CHAPTER FIVE

Let me take you back to the spring of 1999, when Christine and I decided to buy a $650,000 house in Encino, a suburb of L.A. Forget for a moment the utter insanity of the Southern California real estate market, and the fact that six hundred grand doesn’t buy you all that much in L.A. (God knows, when my friends from Texas came to visit, they were shocked to discover that we didn’t live in anything remotely resembling a mansion.) This was to be our home, the place where we would raise our children and continue to fight the Hollywood wars. I was thrilled about it.

And I was scared to death.

Here’s the truth: I was worried about looking after my family, and not being able to keep our brand new house because I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. I’d made the decision to purchase the house based on an interesting psychological conceit. Inside my head, I was bothered by the fact that because Christine needed to spend tons of time with Alexandra, our gorgeous daughter, and that because I was failing to live up to my commitment to coparent all the time, there was a little tension between us. I knew she rightfully resented my feelings in this regard, but I was wracking my brain trying to figure out the best direction for my professional life. I believed that I had the primary responsibility to be the breadwinner for our family. Never mind that Christine had already successfully run a 4½-star restaurant and worked a dozen different jobs in her lifetime. I was addicted to the old-fashioned chauvinist notion that the man should make the money.

That we are still together is a testament to how forgiving Christine is, and to how I’ve managed to care for her at least enough to keep her from changing the locks or inviting someone less self-centered than me into our bed! A gift every husband should know not to take for granted.

I still cringe when I recall how I managed to convince Christine—and justify to myself—that the $650,000 purchase made sense. I calculated—well, spitballed is more like it—what I’d been earning in recent years as a lead actor in independent films who also picked up the occasional small part in big films. On average, my income was about $250,000 per year. Now, you might think that someone who has made more than forty films and starred in a few substantial ones would have no problem meeting this standard, but as I’ve indicated earlier, that’s one of the curious things about the entertainment business. When it comes to financial reward, there is a disparity between truth and perception. Sure, some actors are ridiculously wealthy and lead lives that would make a pharaoh blush. But there are plenty of working actors, successful by any reasonable definition or objective standard, who lose sleep when they buy a new house or hear that they’re about to become a parent.

I’d had an unusual life and career. I’d grown up in the business and made a little bit of money, but I’d also tackled some of the responsibilities of adulthood when I was barely out of my teens. I’d married, put myself and my wife through college, and invested tidy sums of my own money in my work as an aspiring director and screenwriter. Yet, while it was all rewarding in an intellectual and spiritual way, we weren’t seeing much of a return on our time or financial investment. By the time we bought our house, we were fairly racing through our savings account, to the point where it became critical that I hit that quarter-million mark yearly in order to keep the house. There was little margin for error.

How had I allowed my life to reach this level of anxiety? Well, that’s a complicated question with complicated answers. At the time, I had a relationship with a personal manager who knew how to cash in on what my success would yield, and I was willing to settle for the small independent films that paid reasonably well but required little of my time. Then I could concentrate on other things, rather than focus my energy on acting and competing for the roles that would have resulted in an escalation of my stock as a Hollywood commodity—that is, roles as leading man. As I’ve explained, part of the reason for that was the convoluted relationship I had with my body. I knew that in any given week I was capable of treating my body like a high-performance race car—or a dump truck. There are periods of my life that reflect this battle, and when I look at the photos, well, sometimes it’s not a pretty sight. Alternately, I see a relatively good-looking guy or a fat slob who is so unappealing that no director in his right mind would hire him for even a secondary role, let alone ask him to play a heroic or romantic lead.

There are, no doubt, complex reasons for this fluctuation, and if you put me through psychoanalysis you’d probably discover all sorts of issues related to loneliness and self-confidence and, yes, entitlement. My feeling of, Gee, my mom’s made all this money (even if she pissed most of it away). She was a famous actress; the least she could do is set me up with a little annuity. I mean, really, why should I have to follow a more rigorous, traditional path? I’m not just anyone, you know?

I never said that, of course. I never voiced those thoughts—until now—because I know it’s wrong to have those feelings, which represent nothing but the whining of a self-centered, spoiled Hollywood brat. But I had them anyway. It’s funny, too, because I used to scold my mother when she exhibited similar tendencies. Why should Patty Duke—Oscar winner, Emmy winner, important actor—have to audition for parts? Wasn’t she above that?

