Europe’s biggest “The Lord of the Rings” Convention – the ideal setting for the premiere of the ComBOTS character Aragorn
Fulda/Karlsruhe, 11/09/2006. ComBOTS AG (ISIN: DE000CMBT111) presents the first character, Aragorn, from the forthcoming “The Lord of the Rings” collection live at Ring*Con 2006, Europe’s largest gathering of the fans of hobbits, elves & co. Just a few weeks after the announcement of the license agreement between ComBOTS and New Line Cinema at the International Consumer Electronics Trade Fair (IFA) in Berlin, more than 5,000 participants in Ring*Con (November 11-12, 2006, Fulda) have an opportunity to see for themselves the high graphics quality standards, fun and emotionality of personal, digital communication using ComBOTS.
ComBOTS is an internet-based service that leaves behind all the complexity of existing applications including installation- and compatibility problems, complicated user interfaces, the necessity of spam protection. The new product puts simplicity, fun and privacy back into everybody’s personal digital communication.
ComBOTS has its own stand at Ring*Con 2006. All “The Lord of the Rings” fans who register there for a free test will be given, as community scouts, an exclusive character in advance of the sales launch in the ComBOTS Shop free-of-charge.
Using intuitive Drag & Drop operation, a top-design straightforward user interface, hiding the all powerful technology under the surface, ComBOTS brings back fun into communication through permanent and private one to one connections to friends and family. Each of these connections is represented by a high quality 3D character with animated emotions that make icons, smilies or greeting cards look outdated.
From now on anything, like pictures, files or video clips can be sent using Drag & Drop within seconds. Media messages might contain photos, voice, folders or animated emotions. If both friends are online, quite naturally a chat or – with just another click – a free phone conversation can evolve. [combots.com]
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Harper Collins launched Brian Sibley’s biography of Peter Jackson at Park Road Post last night with an interview between writer Tom Scott and the film maker.
These days PJ seems to enjoy interviews, approaching them with a relaxed, anecdotal style that makes the most of the storyteller in him. Some of what he said repeated what we’ve heard elsewhere, but he said some interesting things in reply to Scott’s questions on becoming a film maker. Jackson said it was almost a process of “natural selection” that weeded out anyone but those willing to persevere for years. Most people fall by the wayside, he said.
“There’s nothing that anybody can do at school, no exams you can sit that are really going to help you in the film industry. There’s nothing I could suggest that anyone does. Even film schools…if you’re a real film maker, I suggest you don’t need them.”
Scott suggested that by starting out being his own cameraman, actor, director and props maker, Jackson had in a sense invented his own apprenticeship and then served it.
Jackson agreed, and then added that any time he watched a movie he could make it serve as a film school. For example, just three weeks ago he’d been in a hotel room in Hong Kong, too tired to go out. Flicking through the TV channels he’d found a Spielberg movie he’d seen three or four times before, but this time he watched it entirely to see how Spielberg framed the shots, moved the camera, followed the characters and so on.
Other times, he said, he’d watch really good movies to pick himself up. Sometimes during LOTR filming he’d feel exhausted, his imagination worn out, so he’d watch something like Scorsese’s Goodfellas. “You watch those and you get jazzed up. That’s real film making.”
Jackson described how he’d failed to get a job at the National Film Unit, his first port of call when he left school. They liked him, but there were simply no jobs. That night, he opened the paper to the “Situations Vacant” pages and saw the job “Photo engraver.” He said he didn’t even know what a photo-engraver was, but just saw the word “photo” and thought that was a start, at least, even though he preferred his photos to be moving.
How did his parents feel about his photo engraving apprenticeship, Scott asked. Jackson said they were thrilled, as for most of his childhood they had thought he would become a film maker. Since they knew nothing about film, (and there was almost no film industry in NZ, he noted elsewhere) they probably found that quite scary.
Scott asked him about talent and confidence: when did Jackson develop his “extraordinary certainty” and realise he had the potential to make great movies?
“It’s not even confidence,” Jackson said. “Fear is what motivates you when you’re making movies – which is a good thing.” He went on to describe a dream he had every night while he was making LOTR. “I have an anxiety dream when I’m filming that I’m on the set and there’s all these people around, and I don’t know what movie I’m making. During the day I’m convinced I’m making the worst movie ever.”
