Posted: January 08, 1999 at 01:55:48: by Stephen Geard
Personally I don't approve of attempts to make movies of great novels, especially of SF or fantasy novels. So much has to be left out to fit into a movie's timeslot, that the resulting story is unrecogizable (remember the film of Dune, have you ever seen such rubbish?). Therefore I do not expect the propsed LOTR movie to be at all faithful to what JRRT wrote, and I probably will not see it. But, Mr. Producer, please be advised that if a single character in the movie has an American accent, I will picket the cinema. If major characters are given American accents, I may even resort to violence. Middle-earth is a mythologization of Europe, not North America. JRRT went to trouble of giving characters from the north of ME a slighty different langauge from those in the south to reflect this. The translated Westron spoken by the northern characters contains a preponderance of words of germanic and nordic origin, wheras the southern characters tend to use words of Latin and Greek origin. If the good Prof. went to all the trouble to do that you should not ruin it all with American accents. I understand, Sir, that you are making the movie in New Zealand, if so, please use the NZ accent. It is probably the closest to a Middle-earthian one as you will find.
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