If you could change ONE thing in The Hobbit triology

[Nerwen]

I would have cut the mountain chase/factory sequence. Really doesn't make Smaug look like an effectual villain and muddles his perfectly good reasons for attacking Lake-town.

No, what am I saying? It would be like cutting out the Warbats!

By which I mean: these are weird films, and changing a single aspect won't fix that. I think they might as well be as over-the-top as they can be.

Re: Azog. Indeed, why not have his son in that role? What does Azog "have" over Bolg? Well, he "died" (or, originally, just died, without the quotes), and I guess it's the rule now that everyone has to think the bad guys are dead, so they can be shocked on learning otherwise. Drama, you know.

[Galadriel55]

Change one thing in the Hobbit trillogy? Easy. Don't make it a trilogy.

But seriously - I'm with Nerwen. I don't think one aspect would make much difference in a sea of nonsense.

[Zigûr]

Perhaps if a single change of "appropriate amount of focus on Bilbo" was made, that might have a ripple effect of bringing a lot of other things into line. If the films concentrated on Bilbo as the protagonist there'd be less opportunity for a lot of the extraneous nonsense that I think formed the most objectionable content of the trilogy.

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Change one thing in the Hobbit trillogy? Easy. Don't make it....

But seriously - I'm with Nerwen. I don't think one aspect would make much difference in a sea of nonsense.

Here... I fixed it.

But The Hobbit could very easily have been a Trilogy.

The Hobbit has nineteen chapters.

For a six hour Trilogy, that is an average of 20 minutes a chapter.

And that is without adding a single thing to the story.


MB

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Marwhini

Here... I fixed it.

But The Hobbit could very easily have been a Trilogy.

The Hobbit has nineteen chapters.

For a six hour Trilogy, that is an average of 20 minutes a chapter.

And that is without adding a single thing to the story.


MB

Hmmn. I don't see how this could be done without drawing out each section interminably. And wouldn't that require adding things anyway? "The Hobbit" (the book, I mean) generally goes into much less detail than "The Lord of the Rings"- compare the first part of "Fellowship", where Frodo et al are essentially retracing Bilbo's journey from the Shire to the Misty Mountains. This is partly due to the books being written for different audiences, and partly because more *happens* to Frodo's party over the same period.

[Andsigil]

I'm surprised that I'm the first one to suggest: no Tauriel.

She is to "The Hobbit" as Jar-Jar Binks is to "Star Wars".

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Andsigil

I'm surprised that I'm the first one to suggest: no Tauriel.

She is to "The Hobbit" as Jar-Jar Binks is to "Star Wars".

I was trying to imply that in my suggestion. I feel like if you make the films into actually the story of Bilbo, characters like Tauriel just naturally sort of evaporate.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Andsigil

I'm surprised that I'm the first one to suggest: no Tauriel.

She is to "The Hobbit" as Jar-Jar Binks is to "Star Wars".

What, you mean she's secretly the Dark Lord?

Makes sense. After all, have not advanced Tolkien scholars conclusively proven Tom Bombadil to be the Witch-king?

[Morthoron]

Hmmm....If you could change ONE thing in The Hobbit triology?

I would change the title header from The Hobbit to something more appropriate. Like Peter Jackson's Amok I, II and III. That way, I wouldn't have even paid attention that the movies were made.

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

Hmmn. I don't see how this could be done without drawing out each section interminably. And wouldn't that require adding things anyway? "The Hobbit" (the book, I mean) generally goes into much less detail than "The Lord of the Rings"- compare the first part of "Fellowship", where Frodo et al are essentially retracing Bilbo's journey from the Shire to the Misty Mountains. This is partly due to the books being written for different audiences, and partly because more *happens* to Frodo's party over the same period.

20 minutes a chapter (on Average) is a terribly short amount of time for each Chapter, given that some Chapters can be easily produced as nearly an hour each.

By the rules of Screenplay writing, and alteration to a script, The Hobbit should technically be a 9 to 12-hour set of movies (That is: Using the usual formulae for turning a Novel into a Screenplay, and then a Screenplay to a Script, and then the translation of the Script -> Movie, and how much time is generally given per-page of script).

Jackson did turn The Hobbit into a disastrous set of movies.

But that doesn't mean that The Hobbit as a set of movies is necessarily a disaster.

