Mark's Pages

April 18, 2004:

Knock on the door.

"Hi, we're from a movie company called New Line Cinema. We'd like to lease your property to film a movie called The Lord of the Rings."

Farmer looks over the suits standing on his porch and replies, "Would you mind coming back after the rugby match?" Seems the All-Blacks were on tele.

Think of how an American would have responded. There would have been lawyers, negotiations, contracts. Things would have turned out rather better for the farmer. What seemed like an unexpected little windfall at the time would have grown into a fortune.

At least the farmer owns the tour buses bringing Americans to his property. Yet even that was an afterthought, an inspiration which bubbled-up long after the film had become an immense worldwide hit. As a consequence, the sets are more than half torn-down, he has no rights to restore them, and the tour guides, locals from his village, spend much of their energy encouraging visitors to imagine what it looked like during filming.

Think again of how Americans would have done it. Part of the lease negotiation would have included a co-owned theme park on the property. Hobbiton: Little Land of Plenty, or some other abomination. "Come, ride the Gollum Slollum!"

That this didn't happen is perhaps a tribute to New Zealand's comparative backwardness, a small country with a sleepier culture than America's. It's a shame to realize that the very success of this very film is likely to change things for the worse.