to a fan. I’ve got a dozen now, two or three of which contain passages relevant to my project.

Sellers tend to make copying difficult, since they superimpose words or logos on the image of the item. They also make the image rather poor in quality. All these stratagems are reasonable, since sellers don’t want people to use these documents to concoct fakes. Still, I have found that with a bit of work with the brightness and contrast in Photoshop, one can usually get legible images. They wouldn’t look good framed, but they’re sufficient for extracting information, though it may take patience and some squinting.

3) Cutting edge

If you’re researching a contemporary subject, the relevant materials might make their way into archives, but not soon enough. When I was writing The Frodo Franchise, I planned a chapter on new methods of studio publicity. Most studios promote big-budget the film through free or cheap means like like brand partnering and press junkets, but I wanted to study how New Line controlled the form that such publicity for The Lord of the Rings took.

One section of the chapter was devoted to the Electronic Press Kit (EPK), which has largely replaced the traditional kit that consisted of printed material, photos, and slides. Some archives hold such traditional kits; the WCFTR has many from old Warner Bros. films. I hope somewhere there are archives collecting today’s EPKs. But even if there are, they wouldn’t have had the ones from The Lord of the Rings yet.

I wanted to analyze the contents of an EPK from one of the franchise installments, and there were only two ways to do that. One option was to get the kit directly from New Line’s publicity department. I did obtain the EPK for The Two Towers from the film’s unit publicist during my first research trip to New Zealand. There weren’t any copies of the Fellowship one left, which may show just how ephemeral these things are. Maybe the Return one wasn’t finished yet.

Fortunately the EPKs for all three parts showed up on eBay, if not frequently, at least often enough that I was able to buy the other two without much of a wait. My analysis in the book was based on the Towers one, since that was the only one I already had by the time I began writing.

(These weren’t the only EPKs put out for the film. There were separate discs issued with additional photography, as well as promotional ones put out to herald each DVD release and to boost the films for Oscar nominations. An archivist’s nightmare. I’m sure I don’t have them all, but all the ones I have except the Towers one came from eBay.)

4) Doesn’t fit in an archival box

Then there are the things public archives don’t collect, as far as I know. From my personal experience, those would include the huge number of franchise products and publicity objects that get made around any big franchise or blockbuster films these days. I needed to see some of these for my work on the Rings franchise. People who study fan culture, like Henry Jenkins, presumably also look at such material.

With luck, the corporate archives of the studios are keeping one copy of everything generated for each film they make. Disney certainly has its own archive, currently closed to outside researchers. I presume a whole run of those Big Little Books exists there.

But for the researcher, finding a cooperative collector or starting a bit of a collection oneself is the only way to see this stuff. So I joined eBay, got myself a PayPal account, and learned the ways of online bidding. I got pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.

I particularly needed Rings items because I assumed I would use some of them as illustrations for the book. As it turned out, I didn’t have space in the book to include very many of the licensed products, especially since I was mainly concentrating on how digital technology has changed franchise products. So there was a chapter on DVDs and one on video games, but not much on things like action figures and board games.

I did run across some very odd items from around the world, some of which I purchased. One of the oddest was this series of Rings-decorated model trucks, sold only in Germany. There are twenty in all, but I thought two would do:

I also bought a small number of franchise items related to the book, many of them pre-dating the film project. The point was to show that the success of the Tolkien’s novel in the 1960s led to a franchise of its own, with action figures, calendars, posters, puzzles, and even early video games. I used a group of these as an illustration. It didn’t include the Toby Bell Gandalf (above left), a 1983 item from the book franchise that I acquired later.

Other franchise goods that I bought ended up being very useful as models for the wonderful caricaturist, Victor Juhasz, when he agreed to do the illustration for the front cover. I had thought about the cover for quite some time as I worked on the book, since a franchise is not exactly an easy thing to convey with one image. I settled on the idea of Frodo playing a video game with himself on the screen, surrounded by franchise items of him: a Sideshow Weta bust, a Toy Biz action figure, and a DVD on the chain around his neck, in place of the Ring. I shipped the bust and action figures to Victor, along with a few of the tie-in books with pictures of Elijah Wood in costume. I also sent one of the video-game strategy books, so that Victor could choose a picture to copy for the monitor screen. He came up with exactly the illustration I had in mind.

