Let me just say, up front, that this question is for a competition to win tickets to the Dec. 19 preview (in Melbourne) of The Two Towers. If a consensus is reached in this thread, I may use that answer when I enter.
Right, so there’s this competition, the entering of which entails ringing up and answering a question correctly. Usually with these sorts of competitions, the answer is highly obvious. I get the feeling that this was meant to be true of this question, too, but the wording has made it seem a little vague to me. Here’s the question:
“Who produced the Lord of the Rings Trilogy?”
That’s it. As I see it, the answer could be either (a) Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, the co-producers of the movie trilogy, OR (b) Tolkien, of course. And the main reasons I can’t decide which to go with are: (a) If the question refers to the films, why not just ask who the director was? Seems to me like that would be a more typical question for one of these types of competitions. (b) If the question refers to the books, why say ‘produced’ when ‘written’ is much less ambiguous? For that reason, I’m leaning towards ‘Jackson and Walsh’ being the correct answer. But I’m not really certain about it.
New Line Cinema. No brainer. I can’t see this as being the kind of competion where subtlety is involved. Just in case – Jackson first took the idea to Miramax who passed, but for some reason still get 5% of the profits.
Tolkien never saw the books as a trilogy - rather as a single book that was broken up into three parts when the printers thought that no-one would ever buy such a thick volume…
Short form: Saul Zaentz had the movie rights and wanted Peter Jackson to do the treatment. He (and I suppose Fran Walsh) did a two movie screenplay and the three of them shopped it to Miramax who balked and wanted it to be a one-film story. They released it when PJ et al demurred. New Line was approached, and after studying the sutuation, they asked, “Wouldn’t it be better as three films?”
PJ said he was so stunned, all he could get out was, “Um . . . yeah.” but inside he was going “Yess!!” I’ve not been able to find anything definite, but I presume Miramax retained that 5% as a condition of releasing the rights.
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Serendipitous discovery. Was going through the October National Geographic and there was an article about critters in New Zealand. One of them was a wingless cricket called a weta.
I would go for the movie producer, I’ve never heard “producing” used in terms of books.
hijack: I spent the first 5 years of my life in New Zealand. Once a weta crawled out of a crack in the wheel of a Big-Wheel I was riding. It scared the hell out of me.
'New Line Cinema" is an interesting answer, one that didn’t occur to me, but I think I’ll go with the producers of the film as the answer. I’ll call up and enter later today.