To the Crack of Doom!

Tuesday, December 16, 10:30 a.m.

 The place: Lloyd Cinemas, a Portland, Oregon multiplex, resplendent in 1980s neon and sparkly granite, looking like what might result if Fritz Lang filmed Miami Vice.

The event: “Trilogy Tuesday,” a back-to-back screening of the “Extended Editions” of the Lord of the Rings movies–followed at 10:00 p.m. by the premiere of The Return of the King. Trilogy Tuesday participants get to see ROTK two hours before everyone else–specifically, before the siege army of fans that’s already lined up outside for the midnight show–and we get to watch Cinemascope prints of movies we already own, with beverages, while we wait. All this and theater management is letting us bring our own food. Really.

Disclaimer: The word “geek” is going to get bandied around a lot. It’s not meant as an insult. The web helped fans of fantasy realize that their community wasn’t nearly as small as pretty girls prone to abusing the word “whatever” would have them believe. These days–at least in the circles I frequent–“geekiness” refers to a certain unapologetic enthusiasm. And believe me, there’s a lot of unapologetic enthusiasm on display as I saunter up to the assembled throng. For one thing, I am unapologetically and enthusiastically having my place in line saved by Damon, a 27-year-old friend in the exhibition biz.

Experience leads me to conserve my energy and show up late: Back in 1998–when there were only three Star Warsmovies and two-and-a-half of them were good–I dragged my then-girlfriend to theatrical screenings of all three “Special Editions” over a nine-hour period. Around the time Mark Hamill started getting schooled by a puppet, movie food and cramped seating left us feeling as though we were shaped like ten-pins; by the time the Ewoks showed up, we were primed for deep-vein thrombosis.

Trilogy Tuesday will take nearly four hours longer than that did.

Damon showed up an hour-and-a-half before me; he had his place in line saved by Hal, the man upon whom we must pin the geek Purple Heart. Hal’s been in line since 10:00 p.m. Monday night. Hal, God bless him, wore a “freezer suit” and brought a sleeping bag and a chair. The people ahead of Hal in line–who’ve been holding the top spot as a team since Sunday, cycling through six-hour watch assignments–gave him free coffee. “The people over there had a big tent, an Xbox and a Playstation,” Hal says, pointing behind him.

Trilogy Tuesday was announced a few weeks before tickets went on sale earlier this fall. Tickets ($35 each) sold out quickly; afterwards they fetched hundreds on eBay. In other words, this herd has been thoroughly culled; I’m in the company of the canniest, wealthiest geeks on Earth. A few well-placed bomb blasts at select theaters nationwide would cripple the fantasy-film aftermarket.

11:32 a.m.–I meet the fetching elf teens. Any veteran of the preview-screening subculture–a very real subculture, filled with pear-shaped, bearded cadavers clutching passes scored at record stores, damaged people who’ve mortgaged their lives in pursuit of bragging rights and a large buttered popcorn–would be surprised by the demographics of the Trilogy-Tuesday and midnight-screening lines.

For one thing, there are women.

Meet fraternal twins Katie and Heidi, both 19; they’re dressed as elf maidens, complete with glued-on pointy ear-tips. They’re here with 21-year-old Marie, an art student whose more elaborate elf-ears took 30 minutes to apply–and who’s also wearing a full-on suit of Third Age Elvish warrior armor that took her two-and-a-half weeks to make using craft foam. She got the instructions from a website; in case you’re wondering, it’s the same costume worn by Haldir, leader of the elf archers at Helm’s Deep.

“I met the actor who played Haldir, and I was wearing this,” Marie says with the low-key pride of someone who’s actually done the work. “He said, ‘That’s an awesome costume.'” She dreams of working for WETA Workshop, which made hundreds of suits of armor for LOTR. There are young men in line who would swim through bilge to shake the hand of the last man who kissed her.

Marie’s burgeoning skills are already being put to good use: All three elves have been recruited to participate in the wedding of Talisha Hibdon and John Malkinson–set for 6:00 p.m. under a tent at the head of the midnight-screening line.

11:40 a.m.–Talisha and John–ages 21 and 23–are telling me how they met in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore three years ago. “We were deep into Japanese manga,” John says. “Right around the corner in the bookstore was the Lord of the Rings section; it was a perfect symbol of the turn our lives were going to take.”

John’s wearing a “Frodo Lives” button. Talisha’s dressed in what she calls her “morning costume”–a fairly generic medieval-maid outfit. When the ceremony rolls around, she and John will emerge dressed as Eowyn and Boromir, with John strapping on a borrowed hand-and-a-half sword that’s sitting out in the car. (Sadly, they tell me that their pastor declined to suit up as a Ringwraith.)

