Quickbeam Q&A: Tolkien Fandom at Crossroads
Part Three: TheOneRing.net on Amazon's bumpy ride, its stride, and more
A new era of fandom is upon us, not just with Amazon’s megawatt expansion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but as we move through the pandemic into a world humbled by Mother Nature and cracked apart by the phantasmagoric fanaticisms of the internet. The word “fan” comes from “fanatic,” and here in the year 2021, I think it is important to step back and remind ourselves that there is a connection between the two. In the third part of our conversation with TheOneRing.net’s Quickbeam (Clifford Broadway), we get back to the “fan” part of that equation, and hence the “fun”: for those who missed the first two parts of our Q&A, we explored humanity’s taste for escapism in terms of the rise of fandom and humanity’s temptation into tribalism in the social media age.
[Parts One and Two of our extended Q&A with Quickbeam are here and here.]
Because of COVID, right now everything is compressing and expanding at once, psychographic plates grinding to the physics of a new electromagnetic era. The physical, the mental, and the “meta” — i.e. the spiritual and the mythic, not just blips of data — are interacting in dizzying ways. Which brings us back to fandom, and celebrating why that word belongs to myths, sports and entertainments. Like Bilbo Baggins, it’s important not to take ourselves too seriously, however trying the journey or contentious the topic.
This last part of our conversation with Quickbeam touches on the potential of this uncertain moment in our collective unconscious — a paradigm shift in our secular narratives and dreams. We discuss Howard Shore, the Academy Award-winning composer of The Lord of the Rings films, more hopes and concerns about Amazon’s production, the legacy of The Hobbit films, and the aesthetic symbiosis between electronic music and Tolkien’s fantasy. In the future, we hope to check back in with Quickbeam once the Amazon series takes flight. Until then, we hope you enjoy this third trip into the past, present and future of Tolkien-dom.
Wraith Land: Besides the potential for new Tolkien themes and lands in the Amazon series, what else are you excited about?
Quickbeam: Well, what's also terrific and exciting is there are the rumors of Howard Shore being approached to do some themes. You know, looking at Star Trek: Next Generation, they re-appropriated the most famous Star Trek theme from Jerry Goldsmith, and now it’s used for the opening titles on TV. But that was a previous Star Trek film, you know, even though they had individual music written for every episode of Star Trek. So we'll see whether Howard comes back to do anything, or just licenses some of his previous music that they can modify.
Wraith Land: His music is so great, I mean it really is one of the things from the Jackson films that I still look back, and you think about sort of taking Tolkien into this new art form — the music side is really top notch, what he did there, for sure.
Quickbeam: Yep, the music that has lived outside the films itself. It’s really lived an amazing life outside of the films if you think about it. It's fantastic what he created. So I'm excited because we're in a place of now generationally passing the baton to the next generation.
Wraith Land: That's one thing I've been encouraged by on Twitter, at least with fans — I always avoided Twitter for the most part — but I've recently popped on more and I've been really impressed by the diversity of the fans on Twitter, at least that I've been interacting with: people with LGBTQ backgrounds and people from Asia, and Black or African-descent fans. That speaks to I think the universality of Tolkien’s work. Obviously the films and Howard Shore’s score is perhaps a big part of that appeal.
There was just a story I read the other day in The Guardian by the author Namina Forna about her fantasy book, The Gilded Ones and her experience as a fantasy fan reading Tolkien as a child. She is from Sierra Leone and immigrated to the United States as a kid. Tolkien was a big part of her growing up and helping her through traumas and adapting. But when she got older and saw the films, she said she didn’t see anybody that looked like her, which was jarring in that context. She decided: Well, I'm going to go ahead and write my own fantasy, I'm going to follow in the tradition of Tolkien and create a secondary world and do a lot of things that Tolkien did, but more tailored to my own experience and with characters that look more like me.
