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New Hope for Jackson Hobbit Film?
DrJimbo writes "Just in time for the 70th Anniversary of the Hobbit (published September 21, 1937) Entertainment Weekly has a 5-page article on a possible reconciliation between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema that may pave the way for the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to return and helm the filming of The Hobbit. It was previously reported here that Jackson would not be making the Hobbit film. The EW article says that Jackson wants to make two films: first the Hobbit in its entirety and then another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately Jackson already has a lot on his plate with filming of The Lovely Bones scheduled to start this month and a live action Tintin film in the works."
70 years on and The Hobbit isn't in the public domain. It truly is a shame to see our constitution thwarted in this manner.
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I'm interested to know if Peter Jackson will elect to star in the lead role of Bilbo.
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Please, don't film Tintin. Thanks.
What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period? Bilbo uses the Ring a few times to avoid the Sackville-Bagginses. Writes memoirs. Lends mithril armour to the Michel Delving Mathom-house. Wow, riveting stuff.
In the wider world, Sauron has returned to Mordor and is rebuilding Barad-dur. Three hours on an Orcish construction site, then?
The only excitement you might get is following Aragorn incognito in the guard of Minas Tirith. But to what end?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Am I the only one who felt the LOTR movies were not especially good and that Jackson's eccentric style may not have been the best fit for the book?
Do we honestly care if he directs them? I mean, we care that a bad director doesn't get to, but as long as it's a decent director, does it really matter who it is?
On the other hand, if he manages to get a script written for the 60 year time difference, and it's not 60 years of Gandolf riding around in grey and the hobbits having teaparties (since that's basically what happened), then I'm all for the new film and Jackson. I'm not real hopeful, though, since all the really interesting stuff happened in the books and the other years weren't covered because they simply weren't that interesting.
Or maybe someone can name some of the interesting things that supposedly happened in those 60 years? Gandolf was obviously out doing some sort of research, but I don't think anything specific was ever mentioned. And the hobbits were pretty clearly doing hobbit-like things in their little boring houses. They don't really even have politics, just a few that don't particulary care for each other from feuds that happened generations ago over silly things.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Or...you could just not go. You obviously didn't like the LOTR movies, and that would be apparent that you didn't like them right from the first movie...so I have to ask, did you also go and watch the second and third movie also? If so, why?
If you think that Peter Jackson ruined the movies for you, why did you watch all 3? Or did you? Or are you just a troll?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Whoops, I forgot that the GP may be a Tom Bombadil fan. Yes, tack on an extra half hour to an already very long movie just so you can add... not very much to the overall story line. Brilliant.
But I'm looking forward more to the Tintin movies than to the Hobbit-one.
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Let's see, Jackson only made them what, $3 billion dollars? I think each movie was directly good for around a billion, plus or minus $100 million, and this is talking straight box office, not even considering DVD's, TV rights, moichandizin', etc. I would be no way surprised in hearing the total take is up to $5 billion at this point, and a project like this is going to be like Star Wars or the goddamn Beatles catalog, a fat stream of recurring revenue for decades to come. And this is off an initial investment of $300 million for the whole trilogy? Do they think they could have pulled it together without someone like Peter Jackson at the helm? By all rights, the trilogy should have flopped -- Hollywood can't do quality. LOTR being brilliant is about as long of odds as Babylon 5 finishing its entire five year run and only sucking in the last season.
So New Line realizes they could stop buggering the goose that laid the golden egg and make another fat pile of shiny if they treat it nice? DUUUH, but still a bit of cluefulness not expected from Hollywood. Now go make the movie!
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Oh, and the scouring of the shire also...so after a HUGE battle...then another HUGE battle, you get the destruction of Sauron and the aftermath...then ANOTHER half an hour to 45 minutes of resolving stuff in the shire...THEN the Grey Havens, THEN Sam coming back.
Yep, the general public already complained that there were 3 endeds to Return of the King, why not throw a 4th one in there also....just so those 4 people in the world that complained that the LOTR wasn't word for word like the books will be happy. Happy with really long, boringly edited movies.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I really enjoyed LOTR, really, but there is a project that Weta has in the pocket that I would like much more to see realized: a live-action Evangelion movie. They have being studying it for quite some time but it's "on hold" for quite some time already.
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No, you weren't. I was going to ask why everyone is so excited about the possibility of Jackson filming The Hobbit. Personally I think his rendition of the stories missed an awful lot of what I thought was important, not the least of which was real character development. I slept through the second and third installments. The first was an excellent start, but he failed miserably by focusing on the battles and not the characters, in my opinion.
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only if he writes the script using a fountain pen....
We could always get him to direct it. I hear he is quite good.
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I want to see The Silmarillion made as a mini-series!
While not entirely successful, changes were necessary to make it possible to make a poetic work function dramatically.
Dramatic storytelling is fundamentally unrealistic, because it overemphasizes the power of an individual's ability to control situations through their decisions. LotR doesn't believe the fundamental model. In LotR, no individual is capable of achieving success. While individuals may fail through their own actions, they cannot succeed. This is a profoundly un-dramatic viewpoint; the rules of drama say that the protagonist must overcome adversity through his own virtues. In LotR, characters may attain their ends, but they do not achieve them. It is not accidental that Frodo fails in his quest, it is a deliberate philosophical statement about the action of grace in the lives of people who at least try to be virtuous.
