“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain wrote after the New York Journal erroneously covered news of his demise. “Mistaken publications of obituaries aren’t as rare as you might expect,” observes The Phrase Finder. We might say the same for the frequency with which greenlit film projects never see the light of a projector lamp, or the number of times “dead” film projects are resurrected.
The scuttlebutt now, of course, as we all know, is that New Line Cinema has greenlit The Hobbit, but that both Peter Jackson and New Line head Robert Shaye declare that Jackson will not be at the helm of the project. At the heart of the issue, at least publicly, is the lawsuit Jackson and company have filed against New Line over profits from the ancillary rights to The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson has said he “won’t discuss making the [Hobbit] movies until the lawsuit is resolved,” and Shaye has gone so far as to declare that he doesn’t “want to make a movie with somebody who is suing me… It will never happen during my watch.” Complicating perception of the truth is Saul Zaentz’ assertion that The Hobbit “will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson.”
What’s really being waged is not a fractious legal dispute. The real battle is a tussle over public opinion. No matter how badly all the parties might want The Hobbit to happen, and for Peter Jackson to be at the helm, they all also know that, until a film actually starts shooting, all bets are off. Even at that point, studios have been known to replace directors. So in the meantime, everyone’s jockeying for influence, control, and as big a share of the pie as possible.
And what all the parties involved want to do is avoid pissing off the fans, upon whom all future largesse depends.
In this case, what that means is preparing us all for the worst possible scenario, whether it plays out or not. And my guess is that both Jackson and Shaye are pretty chafed that Zaentz has been the most forthcoming about the truth of the situation. “Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company,” he told the German website Elbenwald in November. “I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.”
The anxiety over the fate of Jackon’s association with The Hobbit began, for me, the night that The Return of the King won 11 Oscars. This is not, contrary to what some may think, the kind of event that brings glee to men like Robert Shaye. Yes, they are thrilled that their films win such accolades; but when the director’s fee for a follow-up project is guaranteed to skyrocket in the wake of such success, studio heads start to seethe. So immediately after the 2004 Oscars ceremony, the tough money was on the boxoffice results of King Kong: if that film mimicked The Lord of the Rings’ wild financial success, Shaye and New Line were over a barrel; if it tanked, Jackson would have huge contract concessions to make. Sure, Jackson didn’t get the call from New Line’s honchos about The Hobbit that he hoped for during that period; but he wasn’t exactly knocking at their door, either.
So when it became clear to Jackson that New Line wasn’t only stalling, but that they were also stiffing him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars due to the corporate practice of “self-dealing”—granting no-bid merchandising rights to members of its own broad corporate umbrella—he decided to up the ante, filing a lawsuit against New Line on February 28, 2005, according to The New York Times.
When, in actuality, King Kong proved neither a blockbuster nor a dog during the winter of 2005, the waters just got muddied. The fact that conversations had been stalled so long waiting on the outcome of Kong didn’t help, nor did the fact that both sides knew what the mutual silence was all about. All in all, there was nothing left but discontent on all sides.
The business being what it is, this is a story that is far from being over; and given that there are not just one but two studios involved, the political jockeying is far more complex than in most cases. My guess is that Zaentz is a lot closer to right than either Jackson or Shaye would like to admit—and that Shaye may regret the vitriol of his rhetoric. “There’s a certain piggishness involved here,” an unidentified New Line lawyer told The New York Times back in 1995. “New Line already gave [Jackson] enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it’s still not enough for him.” When Shaye recently said, “[Jackson] thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars,” you know who Shaye has been talking to.
The smart money is on Jackson making both The Hobbit and the other planned film, and making them with New Line. Will that take place “on Shaye’s watch”? Maybe not. But since New Line has got corporate masters who may be even more demanding than Shaye, that may just mean bad news for Shaye—and good news for Tolkien film fans.
As to the wisdom of making two movies out of The Hobbit rather than just one, that’s quite a different matter. Without yet getting into the structure that such films might assume, it’s fair to say that Tolkien wouldn’t have written the same story that he did had he written it subsequent to The Lord of the Rings.
First, we know that, when Tolkien began writing The Hobbit, he had no intention of it becoming a part of the history of Middle-earth. Second, we know that Tolkien had to later revise The Hobbit to make it consistent with his masterwork, retooling Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum. Third, we know that Tolkien had to temporarily suspend work on Rings in order to work out exactly how characters like Elrond, Gandalf, Aragorn, and the Hobbits themselves fit into his broader mythology. Fourth, we know that Tolkien gave up writing a Rings sequel because the material simply became “too dark.”