“Mom, the young directors out there now didn’t grow up with you. They don’t really know who you are. Of course you should audition for them.”

“But why?”

“Because even though he’s young, he’s spent his whole life preparing for this project, and it’s his prerogative to do it any way he pleases.”

My mother spent a lot of time frustrated with her career because she didn’t want to do the work necessary to land the best jobs. She didn’t like the fact that she had pulled herself up by her bootstraps, carved out a meaningful career, and now, even as an adult, faced the uncertainty of unemployment, or underemployment. She had trouble developing the self-confidence required to say, I know I’ll be in this business a long time; I’ll always work; now what kinds of things do I want to work on? It was more about, I’ve made X number of dollars; I’m entitled to this type of lifestyle. Bad business and bad economics. When I finally read books like The Richest Man in Babylon, The Millionaire Next Door, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I realized there are certain laws of money. Like, if you spend it, it’s gone. As was the case with my mother, my inability to manage my own finances and to invest intelligently has caused me a bit of heartache. I’ve tried to turn it into a spiritual life lesson, into understanding who I am as an animal on the planet who needs to eat and forage, but it’s been painful, and it was particularly challenging around the time that I purchased our house.

I had a young daughter, and it had been eight months since I’d made any money in acting. I’d been killing myself working eighteen-hour days, trying to figure out how Hollywood functioned—how to get screenplays sold and movies set up. I had written a screenplay, developed deals, and tried to improve as an artist, all while earnestly trying not to be just another child actor who couldn’t make the transition to adult performer. It was like there was a voice in the back of my head that kept saying, “Okay, you’re out of college, you’re married, you’ve got a kid, and you want to be the CEO of a multimillion-dollar production company? What steps are you going to take? How do you make it happen?” But the truth was, it wasn’t happening. We were almost out of money. I was floundering. So it was an emotionally exhausting and scary time, and there was this thought that kept me up at night, the nagging sense that I might not make it.

Ever.

And then, at precisely that moment, a project that carried with it the promise of greatness fell from the sky.

It’s interesting the way things work, how sometimes there seems to be a greater force at play in the universe. No sooner had we made a decision to buy the house than I got a phone call from my agent at William Morris, Nikki Mirisch. It was a call that would change my life. I was in my car at the time (the cliché that a lot of Hollywood business gets conducted behind the wheel happens to be true), driving on Burbank Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, not far from my home.

“Honey, it’s Nikki.”

This was a good sign, for the simple reason that she had initiated the contact. The truth was, I hadn’t gotten many calls from my agent in recent months; it always seemed as though I was the one reaching out. But not now. Best of all, there was more than a hint of excitement in her voice.

“Listen, Peter Jackson is doing The Lord of the Rings trilogy for New Line. You’ll need a flawless British accent by Thursday.”

That’s what she said, but for some reason—the traffic? the noise? the fact that the tone of her voice indicated this was important?—well, for some reason, that’s not exactly the way it registered in my mind. I heard three things: Peter Jackson, New Line, trilogy. But the most important part of the message—the words “Lord of the Rings”—sailed cleanly from one ear to the other, without pausing to introduce themselves to my brain. So that’s how I came to hear of this project, which in fact had been in one stage of development or another for several years—not through Daily Variety or any of the other trade publications covering the movie industry, not through any of the hundreds of Web sites devoted to J. R. R. Tolkien. No, the first time I had any inkling that The Lord of the Rings was being made into a movie was at this very moment. And it meant nothing to me. The most important thing I had heard was the name of Peter Jackson.

I knew Peter not as the mad scientist behind such cult splatter flicks as Dead Alive or even as the genius behind Heavenly Creatures, the critically acclaimed 1994 film starring Kate Winslet as a young woman involved in one of New Zealand’s most painful and famous murder trials. I knew Peter as the man who had directed my father, along with Michael J. Fox, in The Frighteners, a weird and morbidly comic film released in 1996. In fact, I had met Peter at the movie’s premiere, and had spoken on the phone both to him and to Fran Walsh, his wife and creative partner, while Dad was making that movie. So there was a bit of personal history, including the vivid memory of my father showing me footage from a documentary Peter had produced and directed. It happened one day when I visited his condo in L.A. Dad popped in a videocassette, stood back, and said, “Watch this. It’s incredible.”

