Behind the Scenes

"Lord of the Rings" and creativity fostered in the private world of sisterhood

As teenagers in the early 2000s, my sister and I were obsessed with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We set aside time during our school vacations to have what we called “marathons,” where we would watch all three films (extended cuts, duh) in a row, a whopping 12 hours of movie watching. Our pre-marathon ritual began the night before, where we danced around the kitchen, plucking ingredients from the pantry, sugar, flour, food coloring, and our mother’s red tattered Betty Crocker cookbook. We made a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting that we dyed hot pink or gaudy shades of teal, the letters LOTR in thick piping across the top as a sugared stamp of purpose. To ward parents off from sampling.  During the marathon, we ate the cake for lunch.

For dinner, we ordered a Greek salad with pita bread and a large extra cheese pizza from Cappy’s, our favorite. This was sort of part of the ritual too. My sister stayed in the car while I got out of my mom’s Tahoe to pay for the pizza with the cash she peeled from her wallet. I had a huge crush on the pizza boy who had been making our regulation pie every Friday night for my entire teenage life. My heart would race as he greeted me from behind the counter with a crooked smile, something all-knowing in his eyes like he could see right through my Hilary Duff inspired velour sweatsuit.

“Here you go, hon,” he would say as he handed me our dairy soaked bounty with a wink (a wink!). By the time I got back to the car, I was both salivating for my favorite dinner and out of breath from our interaction which left me with a mix of longing to get back to the solace of Middle Earth, currently paused in the living room, and a frustration for not being able to overcome my shyness.

By the time my sister and I pulled out my old Winnie the Pooh comforter from the linen closet and spread it in front of the TV for our picnic, the familiarity of my hobbit, elf and dwarf friends dulled the pain. Aragorn’s unwavering sense of purpose and manly beard. Gandalf’s gravelly voice, which we often needed subtitles for to understand what the hell he was saying. Orlando Bloom’s stoic face as a blond wigged Legolas posed on the top of lush green hills. It all felt like the hug I was craving. And while Orlando wasn’t my only reason for watching, I was still recovering from a sexual awakening, Orlando as Will Turner in the 2004 Pirates of the Caribbean movie in which I sat awkwardly next to my father in the theater, feeling my stomach leap and twist at every shot of Will, as a dirt smeared pirate, standing valiantly on ship bows in a gauzy white shirt that didn’t have proper, working buttons. I came home in a daze, going directly to my room, where I sat on my bed and cried, knowing that Orlando was everything I could ever dream of, and I would never have.

Later I would find a semi shirtless picture in a magazine of him leaning back on his elbow, still in bed, a flash of nipple, and I promptly cut it out and stuck it to my vanity mirror, overcome with nausea and a love that felt as sickly sweet as our neon hued marathon cake frosting.

As an adult, I follow Orlando on Instagram and once commented on one of his photos, tagging my sister and saying something to the effect of “wow, he’s still got it.” To my absolute shock, Orlando liked the comment, which meant that for a split second, he knew I existed. I thought back to that lovesick fourteen year old who would have probably begun bawling her eyes out or running for the toilet if that had happened to her today, the poor thing.

As our Lord of the Rings marathon continued, my sister and I would start to become delirious by The Two Towers, during the long battle of Helm’s Deep when our DVD box set prompted us to “continue the journey,” by flipping to disc Side B. Having seen the movie so many times, we started forming ill timed jokes, mimicking lines or pausing the movie when a character was yelling or when Frodo was making that uncomfortable, hypnotized face when the ring was calling to him and he needed to slip it on his extended index finger slowly. We screamed in delight and my mother later told us that she actually felt a pang of jealousy as she walked by the living room, her sugar fueled daughters rolling around the carpet to the soundtrack of an epic battle being just nearly won.

By the second disc of Return of the King, among the most intense and epic of the trilogy, we calmed down, sprawled out with piles of blankets and pillows pulled off of our beds and arranged in a kind of heap in the middle of the floor. When the movie ended, we would slowly drag ourselves from our nest, a feeling of exhaustion and exhilaration that often led to us saying, “I kinda want to watch it again.”