Complicating matters is the general perception amongst many fans—a sentimental, romanticized, and unexamined perception—that The Hobbit is a light, whimsical fantasy. It is not. It is, in fact, an allegorical bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale, a story of loss of innocence. It’s about children no longer covering their eyes in terror and imagining giants and bogies, but rather coming to see the world with eyes wide open and finding out that the most dangerous monsters may be some of their fellow adventurers. The conventions of fantasy may dispose of Smaug quite neatly; dealing with Thorin—or Bilbo’s own complicity in a Great Wrong—is another matter entirely, but one which is at the heart of The Hobbit.
Given that The Lord of the Rings has already come to the screen, though (and stupendously so), we have already seen how blithe young Hobbits such as Pippin must learn to become grave warriors; we have already witnessed the darkness of battles like that at the Pelennor; through Théoden, we have already witnessed sleepers waking to the harsh reality of betrayal and self-deception; we have, in short, already lost the innocence of Middle-earth. Trying to recapture it—on a scale that would duplicate the boxoffice success of Rings—would be a bit like returning to fifth-grade summer camp after a stint in college.
So two choices present themselves: first, scale back the design of The Hobbit as Lord of the Rings Lite for the younger set, and hope that Peter Jackson’s fans have all spawned their own sets of Hobbit-sized kindergarteners who will be thrilled with a Curious George version of Middle-earth; or second, embrace the tone of the last third of The Hobbit and integrate the tale seamlessly with Peter Jackson’s other films. Boxoffice potential almost dictates the wisdom of the latter choice, regardless of the “violence” it does to Tolkien’s original tale.
If the first approach is taken, however, it would allow—perhaps even necessitate—all of the major roles to be recast. In order to see Gandalf in an entirely different light, for instance, a new Gandalf might be required. When pursuing this line of thinking, the financial wheels start turning, and we can pretty easily envision a project of this flavor if New Line somehow manages to go ahead without Peter Jackson (and the wallets of Jackson’s dedicated and thoroughly adult fanbase), especially considering that Jackson would never make such a film.
The second approach, though, begs for McKellan to return as Gandalf, Serkis as Gollum, and Holm as Bilbo—who, we must remember, convincingly played the younger Bilbo in Jackon’s “flashback” scenes as well as the opening sequences of Fellowship.
It also opens up intriguing possibilities for the proposed second Hobbit film—which, by the way, I think is a brilliant concept. Fans of The Lord of the Rings, the book, know that there’s a wealth of historical detail that’s left entirely out of Peter Jackson’ films. In particular, the length of time between Bilbo’s departure from Hobbiton and Frodo’s is collapsed to mere weeks rather than years. This presents a fantastic opportunity to create a narrative—once again temporally collapsed, as with Jackson’s trilogy—that tells both the tale of Sauron’s abandonment of Dol Guldur and the long search for Gollum.
The added bonus? Added roles for Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, Liv Tyler as Arwen, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, and Orlando Bloom as Legolas—maybe even John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. All of these characters were alive during the period of The Hobbit, and were certainly active during the period between the two tales. Heck, we might even get a major role for Craig Parker again as Haldir, which would make his subsequent death in The Two Towers all that more poignant.
And these are two films that Jackson should be the one to make, and ones that I would look forward to seeing.
Yet it behooves the fan base, I think, not to become too territorial with the intellectual rights to The Hobbit. The film production business is as wild and wooly as the American West (or the Far East of Middle-earth) once was. When on the frontier, wizards and artists will do what artists and wizards must; the best that we, the fans, can hope for is to voice our concerns—and then, for lightning to strike twice.
Greg Wright is the author of Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter, and is Writer in Residence at Puget Sound Christian College in Everett, Washington. Formerly Contributing Editor at Hollywood Jesus, Greg’s collected essays on Tolkien and Jackson have just been republished in a new archive at the site. Greg is now Managing Editor of Gospelcom’s movie review site Past the Popcorn.
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Chris Meadows writes: I am delighted to announce that on Wednesday, January 24th at 12 noon Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific., I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Hugo-winning fantasy author Peter S. Beagle on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File (http://terrania.us/biblio/). The topic of the interview will be Beagle’s career, including The Last Unicorn novel and movie, the Lord of the Rings animated movie, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Sarek,” and more. After I finish my prepared questions, Beagle will take questions from the audience.
Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.
I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate but I will summarize:
If you just want to listen, you can do that via streaming audio from the TalkShoe page itself, while the show is airing: http://terrania.us/biblio/ Also, the complete show will be downloadable as an MP3 file (you can also use RSS to syndicate it to your podcast-sync software of choice if you like) starting about half an hour after the show ends. No registration of any kind is necessary to listen.
If you would like to listen and have the opportunity to converse with other listeners and submit questions via text chat, you can register at talkshoe.com (it’s free) and download their Java-based text chat client, which includes the ability to listen via streaming audio at the same time.
