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Day 4 - Two Towers, One Party (Page 3 of 6)Click here for Day 1 report Click here for Day 2 report Click here for Day 3 reportBack to Page 2 of Day 4 report Forward to Page 4 of Day 4 report Move mouse over any picture for explanatory text. Click on any picture to see a larger version. VIEWS EXPRESSED ON THIS WEB SITE ARE THE PERSONAL OPINION OF IAN SMITH AND DO NOT IN ANY WAY REFLECT THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS OF DECIPHER, THE OFFICIAL FAN CLUB MAGAZINE OR STAFF AND VOLUNTEERS OF THEONERING.NET (TORn) |
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Alas, the half hour wait for Billy turned out to be more than an hour - quite a lot more than an hour! Much confusion was caused when two limo's
drew up outside the venue. The excited press group readied themselves.. and were still readying themselves half an hour later with the limo's
occupants seemingly happy to stay inside their vehicles. "They are probably out there on their cell phones with their agents asking 'How long do I
HAVE to stay at this rotten thing?'", quipped Susan. In the event it was a false alarm - the two limo's were lost and were stopped
trying to work out where to go next!
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The press were so psyched up looking for Billy Boyd that they missed Craig Parker (Haldir) walking through the front door. Even the fans lined up in the
doorway opposite (see picture below right) were all focused on the doorway, completely missing the celebrity that would have a whole room of girls screaming
an hour or so later. Susan and I prided ourselves on being the only ones to recognise him (to be fair, my attendance at Ring*Con helped me here, otherwise
I'd have been as mystified as everyone else - Craig looks so different without that awful blonde wig!) We waited while Craig
collected his VIP pass from the desk opposite.... and then walked past it on up the stairs to the VIP area. Damn! (We later found out that once Craig realised the press were waiting he went back
down to meet and greet them). At the foot of the stairs screams of recognition rent the air and Craig happily geeked and shouted out encouragement to the
fans gathered in the far doorway, before heading off upstairs to be prepped for his main stage appearance in the VIP area.
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One person the Press didn't have problems recognising as a celebrity was Bruce Hopkins, who plays Gamling, best remembered from the movies as the
character who dresses Theoden
for battle at Helm's Deep. Not that any of us recognised him, just that his dramatic entrance, complete
in loud red suit shouted 'celebrity' at us! Bruce was clearly out to enjoy himself and was spotted several times during the night hamming it up
with fans and being a general crowd pleaser. I am not surprised to hear that Marc B Lee is trying to book him for Ring*Con 2003 - I'm sure he would
be a huge success there!
We headed up to the VIP area to try and get some pictures of Craig Parker, and Susan got the chance to have a chat with him - he was as affable and self-effacing as he had been at Ring*Con. Susan asked him about those infamous 'Haldir Lives! (I don't care what Peter Jackson says!)' t-shirts which our friend Robyn (Valkyrie Crush) had designed. Craig said he found it "wonderfully flattering. I do have one at home. One of the lady's sent me one. It's all wrapped up in a box". He went on to explain why he kept it in a box. It seems that some years ago he had been in a soap opera and someone had sent him a fan shirt which was really comfortable and so he wore it at home to relax in. He'd made the mistake of wearing it when the Pizza Delivery man called and he realized the pizza man was staring at it rather bemused. Craig got so embarrassed because he felt wearing the t-shirt was like saying "Remember me from seven years ago?!". So now he just keeps the fan t-shirts in boxes. Craig also revealed that not only are there 'Haldir lives' t-shirts around but also underwear too. Susan of course had to ask him what type of underwear and Craig replied that he thought thongs rather than underwear, which caused some debate on whether the writing was on the thin strip at the back or the triangular bit at the front! It was around this time that Susan insisted on getting me into a photo. We mocked up an 'interview' photo (which, like most of the photo's with me in came out seriously underexposed - be grateful for small mercies!) but then I realised my white shirt was probably fooling the auto-exposure system. Quick as a flash, Craig had whipped off his jacket and wrapped it round me. Rumours that the shirt I was wearing that night, which had exposure to Craig's jacket, is now available for auction on Ebay are totally unfounded! I asked Craig whether he would be attending Ring*Con in Germany again this year, and he said it would depend on his schedule, which was looking pretty busy at the moment. Throughout our chat he was fun and polite, but I sensed he really didn't remember me from Ring*Con although was covering well. As we left to see what the commotion downstairs was about (we heard a LOT of screaming) I heard a voice behind me and Craig caught up with me to apologise for not recognising me. "You didn't have a moustache last time" he offered by way of explanation. My "coolness" factor with Susan went up by leaps and bounds after this (and it went up again the next morning when Craig spotted me in our hotel lobby and came over to apologise again). A nice guy! It turned out the