So now I have a fairly decent collection of Rings-film-related stuff. Maybe someday I’ll offer it to an archive, if any will take it. But my collection is far, far from complete. I don’t know if anyone has absolutely everything, every British lottery ticket with Frodo’s face on it, every paper plate, every mouse pad. But I did meet someone on eBay who probably has come as close as anyone to achieving that goal.

Springlering Lord of the Rings Virtual Museum and Shop

I mentioned that private collections often serve as archives, and this is especially important when it comes to ephemeral items. I first met Melinda Burnett (aka Springlering) online when I bought some items from her. I mentioned my book project, and she sent me information about buying on eBay, who the major collectors were, and so on.

I recommend this, by the way. If ever you buy something on eBay related to research, mention your project to the seller when you pay. There’s always a little box where you can write messages about special shipping instructions or whatever. By telling sellers about my book, I got lots of information, plus an offer from a bookstore owner in Queenstown, New Zealand, to hold a signing of my book in his shop. (Alas, I never did book signings in New Zealand.) These people are often friendly and even excited at the idea that something you purchase from them might end up in a book. Several of them asked me to notify them when the book came out. I emailed these people when it did. Some of them probably bought copies.

But back to Springlering. She herself is one of the major Rings collectors, going far beyond the ordinary T-shirts, action figures, and cardboard standees. She has the four Japanese promotional “Middle-earth passports” (see the dwarf one, above right), the French fèves (literally, “beans,” little ceramic prizes hidden inside bakery goods; see below), the Polish Nutella drinking glasses, the 2004 Mardi Gras Elijah Wood medallion, and so much more. Basically she sells her duplicates in order to be able to afford new items (or at least that was still the case when the trilogy was still current).

Not only is she a collector, but she has photographed many of the items in her 6000+ collection and put them on the internet as a virtual museum. She’s still adding to it. I just wish she had had it up when I was researching my book. There must be other enthusiasts in other fandoms who do similar things.

Springlering has left eBay (and gives her reasons in the blog on her site) and now sells directly in her online shop, where you, too, can buy fèves while supplies last. According to the “about” page, she has given talks on collectibles at fan events. If I had been doing more with the licensed Rings products, I would have been wise to interview her.

I should note that this post doesn’t just apply to eBay. There are other online auctions or sellers. The stores that sell on the American Book Exchange, for example, sometimes have original letters, drawings, and other sorts of film memorabilia on offer.

A display case for fèves: “Depart on the quest for fèves” (“A delight for both collectors and dentists!” as Springlering says)

Kristin in Rome, 1997, in front of a “recent” hand from a colossal statue of Constantine. The Amarna statuary fragments she studies are twice as old.

DB here:

Kristin is in the spotlight today, and why not? She’s too modest to boast about all the good things coming her way, but I have no shame.

First, our web tsarina Meg Hamel recently installed, in the column on the left, Kristin’s 1985 book Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907-1934. It was never really available in the US and went out of print fairly quickly. Vito Adriaensens of Antwerp kindly scanned it to pdf and made it available for us. So we make it available to you. More about Exporting Entertainment later.

Second, Kristin is not only a film historian but a scholar of ancient Egyptian art, specifically of the Amarna period. (These are the years of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and their highly unsuccessful experiment in monotheism.) Every year she goes to Egypt to participate in an expedition that maps and excavates the city of Amarna. In recent years she’s focused on statuary, about which she’s given papers and published articles. Now we’ve learned that she has won a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fellowship to work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection for a month during the next academic year. So at some point then we’ll both be blogging from NYC. Think of the RKO Radio tower sending our signals to a tiny world below.

Third, she is about to turn 60, and in her honor the Communication Arts Department is sponsoring a day-long symposium. On 1 May we’ll be hosting Henry Jenkins, Charlie Keil, Janet Staiger, and Yuri Tsivian to give talks on topics related to her career interests. Kristin’s talk will survey her Egyptological work, with observations on how she has applied analytical methods she developed in her film research. You can get all the information about the event, as well as find places to stay in Madison, here.

