Westeros

This month has had its joys and its sorrows, and we’re not even half way through. In the latter column, we must add the very sad news of the passing of Kay McCauley, long-time agent to George R.R. Martin and a host of other writers. George has posted a touching remembrance of the “queen of agents” who did so much to represent his work as part of, and then head, of the agency that her late brother Kirby McCauley founded.

George mentions in passing her parties for the Wild Cards authors, and indeed, it was at one of these—at the swanky Chateau Marmont, during the 2006 Worldcon in Anahiem where we signed the contracts for The World of Ice and Fire—that we first met her. She had negotiated the contract for the book, and had helped us out with various questions including who to talk to at Random House’s royalties department to sort out a problem, and advising us on other matters. She was extremely kind and welcoming to two neophytes such as ourselves, and over the years she always found the time to send a congratulations our way whenever Random House let us know of some new milestone with the book, whether a placement on a bestseller list or a new printing.

She will be much missed.

The Atlantic’s Alyssa Rosenberg has previously covered George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series for the magazine’s website, and this time she’s back with a thoughtful piece concerning HBO‘s Game of Thrones TV series. Comparing and contrasting the series to other HBO and cable programs, with particular attention to difference in degree between accepting the reality of The Sopranos and The Wire versus that of a full-on, secondary-world fantasy such as Game of Thrones. Rosenberg finishes with the following:

Here’s hoping!

Thanks to Conan Stevens, we’ve learned details on where HBO’s Game of Thrones will be airing in Australia. Conan writes that he’s learned the plan at present is for a possible July air date on Showcase, a premium channel which can be found on the Foxtel, Optus, and Austar television platforms.

Sometime on Wednesday afternoon or evening, the last, “Cut”, will be called, and the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones will have seen filming completed. The wrap party already took place this past weekend, as much of the foreign crew will be gone by this coming weekend, departed back to home. What’s left now is weeks more of post-production, such as introducing scoring, visual effects, and so on. We already know the writing and production team will be doing preparatory work in case the show gets greenlit for a second season, so we expect at least a couple of scripts and a good deal of location work (including word that Iceland and/or Morocco are under consideration as shooting locations for the East and the lands beyond the Wall) will be done in the intervening months.

We know that on January 7th, the critics of the Television Critics Association will be getting a glimpse of the production through a long panel schedule to feature the executive producers, GRRM, and actors Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Emilia Clarke. Word has it they’ll be getting an exclusive look at the show proper, as well—except a lot of Twitter and blog activity on the night.

And after that? The march towards the April premiere date—we suspect that the actual day will be announced at the TCA Winter Press Tour—with gradually increasing promotion and marketing efforts. The official t-shirts are, to say the least, just a start…

For three hours on January 7th, HBO will be presenting its programming to critics at the Television Critics’ Association Winter Press Tour. Past TCA events have produced a bounty of information concerning Game of Thrones—from remarks on why HBO greenlit it to the Spring 2011 scheduling—and with the premiere of the show coming before the next TCA press tour (in the Summer), this seems like it’s going to be the point in time when HBO will really focus on the production.

A number of the critics present will certainly be live-blogging and live-tweeting the event, and we’ll be staying up to collate all the major news. The event will be running from 3:15 to 6:15 PM, and we won’t be surprised if a good twenty or thirty minutes of that is exclusively about the production. Maybe even longer, if it so happens that the critics are screened the first episode, which we know has gone through final edit, Presentation participants are tentatively set (but subject to change), as well: executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actors Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Emilia Clarke, and a certain George R.R. Martin.

Many thanks to Jace Lacob of Televisionary for providing the date and time information of the TCA panel.

Real life and hardware problems made it take longer than I wanted, but we’ve now fully commented the 142 images we’ve captured from the full version of HBO’s “Inside Game of Thrones” promo. Additional scenes not shown on the web include Tyrion and Jon conversing about why the Imp reads so much, the discovery of the dead direwolf and her pups, and some dialogue between Dany and Jorah Mormont.

To visit the gallery, go to the Previews section of Gallery, or you can start moving sequentially from the images beginning with this.

As I said on Twitter, cue Queen’s “We Are the Champions”:

HBO surprised us when they tweeted that the official store had, for a limited time only, official Game of Thrones t-shirts available on sale. Quite the surprise—pretty sure it’s not common for them to release merchandise for a show that hasn’t yet aired! Currently, only men’s shirts are available.

