Trivia / Tolkien

• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $20 million. Box office: $7.8 million.

• Young Christopher was played by Ty Tennant, who looks a heck of a lot more like young Tolkien than Harry Gilby does.

• Tolkien's desperate search for G.B. Smith on the battlefield is very loosely based on a time in the Battle of the Somme when their outfits were close together and they were both trying to meet. They did, in mid-August 1916 at Acheux, and continued a debate about whether Rob Gilson's death on July 1 meant the TCBS was no more. Tolkien feared that the remaining members couldn't accomplish the great deeds they had planned without Rob; Smith reminded Tolkien that just because Rob was dead didn't mean he couldn't accompany and even influence them from the next life. He later sent Tolkien a poem about it.

• Ho Yay: On the part of gay screenwriter Stephen Beresford, who decided to include "queer subtext" between Geoffrey Bache Smith and Tolkien.^note If he'd really done the research he'd have picked founding TCBS member Christopher Wiseman; he and Tolkien had been "The Great Twin Brethren" from age 12. Tolkien's son Christopher was named for him. He's also the one TCBS member besides Tolkien who survived the war.. He was working from Smith's best-known letter to Tolkien, dated February 2, 1916, about the TCBS surviving beyond death, and encouraging Tolkien to publish his own poetry; he concludes with the words "May God bless you, my dear John Ronald". Beresford mistook this (as many Tolkien fans do) for Smith's very last letter written just before he died. Smith was gearing up for a dangerous mission that night, but he survived it. Focusing on Smith writing his "last letter" to a male friend instead of his mother or sweetheart (and we don't know that Smith didn't also write to them that night) Beresford decided that Smith was gay and in love with Tolkien.
  
  In fact, Smith's very last letter, written December 2, 1916, while recovering from surgery, was to his mother: "I am doing famously and should be in England shortly after Christmas." His last letter to Tolkien was more like November 12 and said only "I hope I shall be able to come to Great Haywood [where Tolkien was recovering from trench fever], for my leave is assuredly on the wing."
  
  Anthony Boyle who plays Smith rationalized this portrayal in terms of general inclusion: "There's no direct proof that he was in love with him, but if we don't follow our nose when these clues are given to us then we're writing these people out of history."

• More film vs. reality details here.