It’s true. Tolkien had an essential dislike for modern technology, and said so many times in his letters. He thought of himself as the quintessential old hobbit tending his garden amid the chaos of a rapidly-industrializing world.
There was an attempt to make a Lord of the Rings movie in the late 60’s, which Tolkien tentatively released the rights for on the basis of “art or cash” – that is, he would either have complete creative control and veto power over the production, or would be paid a large enough sum of money to turn his back. In the end Tolkien ended up refusing to cooperate (the movie was full of inaccuracies; for one thing, the orcs had feathers), and the project was dropped. I think he would have been happier with PJ’s production than any previous attempts, but that’s not to say he would have liked it.
The first attempt to make a movie based on The Lord of the Rings was in the late '50’s, I think. A group produced a script which they showed Tolkien. The amount of money that they were offering was pretty low and the script stunk. Tolkien said that it was unacceptable. He said that he wanted either reasonable fidelity or lots of money. In 1968 he sold the rights to Tolkien Enterprises (i.e., Saul Zaentz). Tolkien Enterprises now controls all cinematic uses of The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, I think) until such time as the copyrights run out. Tolkien got a reasonable amount of money, but I suspect that in comparison with the amount of money that the Jackson films have made, it’s not that all fired much. In any case, the Tolkien family has no say about the making of any movies.
so now that we appear to have debunked the “Chris Tolkien won’t sell the rights to the Hobbit” myth, when will we see the movie? I mean, it is inevitable that Hollywood will exploit all available source material from the author of a movie series that will gross over 750 million, right?
Here it is. Wow, that is good. I especially liked the way they stiched Ian Holm and Vermithrax together in the same scene. Or is that Peter MacNichol? They both have curly hair.
Cool music and he even puts a bogus release date at the end of Dec. 19th, 2006.
Yeah, cool, except when you were late to the party when the RotK trailer got leaked out for a day or two, and you tried desperately to search on Kazaa for it, and all you got was the spoofed Hobbit trailer with “No, really, this is the REEEEEEAL RotK trailer!”
Well, I read this morning that Peter Jackson just signed the most lucrative director deal in history to do a remake of “King Kong” for his next project (sigh, this is, what, the 5th or 6th version, not counting all the goofy sequels?).
I will be shocked if New Line isn’t all over him for the project after that to do “the Hobbit” (assuming New Line can lay their hands on the rights…you can bet Dreamworks, Universal, etc. will be after it as well–about as sure a $250 million dollar payoff as a movie can be…)
Ive said it before but Ill say it here anyway again, I read somewhere (have no idea where, it was before the release of FOTR) that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema were making the Hobbit, they were just waiting until after the release of LOTR to see if they were successful first as they didnt want to start production if LOTR failed.
As for Peter Jackson directing King Kong, didnt he sign that way back?
No doubt, a film adaption of The Hobbit would be cool, but what would be even BETTER would be PJ’s version of The Silmarillion. I can only imagine the CG spectacular that would be ULMO.
Wait… Just The Silmarillion, or Silmarillion: The Musical?
But I think that The Silmarillion would work much better as a TV series or mini-series. Most of the indicidual tales are too short for a movie, but the whole thing together is probably too long and too episodic. Turin Turambar and Beren and Luthien would be two-parters.
