In my above comment about public-domain literary masterpieces and how later writers and movie directors feed off of them, I mentioned Bram Stoker's
Dracula because -- in relation to Tolkien's epic triology, the scene featuring Smeagol-Gollum climbing face down a cliff in
LOTR: The Two Towers comes straight from
Dracula, where Jonathan Harker relates in his journal what he saw one night when looking out over the empty courtyard of the Count's delapidated castle.
Quote:
... As I leaned from the window my eye was caught by something moving a storey below me, and somewhat to my left, where I imagined, from the lie of the rooms, that the window of the Count's own room would look out ...
What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case, I could not mistake the hands wihich I had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castly wall over that dreadful abyss, face down , with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not beieve my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some wierd effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by this using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just like a lizard moves along a wall.
What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man? I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me; I am in fear -- in awful fear -- and there is no escape for me; I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of ...
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As Tolkien reworked the scene into his own tale:
Quote:
Suddenly [Frodo] stiffened, and stooping he gripped Sam by the arm. 'What's that?' he whispered. 'Look over there on the cliff!'
Sam looked and breathed in sharply through his teeth. 'Ssss!' he said. 'That's what it is. It's that Gollum! Snakes and ladders! And to think that I thought that we'd puzzle him with our bit of a climb! Look at him! Like a nasty crawling spider on a wall.'
Down the face of a precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. Maybe its soft clinging hands and toes were finding crevices and holds that no hobbit could ever have seen or used, but it looked as if it was just creeping down on sticky pads, like some large prowling thing of insect-kind. And it was coming down head first, as if it was smelling its way. Now and again it lifted its head slowly, turning it right back on its long skinny neck, and the hobbits caught a glimpse of two small pale gleaming lights, its eyes that blinked at the moon for a moment and then were quickly lidded again.
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So J. R. R. Tolkien had no qualms about incorporating Bram Stoker's imagery into his own work and Peter Jackson followed Tolkien in the second film of his movie trilogy. Good thing for Tolkien, Jackson, and New Line Cinema that no one from the Bram Stoker Estate sued them for "intellectual property" infringement since
Dracula does not just belong in the public domain, but has become a part of the literary and entertainment culture itself. It seems to me that if the producers, writers, and directors of the upcoming "LOTR" television series want to reuse Tolkien and Jackson in their own stories, then they only need find what Tolkien and Jackson reused from the extant literature and film archives and claim that they based their stories on those common foundations and not on anything that Tolkien had written or Jackson had filmed. After all, "There and Back Again" simply rips off Homer's
Iliad (from Greece to Troy) and
Odyssey (back to Greece agan). Practically all of Western Literature has done that. Tolkien did it twice: short version and longer version.