“This has nothing to do with the Tolkien universe at all. A pre-hominid little person in Indonesia, nicknamed Flo, that’s the real hobbit. The film is based on what those people would have been like. They’re trying to tie in a little science, but then we have flying kimodo dragons, so it’s not 100%, you know, factual, obviously.”
BY PHOENIX JAY
When the frenzied spending of the roaring ‘20s dealt the US stock market a fatal blow in October 1929, Americans who’d been gilding their homes with the latest gadgets suddenly found themselves out of a job. The global crisis, initially dismissed by President Hoover as “a passing incident in our national lives”, put more than 15 million Americans – a quarter of the labour force – out of work. As disposable incomes dwindled, so did audiences at movie theatres: more than a third of the 23,000 that existed in 1930 were forced to switch off their projectors.
Those who refused were reduced to offering ever-more-unlikely appetisers to splice bums with seats. Prize draws promised everything from hams to cars; colourful vaudeville acts were staged on the sidelines. But the most effective formula by far was the ‘double feature’: two films for the price of one. The big-budget ‘A’ movie, given top billing, employed bona fide stars, quality scripts and professional production standards. The other movie, shot on a shoestring, was wildly entertaining, but made in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.
More than 75% of Hollywood films shot between the 1930s and 1950s were these so-called ‘cheapies’, which, on occasion, trounced their big-budget counterparts. John Wayne and Jack Nicholson both cut their teeth on the set of B movies, natural habitat for cult directors such as Ed Wood and his low-budget Dracula, Béla Lugosi. Perhaps most famous among their creators were the ‘Poverty Row’ production companies, who could shoot an entire film in seven days for less than $8,000.
“Most B movies are bad and forgotten,” writes Philip French in The Observer. “But at their worst they have an unpretentious, sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth A movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day… One of the greatest cinematographers, Robert Alton, who won an Oscar for An American in Paris, preferred to work on low-budget movies shot on tight schedules because of the challenge they presented.”
Such knowledge is not lost on Anthony Fankhauser, the producer of Hollywood B movies Snakes on a Train, and Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, among other tongue-firmly-in-cheek titles. He has spent the past two weeks crammed into a small cave in the wilds of Kampot, alongside hobbits, prehistoric Java men, the odd giant, and at least one large ‘flying’ kimodo dragon made of papier-mâché.
“There are only so many movies that can be made at studio level, but there’s an insatiable desire for new content – and that’s not just in America, it’s everywhere. If you go to Cannes Film Festival, for example, what runs concurrently with that is the Cannes Film Market and they sell all kinds of movies. If you walk through there, you’ll see your Batmans, all your big studio movies, and then, on the second floor, they have booths and booths of movies very much like this. There’s a big market for what I guess you could call second-tier content. And people enjoy them.”
Fankhauser, clad in shorts, plaid shirt and flat cap, is speaking on a set devoid of all the usual Hollywood trappings, eating rice while squeezed into a plastic picnic chair (his job title is conspicuously absent from the back). “Of course, I’m a fan. At the time, they probably weren’t considered B movies, but for me it was the Roy Harryhausen movies: Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, stuff like that. I was fascinated by monsters and other creatures from a very young age.”
On another table under the far side of this vast canopy sits a small army of little people dressed in mock animal skins. Among them the notably taller ‘Java men’, sporting glued-on uni-brows that sprout from their foreheads like tarantula legs. One has a lethal-looking spiked wooden club dangling from one hand, a cigarette jabbing at his lips from the other. Bending over to hook a Coke out of the cooler reveals a flash of fake designer boxers. He grins at the camera, lips parting to reveal fake buck teeth.
These unlikely dwellers of 21st century rural Cambodia are, along with one or two rather more recognised names such as The Crow star Bai Ling and Christopher Judge (Teal’c in TV’s Stargate SG-1), the hastily assembled cast of The Age of the Hobbits. The film is timed to beat its mainstream rival – director Sir Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, inspired by the work of celebrated author JRR Tolkien – to screens before the year’s end. While Jackson’s prequel to the Lord of the Rings blockbuster has a budget of $500 million, The Age of the Hobbits’ is $500,000, most of which will be spent on post-production, or the sort of special effects that make kimodo dragons take flight. Filming took just 15 days.
This gloriously camp straight-to-TV ‘mockbuster’ is set 12,000 years ago in Indonesia, where the remains of one of mankind’s possible predecessors – rudely snuffed out since by the cruel processes of evolution – was identified in 2003. Barely a metre tall and even smaller of brain, Homo floresiensis was immediately christened ‘the Hobbit’ by a Tolkien-crazed media. One scientist even suggested naming the species Homo hobbitus.
In Hollywood, initial film pitches have to be 25 words or less (the pitch for Alien was, famously, even more to-the-point, reading simply: ‘Jaws in space’). “The idea behind this film,” says Fankhauser, “is just… hobbits. And there’s an immediate recognition of that word. This has nothing to do with the Tolkien universe at all. A pre-hominid little person in Indonesia, nicknamed Flo, that’s the real hobbit. The film is based on what those people would have been like. They’re trying to tie in a little science, but then we have flying kimodo dragons, so it’s not 100%, you know, factual, obviously.”
The script is hardly Oscar-winning material: “It’s a pretty clear-cut story. The hobbits’ village is raided by Java men, who also existed in Indonesia at the same time. They steal a bunch of their people and they’re going to sacrifice them to the moon goddess. Lots of people get picked off along the way. Yes, we have some impalement, but the piranhas got changed to giant spiders.”
Suggest the plot sounds reminiscent of real-life tensions between the Javanese and the Balinese and the producer laughs. “Doesn’t it, though? I’m sure the writer was aware of that. If you go back to old school science fiction – The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits – there always seemed to be a moral to the story. A lot of that’s been lost in recent B movies. Now it’s more just shock and awe, try to pack in as many visual effects as you can. But any writer who heard me say that would slap me in the face because they all try – I know they do, because some get busted for it – they all try to put subtexts and morals in the script, which you have to, otherwise why write the movie? I think Scorsese called it ‘idea smuggling’.”
Joe Lawson, directing this Tolkien knock-off, made his debut with The Institute LLC – the international arm of Hollywood studio The Asylum – earlier this year with the splendidly named Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. “What happens with a B film is that, hopefully, you walk in knowing that it’s not going to be the best thing in the universe, but it might be monumentally entertaining,” he says from beneath the brim of his legionnaire’s hat, perched on a rock in the searing afternoon sun. Behind us, Cambodian hobbits and Javans – some trained comedians and stage actors, others hired on spec – are smoking, giggling and poking each other with their clubs between takes. The role of King Korm, head of the humans, went to Phnom Penh-based beat poet and actor Antonis Greco after being turned down by John Rhys-Davies, the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films.
“And that’s the thing: the ride is going to be worth the time taken. It’s an hour and a half when you don’t have to think, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money for it. Our movies are about popping the popcorn in the oven, opening a beer; you can even sit back and make fun of it – so long as you’re having fun making fun of it. There are things we do in our films that are outrageous, absolutely outrageous – like Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. The title itself is already way out there. The company that we’re part of is definitely not shy about making films that are fun. And the people who are working on these films, if they’re not having fun, they’re learning something – even if that something is ‘I never want to work on a film like this again.’”
WHO: Hobbit fetishists
WHAT: Age of the Hobbits
WHERE: TV
WHEN: December-ish
WHY: Little people in leather