DIARY OF A CITY GUARD – PART 16
A series of irreverent tales from my experience as a Tolkien-nerd working as an extra on the first series of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television show.
One of my main aims when I got this job was to find out as much as I possibly could about the story being told in Amazon’s Untitled Amazon Project. I mean, this is pretty exciting stuff, the first Tolkien adaptation since The Hobbit films, but nobody yet knows what it’s about – and let’s face it, the possibilities are pretty much endless. As I’ve mentioned before, my knowledge of Tolkien’s legendarium has thus far been as much a hindrance as a help. It’s very easy to dismiss a possible explanation of something you see happening if it doesn’t line up with the books, but this is television, and the books are really only a secondary concern. (I learned that very early on when I saw Galadriel on Númenor!)
And fair enough too, that’s simply the nature of the beast. I know little about the story arc of the show yet, but it’s definitely set at the end of the Second Age, which means the actual writings about this period by Tolkien are rather sparse. I don’t know at this point what Amazon have the rights to other than the appendices from The Lord of the Rings, but rumour has it they also have some rights to Unfinished Tales. However they definitely don’t have access to The Silmarillion; but to confuse the matter they apparently are able to get access to certain elements of The Silmarillion if the Tolkien Estate is happy with the proposed usage. I think.
I suspect this was also a very attractive notion to the writers of the show, as they have far more freedom if there is less source material available. As per “The Second Age” in The Tale of Years (Appendix B in LOTR):
“These were dark years for Men of Middle-earth, but the years of the glory of Númenor. Of events in Middle-earth the records are few and brief, and their dates are often uncertain.”
So, as I said, huge scope for creative freedom to write your own story. The rather glaring downside to this of course is that no screenwriter at Amazon – or indeed any writer at anywhere – is going to write you better source material for Middle-earth than Tolkien himself. If you were writing a show based on The Children of Húrin or Beren & Luthien you would be of much safer ground, with solid foundations. Ironically the Second Age storyline of Númenor is the most fleshed out by Tolkien but <ahem> you could hardly call it safe ground with solid foundations could you? In a further irony, when the show comes out we will see that they screwed around enormously with the Númenor story – but that is a discussion for another time!
“These were dark years for Men of Middle-earth, when wizards travelled by shooting star and volcanoes erupted via a complex mechanism of swords, stones and water.”
It’s something of an understatement to say that it’s bloody tricky to try and work out what is happening just by observation on set – it’s like trying to work out the picture of a jigsaw when you don’t have the box and you only have 7 of the 500 pieces. Half the time you’re too far away from the cast to hear any of the dialogue, and scenes are filmed in an order that bears no relation to the final sequence you’ll see on television. The key scenes in terms of dialogue are often just cast with no extras, so you’re missing most of the story anyway. My curiosity did not abate during the whole time I was working on the show, but I did soon rather lower my expectations as to what information I could gather. For the vast majority of the crew, this is just another job – they have no reason to take a particular interest in learning what’s going on unless like me they are big Tolkien fans, and I’ve yet to run into anyone that is. So far I’ve been part of four or five scenes, all filmed outdoors on the huge Numenor set, either at the docks or in the streets, and all I know is that Galadriel has somehow rocked up in Númenor, Míriel is in charge with Pharazôn close by, and Isildur is part of an army. I have no idea at all what is going on elsewhere in Middle-earth.
Nevertheless, chatting with other extras can be a valuable source of other information. I spoke to a guy who joined the City Guard for a day who had previously been used as an elf extra, although he couldn’t tell me anything other than his costume was amazing and there were a whole bunch of elves standing around by a tree being kinda elvish. So the big reveal here for me is that a show in Middle-earth will feature elves. Scoop!
This same extra had also been a dwarf. This was apparently a rather torturous experience, requiring a length spell in hair & make-up and including numerous prosthetics, and a costume that was both heavy and uncomfortable, but that did feature an in-built cooling system. What I would have given for an in-built cooling system, rather than the ice-pack solution. But again, he had no idea of the dwarf story.
