Quickbeam Q&A: Tolkien Fandom at Crossroads
Part One: TheOneRing.net talks with us about the history of the Tolkien-verse
Where is Amazon Studios going to take us with Middle-earth? Well, to better understand what’s ahead, we need to go back in time some to understand how the modern Tolkien-verse and its fandom rocketed to this moment in the first place. And there’s no one better to talk with about this than TheOneRing.net’s Clifford “Quickbeam” Broadway, who has been covering and participating in online Tolkien fandom for over 20 years.
These days, Quickbeam does a weekly live video stream on YouTube called TORN Tuesdays, where he co-hosts special guests and goes deep on any number of movie and Tolkien topics. His guests range from stars to filmmakers to scholars. I have always known Clifford to be a thoughtful, kind and very open fellow fan. I actually first interacted with him in the early days of TORN in the year or two leading up to the release of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. Back then, he co-hosted a Q&A forum called Green Books. I once submitted a Mythcon XXII report for TORN myself the summer before the movie hit, where I first met Quickbeam in person and got a chance to participate.
I met him again in person maybe a year after on a reality TV pilot about fandom. I played the Tolkien “scholar” archetype who waxed philosophical — and probably pretentiously in retrospect — about the awesome headiness of Tolkien’s world. I also, humorously and embarrassingly, compared Tolkien’s mastery of suspense to sex. Clifford was the M.C. for the final quiz session, where he asked us to expound on why we were the ultimate Tolkien fans. It was a surreal moment. But again, one of the things that stuck out to me was how fun and down-to-earth Clifford was in that context. Since then, he has continued to diligently cover all aspects of Middle-earth as it expands through media and the cultural universe.
Reconnecting recently, we discussed the current state of Tolkien fandom, the historic impact of the Jackson films, his Tolkien documentary Ringers: Lord of the Fans, and the upcoming Amazon TV series. We also went deep into the less kind aspects of today’s internet and fan wars. What follows is an extensive discussion about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium began to accelerate and then jumped into hyperspace by entering the pop cultural consciousness of the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s, as Gen X helped take Middle-earth from the ‘60s hippie era into strange new directions. This is Part One of a longer multi-part chat. It has been lightly edited for pace and flow…
Wraith Land: So first of all, it’s great to be reconnected after all of these years. I want to get your thoughts on a bunch of things, including the Amazon TV series. But can you first tell us more about your own fandom and TheOneRing.net?
Quickbeam: Well, I can't believe that TheOneRing.net just hit on April 26 our 22-year anniversary. When the site started it was within that year that they started hiring additional staff to volunteer and come write, edit, and do some content for the site. And then it's like, “What really? There's a website that has lasted more than 20 years?” You know, that, many Millennials don't understand.
Wraith Land: I know you’re based in Los Angeles. Are you a native or are you from a different part of the country? How did Tolkien first come into your life and universe?
Quickbeam: Growing up in a little beach-side coastal town in Florida, most of my childhood was paying attention to swimming and surfing, and there's manatees in the water, and it's just that kind of place, really literally magical, magical creatures when you look out. You look out of your school window as a child, and there's the surf crashing on the shore. So, you know, I saw The Hobbit come on the telly, in 1977, the same year that the first Star Wars film came out, and then my brother and I were eager beyond any reasonable definition to devour the book.
We're talking about kids, to see the 90-minute animation on — I believe it was broadcast on ABC network — and then the next step was our mom working to get that book. There's a book, and then, “There's more books?! No way!”
So my hat’s off. My hat's off to Rankin/Bass, and all the Japanese animators they worked with, many of whom we would learn later were on at Top Craft Studio, the animation house, who ended up migrating to another animation house, that would become the nascent Studio Ghibli. And a lot of animators, you know, working on Thundercats, the TV show, worked on Rankin/Bass as animators on The Hobbit, and the TV adaptation of The Return of the King. So literally, you know, it was watching televised animation that hooked me.
The Hobbit program won the Peabody Award. Actually, it was a big big year for being a geek — we were all Star Wars fans and The Hobbit fans all at once. All of a sudden, it all happened in 1977! That's really the root of it. That's when this whole fan thing took off. Fandom struck hard and fast in my life, getting into Lucas and the Tolkien-verse at the same time. Obviously, I'm a product of that.
Wraith Land: Right, that was an amazing year, that crossing between all these fantasy worlds. Both films had a major impact on me as well. It’s fascinating the international connections too. I didn’t know that there was a Studio Ghibli connection to Tolkien. It makes sense. I have always felt there was a kinship between Hayao Miyazaki and Middle-Earth.
Quickbeam: The books too. There were times when I would compete with my brother to read that book, The Hobbit. We were jockeying for the book all the time between us. I had to wait when he was putting it down so I could pick it up. Then the Lord of the Rings was very quick to be digested and devoured right after that, and then all these years later, I was working for McKellen.com, working for Ian McKellen, when he was doing a film called Gods and Monsters, which is about the late great director of Frankenstein, James Whale, and he was nominated for an Oscar for that.