The gala event attracted lots of Wellington glitterati (well, a minister and a deputy mayor), Harper Collins publishing people, Dominion Post folk (they’d sponsored a competition giving away tickets to the event), twenty lucky Wellingtonians who’d won said competition, booksellers, and local luminaries from the film world including Dan Hennah and Richard Taylor.
Peter Jackson was introduced by Harper Collins managing director Tony Fisk, who said the biography answered the question, “How on earth did this guy come to be making The Lord of the Rings?”. “That’s the question Peter Jackson sets out to answer in this book,” Fisk said. He also mentioned that the captions to the photos were written by Peter himself, and were in themselves a delight. “We’re treated to things like the sight of his teenage bedroom with all its projects and his birthday cake complete with Kong decorations.”
Many of us had never been in Park Road Post before, so we were pretty stunned by the small theatre where the interview took place. It is a pocket version of the vaguely oriental-fantasy film palaces of the Twenties and Thirties, complete with goddess-shaped pillars holding lamps and wreaths of greenery, faux windows with Moorish filigree-work, plush swags of velvet curtains, and a star-spangled ceiling imitating the night sky. Truly a cinema dream.
Thanks to Dominion Post reporter Tom Cardy for Peter Jackon’s quotes about film school – I didn’t get as complete a transcript from my notes. And double thanks to him for getting my copy of the book signed by Peter. I had to leave early to go to work.
I’ll post a review of “Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey” itself in a few days. The brief glance I’ve had time for so far looks very, very good.
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By JANET MASLIN
From nytimes.com (via Laurelin): Pity Viggo Mortensen, the director of the Center for Multireligious Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. He edited an anthology called “Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue,” and all it does is make people angry. They order this $35 paperback by mistake. Then they grouse about it online, because they thought it had something to do with the “Lord of the Rings” guy.
It’s easier to mix up these two than it might seem. The Viggo Mortensen who acts also has his literary side. He is the author of art books that combine painting, photography, poetry, journal entries and whatever else he cares to include, with interests that also extend to fervently antiwar politics and music.
If his books and CDs seem remarkably free of constraints, that’s because they are. The dreamboat actor runs a fine little publishing house, too.
Indirectly, Mr. Mortensen’s Perceval Press is a “Lord of the Rings” offshoot. It began operations in 2002, soon after Mr. Mortensen had finished playing the warrior-king Aragorn in the movie trilogy. His first book, the poetry collection “Ten Last Night,” had been published nine years earlier. And by 2002, his art gallery exhibitions and books were arriving on a regular basis. Thanks to “the movie, you know, notoriety,” as Mr. Mortensen mumblingly describes his career trajectory, they were selling nicely too.
He noticed. So he asked a question of Smart Art Press, the publisher of most of his work: Could he reprint? “I’ll do the work of making sure they look right,” he remembers saying. “We’ll split the cost of reprinting each new batch. I’ll give you half the books, and you can do whatever you want with them.” And Perceval Press, which takes its name from a part of the Holy Grail myth that particularly appeals to Mr. Mortensen’s sense of independence, was born.
In 2003 Perceval’s roster included three books of Mr. Mortensen’s: “Miyelo,” “45301” and “For Wellington.” Their combined effect was to put the business in the black. When his own output is smaller, however, profits are low or nonexistent. Perceval’s print runs are small, Mr. Mortensen said, there is no real advertising, and its books are available primarily online from percevalpress.com. The point of the enterprise is to cast light on work that might not otherwise be published, and to present artists’ work as it was intended to be seen.
Recently, en route to a film festival with “Alatriste,” a swashbuckling Spanish-language film based on the popular novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Mr. Mortensen stopped in New York. He had preliminary versions of Perceval’s four forthcoming books in tow. Perceval now puts out about eight books a year, all shepherded by Mr. Mortensen in his typically hands-on, “nitpicky” fashion.
“I go over all the books with a fine-tooth comb before they go out,” he said. That includes accompanying the page proofs to Jomagar, the Spanish press outside Madrid that actually produces them.
