The OC Weekly Article April 2005

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April 22 - 28, 2005

2005 Newport Beach Film Festival: Can’t Break the Hobbit

Ringers’ Elvish love letter to the fannish legions

by GREG STACY

Carlene Cordova is the director of the new documentary Ringers: Lord of the Fans, a loving look at the worldwide cult that’s sprung up around J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels. Cordova is herself a world-class geek for all things Tolkien, having fallen in love with the books in her early teens. She met her pal Cliff Broadway (the film’s onscreen interviewer) a few years ago when they were both working for the Rings fan site, www.theonering.net, and what began as a short film for the site eventually transformed into a feature that was sometimes as trying, in its own way, as Frodo’s trip to Mount Doom.

OC Weekly: I’ve read that one of your first boyfriends used to write you letters in [Tolkien’s made-up language] Elvish. Do you really speak Elvish?

Carlene Cordova: That was back when I was 15, and I think my Elvish knowledge has probably lapsed by now. It’s a beautiful language. I taught myself to read it, but we couldn’t really speak it because nobody knew how to pronounce it back then. We Rings fans were all very isolated; it wasn’t like today, where you can find out all this stuff online and there are all sorts of fan communities.

Growing up as a sci-fi/fantasy geek myself, I’ve found that usually when people get into fandom in a big way as kids, they’re trying to escape something or they’re looking for someplace to belong. Was Tolkien fandom like that for you? Were you an unhappy kid?

Well, I was kind of unusual in that I was really, really into Tolkien and other fannish things, but I wasn’t really a nerd. I was one of the cool kids at my school! We kind of redefined what was cool. It was a little school in Ohio, and to be the smartest meant you were the coolest. We didn’t know it doesn’t always work that way in the rest of the world.

What was it that drew you to the books?

Well, we talk in the film about the spirituality of the books. Tolkien was very well-versed in mythology, of course, and with Lord of the Rings he set out to create a mythology for England. That mythology attracts a lot of people who are maybe disenchanted with the major religions. I was raised Catholic, but that religion did nothing for me, while Frodo’s struggle did. I got into Lord of the Rings during the ’70s and ’80s, and I watched it go from being these things you read if you were cool to things where it was like, “Yuck! You read those?” Back then it was kind of a secret, hippie thing; you’d get together with friends in your dorm at midnight and talk about the books for hours.

That was the period of the cartoons, the Rankin and Bass and Ralph Bakshi versions. I have some leftover childhood affection for those things, but apparently Rings fans just detest them. There are no clips from either in your film . . .

Well, the Rankin and Bass versions kind of turned Tolkien’s work into dumb kiddie stories. And we couldn’t use clips because of the rights issues; it just would have been too expensive. But we did license some of the music, and in the film we have some bands do incredible versions of those Rankin and Bass songs from way back when.

Did you really finance the film by selling your Rings collectibles on eBay?

No. It was mostly Cliff selling his stuff on eBay, although I did it some too. And it wasn’t to finance the film, it was to survive! We basically put three years of our lives into making this film, and we weren’t earning anything from it, so we had to sell some things to put food on the table.

How did you finance the film, then?

We were very fortunate to have our producer, Tom DeSanto. He produced X-Men and a lot of other high-profile projects, and he found us some investors. So we had some money for the film, but it wasn’t a lot. The film required a lot of travel, and we were on a shoestring travel budget. We’d pack our own lunches, stay in the same hotel room . . . often in the same bed!

I’ve heard that Broadway hosted some of the official Rings Oscar after-parties in drag. Was he dressed as characters from the film?

[Laughs] Oh, he just dressed in drag once. It was a fun thing for the Return of the King after-party. Billy Crystal did these quick costume changes throughout the Oscar ceremony, so Cliff did the same thing. He was dressed as Elrond, then he was Eowyn. He did that line, “I am no man!” Then he pulled off his helmet and, of course, he was a man. He had an awful wig. It was just funny drag.

Your film is getting compared to Trekkies a lot; people seem to feel that Trekkies was really mean to fans, that it focused only on the worst aspects of fandom, something I don’t agree with. Your film is definitely a sunnier view of fandom, and I wondered if you encountered some of those more extreme fans, people who really took it too far, and you decided not to focus on them.

Actually, the most extreme people that we encountered are in the film. Trekkies was reviled within the fan community—it really ridiculed fans. That’s why Trekkies 2 bombed, because the fans had been burned so badly by the first one and they stayed away. We had to overcome a lot of resistance from the fans. They were worried we were making another Trekkies and we’d make fun of them. But then when they found out we were fans too, they were like, “Oh, well, then . . . you’re okay.”

NEWPORT BEACH FILM FESTIVAL’S SATURDAY SPOTLIGHT IS RINGERS: LORD OF THE FANS AT REGENCY LIDO. SAT., 7:30 P.M. $15; THAT’S FOLLOWED BY A RINGERS FANDOM CELEBRATION AT FASHION ISLAND’S HARD ROCK CAFE. $50 FOR BOTH.