CT participate in HOBBIT films?

[Sauron the White]

Both replies have an amount of truth in them. It is very hard for me to find fault with the thoughts of davem in saying

They had the complete rights to LotR & still messed the whole thing up. Why? Because they thought they could tell Tolkien's story better than Tolkien could, that they could tell a better story by chopping huge chunks of Tolkien's original & replacing them by trivial, nonsensical drivel. That being the case, even if they did get access to the Sil/HoM-e/UT material what makes you think they wouldn't do the same thing?

It is very hard to argue with the historical record. Yes, Jackson certainly did indeed have the complete rights to LOTR and made some changes. Again, that brings us back to the argument heard thousands of times already about the value of changes, both omissions and additions. I join you in not likeing some of the changes. But I certainly liked others and felt they made for a better film.

Are you correct in that Jackson could do the exact same thing even if he had the rights to expand the story and use more detailed descriptions and dialogue from other sources? Probably. The past is the best predictor of the future.

But again we come back to the debate about the merits of changes. WCH argues that if they want to make two films out of THE HOBBIT, they certainly can do so simply by filming the book as is.

It seems to me that if PJ wants to milk The Hobbit for two movies and doubled revenues, he could merely shoot the book without being forced by time constraints to make cuts. Given the quality of the 'original' material he added to the Rings trilogy,

Again we have the discussion about filming a book - not just the HOBBIT but any book - as a script for a film. Is that wise? It obviously would please some people - the Tolkien purists for one group - but would it make for a good film, or even as good of a film as otherwise could be.

My two cents are that I would hope Jackson - or any filmmaker - would include as much of HOBBIT as possible without excluding much save anything which would detract from the film or story. In that I would include the serving animals of Beorn who are just too jarring for my tastes. I also think it would add another facet of the inhabitants of Middle-earth which is not consistent with what the first three films gave us in LOTR and that which hundreds of millions of people are already familiar with.

But it does seem to me that the suggestion to add some other material - say the White Councils meetings and subsequent business with Dol-Guldur and events which bridge H with LOTR - would be welcomed by many viewers of the previous films.

But without the ability to use more accuracte and fuller desctiptions of those events from other sources, are we doomed to failure? Is this not a variation of a self fulfilling prophecy?

"No, we don't want you to use more detailed descriptions because they are not in the material you own. And when you try to wing it on your own by filling in the blanks with your own desctiptions, scenes and dialogue, we will be ready to pounce upon you and throttle you and scream that you got it wrong yet again."



There has to be a better way which takes in both the real world busniess considerations of filmmaking and those who intende to make these films with the legitimate want of the Tolkien print community to have things portrayed as accurate as possible.

[davem]

I suspect that Jackson's/New Line's position is that they want access to all Tolkien's M-e writings - not so that they can produce 'faithful' adaptations, but simply so that they can produce anything M-e related that they want to - or to put it another way, they don't want to be restricted in what they produce, story-wise.

My feeling is that they want to be able to produce a series of M-e movies (this applies to New Line in particular - it looks like their latest venture 'The Golden Compass' is on track to lose them money, so another M-e movie may well mean the difference between success & going out of business altogether), because M-e is a money spinner for them, but their motives are purely commercial.

In short, I don't think the studio has any desire to accept any deal that would give the Estate any creative control, let alone final say, & I think the Estate are savvy enough to know that selling the rights without that kind of control being retained will lead to a very slippery slope of a series of increasingly bad sword & sorcery movies at the end of which lies the Saturday morning cartoon 'Adventures of Merry & Pippin' depicting their 'hilarious' adventures in Fangorn taking on Saruman.....

[Sauron the White]

Of course the making of movies is a business - a big business with a huge downside of having to risk millions of dollars. sometimes over a hundred million dollars. Any film company which is not cognizant of the business side of the process will not stay around for very long.

I cannot take issue with the idea expressed that New Line Cinema is looking for revenue and certainly has not found it since ROTK left the theaters in 2004. COMPASS simply is not passing the test and will not be that revenue stream for them. Of course, the next Babe Ruth never is.

I am not as down on the business as others here seem to be. I accept it as a money making business and do not hold that against them. So is the book business and the publishers of JRRT certainly know how to milk something over and over again to keep those presses printing dollar and pound notes. Thats fine. If New Line wanted to fiendishly explot LOTR to the tune of making Saturday morning Merry and Pippin cartoons they certainly have had four years to attempt to do that. They have not sunk that low.

There seems to be an attempt to take the higher road of feature films in the spirit and feel of LOTR. YES YES YES I already know that Gimli doing fart jokes is not necessarily the higher road. No postings necessary about that. But in the continuum of motion picture quality, LOTR was fairly over on the higher quality side of that scale.

As I get older I get more pessimistic about nearly everything. One big reason is you realize that there are no real answers to the Big Questions you had as a youth. Heck, if you really become down you realize that there are not even any questions either. But I truly love the Middle-earth of the books as written by Tolkien. I have for the last three and one-half decades. I also have loved movies for even longer and love the LOTR films. It would be nice if this same old scene did not play out the way it appears to be playing out with all sides doing just what is predicted by convention and habit.

Five years from now I do not want to be engaging in a debate with davem and WCH about the lack of purity in THE HOBBIT films. And I certainly do not want to read how the filler stuff Jackson put because he was barred from the fuller more descriptive material was rubbish. There is opportunity here and I would love to see it actualized.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

Five years from now I do not want to be engaging in a debate with davem and WCH about the lack of purity in THE HOBBIT films. And I certainly do not want to read how the filler stuff Jackson put because he was barred from the fuller more descriptive material was rubbish. There is opportunity here and I would love to see it actualized.