On this particular day, Mr. Mortensen was ensconced at the Algonquin Hotel, where the main floor recalls the Round Table, and the upstairs wallpaper pattern is fashioned out of New Yorker cartoons. His own literary tastes are not so gilt-edged or mainstream. One of the fall titles, which are expected to be ready at the end of November, is a Spanish-language critical anthology devoted to new Cuban art, intended primarily as a university-level textbook. Henry Eric Hernández’s book “La Revancha/Revenge” is a bilingual alternative to official accounts of the Cuban revolution. A third new book, “Magical Meteorite Songwriting Device,” reprints a set of vibrant collages made by the singer Exene Cervenka of the Original Sinners — formerly with X, and formerly Mr. Mortensen’s wife.
Ms. Cervenka’s book demonstrates what Perceval does best: choose offbeat material and produce it with close attention to the little details. “I say the same thing to everyone: We will make a really beautiful book,” Mr. Mortensen said. “It’ll look the way you want it to look, and you’ll be consulted all the way.”
Not surprisingly, this attitude is attractive to the would-be Perceval author, but Mr. Mortensen is tougher than his soft-spoken manner suggests. “I don’t have trouble saying no,” he said.
Perceval’s specialty items — science adventures (“Land of the Lost Mammoths” by Mike Davis); portrait collections (“On the Way Home,” Anne Fishbein’s photographs from Yaroslavl, a port city northeast of Moscow); odd juxtapositions (“Supernatural,” fusing doll photographs by Lindsay Brice with a Flannery O’Connor short story) — arise out of quirky, unpredictable circumstances.
None are more serendipitous than the ones that yield Mr. Mortensen’s own books, which are often prompted by the globe-trotting that goes with his film career. His latest, “I Forget You for Ever,” is also due in November. It takes its strange title from a phrase written on the side of a bus in Iran.
Perceval will print 2,000 copies of “I Forget You for Ever” and sell them at $38 each. That print run is twice what other Perceval books are usually given, but for good reason: Mr. Mortensen’s books sell out. They also go into multiple editions: one book, “SignLanguage,” has had eight printings, while “Recent Forgeries” and “Coincidence of Memory” have each had seven. And as to the question of whether Mr. Mortensen’s own books bring in revenue, the manuscript for “Ten Last Night” (which was published by Illuminati) has found its way to the used-book site Alibris. Price: $16,499.95.
Perceval has a tiny staff in Santa Monica, Calif., that includes the youngest of three Mortensen brothers, Walter Mortensen. It also includes Sandra Fu, Pilar Perez and Michelle Perez, who is credited with many of Perceval’s sleek, imaginative designs. Asked who in this group has the head for business, Viggo Mortensen answered, “Probably no one.”
Mr. Mortensen, 48, says he learned about publishing from practical experience. He has seen what happens when small presses are bought by bigger publishers and then lose control of the decision-making process. He has also experimented with using a distributor for Perceval’s products, which include CDs and T-shirts as well as books.
“We had a distributor,” he said. “And it’s kind of become like the movies, where they’ll say, O.K., Barnes & Noble will take X amount. They put the books out, and then they get sent to the back of the store if they don’t sell. If it doesn’t do very well, boom, then you’re out. Plus you’re paying a lot just to get them in the store.” Perceval is now back to distributing its own books.
“I Forget You for Ever” is another of Mr. Mortensen’s eerily abstract photo essays, with haunting images that are titled in cryptic, oblique fashion. One street scene, “Arieto,” is named for the barely visible label glimpsed on a broken record. Less subtly named are pictures of foreign cities entitled “Bomb This,” intended as a form of deterrent.
“I do hear people saying I should keep my mouth shut and not say what I think about politics,” said Mr. Mortensen, who clearly has no intention to do so. One of his avowed aims is to find the humanity in faraway places, as he did on the trip to Iran that yielded some of the pictures here.
He went there to visit Sara Solati, a young Iranian author, actress and filmmaker who had woven him into her fiction. (Such is the nature of Viggomania.) Through a bizarre series of events, she had been stalked by an actor and wound up with head trauma. She had been in a coma for months. But when Mr. Mortensen showed up in Tehran to visit her, Ms. Solati had the good sense to open her eyes.
