There and Back Again (14 page)

“I'll be home in a little while,” I told her. “Gotta make a quick stop.”

“Where?”

“The bookstore.”

I pulled into the Barnes & Noble parking lot, jumped out of the car, and practically sprinted to the front counter. Then I made a fool out of myself.

“Excuse me, do you have anything by Tolkien?”

The clerk stared at me with a furrowed brow.

“It's J. R. Tolkien … or J. R. R.… something like that? Does it ring a bell?” I always get crazy in bookstores, kind of excited and lost, and sometimes I end up looking pathetic and pleading for help. This, however, was an unusually sad display.

The clerk rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir. It's J. R. R. Tolkien, and it's right over there. Section seven. I'll show you.”

I'd spent a lot of time in bookstores in recent years, but I can honestly say I'd never been in the area devoted to fantasy, science fiction, and mythology. I had been living in Biography and History and Film Criticism. That's what interested me; that's what I knew. Imagine my surprise when the clerk guided me to section seven, pointed in the general direction of the middle shelf, and said, “Here it is.” I looked up to see not one, not two, not three, but four books by Tolkien. Then my eyes kept moving up, and I realized there was a second shelf, and a third shelf, a fourth, a fifth … There were dozens of books. Maybe scores.

“Anything else?” the clerk asked, giving me a self-important smirk.

“Uh … no. Thanks. I can take it from here.”

Rarely have I felt like such a total moron. How, I wondered, did I get to this point? Here I was, twenty-eight years old, with a degree in history and literature from a major institution of higher learning. I had graduated with honors, for Pete's sake. I considered myself a pretty well-read person. So how did I miss this entire
thing
? This movement in publishing? This cultural phenomenon? I was flabbergasted, and the embarrassment washing over me felt like someone had poured hot water on my shoulders. Like all the floodlights were on me, and everyone was watching, and all I could do was scratch my head and wonder,
What else am I missing?

I'm extremely proud of my academic accomplishments. I'm never too shy to boast that Christine and I successfully completed what I consider to be one of the tougher liberal arts double majors—history and English. But unfortunately, there was a gaping hole in my knowledge. Should I blame my parents for never reading me
The Hobbit,
or UCLA for failing to assign it? Not to mention the ten other schools I'd attended? I guess it doesn't matter. At least I was prepared to hit the ground running!

CHAPTER SIX

It took me a while to figure out which of the books would best serve as my introduction to Tolkien. I dismissed the biographies and quasi-academic analyses—there simply wasn't time to digest them, and even if there had been time, what purpose would they have served without proper context? Nope. I had to go straight to the source: the three-volume set of
The Lord of the Rings.

But even that wasn't such a simple matter, since there are countless editions of the books, in myriad forms, all of them thick and meaty and utterly imposing to someone unfamiliar with the story. My eyes went first to a version illustrated by John Howe, whose sketches were vivid and visceral, which I guess is why they've long appealed to pubescent boys. A lot of kids get hooked on Tolkien and his mythology around that age, but not me. I think unless my mother had read the books aloud to me, that never would have happened. In fact, that's how I “read” numerous classics. John Steinbeck's
The Pearl
and
Of Mice and Men,
and countless others—all of them were practically performed to me by my mother. I had neither the patience nor the inclination to read alone. I couldn't sit still long enough. But I did have the patience to sit with Mom and spend that special time with her, to hang on her every word. That felt more like theater and less like work. Not surprisingly, I always did better on school essays when my mother helped by reading the material to me; I could write endlessly about something I'd heard. But words on a page? That was a problem.

Early in my school career I suffered because of this inability to focus, to simply sit down and do the work uninterrupted and without accompaniment. I know what you're thinking:
Sounds like a kid with attention deficit disorder
. Well, the truth is, there was a period of time when I think that diagnosis would have been made so hard and so quick and been so totally accurate that it's not even funny; then again, they probably could have gotten me for a bunch of things.
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There was a time when my parents were worried that I was depressed because I was so much shorter than everyone else, so they had me meet with a psychiatrist. We chatted for about a half hour, after which he shrugged his shoulders and said, “This kid is fine.” Not entirely true, but pretty close. I had goals in mind. I wanted to write and direct movies. I wanted to act. Hell, I wanted to be president of the United States. There was no way I was going to allow myself to be assigned a label. Somehow I'd fight through all the ideas in my head and find a way to harness the motor that never stopped running.