If they want to make a movie of TH they have all the material they need. Personally, I would have a problem with them importing other material into the story - whether that be the White Council & the assault on Dol Guldur or even the Quest for Erebor material. TH is a perfect, self contained tale & should be left as is.

Beyond that whether a further movie is made is entirely down to New Line - the idea that they would be agonising over not having access to the material they need to make it is a bit odd - like me agonising about how I'm going to juggle four rabid ferrets: the solution to that particular problem is that I don't actually have to juggle them at all.

Maybe its my age, but I honestly don't see why books have to be automatically turned into movies - as though books are nothing but 'first draft screenplays'. There is no necessity for any more M-e movies, & the only reason New Line want to make them is that they're apparently so incompetent that they can't come up with any other movies that anyone wants to watch (on the Golden Compass thing - I don't know whether its down to the 'boycott' which some Churches have tried to organise or whether its down to it being a bad movie, but New Line clearly have got themselves into a position where only another couple of Tolkien movies can save their bacon & that's the only reason they've gone crawling back to Jackson & want access to more of Tolkien's writings - they need to produce Tolkien movies that don't annoy the fans. But after what they did
to LotR I don't see why the Estate should care what happens to New Line....)

[Sauron the White]

davem - in this recent post and in other past posts you write that nobody has to make a movie. Any future problems can be dispatched with the ease of a magic wand simply by not making the movie. I certainly cannot argue with that. If I never drive in New York City I certainly do not have to worry about the traffic there. If I do not build a house on the side of a steep hill in California I certainly do not concern myself with fires and mudslides in that part of the world. Very very true.

However, allow me the temerity to say that your approach is extremely simplistic. Effective yes. But simplistic just the same.

We both live in a very real world. In that world, the imperatives that drive business may well drive an important part of the world. Here are the facts regardless of how you or I or anyone else may feel about them.

New Line Cinema owns the film rights to JRRT's LOTR and THE HOBBIT.
Peter Jackson helmed three of the most financially successful films of all time using these rights.
New Line Cinema is in the business of making films to make money for its owners and stockholders. In business, nothing succeeds like success.
Jackson is the odds on favorite, perhaps the prohibitive favorite, to helm future Middle-earth films based on properties that New Line owns.
There is far more in LOTR and HOBBIT about Middle-earth than the simple narrative tales of a brief time span. They have numerous references to events going back to the First and Second Ages as well as highly detailed material about the Third Age in which both LOTR and HOBBIT are placed. As such, those references are owned by New Line and are fair game for any director they may hire to lead such a project.
Some of these historical references are sketchy and not fully fleshed out to the point where you can make a sustained film about them.
There are other JRRT works, not owned by New Line, which provide a fuller, more descriptive narrative of these events which could be employed to bridge a gap between a HOBBIT film and the LOTR films which hundreds of people are already well acquainted with.

I think those facts are reality. To say that New Line or others simply do not have to make the films is to ignore that reality.

I am not advocating that the Tolkien Estate sign over the rights to SIL or HOME or any other property. I am suggesting that common sense prevail and the Estate allow the filmmakers to properly use more fully developed narratives, dialogue and descriptions in events in those books IF THEY APPLY TO MATERIAL COVERED IN EITHER THE HOBBIT OR LOTR.

I am not talking about a movie about Goldolin simply because Elrond mentions it in THE HOBBIT. I am not talking about a movie about Beren and Luthien and the silmarils simply because Aragorn sings about it in LOTR. But the White Councils dealings with the rise of the Necromancer, the assault on Dol guldur, the Erebor events and other material would be relevant and subject for inclusion.

But after what they did to LotR I don't see why the Estate should care what happens to New Line....)

I do not think they should be too angry about all the extra millions of copies of LOTR that were generated because of renewed interest in that subject generated by the success of those three films. If that amounts to harsh or shabby treatment, please, where do I get in that line for some of that harshness

[davem]

On the specific point:

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

I am not talking about a movie about Goldolin simply because Elrond mentions it in THE HOBBIT. I am not talking about a movie about Beren and Luthien and the silmarils simply because Aragorn sings about it in LOTR. But the White Councils dealings with the rise of the Necromancer, the assault on Dol guldur, the Erebor events and other material would be relevant and subject for inclusion.

I don't see any of that as being part of TH as such, but rather part of the later development of the Legendarium which came about as a result of the writing of LotR & its integration into the Legendarium. TH was not written as part of the Legendarium (as CT has stated, & he intentionally left out analysis of it in HoM-e) & is best seen & treated as a stand alone work. To introduce these 'darker', more complex themes into a move of TH would make the more 'fairy story' aspects of TH (Beorn's animals, talking birds etc) too difficult to integrate convincingly. Hence, for a movie of TH none of the material you mention is necessary.

On your more general point, I honestly don't care what kind of a pig's ear Jackson/New Line make of their 'Hobbit' movies, & I'm fairly sure that if they had access to every single thing Tolkien wrote they'd still fill them with the kind of inanities they filled LotR with.

And the real point, as Mr Hicklin as pointed out, is that it ain't gonna happen.

[Sauron the White]

Ah yes. So we just buy our tickets, take our favorite seats around the well worn track track while, as advertised, the familiar cars scream towards each other at high speeds. They crash, burn and we walk away talking about the recklesness of it all and why did this have to happen yet again?