Kristin came to Madison in 1973, a very good moment. Whatever you were interested in, from radical politics to chess to necromancy (there was a witchcraft paraphernalia shop off State Street), you could find plenty of people to obsess with you. Film was one such obsession.

The campus boasted about twenty registered film societies, some screening several shows a week. Fertile Valley, the Green Lantern, Wisconsin Film Society, Hal 2000, and many others came and went, showing 16mm films in big classrooms in those days before home video. Without the internet, publicity was executed through posters stapled to kiosks, and the fight for space could get rough. Posters were torn down or set on fire; a charred kiosk was a common sight. Another trick was to call up distributors and cancel your rivals’ bookings. One film-club macher reported that a competitor had cut his brake-lines.

What could you see? A sample is above. What it doesn’t show is that in an earlier weekend of February of 1975, your menu included Take the Money and Run, The Lovers, Ray’s The Adversary, Page of Madness, Fritz the Cat, The Ruling Class, Dovzhenko’s Shors, Chaney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, American Graffiti, Wedding in Blood, Pat and Mike, Camille, Yojimbo, Faces, Days and Nights in the Forest, King of Hearts (a perennial), Sahara, The Fox, Day of the Jackal, Dumbo, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, Slaughterhouse-Five, Mean Streets, A Fistful of Dollars, Triumph of the Will, and The Cow. Not counting the films we were showing in our courses.

In addition, there was the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, recently endowed with thousands of prints of classic Warners, RKO, and Monogram titles. (There were also TV shows, thousands of document files, and nearly two million still photos.) When Kristin got here she immediately signed up to watch all those items she had been dying to see. She suggested that the Center needed flatbed viewers to do justice to the collection, and director Tino Balio promptly bought some. Those Steenbecks are still in use.

Out of the film societies and the WCFTR collection came The Velvet Light Trap, probably the most famous student film magazine in America. Today it’s an academic journal, though still edited by grad students. Back then it was more off-road, steered by cinephiles only loosely registered at the university. Using the documents and films in the WCFTR collection, they plunged into in-depth research into American studio cinema, and the result was a pioneering string of special-topics issues. When I go into a Parisian bookstore and say I’m from Madison, the owner’s eyes light up: Ah, oui, le Velvet Light Trap.

Above all there were the people. The department had only three film studies profs–Tino, Russell Merritt, and me–though eventually Jeanne Allen and Joe Anderson joined us. Posses of other experts were roaming the streets, running film societies, writing for The Daily Cardinal, authoring books, and editing the Light Trap. Who? Russell Campbell, John Davis, Susan Dalton, Tom Flinn, Tim Onosko, Gerry Perry, Danny Peary, Pat McGilligan, Mark Bergman, Sid Chatterjee, Richard Lippe, Harry Reed, Michael Wilmington, Joe McBride, Karyn Kay, Reid Rosefelt, Dean Kuehn, Samantha Coughlin, and Bill Banning. Most of these were undergraduates, but Maureen Turim and Diane Waldman and Douglas Gomery and Frank Scheide and Peter Lehman and Marilyn Campbell and Roxanne Glasberg and other grad students could be found hanging out with them. A great many of this crew went on to careers as writers, teachers, scholars, programmers, filmmakers, and film entrepreneurs.

Into the mix went film artists like Jim Benning, Bette Gordon, and Michelle Citron. There were film collectors too; one owned a 70mm print of 2001 and didn’t care that he could never screen it. ZAZ, aka the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, were concocting Kentucky Fried Theater. Andrew Bergman had recently published We’re in the Money, and soon Werner Herzog would be in Plainfield waiting for Errol Morris to help him dig up Ed Gein’s grave. Set it all to the musical stylings of R. Cameron Monschein, who once led an orchestra the whole frenzied way through Intolerance. The 70s in Madison were more than disco and the oil embargo. (To catch up on some Mad City movie folk, go here.)