If you would like to phone in and listen that way, as well as having the opportunity to ask a question on the air, you can register at talkshoe.com and phone in to (724) 444-7444. (It is a Pittsburgh number, so it will be a long-distance call for most people.) You will be asked for the show’s ID number, which is 7022, and your PIN number, which you set when you register. You can phone in with or without also using the chat client, though you should use the chat client if you wish to be able to signal that you would like to be unmuted to ask a question. (You can also phone in via Voice Over IP applications, for free, which I cover in detail on the tutorial page mentioned above.)
Finally, if you will not be able to participate live but would still like to submit questions, email me via the address on this message, or the contact form at http://terrania.us/emailme.htm. I can’t promise I’ll ask all questions that are submitted but I will try to ask any good ones.
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Amy H. Sturgis sends this along: Tolkien/Rowling Lecture Free and Open to the Public (“Evening with the Author” Series)
Where: Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (just outside Tulsa)
Broken Arrow Senior High School
1901 East Albany
Broken Arrow, OK
What: Broken Arrow’s “Evening with the Author” Series
Tolkien scholar Amy H. Sturgis, Ph.D.: http://www.amyhsturgis.com
Lecture: “Harry Potter is a Hobbit: The Tolkien Solution to the Rowling Problem”
J.K. Rowling draws fire from cultural critics and laypersons alike: her works rank among the most challenged books of the last decade due to their supposedly mature content, and yet highly visible reviewers consistently poke fun at their allegedly juvenile nature. A question emerges from these disparate but repeated lines of attack: if children cannot handle dark and serious issues such as death, and adults should not enjoy such childish and light pleasures as fantasy stories, who if anyone is the proper audience for the Harry Potter series? According to J.R.R. Tolkien, the solution to this dilemma lies not in discovering a new category of readers, but rather in dismissing the false assumptions about childhood, adulthood, and the nature of fantasy that inform the question. Join Dr. Amy H. Sturgis as she uses Tolkien’s insights to propose a solution to Rowling’s problem of readership and a lasting answer to her critics.
Book Signing by Dr. Sturgis Before/After Presentation
When: January 29, 2007, 6:30pm
For Further Information, Contact: Nancy Remus at Broken Arrow Senior High School: 918-259-4310 x249
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Last year we tried something different on our Weta Forums, and invited Workshop Designer Daniel Falconer to ‘blitz’ the forums. And it was so popular that we have invited Senior Prosthetics Supervisor and Visual Creature Effects Art Director, Gino Acevedo to do it this month.
Gino oversaw all the special makeup requirements that Weta Workshop provided for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This included hundreds and hundreds of noses, ears and feet as well as the countless full facial and full body make-up appliances for all of Middle-earth’s non human inhabitants.
Seven of the nine leads in the films wore some form of prosthetic appliance- a huge undertaking to say the least! In addition, Gino oversaw the paint designs of all the films’ creatures, including Gollum, and was directly involved in bringing the many digital creatures and characters to life.
During King Kong Gino designed the prosthetic Skull Island Native make-ups with Dominie Till as well as art directing the film’s creatures at Weta Digital.
Gino will be blitzing the forums on NZ Wed 24 & 31 January 2007. Around the world that is:
Melbourne, Australia: Wed 24 & 31 January
London, England: Tues 23 & 30 January
New York, USA: Tues 23 & 30 January
Tokyo, Japan: Wed 24 & 31 January
Paris, France: Tues 23 & 30 January
It’s a good idea to spend some time in the forums before the blitz to search the topics and post your own questions, you can do that by logging onto wetanz-forums.com. You can check out Gino’s bio and gallery here.
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Peter S. Beagle is known worldwide for his novels, non-fiction, and screenplays. His most famous work, The Last Unicorn, has sold more than six million copies and routinely polls as one of the Top 10 fantasy novels of all time (Its follow-up, “Two Hearts,” just won the 2006 Hugo Award). Peter is deeply involved in Middle-earth, having written the famous introductory page in Ballantine’s LOTR paperback editions and the screenplay for Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. This coming February 6, 2007, Lionsgate Entertainment will release a special 25th Anniversary DVD of The Last Unicorn, with a screenplay by Beagle [FANS: help Peters cause by purchasing your autographed DVD exclusively from Conlan Press!].
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As a fiction writer with some experience with the film world, I’m very clear on at least one aspect of the business: you never know the whole story. That applies to other people, as well as writers — it’s entirely possible that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh don’t really know the deepest motives behind New Line’s behavior, and never may. I think it’s been so from the days of The Great Train Robbery.