Next time Mr. Mortensen does a book, it’s likely to feature glimpses of Russia and London, locations for the not-yet-titled film he is currently making for David Cronenberg (who directed him in the 2005 film “A History of Violence”). After that, he has three more films planned.
And where does Perceval fit into this tight schedule? “I need to sleep more than I used to,” he said. “I’ve got to do less. There may come a time when it feels like too much, so next year we may not do as many books.
“Of course,” he added, “I said that about this year.”
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As many of you may have heard, the PJ produced live action Halo film has been put on the back burner. Here is the press release from Wingnut Films:
As was previously confirmed, we deeply regret that both Universal and Fox did not choose to move forward with financing the Halo film under the original terms of the agreement. At this time Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, along with their partner, Microsoft, have mutually agreed to postpone making a feature film based on the Halo video game universe until we can fulfill the promise we made to millions of Halo fans throughout the world that we would settle for no less than bringing a first class film to the big screen. We are fully supportive of Director Neill Blomkamp’s vision of the film. Neill is a tremendously gifted filmmaker and his preliminary work on Halo is truly awe-inspiring. While it will undoubtedly take a little longer for Halo to reach the big screen, we are confident that the final feature film will be well worth the wait.
We will continue to follow any and all news stories on this, if you have heard anything about this send it along!
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Kiwi actor Bruce Hopkins aka Gamling gets involved in all kinds of experimental stuff exploring the possibilities of digital media and the Net. Here’s a word from him on his latest project:
“I have been working on a project with a guy over here called Andrew McKenzie, a lecturer in Digital Media. He got me on board to perform for an animation series he is creating to release on the mobile phone 3G platform. It is very cool to see what he has been able to do. We literally film this on a mini DV against a green screen in one corner of the space he teaches in. He films each character separately creating a library of sequences and then is able to manipulate this to create an episode such as what you see on this posting on Youtube.”
There’s some background on the project here.
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From Variety
By NICOLE LAPORTE
MGM’s recent announcement that it intended to release “The Hobbit” and, hopefully, get Peter Jackson to direct it, caused major buzz in Hollywood.
It also caused a frenzy among Jackson fans, who have been lobbying via petition on the fansite TheOneRing.net for Jackson to tackle the “Lord of the Rings” prequel ASAP. The petition tallied nearly 50,000 signatures and was submitted to MGM and New Line, which share film rights to “The Hobbit.” (MGM owns distribution rights; New Line owns the rights to actually make the movie.)
Reflecting just how important Jackson’s online fan base was to the success of the “LOTR” pics, MGM chief operating officer Rick Sands responded to the petition, saying: “MGM would be thrilled to collaborate with the Academy-Award winning director on this MGM/New Line Cinema production. And, I’m sure to the delight of the 50,000 filmgoers who have petitioned us in recent weeks, demanding we bring this film to fruition, we have had a few initial conversations about the project with Mr. Jackson’s representatives.”
Ken Kamins, who manages Jackson, would not comment on the matter. But people close to Jackson say it’s not likely the director will turn to “The Hobbit” anytime soon — at least not until the lawsuit between Jackson and New Line over “Lord of the Rings” revenues is settled.
Jackson’s suit claims he’s still owed money from the trilogy, including revenues from distribution deals abroad. Sorting through the various overseas deals and payments is a complex matter, however, and no damage amount is specified.
But considering the “LOTR” trilogy grossed close to $3 billion worldwide in ticket sales alone, shouldn’t New Line be working a little harder to make peace with Jackson? After all, Time Warner stockholders would no doubt be tickled to hear that an “LOTR”-type film was in the works, with the potential for LOTR-type grosses.
In the meantime, Jackson is busy with a number of other projects. He’s working on the script for “The Lovely Bones,” based on the novel by Alice Sebold, which will be his next directing gig. He’s also exec producing Universal’s “Halo” and producing U’s “Dambusters,” and just acquired rights to a trilogy of fantasy novels by Naomi Novik about a Napoleon-era ship’s captain and a heroic dragon named Temeraire. The multi-hyphenate is also launching a videogame studio with Microsoft.
Frodo fans will just have to sit tight.
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