Indeed it was. On the television screen was Peter Jackson, with his rumpled hair and cherubic face poking through an unruly beard. “I’ve found the most amazing thing,” he said to the camera. “My neighbor next door had a chest of drawers downstairs in her basement, and I went in one day because she needed help moving stuff. I noticed some old film canisters, so I asked if I could look at them.” Here Peter paused for dramatic effect. “And what I discovered was an absolute treasure.”

Then, in perfect documentary fashion, Peter invited the viewer into the house—and it was clearly the neighbor’s house, exactly the one my father had shown me in pictures. With camera in tow, he guided the viewer downstairs, explained again precisely where he found the film, and how it was old and brittle and had to be painstakingly restored. But, oh my, was it worth the cost and effort! For what Peter Jackson had discovered, right here in his neighbor’s house, was something so remarkable, so shocking, that it would change the course of cinematic history.

With that, a sample of the footage was played, in all its fragile, ancient glory—shimmering black-and-white images of a rickety airplane wobbling down a makeshift runway before climbing into the sky. The narrator explained that this was, in fact, the first footage ever shot of an airplane, and that the flight took place in 1903, approximately two months before the Wright Brothers’ historic accomplishment at Kitty Hawk. Hard to believe? Not to me. I had been to New Zealand once before, when I was sixteen years old and working on a movie called White Water Summer. While there I got to know a few guys who made homemade planes and helicopters, and I came to think of it as something of a pastime in New Zealand. I can remember sitting outdoors at lunchtime and hearing something that sounded like a loud lawn mower, and looking up to see a man flying a … well, I’m not quite sure what it was. It was less than a plane but more than an ultralight. He was doing all kinds of wild aerial maneuvers, climbing high into the sky and then diving straight back down, pulling out of a death spiral at the last second. I thought of that pilot as I sat in my father’s living room, watching this amazing documentary film and thinking, almost incredulously, Well, why not? There’s a tradition of adventure and exploration in New Zealand, and a tradition of aviation as well. It’s a land of pioneers, so …

I bit.

“Dad, this is amazing! Did Peter give this to you?”

Poker-faced, my father simply nodded.

“And the world news media hasn’t picked up on it yet? They don’t know that Americans weren’t the first to fly?”

“That’s right.”

I could barely contain my excitement. “Oh, man, we have to call CNN. The New York Times!”

At that moment my admiration for Peter Jackson was immeasurable. No wonder this guy was able to get Universal Studios to give him forty million dollars to make The Frighteners. He had discovered a moment of human history that had been captured on cinema, and he’d restored it. My God! He belonged in the pantheon of the cinematic greats: Steven Spielberg, David Lean, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola. Suddenly, in my mind, these titans had nothing on Peter Jackson.

I noticed my father chuckling.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Sean.”

“Sorry about what?”

My father has always had a healthy sense of humor, and this was a practical joke he couldn’t resist.

“The footage isn’t real,” he said. “It’s a hoax.”

You gotta be kidding me!

What I had seen, in fact, was a clip from Forgotten Silver. Ostensibly a short-form documentary made for New Zealand public television, the film’s subject was a man named Colin McKenzie, a Kiwi filmmaker who, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, supposedly pioneered synchronized sound in 1908 and color film in 1911. According to the documentary, McKenzie was denied fame on any grand scale not only because he was working in New Zealand, an artistic outpost, but also because he committed a few, shall we say, tactical errors. His sound film featured Chinese dialogue (understood by no one who saw it), and the groundbreaking color film included scenes of topless natives on the island of Tahiti, and thus was deemed “obscene” and quickly pulled from circulation.

The story of Colin McKenzie and his work would be tragic as well as fascinating, if only it were true. In fact, Colin McKenzie is the product of Peter Jackson’s wildly inventive imagination and devilish sense of humor. Codirected by Jackson and noted documentarian Costa Botes, Forgotten Silver has more in common with This Is Spinal Tap than Hearts of Darkness. It is a “mockumentary” rather than a documentary, a playful yet awesomely well-executed send-up of the genre, predicated on the simple yet stunning notion that Jackson has stumbled across a cache of cinematic classics. McKenzie is credited with any number of groundbreaking cinematic achievements, including the first tracking shot and the invention of the first trick camera, as well as the aforementioned footage of the first airplane flight, which, seen out of context, as it was presented to me, looked like one of the greatest discoveries in history.

