Actually, I can easily see having to cut Bombadil. He doesn’t advance the story and would confuse those not familiar with the book. Beorn slows things down a bit, but he does show that there is more to Middle Earth than orcs/Samruman/Sauron vs Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and Men. But they had to simplify-the curse of all film…
I am just grateful to Jackson for not screwing up Eowyn. Much as I like the extra scenes in the EE–I’m glad they didn’t add the bit about the bad stew where she finds out that Aragorn is a member of the Dunidain. The Eowyn I think of would have competently cooked (or supervised the cooking of) a meal for the whole camp without batting an eye. I also think that in terms of set, costumes and weaponry-PJ and Co are impossible to beat.
Why don’t you trust them? After all those are the people who gave us Dungeons & Dragons.
Hey, there’s our director! Courtney Solomon! 
I was able to post in The Pit that OJ’s proposed “How I did it” book and interview have been cancelled, but then to balance that I have to sadly post that New Line seem to have made their minds up.
It’s not a character problem. The problem is, the two places are very far apart. I don’t know exactly how far, but definitely too far for him to be able to run the distance while on fire.
I think they are all good books. And my point is, they hardly changed the story at all, and it worked out excellent. I’m not saying I want Coppola should direct the hobbit, I’m saying PJ should learn from him, and don’t try to change the story.
Imagine the Godfather with PJ as a scriptwriter. It would be something like this.
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Tom Hagen wouldn’t be German-Irish, as that would be too confusing to the audience, he would be Italian as well.
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Sonny wouldn’t have any characteristics, except that he eats a lot.
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In the scene where Michael protects his father with the help of the baker, it wouldn’t be the baker helping, it would instead be people from another gang who suddenly showed up, and wanted to honour their old alliance.
Yeah, I thought about this too. The battle of Helms Deep is something like 10.000 orcs against 500 men, plus a few elves, wasn’t it? I don’t know much about medieval warfare, but it seems unrealistic.
Peter Jackson took what are fairly tedious books and turned them into an exceptionally popular film saga. People packed theaters for films that are quite a bit longer than the average film, and grabbed up DVDs. He gave the new audience for the books a huge boost. A fair bit more people, I’m sure, read the books after seeing those films than did so based on the 1970’s cartoon adaptations.
Gee, let’s pray he doesn’t savage The Hobbit in the same way.
How about Tarantino?
Hentor the Barbarian writes:
> Peter Jackson took what are fairly tedious books and turned them into an
> exceptionally popular film saga.
All of those of you who believe this, tell me: Why do you think that The Lord of the Rings is the biggest selling novel of all time? It has sold more than 100,000,000 copies in authorized editions and something like 150,000,000 copies if you count all the unauthorized editions. (There were a lot of unauthorized editions printed in Asia and a lot of the Russian translations were unauthorized.) In comparison, The DaVinci Code and each of the Harry Potter books, which are the next biggest sellers, sold perhaps 50,000,000 books each. For those nitpickers among you, The Lord of the Rings was the biggest selling novel of all time long before the movies came out. Incidentally, a copy of each of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King only counts as a single copy of the novel for these figures. This count includes all the translations in all languages.
So there are indeed a lot of people out there who think it’s a great novel. Those of you who don’t think it’s a great novel, why would you want a second-rate novel to be made into a film? Name some novels (particularly novels more or less similar to The Lord of the Rings) which you think are better. Wouldn’t you have preferred them to be made into a film rather than The Lord of the Rings? If they are better novels, why would you want The Lord of the Rings to be made into a film at all? Why distort the plot of The Lord of the Rings to be more like your favorite novels so that it can be made into a film? Why not make them into films instead?
There’s this bizarre notion that a book has to be made into a film or it’s just not worth thinking about. Couldn’t it be that some novels are just not suitable for making into a film? I frequently find in reading that some books are pretty good yet are obviously not suitable to be made into films. Nor do I find that it’s generally possible to turn a second-rate novel into a great film. The example that’s usually given is turning The Godfather into the first two Godfather films. But Coppola made few changes in The Godfather’s plot. He mostly removed a bunch of subplots. The only major change was having Kay realize that Michael would never give up the Mafia life and divorce him. Mario Puzo was co-writer of the films, and Francis Ford Coppola persuaded him that that was a more logical choice.
The fans of The Lord of the Rings who dislike the movies don’t greatly care that some subplots were removed. Obviously it would be necessary to remove Tom Bombadil’s subplot and the Scouring of the Shire to fit the plot into eight or nine hours. They do care that the dialogue, the motivation of characters, and incidents from the book were changed. Furthermore, most of them were not greatly clamoring for the book to be made into a film at all. They knew that even three films would mean that a great deal would be left out, and they weren’t terrifically desperate to see a film (even if it was actually three films) which was only a “favorite scenes” version of the book.
Well, I’m not particularly anti-Lord of the Rings, so my end of this particular argument will not be as energized as yours appears to be. I just found the books, particularly the Two Towers, quite tedious, and thought that they benefitted greatly from the film adaptation. I’m fairly sure that as a whole, the Harry Potter books have sold more than the Lord of the Rings books as a whole, and the Lord of the Rings books have been selling for 50 years. I would also point to the cult status of the books, and suggest that just because many, many more people have gone to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this does not make it a better film than, say Chinatown or Schindler’s List.
Precisely for the reason I said - a tedious book was turned into a very enjoyable movie. Very good books often don’t, so this point of your argument is weak. If the outcome of interest is an enjoyable movie, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
And if anyone has expressed that notion here, it isn’t clear to me. I don’t think you’re arguing with anyone here. The question is whether Peter Jackson should be allowed to make the Hobbit film. I say that if the desired outcome is an enjoyable film that many people will see, he’s already proven himself in that regard. If not, go ahead and give a try to capturing every tedious moment of Bilbo’s trek and see how enjoyable the outcome is.
