Peter Jackson Is Not George Lucas

So, thinking about the Radagast / Jar-Jar comparisons (which popped up in several reviews of AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY back in December, and recently again on the MythSoc list*) actually ties in well with a discussion I was having with a friend (hi, Stan) just after we'd been to see THE HOBBIT again in the budget cinema last Thursday.


Basically, we were mulling over to what extent Jackson's trilogy of HOBBIT films being made as prequels to his LORD OF THE RINGS films of a decade and more before can be considered analogous to Lucas's prequels to his original STAR WARS trilogy.

Having been tremendously impressed with STAR WARS when it first came out, and unimpressed by pretty much all the ones that followed, I was stunned to learn that people approaching the Lucas films for the first time nowadays start with PHANTOM MENACE. I can't imagine how this must skew the viewing experience for seeing the original movie as the fourth in a series. Such viewers know who Darth Vader is the first time he appears -- they've seen the mask and heard the breath at the end of SITH. They know who Leia is as soon as they learn her foster-father's name, and that she and Luke are brother and sister. It must be like people who read THE SILMARILLION before THE HOBBIT: I know there are some, and that the sequence works for them, but it's so different from my own experience that it's hard for me to properly envision it.


Of course, where the analogy between Lucas and Jackson breaks down is that Jackson is adapting pre-existing, well-known books. He varies from the books a good deal in detail (more than I wd like) but keeps to the main overall plot and structure. Plus, Tolkien's HOBBIT is not a 'prequel' to his LORD OF THE RINGS -- THE HOBBIT came first, and LotR was written as a sequel (though Jackson's film HOBBIT is a prequel to his earlier LotR films).

By contrast, Lucas's fourth, fifth, and sixth movies (1999-2005) are indeed prequels to the original STAR WARS (1977) and its two sequels (to be a prequel, a work must be made later but set earlier).

Except that while Jackson has everything that happens in THE HOBBIT already mapped out for him, and knows exactly how it shd sync up with the start of LotR, Lucas just makes up things as he goes along (despite claims to the contrary), creating all kinds of continuity problems for himself in the process. Seeing how careful Jackson is in AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY to touch bases again and again with elements in his LotR films, and how hard he works not to clash in this film with what's already been established in the earlier ones, I suspect the final fit between the HOBBIT films and the LotR films will be as seamless as he can make it.

Also, Jackson's LotR is really just a single very long movie released in three yearly installments (similar to Tolkien's LotR, itself not a trilogy but a three-volume novel), a model THE HOBBIT seems sure to follow. Not so both Lucas's original STAR WARS films (1977-1983)  and the follow-up prequels, which are true trilogies: a set of three linked but essentially stand-alone works. And with longer gaps, both between the trilogies and between the films within each trilogy.

So while I can see some surface similarity, I think the analogy doesn't hold. Lucas is Lucas, and Jackson is Jackson. Luckily for me, I prefer Jackson -- but I still remember the 'Beatlemania' moment when the original STAR WARS came out of nowhere and blew everybody away. If only he'd stopped while he was ahead . . .   As I think Jackson will stop when he comes to the end of THE HOBBIT.

--John R.

current reading: TOLKIEN'S BAG END (Morton), THE LAST YGGDRASIL (Young), SPEAKING FROM AMONG THE BONES (the latest Flavia de Luce novel)

*( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythsoc/message/24190 )

A Long Post (con't)

(con't)

(3) So, just how big a deal is this for New Zealand? Well, the first hint I got of it was when I read that when the studio executives flew down to N. Z. , they met with the Prime Minister. That's right: the country's leader made time in his busy schedule for a series of meetings with the film people. In the course of which he brokered a deal which, I learn from skimming the posts on Kristen Thompson's always excellent website, http://www.frodofranchise.com/blog/, immediately led to the New Zealand parliament's fast-tracking legislation to make that deal fully legal. That's right; they didn't just given them big tax breaks (though they did that too): they changed the law so as to keep Peter Jackson happy. There was even some mention elsewhere of the exchange rate for the New Zealand doller fluctuating according to the latest news re. the films and whether they'd be made there. Now that's a big deal.***

(4) The end result of which is that things shd start moving quickly now. During the enforced down time, they had time to work on the script, scout locations, create sets and models, perfect any new make-up and special effect techniques, &c. They did lose their director, Del Toro, who made what seemed at the time a reasonable decision to bail on the film after the delays stretched on and on. A bad choice on his part, it turns out, but so it goes. Personally, I've always hoped Jackson wd direct it himself, so it'd be a smoother match for his LotR films. They still need to lock down McKellan, and Serkis, and I suppose Weaving (though I wdn't mind if someone else played that role here). About the only disappointing bit of casting news I heard was that former Dr. Who Sylvester McCoy has been tapped to play Radagast:

http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a284054/sylvester-mccoy-reveals-hobbit-rol

Too bad: his main claim to fame is having been the second-worst Dr. Who ever.**** This casting strikes me as bizarre, given that if you were going to go that route Tom Baker, the greatest of the doctors, is still alive, though getting on a bit (in his mid-seventies now).