To me, that's still the lesson about Tolkien. I think he would have really been happy to hear something like that, you know, “Okay, yeah, I'll write from my point of view.” His own wasn't maybe as expansive as someone might be today. There was no internet back then and less exposure to the world and other cultures. But I'm always surprised at actually how much his work has continued to reach, has stood up, and still is open enough that I think people can take what they want from it and come from different backgrounds.
The stories of the hobbits for example are just so powerful. That's one of the things I want to ask you. Do you have any worries about what the Amazon series will be like without hobbits to give it that down-to-earth emotion? We don't know if there's going to be hobbits in there, but I do feel the hobbits are something that are very special about what Tolkien did in terms of speaking to the child in all of us, as well as this other more universal side of us. Do you think the new stuff will have as much staying power without hobbits?
Quickbeam: There should not be any hobbits in the show, timeline-wise, but I've heard lots of rumors that they're going to have some of the early peoples or early, early hobbits, the Fallohides and the Stoors, and the Harfoots, because in the Second Age they haven't migrated yet from the Vales of Anduin to the Shire.
I mean, going back to the Second Age, there isn't any mention there. So they're maybe going to play fast and loose with the calendar. So that makes me a little uncomfortable. But then again, you have to squish and overlap events in a weird way sometimes to service the right story. Even Professor Tolkien had to do it. He jumps back and forth in his timeline, you know, and when you're reading the novel, you'll go way, way, way forward in the timeline and then at the end of the book, make a jump back to Frodo and Sam, and now you're back a couple of months earlier than where you were.
I have understood that the licensing deal prevents Amazon from doing things that the Tolkien Estate would veto. We'll see if that really happens. That’s the one hold out. The family could intervene and say, “Nah, your plan is a little bit too fast and loose.” Which is what Christopher always disallowed. He wouldn’t let anyone touch that stuff.
Also, Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar, is also no longer involved. So I'm not encouraged by that either. However, I am encouraged by the fact that they've got some super talented people on the show. Some of the directors and their choices, working with J.A. Bayona — you can't go wrong. He's entirely capable. He’s very talented. He discovered Spider-Man — he discovered Tom Holland — so everything's good with me with Bayona.
Watching A Monster Calls, I realized Bayona can not only handle tough delicate thematic Tolkien material, that is like a Beren and Lúthien type level material, like emotionally difficult and delicate, but he can handle action with that rarefied stuff. That's the rarefied air of a director who can handle shit like that.
I'm confident about the choice to shoot in New Zealand. I'm not confident that our old friends from Weta Workshop are not being utilized, when they could have been. But most of the people at Weta have been booked on other shows.*
Amazon has had a very weird time trying to decide whether they're going to do something borrowed or something blue, whether they’re going to use some of the previous New Line designs and the previous Weta designs. I have been hearing through the grapevine, a lot of conflicting rumors about whether they're using primary recognizable sets and locations and costumes, or whether there's a lot of variants with them bringing in all other visual styles.
After all, director Guillermo del Toro was going to give us one of the weirdest offbeat Hobbit adaptations that would have had barely any resemblance to the book. So we would have been braced for that so we might as well get braced for this. So yeah, I might as well for now be half full for this. If they can spare no expense, then they've got billions of dollars to throw at it.
I'm great with that. I'm great with Bezos money being thrown at it. But that is no guarantee that the people in the writers’ room know what they're doing. So I guess we'll find out when we get there.
Brace yourself for a lot of “hot Sauron” stuff, because it's going to be like “Oo, Annatar, he's going to be all like Tom Hiddleston sexy!” So we're going to have to deal with that. **
Wraith Land: I read your post about about that, about the Game of Thrones sort of thing and that's been a big subject of conversation, is about the nudity.
Quickbeam: Evidently, those rumors of the nudity were early and over exaggerated. The nudity that's going to be in the show, is going to be about the same as you see in Terminator 2: he arrives in silhouette without clothing because he’s just been zapped into place from a previous time. Eventually he gets clothing right away. If that’s the extent of the nudity in the show, then it’s not a problem.
