It was 10 years ago today that something I did with the best of intentions became a headache for far too many people. And for that, I am sorry.
To begin my story, move the clock back to September 2000. I was a young reporter working at the Faribault Daily News in Minnesota. A small town of 20,000 people, there wasn't much in the way of entertainment options for a recent college grad. So I and another newspaper employee often spent time on eBay, searching for oddities or collectibles that caught our interest. It was during one such session that I stumbled across something that was being advertised as the audition script for "The Lord of the Rings" films.
Of course, I had no way to judge the document's authenticity, but I was incredibly curious about and hopeful for Peter Jackson's trilogy. Might his efforts work better than those that had come before? With hope that the answer was yes, I bought the document. If memory serves, I paid about $10 for it. At that price, I figured even a fake script would be worth a laugh.
It turned out the document was no fake. It carried the copyright of Three Foot Six Ltd., a New Zealand company
established in 1999 to administer the production of "The Lord of the Rings" films. Totaling 57 pages and secured with a plastic spiral binding, the document was actually a compilation of script segments that offered a revealing glimpse into the trilogy's writing process. It provided brief representations of different characters found in the film. Aragorn, Arwen, Bilbo, Boromir, Denethor, Elrond, Eowyn, Faramir, Frodo, Galadriel, Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas, Merry, Pippin, Sam, Saruman, Theoden and Wormtonge each had speaking parts in the 23 brief scenes the document contained. It was a great read and one that gave me new hope for Jackson's trilogy. As such, I felt compelled to share the script.
That was my mistake.
Adopting the moniker "Khamûl The Easterling," as I'd always appreciated the Nazgûl characters and considered him best represented among the Nine Riders in the old
Middle-earth Collectible Card Game, I went online to reveal my findings. My forum of choice? The message boards of Decipher, Inc. The reasoning behind that choice was two-fold. First, because I had volunteered for the company in various capacities, I felt more familiar with their forums than I did the main websites documenting "The Lord of the Rings" developments, such as TheOneRing.net. Second, because Decipher had recently secured the rights to produce a new card game based on Jackson's movies, I wanted to excite existing supporters and draw new eyes to their website.
Well, it worked.
Because so much concerning the movie and game was shrouded in secrecy at the time, there was little to discuss beyond the various hopes for both that people held. These scripts served to open the floodgates, with some people loving and others loathing the scenes I directly reproduced from the script. I seem to remember many people appreciating a quiet discussion between Bilbo and Gandalf in Hobbiton. But a scene that altered the books and placed Arwen at the battle of Helm's Deep incurred a good deal of wrath. News quickly spread of the script and by Sept. 13, 2000,
several different websites were discussing "Khamûl The Easterling" and the audition scripts.
What happened next happened quickly. Apparently recognizing my familiar e-mail address, the Decipher webmaster reached out to me and said it was imperative that we speak. I was soon on the phone with the man, who very kindly explained why Decipher was removing my posts and had to ask me to not post any further script excerpts. (I seem to recall naïvely asking if I could post the material elsewhere and then post a link to that material on Decipher's forum. I was told no.) I understood the situation and had no desire to harm Decipher, so I quickly agreed to retire my Khamûl account. This led to some websites reporting that Decipher had banned Khamûl, which I suppose is true from a certain point of view. Looking back, though, I see the decision as one jointly made to ensure Decipher's success with "The Lord of the Rings" license.
But the story didn't end there.
Three years later, when Annie and I watched the special features found on
the extended edition of "The Two Towers" DVD, our mouths dropped as we viewed the "From Book to Script: Finding the Story" segment on the third disc. Ten minutes into the piece, during a discussion about writing the battle at Helm's Deep, came these comments:
PETER JACKSON, DIRECTOR: And originally, we thought that's a great opportunity for Arwen to reappear and to have another connection between her and Aragorn. And it's an opportunity for the two of them to be together, because our real problem was geography. That we had a romance where the two characters, Aragorn and Arwen, weren't, in "The Two Towers," they weren't in the same space. You know, they were in two completely different places of Middle-earth. So how on Earth can you keep a romantic story going when you can't actually have the two people connecting?
PHILIPPA BOYENS, WRITER: Very early on, we had when we were writing this, almost as a selling script, and Arwen had to be, because she was the love of Aragorn's life, much more participatory in the story. You just figure, to the studio execs who were going to be reading this script, you can't have her 300 miles away from the hero. You know, you try pitching the idea of a psychic connection between two lovers and they'll just tell you get out of there. Which, you know, I wouldn't blame them.
PETER: And so our solution was bring Arwen in with the elves. Have her as part of Helm's Deep.
BARRIE OSBORNE, PRODUCER: And certainly we got a lot of fan reaction to that. There was rumor on the net that went out immediately that was the direction the movie would go. And there were a lot of objections to that thought.
LIV TYLER, ACTRESS: People don't think that we ever look at this stuff, and I once made the mistake of going and reading some of this stuff. And I cried so hard afterwords because they were calling me Liv Tyler, Xena Warrior.
PETER: There are certainly elements of truth to what happened on the internet, largely springing from the two-script version that we had prepared for Miramax. And that Helm's Deep stuff survived for a while in the New Line version. And it survived long enough for Liv Tyler to come to New Zealand and be trained in sword fighting.
LIV: I would get up every morning and I would go to a couple hours of sword fighting, horseback riding, working out with a trainer. There was an enormous emphasis for me on this physical stuff.
RICK PORRAS, CO-PRODUCER: The way it was written, she actually was this incredibly gifted and courageous and ruthless fighter, like all elves are capable of being. And as we're shooting Helm's Deep, a decision was made: "Look, you know what? Actually, this isn't working. We need to change this."
Of course, it's impossible to say how much influence my posting of the "selling script" or audition script had on this decision. Was my posting of the script segment showing Arwen at Halm's Deep the first time fans learned of this alteration? No, the old report at
TheOneRing.net confirms that fact. But perhaps my posting drew new attention to the decision at a crucial time —
during the trilogy's filming. It's possible that my posting played some part in bringing about the late change Rick describes to remove Arwen from the battle at Helm's Deep.
And if that's the case, I'm glad to have helped keep the movies all the closer to J.R.R. Tolkien's original works.
That does nothing, though, to excuse the headaches I caused 10 years ago. So I offer this belated apology. To my friends at Decipher, for causing your hearts to skip a beat; to the lawyers, for forcing you to take action when I should have known better; to Peter Jackson and others involved in the films, for the frustration this all caused; and to the fans of this grand cinematic trilogy, for the sighs or curses you made after reading the early script excerpt involving Arwen, I am very sorry. I intended no harm, but understand that which I caused.
At least it all turned out for
the best in the end.
Apps available on this burgeoning forum apparently go through little or no review process. Google, who administers the Android Market and polices its content, has decided the sea is wide open to anyone who wishes to sail on it. Honest businessman? Welcome! Rogue dealer? Hello! It's an incredibly problematic approach that has yielded a sea with many pirates. Some of these pirates are presenting trademarked or copyrighted work as theirs to distribute and are profiting from that deception. Others are wrongly facilitating users to steal materials — or make use of stolen materials — that were illegally copied and distributed. All of these swindlers are committing rampant intellectual property theft as freely as you would change socks. Consider the following examples:
Hundreds of copyright violations like these exist on the Android Market. Google makes it clear in its Content Policy for Developers that "violations of intellectual property rights" will "result in account termination." But it's a policy that's not enforced. Or at least not enforced enough. Google needs to step up the enforcement. Today.