These young bravos worked with the same manic passion as today’s bloggers. The purpose wasn’t profit, but living in sin with the movies. Film society mavens drove to Chicago for 48-hour marathons mounted by distributors. Traditions and cults sprang up: Sam Fuller double features, noir weekends, hours of debates in programming committees. Why couldn’t Curtiz be seen as the equal of Hawks? Why weren’t more Siodmak Universals available for rental? Was Johnny Guitar the best movie ever made, or just one of the three best?

There was local pride as well. Nick Ray had come from Wisconsin, and so had Joseph Losey, not to mention Orson Welles (who claimed, however, that he was conceived in Buenos Aires and thus Latin American). During my job interview, Ray came to visit wearing an eye patch. It shifted from eye to eye as lighting conditions changed. When he showed a student how to set up a shot, he bent over the viewfinder and lifted the patch to peer in. Was he saving one eye just for shooting?

In the big world outside, modern film studies was emerging and incorporating theories coming from Paris and London. Partly in order to teach myself what was going on, I mounted courses centering on semiotics, structuralism, Russian Formalism, and Marxist/ feminist ideological critique.

Back in placid Iowa City, where Kristin got her MA in film studies and I my Ph.D., we grad students had seen our mission clearly. Steeped in theory, we pledged to make film studies something intellectually serious: a genuine research enterprise, not mere cinephilia. Madison was the perfect challenge. Here cinephilia was raised to the level of thermonuclear negotiation, backed with batteries of memos, scripts, and scenes from obscure B-pictures. Confronted with a maniacal film culture and a vast archive, Kristin and I realized that there was so much to know–so many films, so much historical context–that any theory might be killed by the right fact.

Watch a broad range of movies; look as closely as you can at the films and their proximate and pertinent contexts; build your generalizations with an eye on the details. Our aim became a mixture of analysis, historical research, and theories sensitively contoured to both. The noisy irreverence of Mad City, where a former SDS leader had just been elected mayor and city alders could be arrested for setting bonfires on Halloween, wouldn’t let you stay stuffy long.

Kristin’s work in film studies would be instantly recognizable to humanists studying the arts. Essentially, she tries to get to know a film as intimately as possible, in its formal dimensions–its use of plot and story, its manipulations of film technique. I suppose she’s best known for developing a perspective she called Neoformalism, an extension of ideas from the Russian Formalists. Armed with these theories, she has studied principles of narrative in Storytelling in the New Hollywood and Storytelling in Film and Television. She has probed film style in Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood and her sections of The Classical Hollywood Cinema. And she has examined narrative and style together in her book on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and the essays in Breaking the Glass Armor.

Contrary to what commonsense understanding of “formalism” implies, she has always framed her questions about form and style in a historical context. She situates classic and contemporary Hollywood within changes in the film industry–the development of early storytelling out of theatre and literature, or current trends responding to franchises and tentpole films. For her, Lubitsch’s silent work links the older-style postwar German cinema and the more innovative techniques of Hollywood. She situates Tati, Ozu, Eisenstein, and other directors in the broad context of international developments, while keeping a focus on their unique uses of the film medium.

Perhaps her most ambitious accomplishment in this vein is her contribution to Film History: An Introduction. She wrote most of the book’s first half, and though I’m aware of the faults of my sections, I find hers splendid. After twenty years of research, she produced the most nuanced account we have yet seen of the international development of artistic trends in American and European silent film.

Kristin has also illuminated the history of the international film industry. Everybody knows that Hollywood dominates world film markets. The interesting question is: How did this happen? Exporting Entertainment provides some surprising answers by situating film traffic in the context of international trade and changing business strategies. One twist: the importance of the Latin American market. The book also opened up inquiry into “Film Europe,” a 1920s international trend that tried to block Hollywood’s power. In all, Exporting Entertainment led other researchers to pursue the question of film trade, and I was gratified to see that Sir David Puttnam’s diagnosis of the European film industry, Undeclared War, made use of Kristin’s research.

More recently, Kristin has turned her attention to the contemporary industry, the main result of which has been The Frodo Franchise, a study of how a tentpole trilogy and its ancillaries were made, marketed, and consumed. Her love of Tolkien and her respect for Peter Jackson’s desire to do LotR justice led her to study this massive enterprise as an example of moviemaking in the age of winning the weekend and satisfying fans on the internet. She maintains her Frodo Franchise blog on a wing of this site.