However, it was really interesting to see the loud thunder of fans about my article on the possibility of sexualized Tolkien. It made people uncomfortable when they were watching Hermione and Harry kiss each other in that weird hallucination in Harry Potter. So the idea of there being any sexual expression in Tolkien’s world is like “Mmmmm.” The response from fandom, was “Snap!” They were there for that and to respond very strongly to that. I’m glad to know our prejudgement on that was premature.
Wraith Land: One of the things I wanted to ask you then, was what things do you want to see, putting more of your Tolkien fan hat on?
Quickbeam: I want the full-on Atlantis correlation. I want Númenor to be shown in this TV series the way that Tolkien meant it to be shown. I want it to be a pure Middle-earth version of Atlantis — the rise and utter corruption and fall of a great kingdom. I want the Atlantis treatment, all the way. Because I love that stuff.
You know that Middle-earth has its own built-in Atlantis, and if they do it like that, then it's going to be delightful, it's going to be amazing. We're going to get to see the flat Earth changed to be round. Númenor’s going to be destroyed by the end of Season Four? Who knows what they're gonna do in Season Five? I don't know. It’s gonna be wild. But they've got the money, they've got the license, and we just have to work our way forward. As a community of fans, we're going to have to work our way through this.
It's like playing the weird old game of anticipation. It was zombie splatter anxiety that we had back then. Okay, that was our anxiety back then. Now, our anxieties are different, but we do have them. And as long as you're acknowledging them and that they're a little different than last time, then we can work our way through it.
Wraith Land: It's very interesting because I almost feel like at this point this series, even in conversations with friends and stuff, the amount of money being spent, it feels a little bit like it's a too-big-to-fail scenario. So I wonder if that's why things have changed and moved around and people came on and left, because they're really trying to find the magic, or it is a sign that it’s troubled. I think the casting overall has been really interesting.
Quickbeam: Yeah, the departure of the Bryan Cogman connection, was that he was there and did a lot of development work for them and then left. We latched on to that as part of what you'd call my article that was like an exposé about sexuality and nudity in Tolkien-land. He provided a bunch of stuff for GoT that a lot of fans were really, really not happy with. Nobody wants to see a sexual assault in any Middle-earth story, ever. Now, in Professor Tolkien’s writing, the stuff about incest in The Silmarillion, and the breakdowns of prophecy and of different relationships in the most tragic of ways — he goes there. But he didn’t go the direction Cogman went.
The fact that he’s gone from it? We’re going to see if any of his fingerprints are left on the lens or the scripts. The guy who worked on Star Wars, who did a lot of production design — Rick Heinrichs — laid a lot of the foundation early on. He left. So when your head of production design leaves, your Tolkien scholar leaves, and your lead actor, who is going to play Elrond, Will Poulter, leaves — he is so perfect, he would have been so perfect, he’s one of my favorite performers — with all of those uncomfortable things, changing and that revolving door of all those people coming and going, there was a bad air about it at first.
But it seems they have hit their stride, and they've recovered from COVID, and they're in full swing in the one place on Earth that has the least amount of COVID problems right now. So it's a blessing for them. It's a blessing for the production, and maybe in the end, we the fans will be the beneficiaries of that since they've got everything going smoothly now. But it was a real ugly bumpy start
Wraith Land: So you were saying because Christopher Tolkien is gone now, you were talking about The Silmarillion — and I basically had read and then understood that the assumption was that Amazon didn't get the rights to it. But maybe one thing is as they dig more into the Second Age, it's almost like they have to use parts of it to stay in line with the Estate, to be quote-unquote “accurate.”
I mean, it's going to be there. And that brings up a question I have: If this goes well, do you think that The Silmarillion is pretty much inevitable? Because with Christopher Tolkien gone, I can imagine the Estate will sell the rights to it.
