The other night I decided to “sneak” out by myself and see ROTK for the fifth and for me probably final time in the theater. I figured if I could get to the 8:30 p.m. show, I’d be home by 12:15 a.m. and still get a few hours sleep before another busy day. The movie ended, and I was too scared to walk home alone, so I skipped the end credits and trailed the other moviegoers out to the parking lot, figuring safety in numbers, right? So why was I still there, after everyone else had gone, standing in the parking lot, crying inconsolably, unable to go home?

Perhaps I should start at the beginning, if you will bear with me a bit. I do have a point I’m getting to, but you have been warned that this is long!

I first read The Hobbit when I was 8 and LOTR when I was 15. A friend gave me a set of the books, and he was the only Tolkien geek I’ve ever met in person. We would spend hours talking about which character we wished we could be, or thought the other most resembled, or which location in Middle Earth we most wanted to visit. We parted ways a few years later, and in all my travels and friendships since, I NEVER until now had met another person who treasured the books as I did. As the years passed, the LOTR became my literary “comfort food”, to which I returned every so often to re-familiarize myself with the world of Middle Earth. If life got too hard, I could reassure myself that love, honor, and courage still lived there between the pages of my beloved stories. I knew I could always pick them up, if even for half an hour, and escape.

Fast forward to the other night. There on screen are actual people saying actual words out loud from those yellowed pages. People living, breathing, singing, riding horses, weeping, fighting, and dying. There they are! Glory be! And here are all of you! A whole connected community of Heren Istarion who were, unbeknownst to me, partaking of the same comfort food as I. But it’s not my aloneness that overwhelms me! What, then? Is it that I am upset that my beloved story has been “messed with”? That one person’s dialogue in the book has been given to another? That the story line of another character has been changed? That this event was cut, or Frodo was cast too young, or they left out Tom Bombadil? No!

No! I DON’T care that Gandalf isn’t supposed to be telling Pippin about the undying realm because he is just a hobbit and won’t be privileged to go there after his death. What I DO CARE about is that the beautifully written words of Tolkien are being uttered aloud by a delightful wizard of an actor. Uttered with the perfect combination of reassurance and conviction, so that at THAT MOMENT I became the little hobbit hanging on his next words, in hope that maybe I can take courage in the face of my imminent death. Could I have delivered those lines so well? No.

I DON’T care that the scriptwriters used the name “Dimholt Road” instead of “Paths of the Dead.” What I DO CARE about is that a set designer stayed up all night gluing moss to rocks to make a totally convincing set, so that an exhausted director who was running on little sleep himself could film a scene that, when I watch it, I don’t notice that those rocks are not real. Could I have pulled off that reality? No.

I DON’T care that Treebeard doesn’t walk exactly like described in the book (a wading bird, so that his knees bent backwards—whatever!). What I DO find myself caring about is that someone made the effort to paint every one of Treebeard’s leaves by hand because they couldn’t find ones that looked realistic enough. Would I have stopped less than halfway through and said “spray paint the rest”? Probably.

I DO CARE that some guy spent months making eight bazillion little rings so that the chain mail Aragorn wears can peep convincingly out from underneath his leather coat.

I DO CARE that some animation specialist spent hours in his or her little office cubicle working on the computer animation programs so that Gollum’s face has tiny gold sparkles of sweat when he holds up the ring in Mt. Doom. Could I have mastered that effect with my programming skills? Not freakin’ likely.

I DO CARE that all those people spent eight months lovingly building the Edoras set, even though it appears on screen for mere minutes in the films.

It doesn’t matter to me that Denethor wasn’t shown using the palantir (so how can his madness be convincing?--heck, if something ever happened to one of MY children, you might as well lock me up in a rubber room). What mattered to me was that John Noble took the time to research his character and understand his grief over a long-dead wife, even if her name never comes up in the script. Could I have stood in front of cameras and made you believe I was teetering on the edge of madness? Not!

I DO CARE that some person got up every morning, happy to have the job of gluing on someone’s hobbit feet.

I DO CARE that a talented group of actors put their lives on hold, some of them traveling half way around the world, and gave their utmost to deliver inspired and heart-rending performances.

I CARE that all those people cared to do it for me. I know I couldn’t have done it.

So as for all of you out there who enjoy nitpicking and talking about how it should have been done—I hope that when you do you at least consider whether you could have accomplished this Herculean task. Could you have directed and inspired this legion of artists, craftsmen, actors, technicians, and the rest to such heights of dedication and handiwork? Be honest. I suspect that unless your name starts with Peter and ends with Jackson, you probably couldn’t! I also ask that as you voice your criticisms that you keep in your minds at least an acknowledgement of all those who worked so hard on these movies.

I consider myself truly fortunate to live in the here and now. Fortunate that I was around to benefit from the fact that this story was in the hands of this special, gifted, hard-working family of people--this Fellowship of Filmmaking. The task could have been given to someone who didn’t care as much they did. Someone who decided that sleep was more important, or that they could cut corners and build half a set, because, gee, its only going to be on film for a few seconds.

So perhaps it’s just my overwhelming gratitude to all the people behind these films that brought me to be standing in the middle of a deserted parking lot, overcome with emotion and unable to turn the key to go home. Yes to that. Certainly.

But my tears of gratitude were also for my friend who gave me the gift of those books so many years ago. I still have them.

I wish he could have lived to see these films.

He would have loved them.