Yesterday would have been J.R.R. Tolkien's 111th birthday, his "eleventy-first." Fans celebrated worldwide:

It's a clear sign that a movie has passed from mere entertainment into the realm of cultural phenomenon when it starts spawning theme parties. Such is the case with "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Act two, "The Two Towers," blew past the $400 million mark at the worldwide box office in a matter of days. But perhaps more impressively, it is garnering a global fan base not content with multiple screenings of its favorite picture. Friday night in Hollywood and all over the world, they're partying to celebrate the birthday of the man who started it all.

Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the "Rings" trilogy, died in 1973 at 81, but today he would have been 111, which means extremely magical things to devotees. Tolkien begins the "Rings" tale with a 111th birthday party for the character Bilbo Baggins, calling it an "eleventy-first birthday ... a very curious number and a very respectable age for a Hobbit."

SOMETHING PRECIOUS

Endorsed by the Tolkien Society in the U.K. and administered by fan volunteers all over the world, like Tolkien Forever founder Kristi Fojtik and "J.R.R. Tolkien's 111th Birthday DVD Project" producer Josh Rubinstein of Los Angeles, Friday night is a "Toast to the Professor." Fans like Fojtik and Rubinstein are planning to gather at the Cat and Fiddle Pub in Hollywood to raise a glass at exactly 9 p.m. and utter the words "The Professor."

Rubinstein, who is coordinating DVD coverage of the parties around the world for a half-hour documentary on the event, has been a Tolkien enthusiast for 10 years and feels that the fan base "hit warp speed since the movies came out." While many of the Web site reports of party plans were still calling for camera operator volunteers up until the last minute, Rubinstein laughs and said "this isn't a problem in Hollywood. We have two camera operators, and I already had two others who we probably won't need to use." [Variety]

Sorry I missed it as my childhood romance with The Ring has been remarkably rekindled by the films. It already seems inevitable that the Tolkien series would make extraordinary and blockbuster cinema, but imagine for a minute what a disaster this could have been: a deadly-earnest medieval morality play/adventure could easily have become a stilted, overblown self-parody, excoriated rather than embraced by the worldwide host of Tolkien fanatics, or simply ignored like the earlier animated version of The Hobbit. It is a near miracle that the films are as good as they are, rivaling the books for sheer absorptive magic.