Quickbeam: I think that every actor and actress in the new Amazon series has been shown reading a book, and the book that they're reading on every beach table, at every bar everywhere they're at, they're reading The Silmarillion. We know that the actors are deliberately showing The Silmarillion, in everything they've done on Instagram, literally, and on Tolkien Reading Day. So, yeah.
For them to make this TV series, I'm pretty sure they've licensed the Akallabêth. Or even additionally, and/or, the final section, which is Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. So if they've got that, then they've got two sections out of The Silmarillion. If the rest of it is untouched, we'll see what happens later.
Wraith Land: One other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on are the showrunners for Amazon’s series. I’ve read various things about them, that they were associated with some Star Trek stuff, but it seems the main comment on them is that they are pretty unknown. How did these two guys get the biggest gig in TV history?
Quickbeam: Yes, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay. They're the ones who are in the hot seat. They're the people who never had a thing produced. They've never had a screenplay produced, and they were handed the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, why did that happen? How did that happen?
Well, they have a “blacklist” in Hollywood, a blacklist, which is not what it used to be during the McCarthy era. It's called a blacklist, but it’s really the most popular screenplays that continue to float around from agent to agent, and all the actors read them and other studios read these big big screenplays, very very popular, and they get optioned, and then not made, then optioned again and then not made — the hottest screenplays in town. And J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay had a script for Paramount for a Star Trek film, and it is still on that blacklist of screenplays that flips around, and somebody is going to make it someday.
And I think they have another screenplay, which is still un-produced that everyone knows and everyone's talking about. But still, it hasn't been made. And so based on that only, based on that reputation, only just material, they were given the keys to the kingdom. And I'm like, yeah, so, I would like to direct 20 questions at them.
Wraith Land: Yeah that’s crazy. Talking about taking a big risk with lots of money. Speaking of another controversial aspect of Tolkien adaptations, a lot of fans weren't happy with The Hobbit films by Jackson. What are your views or your take on it?
Quickbeam: I have nothing bad to say about The Hobbit trilogy, except for the love triangle and the unnecessary Tauriel-Kíli love triangle with jealous Orlando as Legolas. So that was a bit much — “Jelly Leggy” as I called him in that — as in “Jealous Legolas.”
Now, I love everything about having more Christopher Lee. I love everything about Gandalf and Martin Freeman, in every second. The handling of Thorin’s mental state, in the third film was great.
The Hobbit only suffered from those indulgences that King Kong suffered from: there's some good and bad in everything in this mix, but overindulgent and wearing out its own welcome.
Same with The Hobbit trilogy. When it works, it’s great.
Wraith Land: Right, the last year I said to myself, “Okay, I'm going to go back and rewatch The Hobbit trilogy and take my time.” So I watched the first two which I already had enjoyed, and then for the first time watched The Battle of Five Armies: Extended Edition. I did not like the theatrical version at all. But this time I listened to the commentary, and I remember thinking in the theater, “Why did they kill Smaug so quickly!?” But I watched it and I listened to the filmmakers. I just developed a real love for the trilogy once I understood that they really were basically trying to make a fuller epic companion to the Rings films.
So I'm curious what your take was on The Hobbit movies and where it sits in the fan culture at this point and people's consciousness about it? Because I feel like a lot of people, certainly critics, poo-poo’d it for not being the Rings films or for being too self-indulgent.
But again, then I watched it with my wife. She's not read the books and she loved The Hobbit movies. She was really into it. She cried when Thorin, Fíli and Kíli died. She was really moved by it.
Quickbeam: I had the same experience with some of my closest friends that had not seen The Lord of the Rings films, who watched The Hobbit films first. They love it. They love them. They had a great experience.
Beorn has this wonderful conversation with Gandalf and says, “Yeah, yeah, that's what Saruman says, but what does Gandalf the Grey say?” And all of a sudden you're looking at Ian McKellen, and you're starting to realize, “Okay, there's so much good stuff here.” There's all that wonderful stuff with the attempt to rescue Thráin from Dol Guldur. Absolutely horrible that that was cut from the theatrical release of the film. I love all that stuff.