Most readers of this blog know Kristin as a film scholar. They may be surprised to learn that she also wrote a book on P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster books. Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes; or, Le Mot Juste is a remarkable piece of literary criticism. Here she shows how Wodehouse developed his own templates for plot structure and style. Again, the analysis is grounded in research–in this case, among Wodehouse’s papers. So assiduously did she plumb Plum that she became the official archivist of the Wodehouse estate. This is also, page for page, the funniest book she has yet written.

Her Egyptological work is no joke, though, and she has become one of the world’s experts on Amarna statues. She has published articles and given talks at the British Museum and other venues. Soon she’ll trek off for her ninth season at Amarna. There, joined by her collaborator, a curator at the Metropolitan, she’ll study the thousands of fragments that she’s registered in the workroom seen above. It’s preparation for a hefty tome on the statuary in the ancient city.

You can learn more about Kristin’s career here, in her own words. These are mine, and extravagant as they are, they don’t do justice to her searching intelligence, her persistent effort to answer hard questions, and her patience in putting up with my follies and delusions. You’d be welcome to visit her symposium and see her, and people who admire her, in action. While you’re here, you can watch a restored print of  Design for Living, by one of her favorite directors, screening at our Cinematheque. In 35mm, of course. We can’t shame our heritage.

Poster design by Heather Heckman. Check out our Facebook page too.

Kristin here—

Sentimental Journey

Regular readers of this blog will recall that David and I spent this past May in New Zealand, as Hood Fellows at the University of Auckland.

I did not have much of an excuse to go back to Wellington during our sojourn, but I decided to go for a few days anyway. It’s my favorite city in New Zealand, partly because I have so many memories of exciting events there and partly because it’s an attractive place in itself. Once my lecturing duties in Auckland were done, I took a train, the Overlander, that runs much of the length of the North Island. It’s a 12-hour ride through some very spectacular scenery (including Mount Doom, aka Mount Ngaurhoe; check it out on Google Earth at 39˚ 9’ 25.58” S 175˚ 37’ 57.89” E) and dizzying viaducts over deep gorges.

I was in Wellington for three days, staying where I had stayed on my previous three visits—the Victoria Court Motor Lodge. I originally chose it on the recommendation of Melissa Booth, a publicist on The Lord of the Rings, who had kindly acted as my point person for the first trip. During this year’s stay I had meals with a couple of people I had interviewed who also became friends. Judy Alley was the merchandising coordinator for Rings and King Kong and now works in publicity at Weta Digital. Given my interest in the franchise aspects of Rings, interviews with Judy had explained a lot about the nuts and bolts of coordinating with licensees. Erica Challis, co-founder of TheOneRing.net, had moved to Wellington since I interviewed her in Auckland. We snatched a quick dinner before she went to play French horn in a rehearsal for Swan Lake.

I also finally got to visit Te Papa, the national museum. It’s one of the main destinations for visitors, yet I had never gone through it. I felt it was rude to do that with my cell phone turned on. Sort of like keeping it on in a movie theater. But when I was trying to juggle appointments to interview people, I didn’t dare turn it off. It was worth missing some tourist opportunities, though, since every now and then that phone did ring, sometimes with good news.

For instance, on my first visit in 2003, a week after I had requested permission to watch Peter Jackson supervising the sound mixing on The Return of the King, I got a call at 7:45 pm on a Friday night telling me I could do so the next day. (If you hope to be a director’s or producer’s assistant, be prepared for long hours.) When I showed up, it turned out he and the sound editors were working on the Shelob sequence. Sometimes it pays to sit by the phone.

Park Road Post

During my Wellington visit, I learned from Barrie Osborne that coincidentally a film he is producing was in the sound-mixing phase, and I was invited to come and sit in for a day. Barrie is an American, but he produced The Matrix in Sydney and spent a long time in New Zealand producing all three parts of Rings. Like so many people who came from abroad to work on the trilogy, Barrie fell in love with the place. Now he lives there part-time and works on a range of Australasian projects, including executive producing The World’s Fastest Indian, a Kiwi film, and Little Fish, an Australian drama. (I saw these back-to-back at the American Film Market in 2005, going from the upbeat crowd-pleaser Indian to Fish, a drama about heroin addicts with great performances from Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving—both worth a look if you missed them on their brief American releases.) He also championed The Frodo Franchise from the start, and the book probably wouldn’t exist now without his help.