Seen in its entirety, Forgotten Silver is easily identifiable as a parody, and a marvelous one at that. Or maybe not. When the film was broadcast on television in New Zealand, it was greeted not with the sort of gleeful approval that met Spinal Tap, but with something akin to the shock that resulted from the Halloween radio broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. Which is to say, viewers took the bait—hook, line, and sinker. There was no disclaimer, no warning. Just a serious presentation of a decidedly unserious film. In the days and weeks that followed, New Zealanders embraced Colin McKenzie as a new national hero, and Peter Jackson was applauded for bringing his achievements to the public eye. All of which was a little more than the filmmakers had intended, and in the end Peter apologized to just about everyone who had been offended, including the prime minister. I felt incredibly stupid for falling so completely for the ruse, but I also felt tremendous admiration for Peter. The making of Forgotten Silver required creativity and ingenuity, but it also took guts.

So when the call came from my agent, it was Peter’s name that got my attention.

Oh, my, it’s the Peter Jackson my dad described to me; it’s the Peter who had called me from his screening room to say how much he loved me in Rudy. It’s Peter of “Peter and Fran”—Fran, who once told me that my work in Where the Day Takes You was what they were watching on video in their hospital room when she was giving birth to their son, Billy. That Peter.

Instantly, what was triggered in me when I heard his name was a heightened sensitivity, a feeling that something important was about to happen. An opportunity of the sort that didn’t come along every day. “Trilogy” obviously meant three, as in three movies, as in three jobs, or one very long job, which was good news, and obviously I knew New Line was in the business of making movies, so right away I knew this was one of the more important phone calls I’d ever received. I knew Peter’s career was growing, moving in a particular direction; even though The Frighteners hadn’t been as successful as it could have been, it was still a big-budget Hollywood movie, and I knew that Peter was not going to be doing anything smaller than that. “Trilogy” sounded good. It sounded right.

Let me explain. I know I would not have been cast in The Lord of the Rings if not for my work in Where the Day Takes You and Rudy. Those two movies ingratiated me, demonstrated the caliber of my talent to Fran and Peter, two incredible artists who were open-minded and forward leaning when it came time to hear my name on the list, and so they invited me to audition. Encino Man didn’t help me get the job, but neither did it hurt me—not in this case. Peter understands the arc of a career, the choices and compromises that are made, and he was willing to give me a chance based on the fact that at times I had done some pretty damn good work. I’m grateful for the way things have turned out, but I don’t see it as mere serendipity. Tolkien’s brilliance, the incredible mythology, the spectacular business success of those books, the quantum readership that’s there, and the generational following the author has—well, I feel like there’s a balance between me seeing that ship flying by and desperately throwing a lasso around it and sailing with it, and me kind of running alongside, keeping apace, so that I was able to step on board at just the right moment. It wasn’t like I was watching opportunities go by, flailing helplessly away, and I finally grabbed that one, the big one! That makes me sound helpless. While I would be the first to acknowledge my great fortune in being a part of this project, I also think I deserve some credit for my own involvement.

Ignorance of the subject matter notwithstanding, I knew this was a big deal. I knew it from the names of some of the people involved, and from the excitement in Nikki’s voice. The fact that it was New Line, which didn’t throw money around casually, implied that there would be a relatively tight fist on the wallet, but that was all right. If Peter Jackson had signed on, then it had to be worthwhile. And I trusted Nikki. She was always very sweet with me. I liked her personality a lot, even though in some ways she was a stereotypical agent. She spoke in a lilting, reassuring way, yet didn’t hesitate to let you know when you simply weren’t going to get what you wanted. I got along well with Nikki and was happy to entrust my career to her straightforward, honest approach. The truth is, all agencies work in a conflict of interest, even smaller ones, because they have a roster of clients who often compete for the same jobs. The best you can hope for as an actor is that, when they’re pitching you to the casting director or to the director or the producers, they’re up to speed on your latest accomplishments. But as soon as they get an indication that it won’t work, that you aren’t first in line for the job, they switch gears.