And boy was it humming now, as I stood in the bookstore, shifting my weight nervously from one foot to the other, thinking about how I had to have a perfect British accent so that I could portray this famous character, known and apparently loved by millions of readers, yet completely foreign to me. I'd already called Christine and asked her to line up a dialect coach— fast!

And oh by the way, honey, make sure the fax machine has paper in it, because we're going to be getting an important correspondence from New Zealand, and another from the casting director, and I have to buy this book, and I don't know which one to get, and, and, and …

There was an urgency to it—not quite a sense of panic, but a real determined urgency, accompanied by an implied ticking clock and the feeling that I had to get a handle on what this whole thing was about. All of which provoked some uncomfortable yet familiar emotions. When we were kids, my little brother would wear certain clothes to school, and I would look at him in wonder and say, “What are you wearing
that
for?”

He'd just laugh. “Oh, you don't understand.”

Sure enough, the next day, or the next week, everyone would be wearing what Mack wore. He was smart that way, savvy and cool about trends and fashion and style. Not me. I was the guy who was happy during my three years at Catholic school because we all wore uniforms and I didn't have to worry about what to wear; I was the guy who on “free dress day” would have a panic attack because he had no cool clothes and wouldn't have known they were cool even if he did have them. That was the feeling pouring over me as I looked at this cool, hip thing—the Tolkien section of Barnes & Noble—that I knew nothing about.

I flipped through the Howe book first. For some reason it just didn't trigger anything that normally draws me in. I felt bad about that years later, when I was in Paris and attended the opening of one of John's art shows, and saw firsthand the original artwork he'd created for those books. It was absolutely stunning. On that day in the bookstore, though, in my frenetic state, I didn't give John's illustrations the time and consideration they deserved, and so they didn't grab me.

But Alan Lee's did.

Alan, as most Tolkien fanatics know, is one of the most prolific and revered book illustrators in the world. Inspired by Tolkien, his fellow countryman, to devote the lion's share of his considerable talent to the realm of fantasy, Alan has become forever linked with the characters who inhabit Middle-earth. He also was awarded the Carnegie Medal for his illustrated edition of Homer's epic
The Iliad
, which implies a different sort of sensibility, one that is rooted in mythology as well as fantasy. Perhaps that's what struck me that day, when I picked up Alan's illustrated edition of
The Lord of the Rings.
It looked like mythic history, rather than fantasy—a book that had more in common with the Arthurian legend than it did with
Harry Potter.
I ran my fingers over the cover, leafed through the pages, pausing not to read but merely to admire the artwork, and I couldn't help but think,
Wow, these drawings are unbelievable. It looks and feels like real history
.

So I bought
The Lord of the Rings
illustrated by Alan Lee. Unfortunately, I didn't buy
The Hobbit,
which, in retrospect, was a mistake. If I'd been listening more closely to Nikki, I might have absorbed her reference to
The Hobbit
and understood the value of reading that as well. Reading it first, actually. But I didn't. Instead, I went home with Alan's three-volume set and read aloud with Christine the first 150 pages in about three hours, reading very quickly, not really understanding the story, but soaking up descriptions of the land and characters, and stopping to reread, or at least read more carefully, any time I saw the words “Sam” or “Samwise Gamgee,” the character I hoped to portray. My goal was to absorb as much as I could, as fast as I could, to figure out how important Sam was to the larger story and the world in which he lived. And it seemed to me that he was indeed a pivotal character.