Another pleasant surprise is the fact that they’ve copies of all four of GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels available as well. Very cool.

Myles McNutt of Cultural Learnings, a commentator on the media and television critic, shares a thoughtful analysis of how HBO is marketing itself and Game of Thrones in light of last night’s Inside Game of Thrones explosion of fan joy.

It’s a thought provoking piece, providing a perspective that few regular viewers are likely to think about.

(And yes, we’re still screencapping. Not even half way through!)

I’ll have to call it a (very brief) day and leave off screencapping—I’ve now gone 24 hours without sleep! However, I’m about a quarter of the way done through the images we’ve collected, and they’re all commented. If you’d like to see them (and add your own comments), please go here, starting with this image.

Still over a hundred images to annotate. Amazing amounts of visual detail, and some things which I think I can now talk about from my Belfast visit because they’ve been revealed here.

Here’s the streamable video, provided by HBO over at Making Game of Thrones:

Much as we suspected, this 10 minute piece featured both some new footage and a lot of what would be considered recap for dyed-in-the-wool fans. However, this gave us plenty of opportunity to hear from the producers and actors (including some we haven’t yet glimpsed with the production, such as Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry), and to see copius amounts of new footage. It’s hard to believe that we’re now looking at the wrap of filming in two weeks, and the first airing little more than four or so months away!

We’ll be posting our screen caps and commentary as soon as we can, though we doubt we’ll be able to finish it tonight (remember, we’re in Europe!) That said, we should soon have a few pieces up in the Previews section of Westeros’s Game of Thrones Gallery.

HBO‘s “Inside Game of Thrones” program will be airing tonight, starting at 8:45PM EST, just before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire. The 15-minute period will feature a few minutes of general promotion for HBO’s programming, apparently, but around 10 minutes are specifically a feature focused on Game of Thrones. What can we expect to see? We’re not sure, but our guess is that this will be an introduction to the story and the characters for the wider subscriber audience, with the intention of intriguing them. Our understanding is that any clips from the show will come from the first five episodes (running right through the Hand’s tourney), but there’s plenty of scenes we’ve yet to get a glimpse at. There’s also a hope we’ll be introduced to and get a better look at some of the actors who’ve not yet been very featured: Rory McCann as the Hound, Michelle Fairley as Catelyn Stark, Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger, and so on.

HBO has promised that the video clip will go on-line right after it airs, on the production website Making Game of Thrones. Naturally, we’ll have it linked over at Westeros as soon as the video is available, and then we’ll indulge in watching it and commenting it. Whether we’ll be able to screencap it thoroughly or not…. we’re not sure. Possibly not, given that a 10 minute program is likely to add a hundred or more images to our already extensive Gallery, and as we’re in Europe it’ll be quite late before we can even get started.

HBO’s Making Game of Thrones official site has been updated with a brand new post, written up by writer and script editor Bryan Cogman after torrential rains caused a bit of trouble while filming was taking place at the San Anton Palace, the official residence of the President of Malta, which Bryan describes a being used because,“the courtyards, colonnades, and gardens of this 15th century palace,” are being used for the Red Keep. There’s a terrific anecdote about Maisie Williams, who plays Arya, which I heard from Bryan when I had visited the production offices.

At the end of his post, Bryan signs off with, “Righteous in Wrath.” That’s one of the many house mottoes George has created for the noble families of A Song of Ice and Fire, many of which he provided to Westeros.org for our Heraldry project. Those words belong to House Hornwood. Want to see all the mottoes? Visit the mottoes section of the Citadel’s Heraldry section!

This one takes the cake.

Who’d have thought that Syrio Forel himself would show up in one of Joe Campo’s videos as part of his quest to land a part in Game of Thrones? Not only is it funny, it may give us just a little taste of how Syrio may sound in HBO’s TV series!

Good luck to Joe, and many thanks to Miltos for being such a good sport!

Now, can we get the Mountain into this?

It took awhile, but we managed to get our annotations from the excellent, minute-long third teaser all sorted out. You can find them starting from this page of our Previews gallery. Hope you enjoy them, and remember, next Sunday will bring us the 10 minute “Inside Game of Thrones” feature!

The brand new teaser is out, and Making Game of Thrones has kindly placed it up on the web for all of us to enjoy!

What’d you think of it?

You can find our annotated stills starting here.

For those wondering, the music from the trailer was provided by Sencit Music, who’ve provided scoring for teasers including Inception.