“Hey, have you thought about Sean Astin for this?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, you know, he’s gotten some great reviews lately.”

“Uh-huh … Who else you got?”

Boom! That’s it. The agent immediately transitions to another client, because all he or she cares about—naturally—is keeping the commission in house.

I’d been through that sort of thing a lot. I didn’t want it to happen again now. The stakes were too high. I was worried about my family and career. I knew that I was in a rut. Despite becoming better educated, better read, and more equipped to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood, I hadn’t made the progress I wanted to make. A lot of the movies I was doing went right under the radar—nobody saw them or would remember them—so I felt like I hadn’t reached critical mass yet on having done schlock. But I was getting dangerously close, and that was the source of much of my anxiety: among the kind of smart, interesting, creative people who drive the movie business, I was afraid I wasn’t perceived as someone who was really dedicated to his craft. Instead, I was perceived as the guy who was going to school and raising a family and struggling a bit after Rudy. And that’s an accurate reading on it.

All of that contributed to my intensely acute reaction to Nikki’s call. I tried to absorb everything while simultaneously asking the right questions and looking for a place to pull off the road and park the car.

“The Lord of the Rings?” I asked, repeating the one piece of information that meant almost nothing to me.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You know, Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“The Lord of the Rings!” she shouted. “They’re the sequels to The Hobbit. You do know The Hobbit?

I took a deep breath. The Hobbit. Okay, that I knew. Somewhere deep in the dark recesses of my memory, I thought I recognized The Hobbit as a book my mother had read to me when I was a kid. Upon further review, however, I must admit that I’m pretty sure I was confusing The Hobbit with The Phantom Tollbooth. Either way, it’s fair to say that I was basically a blank slate on the subject of Tolkien. But there was no point in admitting that to Nikki. I wanted the job. I needed the job.

“A flawless British accent by Thursday, huh?” It was Tuesday afternoon. I laughed nervously. “Can’t it be Friday?”

“No! They’re faxing the pages to you right now, and Victoria Burrows will meet with you on Thursday. Take it or leave it.”

There was no leaving it, of course, and not merely because it was such an awesome opportunity. Victoria Burrows was an important person in my life and career. As the casting director on The Frighteners, she was responsible for bringing my father in to meet with Peter and Fran. I had met Victoria at a gathering at Universal Studios following the premiere of The Frighteners, and had found her to be enormously engaging and interesting. She knew about Kangaroo Court and the fact that it had been nominated for an Academy Award, and she seemed to genuinely admire my work. Whether she actually did, I’m not quite sure, but I do know that she was a smart, beautiful woman, with no small amount of power, and I was completely taken aback that she had any idea who I was. It was immensely flattering.

Victoria asked me if I was interested in any more directorial work, and I said that indeed I was. She then told me that Richard Donner was in the process of lining up directors for the television series Perversions of Science, which had been adapted from Tales from the Crypt. Well, that was a critical piece of information, for the next morning I went straight to my publicist’s office and said, “You know what? Get me Dick Donner on the phone.” A few minutes later I had Dick cornered.

“Remember when you promised me an episode of Tales from the Crypt in the first season or, worst-case scenario, the second season?”

“Look, Sean…”

“And it went five seasons and I never got a shot? Well, now I hear you’ve got this new show, and you’re looking for directors. I’m on the list, right?”

“It’s not my money, kid.”

“Come on, Dick. I was nominated for an Academy Award.”

“I know.”

“It isn’t rocket science. I’m overqualified to do this thing. So let’s go! What are we waiting for?”

Eventually he got tired of my badgering him, and I got him to promise that if my name came up, he wouldn’t reject me. So I hung up and started calling around to see what I could make happen. I worked closely with the rest of his team and landed the job. But the point is this: without Victoria Burrows, I wouldn’t even have known the job existed. So she’s on my list of angels who have helped me and given me insight at critical moments in my life and career.

Now, while on the phone with my agent, I learned that not only was I being considered for a role in what sounded like an important project, but the person charged with the task of casting the film was none other than Victoria Burrows. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Nikki, was it your idea to put me up for this part—or Victoria’s?”

The line went quiet for a moment.

“Honey … it was both of us.”