It just means that Jackson had no clue how to properly translate the Novel to the screen, as he turned it into a travesty whose inclusion of all manner of idiocy obscured the greater sum of material that he cut out, which should have been left in.

MB

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Marwhini

20 minutes a chapter (on Average) is a terribly short amount of time for each Chapter, given that some Chapters can be easily produced as nearly an hour each.

By the rules of Screenplay writing, and alteration to a script, The Hobbit should technically be a 9 to 12-hour set of movies (That is: Using the usual formulae for turning a Novel into a Screenplay, and then a Screenplay to a Script, and then the translation of the Script -> Movie, and how much time is generally given per-page of script).

Okay... I have a media background myself, and this is the first I've heard of there being any "usual formulae" that can *predictably* turn a novel into a script based simply on the number of pages. Novels are all over the place in the amount of time they cover per page, plus of course the pages themselves vary wildly in their formatting according to the whim of the publisher. Different editions of a book will have a different number of pages.

Now, there *is* a formula for predicting film length from the number of pages in the script- but that's because scripts do have standard formatting. In fact that's *why* they have it. Are you sure that's not what you were thinking of?

This is not to say that you're wrong and I'm right about whether a faithful "Hobbit" Trilogy would be viable, just that I don't believe that an appeal to abstract "rules" and "formulae" is particularly useful here. Understand that I am not dismissing your idea out of hand, either- I'm actually curious. How would you go about this? Where do you think each installment should start and end?

EDIT: But this should probably have its own thread, so we don't hijack Aaron's.

[Marwhini]

You're not familiar with the 1 Page = 1 Minute rule?

That is for Screenplay/Script -> Screen-time.

http://johnaugust.com/2006/how-accur...er-minute-rule

And the heuristic can be googled, where you will see that there is a LOT of discussion on the issue, but that it remains a Heuristic (general rule-of-thumb).

And for working from Novel -> Screenplay/Script, usually you translate roughly 3 - 5 pages to 1 page of Screenplay/Script.

This is because most Novels run between 300 - 500 pages, and you want to wind up with a Screenplay that is roughly 100 - 120 Pages, to get a roughly two hour movie.

But some Novels, or especially Comic, are shorter, and you can go on a 1:1 basis. One of my friends wrote the Screenplay for the movie The Crow, and that is the formula is basically described in creating the Screenplay, and the alterations he made from the basic Comic, since they had to provide an additional 60 pages of material. I have other friends who work in Production and Direction (most in video games - I went to High School with the owner and Founders of Ensemble Studios). And I've worked on the Talent side of Movie making for some time - I am in every Robocop movie, usually doing Stunt or Firearms work, but in two normal scenes as either extra (my first appearance in the first movie) or as Bit-Part work... And I've been in more TV than I can keep track of.

One of these friends and I have a project planned for his Graduate School work on a documentary on the depiction of Tolkien's work in Popular Media (the various movies, influence in comics and games, etc.), as well as how these seem to relate to Tolkien's own conceptions of his work.

In the course of doing that... We looked at what it would take to get The Hobbit Produced, and what a Screenplay would likely look like.*

As a Single movie, cutting down about ⅓ of the content of the book (which is roughly 300 pages - the annotated version is 305 pages for the body of the story. The Non-Annotated version is significantly longer being on smaller page sizes than the A4 on which the annotated version is printed), you can get a normal 2 hour movie, but it is going to greatly abridge a lot of stuff.

But... Looking at it as a Trilogy, you can go with a 1:1 transcription of the Book -> Screenplay to get a product that gives you 5 - 6 hours of Screen-time.

Which breaks down into 20 minutes a chapter, on average.

Which is really all that needs to be addressed, regardless of any heuristics used in the Film Industry regarding page count.

20 minutes a chapter isn't a lot of time to cover the events of a chapter, which tends to run between 15 and 40 pages each in The Hobbit.

MB

* in the course of doing this we decided that "Movies" was a bad way to go about producing Tolkien's works, and that it would be better produced as a Cable-TV series, where each episode is 55 minutes long. We found that we can squeeze just the main Canon into four - five "seasons," with each "Season" containing 13 - 18 episodes. Or we could do a greatly expanded mythology that includes everything we can make fit into ten seasons of roughly the same length each. The one thing we wanted to add, which Tolkien never wrote anything explicitly about was the First War between the Elves and Sauron in the Second Age. Considering that all we would have to do would be to avoid including anything or anyone that would contradict the established Canon, we thought it was do-able, even if fraught.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by marwhini

here... I fixed it.

