Online fandom: Have we gone too far or not far enough? - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
On the other hand, the entertainment business is very much aware of online fandom, and there has been (in my estimation) an increasing trend in the industry to curry the favor of online fandom, either by tolerating the existence of Web sites which make use of trademarked names and copyrighted images or by actively promoting online fandoms. There are still some clashes in the wings, but as a fannish Webmaster who has wrangled with these issues for years, I sit more comfortably today than I did when I first heard about studio crackdowns "somewhere out there on the Web."
And as the Webamster of a fannish movie news site I have never had a special relationship with Peter Jackson's production. Maybe someone deep inside the organization owes me a few small favors, but the only return I ever asked for was confirmation of whether the Tudor-style village that a New Zealand newspaper published pictures of was indeed Bree (and I received confirmation before everyone else that it was indeed the Bree set, designed by Alan Lee -- all favors paid in full).
What else, if anything, I might ask for eludes me. It has never really seemed likely to me that I should try to develop a special relationship with this particular production. Nor has it seemed important to me to pursue such a relationship.
Remember, I only got into the game for the most selfish of reasons: to shut people up. I devote relatively little time to maintaining my LOTR movies site and the fact I'm able to update it frequently at all is a testimonial to the hard work of many other people. My spy network is the world-at-large. I don't mind repeating what others say. I'm rounding up the facts and rumors, after all. I've found my niche.
But that brings me to where online fandom is starting to generate sparks with the productions. Let's talk about TheOneRing.Net in particular. They're nice folks. They, like Tolkien Online, are coming to Dragoncon. They've done me a few favors in the past (stuff about which you folks know nothing). These two sites (and several others) have actively pursued spy reports. Everyone likes spy reports, and many of the movie news sites have developed networks of contacts in New Zealand (two of the movie news sites are based in New Zealand).
I think it's safe to say that TheOneRing.Net is probably the most well-known of the movie news Web sites. The rest of us get our share of scoops (or try to), but if I had to pick the most well-known site, TORN would be it. Tolkien Online (formerly known as TheOneRing.Com, a domain name they claimed three weeks prior to the other guys) is probably the second most well-known site. And, if you really have to know, I would say Joram Manka's Ringbearer is probably the third most well-known. But only one of the LOTR movie news sites actually becomes part of the news on occasion.
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