Which meant, of course, that it was Victoria’s idea. But what the hell. This was no time to argue over loyalty. This was a time to argue over time. I needed more. Lots more. There was research to conduct, material to read, a dialect coach to be hired. How could I possibly develop a flawless British accent in two days, and still have time left over to figure out who the hell Tolkien was? It just wasn’t possible.

I tried to make this case to Nikki as I steered the car back into traffic and began looking for the nearest bookstore. In desperation, I played what I thought was a trump card.

“Look, Peter Jackson is a friend of my dad’s. I’m sure if he knows that I’m preparing an audition tape, he’ll wait a couple more days.” (My dad later told me he had promoted me to Victoria before I got the call. Frankly, I’m grateful to all who played a hand in my future!)

Dead silence on the other end of the line.

“Nikki?”

“Thursday, Sean. Be ready.”

I hung up the phone and immediately called Christine, who somehow interpreted my breathless ranting and understood the importance of what was about to happen. She was familiar with Peter’s work, but she also admired him for his ability to forge a seemingly perfect creative alliance with Fran. Christine, too, had met Peter at the premiere of The Frighteners, and she’d seen my father’s scrapbook documenting the making of that film, with hundreds of pictures of the magnificent prosthetic work of Richard Taylor (which would also be a vital component in the making of The Lord of the Rings). In sum, she knew Peter was a master craftsman. Of equal importance to Christine, though, was the memory of one evening at our home in Sherman Oaks, sharing dinner with my father and his wife, Val (Valerie Sandobal), during which they waxed eloquent on the subject of marriage and work, and how, under the right circumstances, the two can be combined to form an almost perfect union. Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson had done precisely that, according to my father. They were a team in the purest sense of the word, utterly committed to a common goal in their professional lives, as well as to each other. They believed in making work part of their family, and family part of their work. And they did it beautifully. Christine and I came away from that evening longing for a similarly powerful creative relationship, so when she heard that I had a chance to work with Peter and Fran, she was almost as excited as I was.

“I’ll be home in a little while,” I told her. “Gotta make a quick stop.”

“Where?”

“The bookstore.”

I pulled into the Barnes & Noble parking lot, jumped out of the car, and practically sprinted to the front counter. Then I made a fool out of myself.

“Excuse me, do you have anything by Tolkien?”

The clerk stared at me with a furrowed brow.

“It’s J. R. Tolkien … or J. R. R.… something like that? Does it ring a bell?” I always get crazy in bookstores, kind of excited and lost, and sometimes I end up looking pathetic and pleading for help. This, however, was an unusually sad display.

The clerk rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir. It’s J. R. R. Tolkien, and it’s right over there. Section seven. I’ll show you.”

I’d spent a lot of time in bookstores in recent years, but I can honestly say I’d never been in the area devoted to fantasy, science fiction, and mythology. I had been living in Biography and History and Film Criticism. That’s what interested me; that’s what I knew. Imagine my surprise when the clerk guided me to section seven, pointed in the general direction of the middle shelf, and said, “Here it is.” I looked up to see not one, not two, not three, but four books by Tolkien. Then my eyes kept moving up, and I realized there was a second shelf, and a third shelf, a fourth, a fifth … There were dozens of books. Maybe scores.

“Anything else?” the clerk asked, giving me a self-important smirk.

“Uh … no. Thanks. I can take it from here.”

Rarely have I felt like such a total moron. How, I wondered, did I get to this point? Here I was, twenty-eight years old, with a degree in history and literature from a major institution of higher learning. I had graduated with honors, for Pete’s sake. I considered myself a pretty well-read person. So how did I miss this entire thing? This movement in publishing? This cultural phenomenon? I was flabbergasted, and the embarrassment washing over me felt like someone had poured hot water on my shoulders. Like all the floodlights were on me, and everyone was watching, and all I could do was scratch my head and wonder, What else am I missing?

I’m extremely proud of my academic accomplishments. I’m never too shy to boast that Christine and I successfully completed what I consider to be one of the tougher liberal arts double majors—history and English. But unfortunately, there was a gaping hole in my knowledge. Should I blame my parents for never reading me The Hobbit, or UCLA for failing to assign it? Not to mention the ten other schools I’d attended? I guess it doesn’t matter. At least I was prepared to hit the ground running!