So we have elves, dwarves and men, and presumably we’ll get Sauron and some orcs too. Hobbits and wizards don’t really turn up until much later in the Third Age, so in theory I don’t expect to hear anything about them. But seeing Galadriel in Númenor on day one forced a dramatic recalibration of my expectations of this show, so I’m not sure anything would surprise me that much. And let’s be honest, what sort of billion-dollar company with the rights to Gandalf, one of the most iconic book and movie characters of all-time, is going to make a show without Gandalf? Indeed I learn fairly early on from a make-up artist who tells me that there was a wizard on one of the other sets, and while he didn’t have a name all the crew referred to him as Gandalf. When the show is released we see a character named The Stranger, but despite the fact that there are many clues about his actual identity – all of which are about a subtle as a kick in the face – many fans remained unconvinced that it was Gandalf until the somewhat clumsy reveal at the end of season two. So I knew from early on (my Non-Disclosure Agreement meant I had to keep my mouth shut), but I still think the strongest of the many strong arguments pointing to The Stranger being Gandalf was the surely unthinkable notion that Amazon had the rights to use Gandalf but would choose not to.
And so it proved with hobbits. A friend of mine is working occasional security for the show, and tells me that he’s been working on the hobbit set. Ok, tell me more… well, apparently they’re called harfoots and are a sort of proto-hobbit. I confess that I hadn’t extended my Gandalf theory at the time to include hobbits, but of course we are going to get hobbits. Nothing says Lord of the Rings like a hobbit or two, and there will be no wasting valuable IP here thank you very much. It’s what Tolkien would have wanted!
Actually we know what Tolkien would have wanted from this show was a bucket load of cash, and I think the US$250million that Amazon apparently paid the Tolkien Estate for the rights qualifies as many, many bucket loads. In fact, inspired by my friend Alan Sisto (he of the esteemed Prancing Pony Podcast), I’m going to work out exactly how many.
If we take a standard American five-gallon bucket, which frankly seems like a bloody big bucket but that’s Americans for you, then we have a volume of 1,639.91 cubic inches. I apologise for not using metric measurements but hey, we’re in US dollars so when in Rome etc, and even if I convert them I’ll be confusing Alan who is American and thus not learned in the ways of the metric system – so just go with me here. If we’re using dollar bills, a stack of 100 would be 6.86 cubic inches. So we can fit 239 stacks of 100 in the bucket. This is going to result in some form of worldwide bucket shortage upon delivery to the Professor, so let’s up the bills to $100 rather than $1. That’s gets an impressive $2,390,000 of cash in one bucket. Thus I can confidently state that $250million is actually 104.6 bucket loads of cash. For any Australians reading and getting thoroughly confused (well, more than confused than normal), that is 1/8896th of an Olympic-size swimming pool.
As I’ve said before, the City Guard’s natural enemies/poor relations are the Sea Guard, of whom I will later learn Elendil is a Captain of. I’ve actually been in a scene with Elendil already, but I had no idea it was him at the time – ‘twas Elendil that was in conversation with Galadriel right in front of me on the docks on my first day of shooting. Anway, despite their obvious deficiencies and their cape-less costumes, the Sea Guard were a nice bunch of guys and I got talking to one whose son was working on the show in the art department. As well as creating many set pieces featuring writing in some of Tolkien’s languages, he had apparently been tasked with creating a full working version of Adûnaic, the language of Númenor, that can be used in the show. Tolkien himself never completed the language, so this is a mighty task to be given, but hearing this at least gives me hope that the show is taking Tolkien very seriously – at least in some ways.
Returning to Elendil, I actually bump into him the next time I’m on set –or rather he bumps into me. I was making my way back to the tents after a cheeky visit to the nice clean spacious toilet I had discovered in the studio block. I don’t think we were supposed to use them, we were expected to use the portacabin toilets, but a nice quiet spacious bathroom is perfect for the man in guard attire – so I didn’t tell anyone else about my discovery. Anyway, I’m walking down the corridor on the way back from my private bathroom and a big heavy studio door flies open and knocks me over. This could probably have done some damage were I not wearing armour. It might be plastic, but it’s effective! Against doors, at least. As I get up, another armoured man looks at me in a kind of puzzled what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-on-the-floor kind of way and walks off, while I look at him with a clear expression of dude-what-the-fuck?! To be clear, I have heard nothing but lovely things about Lloyd Owen, who plays Elendil, and I don’t think he had a clue that he’d knocked me over, but I’ve never been able to look at or read about Elendil in quite the same way since.
“Well he shouldn’t have been using that toilet, it’s his own fault”