A few things resonated. For example, I liked that Sam was a gardener, and I liked the way he spoke. There was, it seemed, a rural, almost agrarian, pastoral sound to his speech. I thought that the simplicity of it, the idea that Sam was at peace with himself and the land he tilled, was so cool. Not that I understood what it meant. I had no idea yet that Sam's heroism and courage were rooted in his simple, noble approach to life. I knew only that Nikki and Victoria were excited about this project and this story, and I figured I'd better try to find out what it was that piqued their interest. So I didn't come to the character organically; I didn't really appreciate the value of Samwise from the beginning. I just knew that he was an important character, and that if I was playing him I had to present myself as an important actor, someone whose credibility and credentials—from starring in
Rudy
(whose titular character displays a courage that, in a way, mirrors Sam's) to putting myself through college, where presumably I had done a fair amount of reading (though obviously not quite enough). No problem there, really, since I considered myself to be a serious actor, recent setbacks notwithstanding. I was a legend in my own mind, if not in the minds of studio executives, and I knew that if
The Lord of the Rings
was an important project (and what trilogy isn't important, at least from a financial standpoint?), then I had to approach it with the proper combination of reverence and confidence.

What I understood from the moment I began reading the trilogy was its level of artistic achievement. It was clear from the first three paragraphs that the language employed by Tolkien was exceptional. He was brilliant. The book was brilliant. This was not a dressed-up, fleshed-out comic book,
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which is the way I had viewed most books in the fantasy realm or genre. It was literature, and I felt humbled and embarrassed that I had never read it and knew nothing about it. It was important, serious, world-class art, and the moment was now upon me to demonstrate that I was equal to the task of engaging the material in a serious way and bringing my talents to bear on a cinematic interpretation of Tolkien's work.

Understand, please, that this is not the response typical of an actor being introduced to a project. What usually happens if you're offered a role in a movie is this: you sit down with the script, or with the book or magazine article on which the script is based, and with sweaty palms sticking to the paper, you begin to read. In those first few paragraphs or pages, the thought running through your mind is:
Oh, God, please don't let it suck. Let it be something I can sink my teeth into
. You want more than anything to be working, to be earning a living, but you also want to have an opportunity to work on something you feel really good about, because that makes the process enjoyable, fulfilling. Acting is hard. Not hard in the way that firefighting or law enforcement is hard. But it is hard. Even on the best of days it's emotionally exhausting. There's a stunning openness to it, a vulnerability that comes with stripping your soul bare in front of a group of strangers (and that's what actors are in the first days of a movie production) in the hope that your combined efforts will result in work that will be sufficiently interesting to another, much larger group of strangers—the moviegoing public—a few months down the road. But it all begins with the written word. If the source material fails to hold your interest, well, you know it'll be a long, uphill climb. Therefore,
Please don't suck
becomes the mantra in your head.

Sadly, the undeniable truth is that much of what gets produced does, in fact, suck; there are so few scripts of quality, and so many that are merely retreads. In the years leading up to
The Lord of the Rings
I reached a point in the auditioning cycle where I lost faith, where it simply wasn't fun anymore. I had starred in enough movies, and had done enough television pilots that didn't go. I hated the feeling of auditioning cold for parts that I really didn't want, in projects of modest to little merit. And yet, like my mother before me, I wasn't at a place where I felt particularly confident about being selective, saying to my agents, “No, I don't want to do that.” Like anyone else, I had to earn a living. Moreover, I wanted to have the freedom to flex my entrepreneurial muscles on occasion, and that was an exercise regimen requiring substantial capital. As a result, when it came time to audition for a given director, especially first-time filmmakers or people who hadn't done well in their previous endeavors (and that happened a lot), I had difficulty mustering the requisite enthusiasm. I preferred going to meetings, pitching projects, because I do those things pretty well. In general, my auditioning skills had dulled considerably, although my level of self-confidence and interest ebbed and flowed according to a variety of factors: whether I was physically fit, working out, eating right, and feeling good about the project at hand. If I was in shape and excited about a particular project, I'd get a little of the swagger back and be happy to go into a room and put on a show, just as I had so many times when I was younger.