:rolleyes:. Not obvious at all. Sure, Tom Bombadil was irrelevant and would have added around a half hour to the movie, especially if they included the only redeeming feature of the detour the Hobbits took - the Barrowwights (and plus, the barrow-wights would probably look like Jackson’s other ghosts in the series, which would have ruined the entire thing for me.)
OTOH, you had parts that were added to the movie for no good reason (such as the lame “falling sequence” and romantic interludes with Arwen,) which even casual fans agree were mistakes.
Sure, people would have complained about another “false” ending, but that’s a pacing issue, not length. And life’s not like that anyway: why should a movie be all clean and decisive? It makes Tolkein look even less in touch and more romantic than people thought of him before.
I’m not saying the majority of people would have loved the Scouring, just that they didn’t love all the extraneously added parts either.
Pushkin – that article you link to seems to be using the Jackson letter for all its quotes, leading me to believe that there’s no story there, other than what we already knew. I’m guessing that, as someone said upthread, that this is PJ playing hardball.
I think that it’d be a shame if Jackson didn’t get to make The Hobbit. And I’m amazed at the level of nitpickyness about the changes in LOTR. I’m a fanboy myself, and didn’t like some of the changes he made, but it’s a insanely huge project with millions of decisions to be made and Jackson made a lot of good ones – many more good than bad.
Hentor the Barbarian writes:
> I’m fairly sure that as a whole, the Harry Potter books have sold more than the
> Lord of the Rings books as a whole, and the Lord of the Rings books have been
> selling for 50 years.
Only in the sense that the six Harry Potter books have sold about 50,000,000 copies each, for a total of 300,000,000 books. The Lord of the Rings has sold over 100,000,000 copies if you count only the authorized editions and about 150,000,000 copies if you include the unauthorized editions.
You haven’t answered my question though. What novels do you prefer to The Lord of the Rings? Wouldn’t you rather have movies made of them than have a film made of a novel you didn’t like?
Ludovic writes:
> Not obvious at all. Sure, Tom Bombadil was irrelevant and would have added
> around a half hour to the movie, especially if they included the only redeeming
> feature of the detour the Hobbits took - the Barrowwights (and plus, the
> barrow-wights would probably look like Jackson’s other ghosts in the series,
> which would have ruined the entire thing for me.)
A competent screenwriter perhaps could have included Bombadil and the Scouring without going over the amount of time possible in three films. Incompetent writers like Jackson and his co-writers would have screwed up those scenes just as bad as they did the rest of the films, and they wouldn’t have bothered to eleminate their bad additions. It’s thus for the best that they didn’t include Bombadil and the Scouring.
Perhaps, but probably not. Movies are different than books. They have different rules. Bombadil has nothing to do with the arc of the story – he’s an aside that Tolkien put in the book because he loved the character (and because he was making up the story as he went along, at first). I believe Bombadil came from a poem that Tolkien had already written prior to beginning LOTR. At best, a Bombadil episode in the movie would have been interesting color, but it makes complete sense to me that he was cut (as much as I like him and especially the barrow wight sequence).
The Scouring is more reasonable to argue about, though. It is, in many ways, the heart of what Tolkien was about but, again, the story has such a tremendous climax in the defeat of Sauron that it’s hard to see how anyone could have pulled off making the audience sit through that part of the story and THEN have the necessary ending of Frodo leaving, etc.
I did answer that. It’s irrelevant, if the desired outcome is a good movie. If I picked only novels I liked to be made into movies, I wouldn’t have picked The Lord of the Rings, but I very much liked the movies. In the same vein, there are many novels I liked that ended up as pretty bad movies, so the question isn’t one of a direct link between good novels and good movies. It’s about good adaptations, and Jackson has proven himself in that sense.
My sense of your real desire in your repetition of the question is that you want this to devolve into a debate about whether novels I like are better than novels you like. That would be pointless.
I think a good bit of the answer would have been to end the Return of the King with the Coronation & Wedding and then make a shorter fourth movie called “The Journey Home”.
The success of Fellowship of the Ring should have been enough for the production company and Jackson to change the original plan a bit and prepare a two-hour movie that was a journey back and then the Scouring of the Shire and ending with Frodo and the White Company departing the Shores of Middle-Earth.
This would have removed the #1 complaint about Return of the King. (The many endings) It would have allowed more money to be milked from the Lord of the Rings and would have left the die-hard fans happier.
Jim
So that’s 33 333 333 / book give or take a book. So it’s true, Harry Potter does outsell Tolkien.
Anyway, I’m a fan of both the books and the movies, and I’d love Weta to be involved in The Hobbit. I loved their work on both LOTR and Narnia - TLTWATW. I think the latter shows they can still provide that LOTR verisimilitude under a different director. If PJ directs The Hobbit, that’d be gravy, to me, but I think getting Weta in on the production’s the *important *part.
Plus, I’m not sure if people like McKellen or Serkis would work on it if there’s no PJ. They seem awfully loyal to him in the EE stuff I saw.
Nice, that would have solved a lot of problems: the fanboys have their precious Scouring and the casual fans get a final ending.
You could even clip off all of the unnecessary Arwen stuff from the previous 3 movies and put it into a separate storyline that details the travails of the Elves as they are leaving Middle Earth. Granted it would skip back in time occasionally as Arwen is remembering stuff that happened “during” the previous movies, but it would have the additional bonus of cutting down on the running time of the other movies leading to even fewer running time complaints.
Well of course it did. Just think of how much that boat cost, and then they went and sank it!
Actually, if Wendell Wagner is correct, that figure means 100 000 000 sets of the entire trilogy.