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At The Movies
A Shore Thing
Composer grabs for the brass Wing'
with second film in Tolkien trilogy — setting
himself up for another Oscar win.
.
CARVIN KNOWLES
Special to the Jewish News
T
he 19th-century composer
and notorious anti-Semite
Richard Wagner believed
that a Jewish composer could
never successfully treat serious mythical
subject matter in music. But Wagner
never anticipated Howard Shore.
Shore does mythologize music suc-
cessfully — and now for the second
time. With the Dec. 18 release of The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, based
on the writings of English novelist
J.R.R. Tolkien, audiences will hear more
than just a sequel to Shore's Oscar-win-
ning score for last year's The Lord of the
Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
The soft-spoken composer said he's
writing the continuation of a larger work.
"Essentially, The Lord of the Rings is
created as an opera," Shore said. "I'm
writing a nine- or 10-hour piece based
on Tolkien's legends and languages,
with a 60-voice mixed choir, a 30-
voice boys choir and 10 soloists."
While many may have detected char-
acteristically Hebrew scales and modes,
similar to those found in liturgical
tropes, in the score of the trilogy's first
film, Shore said he derived the music
directly from the Tolkien text.
"The text is the most important to me;
the book is always open On my desk," he
said. "Because The Lord of the Rings is so
vast and such a complex piece, it took a
lot of research and rereading.
"I had to understand the period in
which it was written. And I also had to
understand the 50 years after, and how
it affected culture around the world."
Tolkien wrote the main text during
World War II. At the time, he denied
he was writing an allegory about
Hitler, claiming instead that his story
of power and genocide is universal.
Yet the influence of those times is
apparent in his work: In the second
book of his epic trilogy, Tolkien's char-
acters face an alliance of two leaders
bent on utterly destroying the race of
mankind.
The filmed version of The Two Towers
has kept the genocidal theme intact.
"It isn't just the grand spectacle of
battle and the horror of massive
deaths," said Shore. "It is the intima-
cies of war — the fear of war and of
families being torn apart."
Even by adhering to the story,
Shore, 54, hopes to leave his own
mark. "It was important for me to let
my own voice sing," he said.
`Adaptation'
"John Malkovich" team is back with another film
straddling the line between truth and fiction.
ERIN PODOLSKY
Special to the Jewish News
A
fter the success of offbeat,
Oscar-nominated Being John
Malkovich in 1999, director
Spike Jonze and screenwriter
Charlie Kaufman are back in movie
theaters today with Adaptation.
Another self-reflexive film
(Malkovich, of course, featured the
title actor playing himself), Adaptation
started out as a straight book-to-screen
adaptation of New Yorker journalist
Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The
Orchid Thief about a flower bandit
named John Laroche. But that's not
how it ended up.
"I struggled trying to do a very tra-
ditional adaptation of the book, and I
got depressed and I couldn't figure out
how to do it in a way that made me
happy," says Kaufman, who grew up
in a Jewish home on Long Island.
"I was blocked and I came up with
this idea because it seemed like that's
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2002
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what I was thinking about every day:
the fact that I couldn't write it. I like
to write about what it is I'm thinking
about, so I thought, 'OK, I'll do
this,' and I did."
"This" turned out to be inserting
himself and the torturous process of
writing — along with a fictional identi-
cal twin brother and fellow screenwriter
named Donald — into the script.
Nicolas Cage plays both the real and
the fictional Kaufman. Meryl Streep
and Chris Cooper play the screen ver-
sions of author Orlean and orchid
thief John Laroche.
"I was scared, but it kind of opened
up my brain a little bit and allowed
me to move as opposed to spinning
my wheels," Kaufman says of the
strange turn his screenplay took.
'As Charlie was struggling in writing
it, we were shooting Being John
Malkovich. And after months of trying
different things, he mentioned the idea
that he was considering writing himself
into it," says Jonze, who grew up in
Nicholas Cage plays a confused L.A.
screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman
in 'Adaptation."
Bethesda, Md., as Adam Spiegel — a
member of the Spiegel catalogue family.
"That's when I understood where it
could go. That was the point where I
said I wanted to direct it, even though
I hadn't read it. I just knew that he
was going to discover something once
he started going in that direction."
Kaufman wants to make sure that
Composer Howard Shore: Doing justice
to a literary classic.
A Third Career
Shore's own musical voice first made
its mark when he was only 7 years
audiences understand that what they
see on the screen is not the real
Charlie Kaufman.
"Nicolas Cage is not really playing
me. He's playing a character that I
wrote," says Kaufman. "Obviously
there are differences and I don't think
they were trying to do an impression
of me because that would have been
pointless.
"I had a lot of concern and guilt about
it, and I think that's one of the reasons
the movie came out the way it did.
"I didn't want to put words in Susan
Orlean's mouth; I didn't want to put
words in Laroche's mouth. They're real
people, and I didn't feel comfortable
doing that."
On the other hand, Kaufman is very
protective of his personal life and
prefers not to admit what is real and
what is fake in his writing — the fic-
tional Donald also mysteriously shares
writing credit on the film.
"I kind of feel like there's truth and
there's fiction in this movie, and I
don't want to spoil it for people by
saying, 'This is true, and this is not
true,"' he says.
"It's fine if people think what they
want." ❑
Adaptation, rated R, opens today.
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