The Rings of Power – A Process Dedicated to Failure
It seems likely that I’ll be doing without electricity thanks to a storm of the century that is about to hit the Mid-West like a frozen freight train.
I get the power back when I get it back. But I obviously can’t be posting until then.
Amazon just released a making-of documentary about Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power like they were proud of it and everything.
I steadfastly maintain that without Tolkien doing the actual writing, it was never going to be anything other than second-rate pastiche. It just isn’t possible to produce anything of similar quality to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. If nothing else the modern education system isn’t remotely up to producing a writer with the erudition of the creator of Middle-Earth.
While it was never going to measure up, it didn’t have to be the incompetent parody of Lord of the Rings. It comes across as a TV show that was trying to play Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of Rings straight.
How did it get so bad is the question everyone who isn’t lying about how good it is, keeps asking.
This show was the end product of a process dedicated to failure.
In this case, the process began being constructed by Gerald and Carol Abrams in 1976. They were a husband-and-wife team of realtors. It is a truth that a bad realtor will sell you one house once, this year but a good realtor will sell you five houses over thirty years. If all goes well on both sides, each house will be more expensive than the last.
The key to this business model is to first find an “up-and-comer” whose income is likely to increase exponentially with time. Second, you build a long-term relationship with that person. If you have a kid who is the right age you send him over to mow the lawn with firm instructions on how to make a good impression on the client. If your kid is vaguely interested by the client’s profession, then the Realtor’s son must show a fascination with every aspect of it and pepper that client with questions. The client should see himself in that kid and thus the family is embedded even more into the client’s life.
Building relationships is everything if you are going to get to the top in that business and you have to teach your kids how to do it too.
In 1976, Gerald and Carol Abrams landed a whale although they couldn’t have known it. A hot young director named Steven Spielberg had just knocked it out of the park with a shark movie. He wanted his first house, and they were more than happy to help an up-and-comer. Their son, Jeffery Jacob Abrams was of the right age to mow lawns and liked playing around with a Super 8 camera.
Young JJ appears to have walked away from that apprenticeship with a firm belief in the importance of building relationships in Hollywood, the necessity of a solid long-term business plan, an “it’s not who you are but who people think you are, mentality,” and that storytelling is nothing more than a bag of plug and play elements from successful IPs.
All of Abrams’s followers obey these simple principles and they have spread like cancer throughout the entertainment industry. Largely thanks to one phone call from JJ Abrams.
Then we switch to Simon Tolkien. JRR’s son Christopher didn’t step down from running his father’s estate until he was well into his nineties and in failing health. It turned out he had a good reason. His own son Simon is pretty much retarded. He has no comprehension whatsoever of his grandfather’s work. And it turns out he was the source of some of the worst ideas in the series, to include making Sauron, Walter White. He honestly thinks that’s a brilliant idea.
This is Nerdrotic’s take on how Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power went Woke.
Gary claims, and I believe he’s right, that it was initially meant to be a lot more respectful to the lore.
It had several fundamental problems but the biggest is that making something based on J.R.R. Tolkien but not written by him was always going to be hard. Hollywood doesn’t like hard.
When the inevitable development problems in the story cropped up, it was easier to fire the people who cared and then just grunt out a steaming pile of Amazon Video.
Bad Reboot will always go with political activism when they don’t know what else to do because that never goes over badly in Hollywood.
The real eye-opener is watching how something that started with reasonably good, if utterly hopeless intentions, snowballed into being a Woke disaster of legendary proportions.
When things started to go wrong, they went woke as a default. They literally didn’t know what else to do.
The big picture problem is that the American entertainment industry thinks it’s too big to fail.
And I strongly suspect it already has.
It was up so high it can’t tell that it is falling. They think it’s another downturn but it’s like Detroit in the early 1970s.
Institutionally it can’t make the adjustments it needs to. There are too many vested interests in keeping everything the way it is despite the fact that it is completely unsupportable.
