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Filming For The Hobbit Begins In July
krou writes "Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that filming for The Hobbit and its sequel is scheduled to begin in July, and will take approximately a year to complete. Casting is now 'taking place in LA, London and New York,' and [director Guillermo] Del Toro is already 'living in Wellington, close to the Jacksons and the studio in Miramar.' Apparently the script is still being worked on, and 'the first draft is crammed with old and new friends, again on a quest in Middle-earth.' The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an original story not written by Tolkien, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings."
The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an original story not written by Tolkien, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings."
A sequel NOT written by Tolkien? Ew. How about instead another prequel taken from The Silmarillion? That would be full of awesome, almost guaranteed to win several internets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion
duh
it will be hard to nail tolkien's tone in a made up "middle movie". even if it isn't "studio committee of frat boys"ed to death, lotr fundamentalist fanboys will eviscerate it. they can deal with no tom bombadil, since its a story line that's so out of touch with the rest of lotr that it can safely be surgically removed, but whatever they do with the rumored necromancer plotline for this "middle movie" they better be damn respectful to the world of lotr:
http://www.storyscape.net/hobbit_necromancer.html
as an aside, i always thought a good jumping off point for lotr fanfiction/ hollywood exploitation would be an examination of the blue wizards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wizards
so little is sketched by tolkien of them and the world to the east of mordor they went too, that it could make for some great lotr-type stories without stepping on any middle earth toes or the fanboys who guard the mythology's continuity
it could have an east asian or russian mythology theme, keeping in touch with all those maps that overlay mordor with either germany, transylvania, or the middle east
and maybe we would get more oliphants! ;-P
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Gandalf tells Bilbo he hasn't aged a day. He's celebrating his 111th birthday in the first movie.
And in the flashback, where Bilbo finds the ring, obviously Ian Holm looked pretty much the same as he did in Fellowship.
They should have made The Hobbit with Ian Holm a few years ago. Or at least scanned him in so we could AVATAR his performance into the movie, if the need arose.
Now, we'll have a movie with a different Bilbo, an older Aragorn, an older Gandalf... even an older Elrond.
...and create something new, genius. Something that would require a little more effort, something that would have a little more risk because it lacked an installed fan base. Something without a fuckin' elf.
I'm agnostic on that.
Drama is not a medium Tolkien wrote for, so we can expect The Hobbit, like the LotR film trilogy, to be largely paraphrase. The Hobbit film will be a different story set in the same world, more or less following the events of the novel.
That said,the vast world Tolkien created practically begs for more stories to be written in that setting. It's a shame that copyright prevents this. Little of what would be written would do it justice, but it's not like there's a lack of writing genius in the world. Neil Gaiman could do wonderful things with that world. It wouldn't be Tolkien of course, but it would definitely have echoes. Gaiman is one of the most unpretentiously erudite writers I can think of.
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Tolkien's dialogue can't, and never could, survive a direct adaptation to the big screen. Even if it could be managed, people would still complain that the actors didn't act in the manner that they themselves had envisioned while reading the books. Perhaps more importantly, books have the luxury of taking up entire chapters to describe background, settings, and conversations; movies do not. Tolkien purists will never be satisfied with *any* adaptation of his work. Luckily for them, the source material will always be available for their enjoyment.
I think the siege of Gondolin out of the Silmarillion would make a hell of a movie, as would the part where Morgoth & Ungoliant destroy the trees. Man, I need a life. I also agree that, given the right writing, the sequel they're planning could be decent.
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Well, Tolkien did tell us all the things that happened in those 60 years, so it's not like they are going to *completely* make it up. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't come up with a better story, than, say, the recolonization and fall of Moria, or the fight against the Necromancer in Mirkwood. My money is on the former. It will be called "Moria", and the tag line will be "They are coming..."
Yes, but Tolkien left a large gap in there that could be filled in with a story pretty easily.
When we leave "The Hobbit", Bilbo Baggins is still a young Hobbit in his 50s, flush with treasure. When we start "Lord of the Rings", he's 111 (a ripe old age only attained by liberal use of The One Ring) and his nephew Frodo takes over. There are a lot of good stories about what uses he put the Ring to, if nothing else. Frodo might deserve a bit of a back-story. I'm sure Sauron and Saruman weren't sitting around watching HBO and eating fried food. Gollum, for all that he was in a cave, had to have done something interesting during that period after losing the Ring to Bilbo.
Tolkien didn't see any grand adventures in there to write about, but that doesn't mean a 60-year gap in the action can't contain any interesting stuff.
I love "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings". I truly do. But I finally accepted Jackson's LoTR as a different story from J.R.R. Tolkien's work. No less a masterpiece for all that, but a slightly different story. I expect "The Hobbit" to be the same, and in that context I'm perfectly OK with Jackson et al filling in some blanks that Tolkien himself left.
It's like Abram's reboot of "Star Trek" - based on, but different. Except without all the lens flare.
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