:d

[seriously, what's wrong with this smiley? Why doesn't the picture show up? I keep typing in : D, and it just reverts to lowercase. ]

[Nerwen]

Let me try.

[Nerwen]

As you see, it's working for me. Very odd.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

:d

[seriously, what's wrong with this smiley? Why doesn't the picture show up? I keep typing in : D, and it just reverts to lowercase. ]

Your smiley is licking its nose. Which is kind of gross.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Your smiley is licking its nose. Which is kind of gross.

But rather impressive.



[It's working now --- weird.]

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

I would have cut the mountain chase/factory sequence. Really doesn't make Smaug look like an effectual villain and muddles his perfectly good reasons for attacking Lake-town.

No, what am I saying? It would be like cutting out the Warbats!

By which I mean: these are weird films, and changing a single aspect won't fix that. I think they might as well be as over-the-top as they can be.

Re: Azog. Indeed, why not have his son in that role? What does Azog "have" over Bolg? Well, he "died" (or, originally, just died, without the quotes), and I guess it's the rule now that everyone has to think the bad guys are dead, so they can be shocked on learning otherwise. Drama, you know.

You are right about the chase segment. For whilst it was an entertaining visual spectacle, it rendered poor Smaug rather impotent.
Same with the Goblins, and their apparent inability to defend themselves as they are hewn down in their hundreds.

Had we seen the Dwarves slowly accumulate more and more wounds - some losing limbs, some being horribly scorched by Smaug, some just being jittery and terrified of having to fight again - it would have presented things in a different light.
But instead, we have absurd scenes where, if memory serves, Thorin and another Dwarf all but point and laugh at the prospect of taking on about a hundred Orcs singlehanded.

The heroes in the LOTR trilogy either had to connect themselves to a massive army, or else hide and hope to Hell someone didn't gut them like a fish. But for some reason, the movies turned into a video game.
Go to Point A, defeat 500 Orcs, Go to Point B, repeat.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Aaron

You are right about the chase segment. For whilst it was an entertaining visual spectacle, it rendered poor Smaug rather impotent.
Same with the Goblins, and their apparent inability to defend themselves as they are hewn down in their hundreds.

Had we seen the Dwarves slowly accumulate more and more wounds - some losing limbs, some being horribly scorched by Smaug, some just being jittery and terrified of having to fight again - it would have presented things in a different light.
But instead, we have absurd scenes where, if memory serves, Thorin and another Dwarf all but point and laugh at the prospect of taking on about a hundred Orcs singlehanded.

The heroes in the LOTR trilogy either had to connect themselves to a massive army, or else hide and hope to Hell someone didn't gut them like a fish. But for some reason, the movies turned into a video game.
Go to Point A, defeat 500 Orcs, Go to Point B, repeat.

Losing credibility is always a potential problem with recurring villains or ones who get a lot of screentime, but as you say there are ways around it.

I do think the length of the films to be once again part of the problem- I guess they felt if they restricted Smaug to just his appearances in the book, it would be- relative to the running time- almost a blink-and-you-miss-him situation.

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

Losing credibility is always a potential problem with recurring villains or ones who get a lot of screentime, but as you say there are ways around it.

I do think the length of the films to be once again part of the problem- I guess they felt if they restricted Smaug to just his appearances in the book, it would be- relative to the running time- almost a blink-and-you-miss-him situation.

The problem with Smaug in the book is that his death does not serve the narrative - but the symbolism Tolkien wanted to convey.
Had he been trying to write a simple adventure story, then yes, the heroic Dwarves would kill him in fair battle, or perhaps even Bilbo would find his courage and strike the killing blow himself?
But who defeats him? The very people he was gloating about destroying. With the help of a thrush. The Dragon, a destroyer of both man and nature, is undone by his own sins coming back to haunt him.

Just as Thorin's party is, when the Orcs arrive to avenge the Great Goblin, and, in Bolg's case, Azog.

A book can take these kinds of huge risks, and trust the audience to perceive the moral message in it all. But films, especially big blockbusters, often seem to be designed as disposable, forgettable cash-grabs.
In that regard, the films were very, very successful.