noise downstairs had signalled the arrival of the hobbits Merry and Pippin aka Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd. I'm afraid this is where I started to get worried. Billy headed straight for the small VIP room where we'd interviewed Craig. He was almost immediately surrounded by fans (sponsors rather than TORn staff, I hasten to add) wanting photo opportunities. At the premiere he had seemed to enjoy the attention, but tonight he clearly wasn't enjoying it at all, but people pressed on regardless. I couldn't help thinking that this was hardly a "party" for him. I took a few photo's as others were doing - draw your own conclusions from them. In the event Susan and I just didn't feel we could hassle him with our own photo's for the magazine or with interview questions, and left him be. One of our party heard from a cast member the next morning that the guys had all got very drunk at a New Line pary the night before and that Billy had been ill all day, and had been taking a lot of Neurophen. Hopefully this explains what I detected as a lack of his usual joie de vivre, rather than any concerns at the lack of privacy he had in the VIP area. That being said, I do wonder what enjoyment there is for the cast at these events. At one stage we heard someone asking Billy for an autograph, despite quite clear and explicit warnings that this would not be tolerated. When a TORn staffer admonished the lady in question, her only reply was "Well he was happy to do it" Wrong, lady! And it's the selfish actions of people like this that jeapordise the chances of the cast and crew attending future functions. Let them party - don't mob them - or they WON'T come back! Susan did get to talk to Billy's manager, who told her that he was also Sean Bean and Bernard Hill's manager too, and said that he had helped both get their parts in the 'Lord of the Rings' movies. While Billy was being mobbed, Dom sneaked into another corner of the room to talk to Craig, but even that started to get busy. My own interpretation of what happened next is that he realised that if he hung around much longer he'd be in a Billy-type endless-photograph requests situation, so he headed off for the other end of the room where there Michael Bilach was dressed in a Gandalf the Grey outfit, playing folk music for our entertainment. I guess it's typical of the maverick Dom to ignore all the people who were rushing to fan-worship him, and head for the one guy who wasn't in a rush to talk to him at all. It's here I'm afraid that I became a bit of a hypocrite - desperately needing more "celebrity photo's" for the magazine, and finding it impossible to get a good shot of Billy with all the folk crowded around him, I followed immediately behind Dom, and took the rather intrusive photo's of him talking to the musician and drinking a beer, that are shown below. Not one of my prouder moments! Fortunately Susan saved the day when he recognised her from the fan club breakfast at Comic-Con last July (or, more accurately, recalled the way she'd sneaked up on him with those life-size cutouts of him and Elijah). He seemed happy to talk to her about what he was working on at the moment, and told her why he had come to The One Ring.Net party this year: "The main reason we came is, to give him his credit, Sir Ian McKellen. Last year Ian McKellen called us up and said you should come but we were at some other party. He gave us a telling off! He was like 'It's very naughty. There's lots of girls. They're waiting for you!'. So I emailed him last week and said 'I'm going this year with Billy!" Susan asked Dom about his plans for the future and he had this to say: "I'm going to be in New Zealand in May and again in December and some times inbetween looking at property so I can't tie myself up for a big long job at the moment.". He went on to talk about his script-writing with Billy: "Billy and I are a partnership of writers and the way that Billy and I write the best is that neither of us like to write on an empty canvas. We like to have something - a kind of benchmark - to start. So Billy said 'I don't want to start it', and I said 'Well I don't want to start it either'. So we came together in a Pizza Hut driving back from Mexico and we spoke about the story for 3 hours. I taped it. We talked it through from start to finish. Then I went home and wrote it up on paper. I sent that to Billy, Billy sent it back again and it went back and forth so that at some point Billy's got it somewhere. It works better when we bounce off each other so we're gonna spend a month together in New Zealand and then we're gonna go to Hawaii for 2 weeks." We let Dom go off and join his fellow cast members and decided to head for the press lobby again, with perhaps a quick trip to see how our friends were doing. Just as we were about to leave Matt (Arathorn) tapped me on the shoulder, "There's a photo opportunity if ever there was one" he advised, pointing at the pool table in the middle of the room. Someone had knocked over a drink on the table, breaking the glass in the process. Craig Parker was clearing up the bits of broken glass to avoid anybody getting inadvertently hurt. Like I said, a nice guy! Click here for NEXT page of report on Two Towers, One Party Click here for PREVIOUS page of report on Two Towers, One Party |
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Don't forget you can check out reports of lots of other Lord of the Rings -themed events in the Web Logs section |
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| Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk |