Salon.com > Jim Paul

Tolkien and terror

Thu, 15 Nov 2001 20:24:00 +0000

In one of those odd zeitgeisty moments, when one finds oneself a creature of the culture without even trying, I picked up J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" recently, for the moment forgetting about the three-movie hobbit extravaganza about to be visited upon us. I found one of the three volumes on a shelf and wondered what I'd think of it now. I'd loved it when I had read it before, in the flower power era. I ended up reading the entire work, all 1,000 pages.

It surprised me. I am not a fantasy buff. My friend Harry simply said he would never read a book that long that had elves in it, and I had to agree. But what I recalled about the book and what I found still true was that it was scary. Evil flying things cast shadows of despair across the land, and these things, the Nazgul, still had a potency that got me through dozens of pages of elves and dwarfs.

The book has its other points. Tolkien was a serious and learned scholar of Anglo-Saxon myth and language, and an Oxford Don, and this, his life's work, remains monumental and beautifully written, if seriously eccentric. As amazing as ever is the minutely detailed geography of Middle-earth, as well as the fully foliated language system for each of the various races in it. Tolkien the philologist wrote that the book was "fundamentally linguistic in inspiration," a story written to provide a world for his invented languages.

The medieval mind of George Lucas

Tue, 18 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In August 1976, George Lucas was exhausted and desperate. He had been in London, directing the actors in "Star Wars," a film he had every reason to believe would fail. The usual turmoil and sheer labor of the set had been made worse by the lordly British studio unions, who quit promptly
at 5:30 for tea, and by the money people back in Burbank, Calif., who in the end pulled the fiscal plug on the filming. At the end of 16 weeks of shooting, Fox gave Lucas three days to finish two weeks of work, a cost-saving move that appears at least ironic now that "Star Wars" and its succeeding
films have gone on to gross billions. At the time Lucas had to hire triple crews and divide the stage into three sets, on each of which he directed the action for the final three days. "I cared about every single detail," he recalled (including the duct-taping of Princess Leia's breasts -- "No jiggling in the Empire," noted Carrie Fisher). By the end of shooting
Lucas was pale, ill, ready to drop.

Confessions of a real-time TV addict

Thu, 31 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000

maybe I'm weird this way, but I thrill at the sight of partially deflated air bags. Take the one that may have been blocking the Mars rover's ramp earlier this month. I watched for hours as engineers tried to lift a metal petal, turn a little wheel and spool up some air-bag fabric. Good, close pictures of metal sprockets and bumpy surfaces! This was a real-time TV fanatic's dream come true. I was in heaven.

There's nothing like live-feed TV. For me the high point in the weekend-long Mars coverage wasn't even on Mars; it was the live feed of an office at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, Calif. In this office, workers did ordinary office things. Occasionally someone would call one of the staffers on the phone, to tell them they were on TV, and then he or she would look up at the camera and wave, but mostly they just hung out, waiting, as I was, for the next news from Mars. A guy unwrapped a sandwich. A woman added up numbers, on paper yet, and using a pencil. Boffo. Two thumbs up.

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

Sat, 16 Dec 1995 20:00:00 +0000

In the late fifties, Elie Wiesel took a voyage to Brazil. By then his starving student days were behind him, and he had begun to have some success as a journalist in Paris. In fact, he was traveling on assignment to write about a group of Jews, unhappy with life in Israel, who had taken the Catholic Church's offer of free transatlantic passage plus two hundred dollars in return for a promise to convert.

Wiesel himself was fresh from a romantic triumph. A woman named Hanna, a teasing beauty whom he had adored for years, unexpectedly asked him to marry her. Wrestling nonetheless with his decision, he got on the boat. Then, at sea, Wiesel locked himself in his cabin and began to write, "feverishly, breathlessly, without rereading," composing an account of his concentration camp years.