The film he was finishing up was The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, an adaptation of a popular children’s fantasy novel by Dick King-Smith. It will be released on Christmas Day and has a PG rating.

The mixing was taking place in Studio 2 of Park Road Post, the same place where I had watched Peter supervising the Shelob scene.

Park Road Post (formerly The Film Unit) is a state-of-the-art post-production facility that started moving into its new building gradually, starting in the summer of 2003. At that point only the sound studios and the offices along the corridor outside them were finished. A segment about 19 minutes into the “Soundscapes of Middle-earth” supplement on the extended-version DVD of Return shows the facility as it was then.

My first interview with Barrie was in one of those offices, with considerable construction noise right outside the window. Fortunately my microphone was directional enough that it didn’t overwhelm our conversation. (That office is seen in the “End of All Things” supplement on the same disk.)

By my third visit to Park Road Post, in late 2004, the editing rooms and the huge, beautiful front lobby had been finished, the garden in the center courtyard was being installed, and the processing laboratories were being built. Now the whole thing is finished, with a strange juxtaposition of beautiful modern design in the front and big windowless concrete buildings at the rear.

Park Road itself is a street in the Wellington suburb of Miramar, lined in one section by small houses and then by rows of undistinguished warehouses and small industrial buildings. Next door is the large California Garden Centre, a round, orange building. Gazebos and garden swings are displayed right up against the walls of the sound studios.

Walking from this mundane environment into Park Road Post is a disorienting experience. Suddenly one is in a modern building with a design heavily influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. Natural wood, fireplaces, stained glass windows, cushy leather sofas. It’s a building that one doesn’t want to leave. It has almost an other-worldly quality, which is perhaps not surprising given that it was designed by Dan Hennah, the art director of Rings and Kong.

Making the place as attractive as possible was part of the brief that Peter and partner Fran Walsh handed Dan. As he told me, “It was partly about getting it technically correct and partly about creating an environment that, while being technically correct, was still human and homely and all those things—the comfort zone. So that you actually felt like getting up and going in there in the morning—rather than thinking, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to go into that bloody hole again!’”

By now the ironic story has become famous. A 17-year-old Peter Jackson, aspiring to be a filmmaker, left school and applied for a job at the Film Unit back in the late 1980s. He was turned down, so he worked as a photo-engraver at a newspaper instead. Eventually he got enough backing to quit and finish Bad Taste (1987), his long-gestating first feature. A little over ten years later he bought the Film Unit, then housed in what he described to me as “a sort of ‘Soviet bloc’ feeling place.” During my first visit in 2003, the editing and lab facilities were still there, in a dreary-looking industrial complex out in the distant suburb of Lower Hutt.

Tracking The Water Horse

At the Water Horse sound mixing director Jay Russell was present, though he slipped out at intervals for meetings. As I was about to leave, he remarked that watching sound mixing is like watching paint dry. That’s what everyone says about mixing, but I find it fascinating.

Back in the late 1970s when David and I had the opportunity to spend about half an hour watching the great Walter Murch working on a scene for Apocalypse Now, it was a slow process. Mixing was done on film, so every repetition involved a pause for rewinding, threading the projector, and so on. Now, with high quality digital images being projected on the studio screen, mixers can almost instantly go back to the beginning of a segment by sliding a control handle or move to a different scene by typing in a file number. As a result, there may be many repetitions of the same series of shots, but there’s not that much down time.

The repetition isn’t boring, either, since you can listen for the tiny changes that the mixers make between projections of the scene. (See David’s account of his experiences watching James Mangold’s team mixing sound for 3:10 to Yuma.) There may also be pauses, but usually they’re for discussions among the sound team members. Some of this was just too technical for me to grasp, but what I could follow was fascinating.