The ending left my sister feeling sad, a lethargic whimsical expression across her face as I followed her floppy blonde messy bun back to our separate bedrooms. The film ends with Frodo, a few years after his journey, boarding a ship to the White Havens, an airy Elven place he plans on never returning from. His hobbit companions look on, tears streaming down their faces as Frodo gives them a slow, telling nod while violins and harp strings signal the end of a journey. And while I see the merit in my sister’s sadness, I always wondered if it had something to do with the fact that she was in love with Elijah Wood, who played Frodo, and in that little, half smiled nod, felt similar to how I felt when the screen went black in the theater during Pirates of the Caribbean. Or when my pizza boy love died before it even began, on a Friday night during our typical exchange, when he asked me in great earnest to make sure that I said hello to my mother for him. The pizza box deflated in my hands as I walked back to the car to deliver the message, at which my mother cackled with her head thrown back. As I melted into the seat, slowly congealing like the oily slicked extra cheese in my lap, I felt my sister sympathizing with me in the backseat, a kind of sister sonar pulsing through the car.

Back then, celebrities were a mystery. If we wanted to know anything about Orlando or Elijah, we had to do some digging. J14 and Tiger Beat never gave us what we wanted, bubblegum headlines that promised outrageous confessions or glimpses into private lives but only delivered Orlando’s favorite color or a centerfold poster of Jesse McCarthy (no thanks.)

Luckily our extended Lord of the Rings DVD box set came with bonus hours of behind the scenes footage that we watched as routinely as the movies themselves. It was not only a glimpse into how our favorite film was made, but it allowed us to see our boys in the wild. We could watch them living. We saw them eating at picnic tables, half costumed, in baseball t-shirts and pointy hobbit ears. We saw flashes of them sleeping between takes, the rolling New Zealand landscape like lush green pillows. We watched them sitting across from photo collaged mirrors in trailers, regarding themselves as their wigs were strapped on. 

Even the actors we didn’t have crushes on, we wanted to befriend. Soon we not only knew how Minas Tirth was constructed or how many hours it took to glue on those hairy hobbit feet, but we also had mental tallies of set injuries and broken bones, favored bands, where tattoos were on bodies. The more we learned, the more we loved them. We had constructed a narrative, my sister and I, one where these details mattered, where they might come in handy. But what it really did was bond us even further. Our fantasies and this fantastical world anchors to each other.

We kept a private notebook too. As an avid diary keeper, I always had a notebook around me, composition books I collaged with magazine cut-outs, penning Dashboard Confessional song lyrics in Sharpie along their spines. But this notebook was different. In a giddy haze of one Lord of the Ring marathon afternoon, I started writing a story that I knew my sister would find funny. That was my motivation for most things, waiting to see if what I said or did would cause her mouth to open wide without sound, her eyes rolling back before a short burst of laughter came through, her silver braces on full display. When I handed her the notebook with the few paragraphs I had written, she took the pen from me and wrote a paragraph of her own, continuing the story. It wasn’t long before we had pages of our new imaginary friend, Alan, a nerdy boy we invented and took on wild adventures. We made him do things physically impossible much to our delight. Lines like “Alan ran through the jungle for three days and three nights,” sent us into fits of laughter that left us choking. We only wrote these stories with Lord of the Rings on in the background, the mountainous scenery and old timey jargon bolstering inspiration that had our pens scribbling like seasoned novelists. The notebooks stayed tucked away under our beds until the next viewing, pulled out only with the cake ingredients and the DVD box set.

high school journals and the one of the sister notebooks

There was a bliss as teenage girls, a kind of elation of being our awkward, confused, and pining selves in the privacy of our sisterhood. We could obsess. We could fill notebooks with wiry, gel penned nonsense.  We could rewind and hit pause. We could list all the details about the boys we wanted to love who didn’t know we existed or didn’t see us for the women we thought we had already grown into. I think it was a way for us to find control at a time when our bodies and our feelings felt so reckless; monstrous and beautiful and otherworldly. We could always come back to Middle Earth, a place we knew was fantastical but had more order and structure than the girl world we inhabited.  We could whisper in each other’s ears and know the secret would be kept. We could write whatever we wanted. Just for amusement. Just for the sake of it.