Amazon Is Going To Extreme Lengths To Prevent ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Spoilers

Game of Thrones has drone killers. Star Wars: Episode IX has closed-circuit television cameras. Lord of the Rings has… locking people in a room

It might be old fashioned, but it’s a gosh-darn effective way of preventing spoilers. Very little is known about Amazon’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book series, and there’s a good reason for that: the writers are currently “working under lock and key,” according to Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke.

“They’re already generating really exciting material,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “They’re down in Santa Monica. You have to go through such clearance, and they have all their windows taped closed. And there’s a security guard that sits outside, and you have to have a fingerprint to get in there, because their whole board is up on a thing of the whole season.”

Salke also explained how Amazon is wooing the Tolkiens (the author died in 1973), and how the Tolkiens are impressing Amazon. “We get behind a franchise in a major way. The Tolkiens are coming to New York, all those estate holders. The older ladies, who are now, I think, in their 80s and 90s,” she said. “His daughters and the grandchildren, they’re coming to New York, and Jeff Bezos, me, Jeff Blackburn, a team of us are going and they’ve invited us to a dinner and see [some] creative work that they haven’t shown the world yet.”

I can think of one billion reasons why Amazon wants this relationship to work out (and why there’s a room of dehydrated writers living off Whole Foods chips).