Since it's the first thing most "Lord of the Rings" fans want to know, let's get it out of the way up front.
No, Kristin Thompson didn't get to interview director Peter Jackson. But she did get to spend an hour in the same room with him while he was mixing sound for the giant spider sequence in "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King."
"It was a real treat," says Thompson, a film scholar and honorary fellow with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's communication arts department. "It was obviously one of the high points of my visit."
That visit was a four-week trip that Thompson took to New Zealand last year, doing research and interviews for a book she's writing on the "Lord of the Rings" phenomenon and what it means to modern filmmaking.
The book, which Thompson hopes will be out in spring of next year, won't be the kind of glossy infotainment publication you might find in a comic book store. It'll be a serious academic text that will look at, among other things, the globalization of film production, the profitable intersection between film and video games, and changes in the ways films are distributed around the world.
"I'm not the only one," Thompson says of her project. "There are at least four other book-length academic projects that I know of. This is going to be with us as an academic franchise as well as a film franchise."
"Return of the King," the third installment in the film trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal fantasy series, has earned a billion dollars in global box office receipts and is the heavy favorite to win the Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this Sunday. (The awards show will air at 7 p.m. on WKOW-TV/Channel 27.)
If it does win Best Picture, Thompson thinks it will make some naysayers sit up and take notice of the film as more than just popular entertainment.
"There is this sort of lingering perception, I think, especially among academics and educated people, that this is somehow just a teenage blockbuster fantasy film and that's it," she says. "If it finally does win a bunch of Oscars, and I think it's very likely, there's going to be people who will take a closer look at it and will finally be willing to give it a chance."
Thompson, who is also an Egyptologist, has written extensively on film in the past, including her 1990 book "Storytelling in the New Hollywood." But her concentration has mostly been the silent film era, and since those involved in those films are all deceased, her research consisted largely of visiting film archives and other historical repositories around the world.
Researching and writing about a movie that was not only current, but in the process of being filmed, was a much different experience, she says.
For one thing, she had to navigate a labyrinth of obstacles created by the studio, New Line Cinema, and the Tolkien estate to get permission to interview key players, tour the studios and research the book.
Fortunately, Thompson met producer Barrie Osbourne through a mutual acquaintance. Osbourne liked the idea of the book and ended up championing Thompson's involvement, helping to facilitate interviews and tours and explain Thompson's project to others.
The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy was made almost entirely in New Zealand, and all three films were shot back to back, which Thompson says was both a financial gamble and an economical way of making three movies. She spent a month in the city of Wellington while the film was in post-production. While there she conducted more than a dozen interviews, toured some of the locations used in the films and got to see some orcs being filmed for computer-generated background shots.
"It really was quite as wonderful and exciting an experience as you might expect," she says.
With the Tolkien trilogy wrapped up, Thompson says studios are busily optioning up fantasy literature that they hope will be the next "Rings," including C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia" and Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials."
Thompson is planning a follow-up trip back to New Zealand this year to finish researching the book. And she hopes that a sit-down with Jackson will finally be in the cards.
"I definitely would like to get some time," she says. "I'm now one degree of separation away; I have his assistant's e-mail address and phone number. I'm sort of assuming that I will be going back at some point at his convenience."
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