Once, long ago, I said lightly to Ralph Bakshi, “Of course, everybody down there in Hollywood keeps three separate sets of books.” To which Bakshi replied, “Hell, yes!” I was joking. He wasn’t. I learned all about that when it came time for me to collect the last half of my own miserly $5,000 pay for writing the animated version of Lord of the Rings, only to find that I had to threaten to sue Saul Zaentz in order to get it. (And I am still fighting, all these years later, to try and make him live up to his other promises. Click here if you are curious.)
I am far less knowledgeable and opinionated about directors than I am about scripts and screenwriters. But I do believe that, certain flaws aside, Peter Jackson made as good a Lord of the Rings as we are ever likely to see outside the multiplex of our minds. Someone else quite possibly might have made it as well — as someone else may well make a perfectly good film of The Hobbit — but I know something of LOTR’s nearly-half-century journey to the screen, and I don’t believe that anyone else could have gotten it made. We’re not talking about special effects unavailable twenty years ago, but about obsession: about a certain kind of madness, if you like. Madness allied to talent, to commitment, to love… as George Gobel, a comedian of my youth, used to say, “You can’t hardly get them kind no more.”
And you can’t.
Peter S. Beagle
http://www.peterbeagle.com
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John D. Rateliff moved to Wisconsin in 1981 in order to work with the Tolkien manuscripts at Marquette University. He has been active in Tolkien scholarship for many years, delivering papers on Tolkien and the Inklings. While at Marquette, he assisted in the collation of their holdings with those Christopher Tolkien was editing for his History of Middle-earth series. A professional editor, he lives in the Seattle area with his wife and three cats (only one of whom is named after a Tolkien character). His upcoming book, History of “The Hobbit,” is described by TolkienLibrary.com as “An essential resource book for the forthcoming movie adaptation of The Hobbit.”
TheOneRing.net asked John to comment on the recent activity regarding The Hobbit, here is what he had to say: As I see it, there are two paths a film of THE HOBBIT could take, one being to stress its affinities with THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the other to emphasis its independence (it was after all originally written as a stand-alone story).
For the first path, Peter Jackson is obviously the man for the job. Only he could make a film of THE HOBBIT in such as way that it seems an extension of the three LORD OF THE RINGS movies, which is unquestionably what the overwhelming majority of people who saw the LotR movies want. Without Jackson at the helm, without his team of scriptwriters and his crew and his special effects people, it’d be impossible to make a film of THE HOBBIT that has the look and feel of the LotR films, even with New Zealand locations and the retention of some of the cast Jackson assembled. With Jackson in charge, I have every confidence he could make a film of THE HOBBIT just as good as his films of THE LORD OF THE RINGS (and that’s saying something).
For the second path, my feeling is that if Jackson and his team don’t make the film, then everything should change. New director, new scriptwriter, new cast, new crew, new concept artists, new composer, new special effects house, new locations. There’s more than one way to make a good film out of THE HOBBIT (and more than one bad way too, or course), and whoever would wind up in charge under that scenario should concentrate on making the best possible movie, not on doing things the way Jackson would have done them.
My greatest fear is that it’ll fall between these stools, and we’ll get pseudo-Jackson or “Jackson-lite”: an attempt to film something that looks like Jackson’s work without Jackson himself, which I think would be disastrous.
So, for me the best possible outcome would be for Jackson to make the film, in New Zealand, starring the two Sir Ians (McKellan and Holm), backed by Shore and Lee and Howe and the rest, but hopefully with more fidelity to Tolkien’s storyline and without the occasional gaffs that marred the second and third films ( e.g., the characterizations of Faramir and Denethor). I’ve come to accept that Holm’s starting as Bilbo is unlikely, but given the excellence of his performance in the first film, one can hope. That said, there are any number of talented actors out there who could play these characters — after all, I was one of those bitterly disappointed that Sean Connery was not cast as Gandalf in THE LORD OF THE RINGS, only to be deeply impressed by McKellan’s superlative performance, which I really think could hardly be bettered. So if we were forced to do without Sir Ian Holm I’m sure they could find someone else who could do a fine job — my own personal choice would be Sir Hugh Laurie, who’s about the right age to play Bilbo and has shown he can do both silly (Bertie Wooster) and serious (House).
As for a LotR prequel film, it’s an interesting idea but I don’t see how it’s practicable. There simply isn’t a single story between Bilbo’s adventures and Frodo’s quest to build a film around. There are lots of interesting snippets — Balin’s foray into Moria, the adventures of young Aragorn, and the like — but they don’t add up to any kind of coherent story. A tv special might be able to get away with a series of vignettes, but I don’t see how that would work in a theatrical film. In the end I’m reminded of Tolkien’s own decision, after writing a single chapter of his projected sequel to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, “The New Shadow”, to leave well enough alone, and think the studios would be wise to do the same.
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