That particular day came fairly late in the overall process. Jay was there because the work on the sound was close to finished. The team was concentrating on the final mix of reel 1. It was quite a contrast to the footage I had seen being mixed for Return. In that case a lot of unrendered effects shots were still in the edit, and many scenes hadn’t been locked down yet. Shots of Gollum often just showed him as a figure made up of silvery bands against a black background, and in some cases there was only a title describing the nature of the scene—a close-up of Treebeard looking left, for example. (Again, the DVD bonus chapter “The Soundscapes of Middle-earth” shows some vivid examples of the process.) In the case of The Water Horse, all the footage was finished, and the editing had been completed.

A lot of what goes on at this late stage is tweaking individual tracks. Even though there’s a full mix by this point, the team frequently take out all the tracks except one, so that a bustling city street scene may have densely layered traffic sounds and a musical track during one run-through and only a couple of characters’ footsteps in the next.

As with many films, some musical instruments were on separate tracks. Jay could ask for a drum beat to be turned up to provide a more distinct rhythm to a scene or for certain instruments to be favored so as to enhance the atmosphere of the Scottish setting.

Some of the people present had worked on Rings as well, so I knew a few of them already. It was great to see Rose Dority, post-production supervisor, again. Since my book isn’t really a making-of study, I hadn’t interviewed her, but she had been very hospitable. I also recognized Dave Whitehead, the supervising sound editor, who seems to have worked on half the films made in New Zealand over the past 13 years.

At lunch I got talking with Dave, and he told an anecdote about how some of the war chants of the Easterling attackers during the Battle of the Pelennor in The Return of the King were done. The sound department couldn’t use English, of course, and no texts had been provided. One tactic the recorders and mixers resorted to was spelling the names of their children, friends, and colleagues backwards. In fact I had been present the day those chants were being synchronized and remembered vividly how at the time Dave had explained that “Revilo!”—which sounded very aggressive when shouted in unison by male voices—was based on his son’s name, Oliver. Rose got into the mix as well, as “Ésor!” In the final mix, those chants are not really distinguishable as individual words, being parts of a dense mix of battlefield noises. Still, it was fun knowing that they were there.

The Water Horse mixing went on until mid-afternoon, when a group of people came into the studio for a run-through of the first reel. By that point I was pretty familiar with all the footage and could concentrate on the soundtrack rather than figuring out the plot from the scenes shown out of order up to that point.

Once the screening ended, Barrie asked various people if they had noticed anything that might need changing. Rather to my surprise he included me. Fortunately, rather than sitting there saying, “Ummmm … no,” I did have a suggestion about one sound that was slightly too loud and distracting during a suspenseful moment. That got duly noted down with the other comments and fixed during the final changes. That was an unexpected treat!

The Water Horse is a story of a Scottish boy who finds a strange egg that hatches into a little creature that will grow into the Loch Ness Monster. In the reel I saw, the landscapes were beautiful, a smooth mixture of footage shot in Scotland and in New Zealand. With both Weta Workshop and Weta Digital providing special effects, it naturally has high production values–including a carefully mixed soundtrack. It’s a children’s film, but from what I saw of it, parents will enjoy it as well. (The favorable Variety review is here.)

It’s a production by Walden, which specializes in family-friendly projects. The company seems to like New Zealand, given that much of the first Chronicles of Narnia film and part of the second were shot there.

Kristin here–

Now that The Frodo Franchise is out, I’ve started a separate blog for it. The aim is to keep posts on my book, the Lord of the Rings films, and the Hobbit project from taking up too much space on Observations on film art and Film Art. There’s a link to the new blog on the front page of Observations, or you can find it here.

The Frodo Franchise Blog will contain news items and notices of events around the book, including signings and media interviews. I hope to use the blog as a way of updating some sections of the book.

We’re still trying to solve a few technical problems, but the first news item, updating and discussing some new scraps of information about the Hobbit film, has been posted. Rather than trying to update once or twice a week, as we do here, I’ll be posting items as quickly or slowly as new information arises. There’s an rss feed at the upper right so that you can be notified of updates.

I hope you enjoy the new blog!