So I started working on some of his online stuff with McKellen.com and it was way before he had a conversation with Bryan Singer about doing Magneto and being in X-Men. It was way before he got cast by Peter Jackson, to be in New Zealand for Lord of the Rings. I was just working for him at the time.
TheOneRing.net put out this call for writers, and I started working as a writer for TheOneRing.net before Ian was even cast in the role of Gandalf. So one of the reasons why I was excited to be a contributor was because I was the one writer for them who was based in Los Angeles. I was no longer living in a little beach town in Florida. I was actually here in LA at that time. I was writing, writing, writing, research, research, and interacting with fans on message boards.
There were wild conversations on the IRC chat, called Barliman’s, which was super popular. So it came to our attention that a lot of the crew members — the carpenters and textile people and the “boots on the ground” down in New Zealand who were working on Peter’s project — they were getting information from us! Instead of getting information internally from the production company. They were looking at our spy reports and our stories on TheOneRing.net.
But there was a pretty quick confluence of events. After Ian was cast as Magneto and Gandalf at the same time, my job was to siphon off secret information from somebody and protect my source. At the same time I was working both sides of the coin, working at McKellen.com, and the TheOneRing.net. So I was in the sweetest of all sweet spots.
As it turned out, I helped make the arrangements with Comic-Con. In the year 2000, before there was ever a Hall H that was ever constructed. It didn't exist. We were trying to bring in McKellen, to come be part of the New Line Cinema reveal. New Line Cinema had the biggest room at the convention at that time, just upstairs in the mezzanine, right outside the sales pavilion.
And I got him to come in as a surprise. After New Line show their little teaser trailer, which had blown up the internet — back then, the number one thing you could download that blew up the internet was the trailer for Episode One, The Phantom Menace, and that bloody teaser trailer that came out in late 1999, early 2000 for the Lord of the Rings — those were the QuickTime trailers that we were all downloading that blew everything up. Remember!? You were there for that too.
Wraith Land: Absolutely. I downloaded both of those eagerly, at the small low res compared to today, these little videos. I remember it clearly. It really was a huge deal. I was excited and anxious about what it would mean.
Quickbeam: Right, and then everything quickly dovetailed with everything else. With the launch of Green Books (on TheOneRing.net), we wanted to do an online literary magazine, and the format was called Green Books, and we, together with Erica, one of the founders of the TheOneRing.net, Erica Chalice (also known on TheOneRing.net as “Tehanu”), myself and a couple of other brave souls, got some people together under online avatar names, one of which stuck with me all these decades, “Quickbeam.” (The other big founders of TheOneRing.net were “Xoanon” and “Calisuri,” who got the main site going first.)
The other people in Green Books fostered an environment of doing Q&A’s for the fans who had very strange unanswered questions about Middle-earth and Tolkien artists. We would do the research and read up on the books and then respond with articles, and then I wrote a lot of major feature articles that were collected with a bunch of other people in Green Books, and we made an omnibus. There were two volumes of our printed books in softcover, called The People's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Wraith Land: I was one of those Tolkien fans that contributed questions or comments in Green Books in the lead up to the films. My clear memory was how welcoming you and Tehanu were in those forums. It was a great place to share knowledge, concerns and perspectives before it went supernova. There was no social media. It is easy to forget how much more intimate the Web was back then.
Quickbeam: That’s right. And then it was time for the films to come out, and the films came out, and the excitement became not just fan excitement when the films came out, it became something that could only be described as seismic. It was seismic with everyone in popular culture responding to it in a way that was not predictable at all. No one knew that this zombie splatter film director, who had been isolating himself down there in the far corner of the world, no one knew he was gonna do it. No one could have guessed when The Fellowship of the Ring came out. That was magic out of his hat!
We had gotten a good whiff of it with the Cannes Film Festival — early preview footage — and that was the earliest bits. It showed a major segment for Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria, and that was shown in Cannes Film Festival to all the press, to Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin and onto everyone around the world. And the trades and the magazines, the reporters and the stars, you know, Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler, and they were all at Cannes Film Festival. It was a crazy moment in time.
And just now at this very moment while we're speaking, we did the 20th anniversary of the recording of the film score, those early sessions recorded in Wellington Town Hall were just for that segment of the Cannes film footage, which was the fight with the troll in the Chamber of Mazarbul with Balin’s Tomb, and the flight, the Bridge, and of course the confrontation, which clips and ends at the very end, without completing the confrontation with the Balrog. I remember watching the Cannes film footage and everyone got a whiff of how brilliant it was going to be, and then it all exploded with the second film, Two Towers.