I’m mildly stunned that a groom would voluntarily dress up as Boromir, the character who cracks under the pressure and tries to steal the ring from Frodo. Why didn’t he and Talisha choose to dress up as LOTR’s resident prom couple, Aragorn and Arwen? “I’m more connected to Boromir and the temptation he went through,” John explains, smiling. Talisha chimes in: “Arwen really was a small part in the book. She’s almost kind of a Mary Sue–there’s no fault within her. Eowyn’s my favorite.”

The easiest thing in the world would be to arch an eyebrow at all this, to make some above-it-all wisecrack, but John and Talisha radiate an almost unbelievable, sensuous calm–a calm that gets even more unbelievable when you hear the story behind the wedding. Originally, the couple was set to get married at “TentMoot”–a planned five-day Lord of the Rings convention in Portland, which they came up from the Bay Area to help organize. “We were going to have Laurence–the actor who plays Lurtz [in ‘Fellowship’] and the Witch-King [in ROTK] to marry us,” John says. “I was gonna get a head-butt for a blessing!”

But then TentMoot fell apart under murky circumstances–leaving the couple, hundreds of miles from home and tight on cash, about a week to plan a wedding. They decided to exchange vows in line. Fans in costume were roped into the ceremony. They borrowed a banner and cloak from representatives of TheOneRing.net. Talisha’s combination best man/maid of honor will be dressed as Samwise Gamgee; the ringbearer will, of course, be dressed as Frodo.

Mind you, they were organizing all this as they stood in line. It turns out John and Talisha queued up on Sunday night. “We’ve racked up a lot of long-distance roaming charges,” says John, who jokes that their honeymoon will consist of “getting jobs.”

11:57 a.m.–The ushers let us into the 429-seat auditorium. There’s none of the scrambling and shoving I’ve come to expect from the typical “screening rats;” Hal even lets me walk in front of him. Damon and I score amazing seats–on the aisle, for easy restroom access.

Because Damon works in “the biz,” he’s already seen “Return of the King” at an exhibitors’ screening. “I think the last time I really did serious time in a preview-screening line was in 1999, at the first public screening of ‘The Phantom Menace,'” he says. “One time, when they did the re-issues of the ‘Star Wars’ movies, I had a friend who spent the night in line before ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ Meanwhile, I played the ‘Star Wars’ Nintendo 64 game at his house and slept in his bed and showed up the next day. He was falling asleep through the movie.”

But, I say, your friend could lay claim to the secret motivator of all geek culture: bragging rights. Isn’t that why we’re here? “It’s partially bragging rights,” he says. He indicates the theater. “But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. . . . ‘Star Wars’ plays better in a packed auditorium. Everyone’s in the buggy. Everyone’s on the roller-coaster.”

Fair enough. But won’t they be showing marathons of these movies at revival houses for the rest of our lives? “These are new prints. These are presentation DTS 6.1 EX films. There are probably 27 speakers in here.” Pause. “It’s enough to give a man speaker envy.”

12:26 p.m.–Our friend Scott arrives, fresh from a half-day at work and positively giddy when he sees our primo seats. He’s already seen “Return of the King,” too. I have to ask: Why didn’t you two sell your Trilogy Tuesday tickets on eBay? “I was sort of thinking about it,” Scott says. “But then I saw ‘Return of the King.'”

I scan the auditorium. There’s a middle-aged woman wearing chainmail and eyeglasses. There are quite a few haircuts that could only be described as Society for Creative Anachronism mullets. There are goatees. There are suede boots. There are trench coats and a number of forest-green cloaks. One guy’s wearing Neo’s “Matrix Reloaded” black cassock. Another is wearing an “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” T-shirt. Near the door, a guy in a skullcap dozes while his little girl sits at rapt attention. Behind me, a kid in a “Space Invaders” shirt has vanished into his Game Boy; throughout the auditorium, cell-phone games are beeping. There are ill-fitting wigs and appliqué elf/Spock ears that will not be removed for the next 13 hours. There’s a Harry Knowles-looking fellow in a bright-purple, velvet, hooded, floor-length vest, charcoal-gray leggings, and an Elvish medallion, carrying some sort of apothecary pouch.

But you’d expect to find that sort of thing here. There are also some surprises. For starters, there’s a distinct absence of the smell of man-flesh warmed by CPU radiation–an odor known throughout the world’s basements as “geek musk.” And said audience is also at least one-third–maybe even half–female. As a woman behind us (who’s also “in the biz”) jokes when I point this out, “Once you get into horse territory, girls enter the theater.”

As stepfather to a 13-year-old girl, I’m already acquainted with the works of Tamora Pierce–author of seemingly dozens of volumes about teenaged girls and their velvet-flanked equine pals that only magically endowed teenage girls can understand. Pierce’s “Alana” series is the gateway drug to Tolkien, or vice versa. Sam Wilson, the 16-year-old college student who organized the local line party and trivia and costume contests (her T-shirt reads “Ring Leader”) puts it nicely: “I’ve read the ‘Alana’ series five times,” she says. “I think Lord of the Rings appeals to women more than Star Trek or Star Wars.” She and her co-organizer Michelle Bauer laugh: “And also the actors are more attractive.”

