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Old 03-17-2008, 07:40 AM   #144
davem
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Sibley View Post

Yes, Marian's performance was excellent and she worked wonders in those few short scenes without any radiophonic tricksy stuff. My problem with the film is similar to the reaction I have when Gandalf becomes threatening at Bag End - it is just so unsubtle...
I think Jackson & the writers too often fell into the old 'show, don't tell' trap - film has advantages over radio in that you can show things, but there's always the temptation to show too much - to 'shout' rather than just 'say'. Brian Rosbury described movie Galadriel as a 'screaming sea-green hell-hag' or somesuch. Once again, as with the Balrog, radio allows the listener to visualise the characters/events as they wish, & not to have a director impose an image on them. Galadriel should not go 'psycho' at that point - however good the sfx a director has may be.

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I'm trying to remember... Ian Holm, I think, had already read the book and certainly read it in close detail while preparing for the role. David Collings (Legolas) was a devoted fan of the book and knew it well which was a great help in the Fellowship scenes.
I remember reading, in John (Bilbo) Le Mesurier's posthumous biography, a letter written to a show-biz friend saying something to the effect that he was working on The Lord of the Rings for the BBC, didn't have the faintest idea what it was all about but that it was all very jolly because he was working with old friends like Hordern who also didn't seem to know what was going on...
Hmm, you know, listening to the Church House recording, I got the feeling that David Collings was in the same position of not really knowing the story. I don't know why - of course, Peter Woodthorpe tended to take over the discussion a bit! Did you have Ian or David doing an 'Ian McKellan', wandering the studio with a copy of the book & making 'suggestions'?

More seriuously - how much of the recording was out of sequence - I think I heard Jane Morgan mention that the last few episodes at least we're recorded in order, but was there a lot of jumping around Bag End one day, Pelenor Fields the next, then Lothlorien the day after, etc...

I didn't realise that John Le Mesurier was in the same boat as Michael Hordern & didn't know what was going on - still, the magic of radio (or Middle-earth) worked in both cases.

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Amon Hen was cut for several reasons: time (always a pressing factor); the necessity to have Frodo soliloquising on the Seat of Seeing - always a difficult thing to achieve on radio; and because the Eye imagery had featured so recently in the Mirror of Galadriel episode where it had similarly been described in a mini-Frodo-monologue...
I see what you mean - Frodo's vision on Amon Hen, with the armies massing for the coming war, is one of the scenes from the book that sticks in my mind most strongly, but I don't see that working as a soliloquy, & you can't keep using the narrator to describe what's happening. Was there a temptation to keep resorting to the narrator - I think you hit the right balance, but it must be tempting to avoid the soliloquites, (or giving poor Pippin all the obvious questions to ask!) by just having the narrator tell the listener what's happening? Were there points at which you struggled over when to use a soliloquy & when to use the narrator - in other words did you only use the narrator when you couldn't use a character, or were there points where you could have written a scenes for the characters, but chose to use the narrator instead? What I'm getting at is did you decide to have a narrator in the series because there were things you couldn't handle any other way - was he a last resort - or was he seen as another character whose role was essential to telling the story?
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