After that, by the time the second film came out, we were already doing Oscars parties, huge fan events — the fans could come to a Hollywood party and be in black suits, tie and tails and elegant cocktail dresses and beautiful ball gowns. Who knew? We thought that we were dealing with the guy who did Dead Alive. This was the guy who had his lead actor pick up a lawn mower at the climax and blood sprays by hundreds of gallons everywhere. We had no idea Peter was going to handle J.R.R. Tolkien at that level. And critics were loving it. The box office was loving it. Everyone was loving it.
Wraith Land: And is this how you were able to build up sources and inspiration for your Ringers: Lord of the Fans doc film about Tolkien fans? Was it the sheer scope and energy of this “crazy moment” that propelled you?
Quickbeam: Years later it became the story that was told, and retold, and then Ringers got early investors who were fans, just hardcore fans from TheOneRing.net and was that first wave of investors. We took a bunch of digital cameras that could do 1040 in High Def, we've got 1040 pixel cameras, we're like, “Okay, let's do this!” So we shot in high def. And then when we released the bloody film on DVD, you know, later we had to put it down to standard def, which was a crime. It looked good, but it was a crime.
So then our documentary film was finished, where we traveled to England and interviewed Terry Pratchett, before he passed away, and David Carradine before he passed, and also Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead. We interviewed Geddy Lee from Rush and all the rock and rollers, and with some friendly contacts to people behind Led Zeppelin, their management, actually that let us talk directly to Robert Plant, and his response, and literally when he was at the tennis court was, “Yes, by all means,” he let us license ‘Ramble On.’* So we were the first little indie film ever in the world to license a Led Zep song ever, because they had spent a couple of decades notoriously denying folks.
Wraith Land: Well that speaks to the power I think of Tolkien's works and that they would feel that kind of fraternity with you guys and what you were doing and that they would support and OK. That was super cool.
Quickbeam: Oh totally. So I can just kind of say that Rush’s Geddy Lee let us license the song ‘Rivendell’ for $1, which is virtually free. Yeah, the paperwork had to be completed with a payment, that was just, you know, a penny. So, that was all because of them being hardcore fans themselves.
We learned the most weird and interesting stories. David Carradine was walking around United Artists desperately trying to persuade Ralph Bakshi not to make his 1978 animated Lord of the Rings film, but to continue with his live action footage that he had already shot at a castle in Spain. Carradine was trying to tell Bakshi to keep that footage as it was and not do any rotoscoping or animation over it at all.
So we've got all these little gems — fun bits in our film. And now that we're here in 2021, we have worked hard to re-scale the film back up to high def. So we're going to reissue the film. Direct rental on YouTube, or whatever, because, you know, we're ready.
Wraith Land: I think it's the perfect time. One thing listening to you talk about this amazing journey is just how much of it was timing, the synergy between the filmmakers who were also fans and that you guys were fans and it really was unprecedented, the level of access. Where do you think we are now then in this epic timeline of the modern Tolkien-verse. Today, there's even more! There's a lot of YouTube channels, there's the Tolkien Professor around, he's doing Wired videos. There’s Stephen Colbert and so on.
Quickbeam: You've got a lot of YouTube providers who are breaking specific production news. We’re the old grandfather clock in the room, like we're not the new kids. There are a bunch of new clocks. Yeah, we're the old grandfather clock in the house, and whenever we chime, everybody in the house kind of hears it. That's my analogy. No matter where you are in the home, you'll hear that grandfather clock keeping time.
Some of the other content providers are getting more specific scoops about the directors who are shifting in and out of play down during the current Amazon production. Where we are as a fandom in terms of how we talk to each other and how we deal with each other is something of a more tentative atmosphere, I think, because all of us are wildly energized at the fact that we're going into the Second Age of Middle-earth, to see new areas of Arda, and especially to see it in ways that we've never seen it before.
And we know that Jeff Bezos makes a billion dollars every couple of days — every couple of days — so he's spared no expense in paying a lot of money. The reason why there's some tentative feelings about it is because of the fact that Christopher Tolkien retired from his position as guardian and gatekeeper of the estate, and then not long after that, he passed. His guardianship was so specific, and perhaps draconian in some ways, but it was specific and he kept things under control.
Now we don't know who's in the driver's seat, and we don't know what kind of licensing has happened, the full scope of what partial pieces of The Silmarillion have been licensed are not yet understood. They've got everything under license from the existing Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which means they have the Prologue and Appendices, and those maps that are there.
But we don't know what else they've licensed beyond, with Unfinished Tales or other content in the books, particularly looking at The Silmarillion, we don't know. But the real tentative feeling that I have, is because there's a lot of weird polarization coming around and because of the bad energy that has hit.
More with Quickbeam on Tolkien fandom’s future — continued…
* The Led Zeppelin song ‘Ramble On’ famously includes lyrics about Middle-earth. Singer and lyricist Robert Plant drew inspiration from Tolkien’s works for many of the band’s most famous anthems, including ‘Misty Mountain Hop,’ ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore.’