2:09 p.m.–The lights go down; The Fellowship of the Ring has begun. I quickly realize a few things: (1) The audience is subdued–we’ve all seen these movies so many times that they might as well be spoken in Latin; (2) the Extended Edition footage is revelatory on the big screen; and (3) digital effects look 10 times more convincing when filtered through film grain.

2:54 p.m.–I lean over and whisper to Scott: “Sean Astin is so good in these movies.” Scott replies, “You have no idea.” (He’s right: The son of Gomez Adams will be positively unleashed in ROTK.)

4:46 p.m.–As part of a new anti-piracy initiative, patterns of dots now flash at random intervals on movie prints; each dot pattern is unique to a specific print, helping cops trace pirates to specific locations. However, the unfortunate side effect is that it makes Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel look like she has flickering Maori tattoos.

5:29 p.m.–Lights up; the Fellowship credits roll. A ‘tween-aged girl behind us fell asleep. I’m already emotionally exhausted. Even worse, I’m emotionally exhausted and impatient. I’m starting to realize the fundamental flaw of Trilogy Tuesday: I’m twiddling my thumbs wading through these gorgeously presented classics (which I’ve already seen a dozen times or more) en route to a big finish that nearly every advance review has declared the best film in the series. It’s a sort of velveteen suspense, and it makes me feel like a spoiled brat: I’ve just spent the best presentation of the best movie I’ve ever seen studying the backgrounds and set-dressing details.

5:44 p.m.–I step into the rain to check on the wedding. A three-tiered cake sits unmolested and unguarded on a bench; napkins are held down with palantír paperweights. John looks fabulous as Boromir; Talisha must be in seclusion, getting into her costume. I walk down the midnight line. Next to a pay phone, there’s a TV plugged into the theater’s external power supply; people are huddled around it, watching “Fellowship.” A vendor’s table sells Lord of the Rings DVDs, books, and toys; someone else is selling bumper stickers that read “Gamgee for Mayor: Keep Our Shire Green,” “PO-TA-TOES,” and “GOT ROPE?” A child walks by swaddled in a foil thermal blanket. College students wrapped in blankets play Nintendo, Monopoly, laptops, acoustic guitar. Marie looks miserable and determined in the cold, fiddling with her elf armor.

Back inside, someone’s railing against the Tolkien estate’s official reluctance to support Jackson’s adaptations: “I wish Christopher Tolkien would stop being such a bastard!” There’s some concern about what this will mean for a film adaptation of “The Hobbit.”

6:02 p.m.–Without notice, the lights go down and The Two Towers rolls. People scramble to their seats. Interestingly, the audience is getting louder as Trilogy Tuesday progresses; because the Two Towers Extended Edition has only been in stores for a few weeks, the audience hasn’t had a chance to completely devour it, robbing it of its power.

8:57 p.m.–Helm’s Deep rages. I lean over to Scott: “So the battles in Return of the King are bigger than this?” “They make this look like a tea party,” he says.

9:36 p.m.–Lights up; end credits. The girl behind us fell asleep again. Outside the men’s room, someone’s wearing a T-shirt featuring Elrond wearing Agent Smith sunglasses, with the slogan “The Matrix has you, Frodo.” In the prevailing spirit of geek-drunk bonhomie, this seems really, really funny.

9:51 p.m.–In the theater lobby, an Asian-American teenager in a cheerleader uniform walks by a woman in a medieval-wench costume. Calculating the number of fetishes in this single tableau makes me feel like Charlie Sheen at a comic-book convention.

10:00 p.m.–The audience is the chattiest it’s been all day. Damon, Scott, and I start seeding Return of the King with plot points from the legacy of horrible second sequels: “I’m looking forward to Aragorn recruiting the dead Ewoks.” “And the alien-studded musical number at Barad-Dur.” “And Gandalf chasing Mario Van Peebles across time.” “And Boromir coming out of retirement to teach Aragorn how to beat Clubber Lang.”

10:07 p.m.–Lights up. A representative from New Line Cinema takes the stage. “I want to thank you for your support and loyalty,” she says. (“Loyalty”? Did we refuse to watch films produced by Paramount?) She tells us we’ll be rewarded for our fealty with a “picture frame,” to be distributed at the exit. A picture frame? “One frame per person, okay?” she says; she sounds a little concerned–and rightly so: One souvenir confers bragging rights, but two souvenirs confer bragging rights and eBay money. Personally, I was hoping for a poster or T-shirt; the first person to e-mail me gets my “picture frame” mailed to them for cost of postage.