In Tolkien's world view, the agency of individuals even in their own decisions is limited. People roll along in the grooves that their habitual actions have worn in their character. We are carefully presented with pairs of characters in which the practice or non practice of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love play out in their destinies: Frodo/Gollum, Theoden/Denethor, Faramir/Boromir. The idea that a character's destiny is part of a larger process than the events of the story is also anti-dramatic.
It is inevitable that changes are made to make the movie work dramatically -- at the very least the elaborate parallelism of Tolkien would have doubled the length of the movies. This is not heresy, Tolkien himself was the kind of author who never stopped changing a manuscript until it was torn from his hands. Some of the movie changes work, some of them don't.
The changes that don't work fail because the story is simply too complex already for them to be developed adequately. As it is, considerable familiarity with the story is needed to follow the movies. The story changes work to the degree their ends are consistent with time available. The changes in Faramir, for example, simply don't ring true, because there isn't enough time to show him making a believable "change of heart" decision. Rewriting Theoden's death scene to be played with Eowyn was not only time efficient, it heightened the emotional impact of the scene. It also brings the somewhat brash screen Theoden back to Tolkien's Theoden, whose saving grace was humility.
Many changes were done to preserve pieces of poetry in the original; Eomer's words are put in Theoden's mouth; the words of the unnamed narrator are put in Gandalf's mouth. By in large these are to the benefit of the movies in that they preserve some of the beauty of the original.
I was watching the DVD of Return of the King recently, and I was particularly struck by the Rohirrim in the Battle of Pelennor Fields. This was of course altered to fit the needs of dramatization, but I believe Tolkien would have been thrilled. It shows how Jackson understands the heroic values of Lord of the Rings, even if he is not 100% successful in translating those values to the screen: heroism is not conferred by victory, but by acting courageously when reason tells you victory is impossible.
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- My name is Hobbit Skywalker - I've come to rescue you!
- Are you sure you're not an Ewok in disguise?
... A New Hope
This is the one they should have made first! I can't wait to see Episodes V and VI.
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where some studio bigwig has "the intellectual capacity of an artichoke", as Harlan Ellison so famously put it.
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Which was pretty much inevitable. No two people would make the same choices, therefore any specific changes are bound to cause dissatisfaction in some people. Fan satisfaction/dissatisfaction is not a viable criterion for judging whether a change works.
My opinion is that in order for changes to work, they have to have screen time to play out. This means that reasonable changes that condense the story nearly always work, although we might be disappointed to lose some of our personal favorite bits. Changes that demand explanation tend to fail to make their point and make the movie somewhat more confusing. Very few of the changes made were "silly", although more than a few were too ambitious. I could give examples of seemingly arbitrary changes that actually make sense withing the overall plan of the movie; the fact that the plan is not 100% successful doesn't make them "arbitrary".
You might not agree, but I think that's a substantive opinion.
I have over the years made a point of studying literary criticism of Tolkien. Right or wrong, serious literary criticism is at least subject to refutation, which means it takes some courage and integrity to do. I wonder who in your opinion, is not self-absorbed, fallacious, or dumb when it comes to Tolkien, other than (obviously) yourself?
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HOLLYHELL, Monday — In an admirable display of synergy between hard-headed business sense and sensitivity to artistic rightness, New Line Cinemas has hired Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord Of The Rings.
"Peter Jackson may have made us three billion dollars and paved our goddamn driveways with Oscars," said a spokesdroid, "but when he dared question the three nickels and a gum wrapper payment, well. We knew we just couldn't work with someone so risibly unprofessional."
Sandler is likely to be working under renowned producer Uwe Boll. "Okay, here is what I am thinking, ja? Your Bilbo Baggins will be a WOMAN in Nazi Germany. A naked woman. And the One Ring will not show up. And she gets raped by Hitler! Gandalf will be played by Keanu Reeves. I AM THE DIRECTOR! I mean programmer. PRODUCER."
Jackson has lost weight, shaved his feet and gone back to his roots to make a warmhearted New Zealand-based family film in the style of his earliest works, under the working title Zombie Cancer Bukkake Pus-Nodules, with a budget in the range of over forty New Zealand dollars.
Work at New Line continues. "We at New Line are convinced that Professor Tolkien would have agreed with us that Adam Sandler will realise her artistic vision eleventy-one percent. We've bought three years' worth of shark futures."
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Huh? Tolkien died in 1973, so by my reading, the Hobbit loses copyright protection in 2043.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Technically, MGM owns the production rights to The Hobbit. New Line and MGM currently have a partnership agreement to produce The Hobbit, but the rights revert back to Saul Zaentz sometime next year if principal production hasn't begun. Since Michael Shaye (president of New Line) has been such a dick to Jackson in recent months, it makes total sense for MGM to stall the process until the rights revert, then MGM and Jackson can repurchase the rights and make the film(s) Jackson wants, which will please the fans and cut New Line out of any revenue from it.
The fans, MGM, and Zaentz all want Jackson to direct.
Zaentz bought the film rights for all of Tolkien's works in 1971 so the Professor could pay back taxes. Tolkien didn't believe any part of Middle Earth could be done justice on the big screen.
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