KEY POINTS:
What's the first thing a couple of film scholars do when they come to New Zealand? Go to the beach, of course. But not just any beach. The stretch of sand in question is the black, wave-tormented north end of Karekare, west of Auckland where Holly Hunter, Anna
Paquin and a baby grand landed in Jane Campion's colonial-era bodice-ripper.
There they are, Professor David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, on the blog they maintain at www.davidbordwell.net There's even a cover-shot of the script, held up in front of the distinctive ridgeline, cineastes' cyberproof that they really were there.
If it seems like the kind of thing that movie buffs, dedicated fans, film geeks do, no problem. Bordwell and Thompson, a husband-and-wife team based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, answer to all those descriptions, probably all at the same time.
The pair, visiting the University of Auckland this month as Hood Fellows, are lecturing this week and next on enthusiasms as diverse and arcane as the aesthetics of CinemaScope (Bordwell) and the ancient Egyptian statuary built during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten (Thompson).
Of less specialist interest may be a lecture in which Thompson will cover some of the material in her new book, the first academic survey of our best-known export. The Frodo Franchise: How The Lord of the Rings became a Hollywood blockbuster and put New Zealand on the map is published in September by Penguin.
Thompson has seen all three films at least three times in cinemas and also on DVD and professes to enjoy them still.
But hers is not the work of a fan. The book systematically surveys the way the three-film deal was structured and the way the movies were made, and marketed.
And, as its name suggests, it considers the trilogy as part of a network of interlocking marketing campaigns that have continued long after the cinematic release of the third film.
Working from the perspective of a film historian, she is conscious that franchises - the term Hollywood uses for movies with marketing tie-ins such as merchandise and endorsements - are nothing new.
"In the 1920s, Felix the Cat was being sold as a soft toy, and of course Disney in the 30s was the ultimate franchiser.
"But Lord of the Rings became an industry in itself which had spawned by the end of the trilogy's release more than 400 licensed products, including different DVD versions, video games, trading cards, and collectable statues. The franchise is still going. The company that makes the games, Electronic Arts, has contracts for years."
Those who wonder whether it's sad that film has become a launching-pad for an orgy of consumerism will find scant sympathy here. "What about a Renaissance altarpiece designed as a work of art and paid for by a local patron?" asks Bordwell.
"That was propaganda in a way. I'm not saying that it spun off a huge marketing campaign - although probably a few saints' relics were sold along the way - but art and commerce have always been tied together."
The title of Thompson's lecture, Click to View Trailer: The Internet and The Lord of the Rings, points to another of the book's preoccupations. But what was groundbreaking about Rings was the role played by the internet in creating and sustaining interest in the films.
Not all of that was authorised. Indeed the studio, New Line, sought - somewhat vainly - to exercise a level of control that bordered on the paranoid.
"Peter Jackson was brilliant about how he used the internet," Thompson says. "He was a friend of Harry Knowles, whose aintitcoolnews.com is the biggest popular culture site on the web.
"And he did a Q&A a few days after it was announced that New Line was going to make the films. He got 14,000 questions, of which he answered 20, and he got an enormous amount of credibility with fans.
"The video production diaries he did for King Kong are now an industry standard and other studios are modelling on him. He really understood what fans are like."
Bordwell: "That's because he is a fan himself. He grows up loving Star Wars and King Kong and, when he grows up to make movies, he doesn't forget that he's a fan."
Both agree that New Line didn't know how to handle the interest generated. "It wanted to sell the film but to control the information. But on the other hand, you have these fans pushing against the gate saying: 'We want to know what Aragorn's costume looks like'. Then you've got [producer] Barrie Osborne and Peter Jackson stepping in between them and opening up the gates a little bit."
Needless to say no one from New Line wanted to speak to Thompson, who interviewed 77 people, including Jackson and Osborne.
"They had no idea what kind of a book I was writing. I'm sure they thought I was some sort of journalist looking for dirt, or somebody who was trying to make money off their backs."
* Thompson's lecture, Click to View Trailer: The Internet and The Lord of the Rings, will be delivered next Wednesday at 6pm in lecture theatre B15 in the General Library Building.
Technical tricks of the trade
If you remember Cinerama, you're probably old enough to get senior citizens' rates at the movies. The short-lived technology which was projected from three interlocked projectors on to a screen that curved 146 degrees was the Imax of the 1950s.
Auckland had a Cinerama screen but the problem, as with Imax, was product. Only two dramatic features were made in that format, and it was soon displaced by widescreen technology, such as CinemaScope and Panavision, that didn't impose such capital-intensive requirements on exhibitors.
These developments took place in the early 1950s against a background of a sharp drop in cinema attendances in the US, driven by the mass post-war migration to suburbs, where cinemas hadn't yet been built. The movies needed to provide gimmicks to bring people back.
So in an era where cinema-going is static or falling slightly, does Hollywood have more technical tricks up its sleeve?
David Bordwell believes Imax's potential is far from exhausted. The Imax-specific films, mainly natural history epics, had limited appeal, but studio movies have been remastered for Imax - Matrix and Harry Potter films and, recently, the live-action comic-book adaptation 300.
But as the LOTR has shown, the future of the movies may be more about marketing than technology.
"Hollywood has figured out who its passionate audience is," says Bordwell. "They are kids. They're the ones who buy the merchandise, buy the DVDs, go and see the movie six times. Why wouldn't you cultivate that?
"Comic-book conventions like Comicon get 120,000 kids, with money in their pockets. So the studios are rolling out their stars and trailers of upcoming films. Suddenly these geeks who used to float on the edges of society become an important demographic for the industry.
"Hollywood isn't interested in Mom and Pop. They are saving for their mortgage. These kids have $50 in their pockets from their jobs and they are willing to spend it all."
