RJA's talk about the ill-effects of a movie on a fandom inspired this rant-on-a-rant. Admittedly, this topic is old. Practically everyone I know who has ever read a good book talks about whether introducing the story to new audiences by porting it to a more popular media is worth the grief of losing the original author's intent in all the "fixing" and "editing" that must be done in order to make it more profitable. It was said just about everything. I myself have ranted for months about the Dune TV miniseries. The HP fandom discussed whether the movies are a Good or a Bad Thing, and there are many more examples. I'm afraid it sounds snobbish and elitist, but it must be said: the reading public and the movie going public are not exactly the same, and some books were not written for the benefit of the population that fits in the highest section of the bell curve. When it's too long, too slow and requires too much imagination to follow, even some of those brave souls who were not afraid to lift the hefty thing will not get to the second volume. So, in order for the ends to meet and populations to overlap, you must either educate the bell curve or simplify and air-brush the work-of-art. We know which way is more profitable. One of the dangers of capitalism, I guess. Of course, sacrifices must be made in the process. While moving the target audience to the left of the curve to get more people, you lose the rightmost tip. Commercially speaking - it pays off, even if they sometimes trace your Orcish ancestry (I shouldn't talk though, as I myself was ready to claim that John Harrison is a predecessor of the Harkonnens). LoTR is a very costly production. They had to make the movie sell well. So they adapted it to fit the audience better. Some of that new audience are bound to be the swooning fangirls. They could've used less hunky actors, emphasized and explained Tolkien's Victorian ideas about male bonding and the role of women in society, even preserved the language. They could have made it an utterly geeky movie, one that no fangirl-ish type would ever pay to see, so TVSDs' reader-base would shrink beyond the point of self-containment and no one would print out PHF t-shirts. We have an example of what those movies look like. Have you seen any of the nine Star Trek films listed in IMDb's top 250? I personally think the solution is encouraging people to read instead of filming every book. Filming should be left for cases where the original is in danger of being forgotten by non-scholars. I'm sure Zeffirelli is the one to thank for a whole generation's acquaintance (minimal as it may be) with the long-dead playwright's work, but 20th century literature? We should read the original.