At the same time, I dislike the bloat. The whole stuff with Alfred Lickspittle getting into really bad drag and stuffing coins into his brazier? “Whatever, you know?” Whatever. But, if you're going to give me more Christopher Lee, I'm there for that. What would have been a two-film version, if Peter hadn’t made three films? So when you're talking about The Hobbit, I'm often thinking about The Hobbit that could have been.
Wraith Land: The three films approach, I haven't read it anywhere, but I always assumed it was just sort of MGM and New Line saying, “We want three,” or was that more of a creative thing, where they said, “You know what, let's do three! We have the money to go bigger.”
Quickbeam: It was both. Like he needed the time to get the third film and its contents ready to go. Peter was playing catch up with himself, all the time. It was also financial, because Warner Brothers said, “You've got the infrastructure there. You've got the people there. All the boots on the ground, and the craftspeople are there. They're going to build and paint everything you need, so you might as well. Here's the ‘hot cost’ budget.” And then Peter was like, “Yeah, I can do it with this much more. We can push it out.” And then all of a sudden Peter had extra time to finish what he could not finish.
Wraith Land: And on Del Toro. I know you interviewed him and you were covering the production, and you talked earlier about how it would have been very different if he had made the films. So I imagine you've got more of an inside sense of what his take was gonna be? Were you excited to see that, or do you feel like that was, I want to say, dodging a bullet because it was too radically different?
Quickbeam: It would have been too radical. I mean, in his version, Beorn lived in a house that was similar to the Baba Yaga. It was going to get up on chicken legs and walk around the forest. So, when Beorn’s house is all of a sudden just like Baba Yaga in the Slavic legends, people would have been like, “This is not identifiable as Tolkien anymore.”
So maybe we dodged a bullet. But I would have loved to have seen the practical effects, and to see Doug Jones come in as some wonderful creatures. But who better to walk in his own footsteps, than PJ himself.
Wraith Land: Switching gears back to music, one thing that sticks out to me from your earliest reports for TheOneRing.net was your enthusiasm for electronic music, and in particular Boards of Canada. I remember thinking that was interesting, because I am really into electronic music too.
It’s not really a theory, but for whatever reason, I think the spaciousness of electronic music fits the headspace of Tolkien’s stories and the expansiveness of Middle-earth really well. I used to love reading Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to like Depeche Mode’s Violator on headphones.
I don’t know, maybe there’s something about how electrons can transport you. That kind of music can kind of create a secondary world or ambient experience, and I wonder if you agree with that? You know, that there's some sort of weird symbiosis between electronic music and that kind of technological futuristic thing and Tolkien's world, which is not futuristic per se, but it's all about timelessness and spirit.
Quickbeam: Yeah, for sure. There’s something there. And more generally, I agree that there's a perfect soundtrack for every graphic novel, for every comic book, every regular book, and sometimes I hear musical influences that I think the author had in mind when they wrote it.
For example, when I read the original issues of The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, I can literally hear the original Kate Bush and Depeche Mode albums he was listening to in the late ‘80s when he wrote those.
Maybe it’s ASMR! Tolkien was tapping into a higher consciousness.
Wraith Land: One last thing I wanted to ask and end on, going back in time. You've talked about this before a bit, but I'd love to get the story behind your TORN handle, “Quickbeam.” Why that Tolkien name in particular?
Quickbeam: Oh, because I was always the person in the room who was moving faster than anyone else. I was always the person who was moving faster, to the point where I will finish people's sentences before they do. That's exactly why Treebeard said Quickbeam got his name. Yeah, guilty as charged!
*Weta Workshop is the special and visual effects unit behind Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth films, as well as other marquee movies, like James Cameron’s Avatar.
**Annatar is the name and the more appealing form of Sauron in the Second Age.