10:11 p.m.–Lights down. Insane cheers, followed almost immediately by loud shushing, followed by . . . an image of a worm on a hook. We’re watching a Gollum’s origin flashback that starts out, I kid you not, like the Danny Glover/Joe Pesci comedy Gone Fishing. It’s just wacky–until it very suddenly isn’t.

Nearly 12 hours of buildup and preamble and sensory overload and audience pheromones make it impossible to review Return of the King in any meaningful way. The movie’s so vast that it really needs to be seen on its own, freed from the shackles of being part of a “cultural event.” Suffice it to say I love the film’s vertical visual motifs, the way the camera swoops all over Minas Tirith like it’s a Cities of the Fantastic comic book, and the giant elephants (bloodlessly) squashing horses; however, I also find the first hour even slower (and possibly less visually interesting) than the middle hour of Two Towers. But frankly my critical apparatus has blown a fuse; the blood for processing anything other than spectacle and base emotions has settled somewhere near my socks.

That said, trilogy Tuesday does make some of Jackson’s aesthetic deviations in ROTK blindingly clear. For one thing, ROTK’s color scheme is jarringly different than the other two chapters. The filmmakers relied on digital color grading to sepia-tone each movie with its own color scheme, a la O Brother Where Art Thou? The first two films are almost monochromatic–with Fellowship of the Ring taking on autumnal hues and Two Towers looking slate-gray. But for whatever reason, Jackson & Co. use digital grading to make Return of the King selectively bright and colorful, like a 1930s postcard or a tinted photograph of Lillian Gish blushing. When our heroes finally return to the Shire, the place looks like it was carpet-bombed by ice-cream trucks. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not as scared of orcs when they have pink and lime-green faces.

That said, I’m pretty sure I’m alone in this sentiment, at least in this crowd: The audience keeps breaking out in paroxysms of applause I haven’t heard since I was 11 years old watching Superman II. Applause explosions at 11:02 p.m. (“And Rohan will answer!”), 11:39 p.m. (Eowyn: “Ride with me!”), 12:25 a.m. (“That still only counts as one!”), 12:39 a.m. (“Certainty of death? Small chance of success? What are we waiting for?”), 12:48 a.m. (“I can’t carry it for you, Mr. Frodo, but I can carry you”), 1:09 a.m. (a big fat kiss), and 1:13 a.m. (someone gets married), among others.

1:24 a.m.–The camera cranes in on . . . a doorknob. Fade to black. “The End.” Enthusiastic applause. The lights go up and the credits roll while Annie Lennox keens “Into the West,” and the most well-behaved, reverent, wet-eyed audience I’ve ever seen files politely toward the exit to collect the fruits of their loyalty. The “picture frame” turns out to be a Sideshow-Weta “Lord of the Rings Film Frame Collectible”–essentially a wee plastic tombstone showcasing three anamorphic Cinemascope film frames, one from each movie. Of course, the word “collectible” on mass-market packaging invariably means said item is trying way too hard to be “collectible”; it’s like day-spa promotional literature abusing the word “elegant”–if you have to ask for the modifier, you can’t afford it. Inside the box, carrying on the desperate-adjective motif, a piece of paper announces, “Congratulations on receiving this unique piece of film history . . . this ultimate gift item . . . this exclusive desk piece that includes actual film frames . . . unique and individually cut . . . embedded in a hand-crafted desktop frame . . . accented by the Eye of Sauron . . . his overbearing presence invading down into the entire piece.” [Italics mine. Exclamation points absolutely unnecessary.]

Scott’s Film Frame Collectible features a shot of some blades of grass from Return of the King.

Outside, Damon breaks out the cheap cigars, and we spend 15 minutes–our remaining geek endurance–debriefing. A goateed acquaintance walks by and utters what may become a common complaint: “They changed the ending.” He’s referring to the never-filmed “Scouring of the Shire” sequence, wherein the Hobbits return to their Thomas Kinkade hometown and weed out some remnant thugs–a neat bit of anticlimax in Tolkien’s book that hammered home how war transforms height-challenged hedonists into guerilla badasses.

“The geeks who read the Internet have been prepared for that for a couple of years,” Damon says.

I TRY TO ARTICULATE some problems I had with the movie–the way the lurid color-timing made things look a little fake, the clunky start, and the sailing-into-Maxfield-Parrish final scenes, which were a little weepy and mawkish relative to the rest of the trilogy. “I think this setting was not conducive to watching this film,” Damon counters, and of course he’s absolutely right–a film so overwhelmingly choked with detail and emotion doesn’t need eight hours of emotion and detail-choked preamble. It’s like trying to taste-test 20 pieces of fudge. Scott agrees: “I don’t know that I’d want to watch Return of the King for the first time in this environment.”

“It was worth it just to get the taste of the Star Wars prequels out of my mouth,” Damon says.

M.E. Russell is a writer and cartoonist in Portland, Oregon.