On the other hand, there is the cheerful thought that since he's playing someone who doesn't appear in the book, McCoy's scene may not wind up appearing in the movie either (i.e., the theatrical release). But that seems unlikely. We'll just have to suck it up and hope Jackson can cox a career-transcending performance out of unpromising material. He's done it before.

(5) And finally, I learn from the new BEYOND BREE (just arrived) that the studios have finally done the right thing and paid the Tolkien Estate the money they owed them. And again we're talking a lot of money here: "millions of dollars" according to the passage quoted in BEYOND BREE (cf. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/10/jrr-tolkeins-the-hobbit-might-finally-be-coming-to-screens.html). There's nothing like needing something out of somebody to make a big business do the right thing. So that's good news at least.

--John R.

***but then given that the first three films made about ten billion dollars all told, there's an awful lot of money potentially to be made from the two-part HOBBIT film.

****beaten out only by his predecessor, Colin Baker as the sixth doctor.

The Epic of the Decade?

So, Friday I picked up the new issue of TOTAL FILM magazine (not something I usually read), which proclaimed on its cover their selection of Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy as The Epic of the Decade. This designation turns out to be less distinctive than it might be, since the magazine turns out to have ten nested covers, each inside the other: Best Epic, Best Blockbuster, Best Sci-Fi, and the like. Still, LotR did get priority of place, both as the first cover and first write-up for the lead story (pages 62-65) -- which focuses mostly on Jackson who, seeing the films again for the first time since their release (in order to get his mind working on THE HOBBIT project), muses on ways his films had influenced the way other films had been made, right down to specific shots. Better still, there's a small box about the upcoming HOBBIT movie, which is due out the end of next year: they've now finalized the look of Smaug, the wargs, spiders ("visually striking, in a different way to Shelob; massive but very nimble") &c. Apparently filming starts late this spring -- not so far away at all now, the day before Groundhog's.

Retrospectives are always interesting, and when the tenth anniversary of the first film rolls round I'll be curious to see what the consensus opinion will be about how well they hold up. There may be remakes someday (given the way Hollywood works, or doesn't work), decades down the road, but I suspect these will remain the film adaptations people think of when they hear the phrase "Tolkien movies".

--John R.

current reading: THE RABBI'S CAT by Joann Sfar.

On-Again

So, thanks to various people's postings or sending me links (thanks to David, Douglas, Yvette, & Jessica), earlier this week I heard the latest news about the new Peter Jackson HOBBIT movie(s). Specifically, the lawsuit the Tolkien family brought against New Line a year and a half ago (February 2008) seems to have been resolved. 

Here's the basic story (Associated Press):

(1) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_en_mo/us_tolkien_lawsuit

Along with the main facts, among the many interesting details here is the major news that "One of the main beneficiaries of the settlement is The Tolkien Trust" -- a group that doesn't get nearly the attention you'd expect, given the good works they do. Also, it names the Estate's lawyer in this case (Bonnie Eskenazi) and asserts that the Estate was "due 7.5 percent of the gross receipts", of which they'd only been paid $62,500 upfront money before production of the first film began.  Quite a discrepancy. 

Seven and a half percent. Of the gross. Wow. 

By contrast to the journalese of the AP piece, a more carefully worded piece (the first, in fact, to announcement the news) is the one by Douglas Kane on The One Ring.net, which stressed that the settlement still needed to be reviewed and signed off on:

(2) http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2009/09/01/33357-tentative-settlement-reached-in-tolkien-v-new-line-it-appears-that-the-hobbit-movie-is-safe/

The Reuters news story, also linked off the OneRing.Net site, has an edge over the AP one in one respect, in that it gives the quotes from Christopher Tolkien and Warner Brothers' President, Alan Horn, in full. While Christopher is extremely careful and polite in his phrasing, as we would expect, I was startled by Horn's comment that the studio "deeply value[s] the contributions of the Tolkien novels to the success of our films". Well, I suppose "contributions" is one way to put it.

(3) http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2009/09/08/33420-reuters-the-tolkien-trust-new-line-cinema-and-harpercollins-settle-lord-of-the-rings-lawsuit/

Finally, though their webmaster seems to be incapable of spelling the word "Tolkien", The Guardian has its own piece similar to the Reuters one but with additional details, such as the Tolkien Trust's being one of the beneficiaries of the settlement, HarperCollins being a co-plaintiff, and the amount originally sued for being 133 million pounds.

(4)  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/09/hobbit-lawsuit-film-tolkein

So, as usual, by reading a number of different reports you can learn more than from an single story. There's a good deal of disagreement among all these sources about just how much money the films have made (from what Kristin Thompson wrote in THE FRODO FRANCHISE, they're all understating it a good deal). Nor is it clear if the settlement is for the full amount originally asked for or not, since the details are quite properly confidential. But if there's any truth to the AP story about 7.5% gross, then the good causes supported by The Tolkien Trust should get a big boost from this, which is a Good Thing.

And, of course, this means the major obstacle in the way of making the film is no longer in play, so the chances of its being made go from good to excellent. Jackson is said to have recently finished the script (of part one, at least), so we'll probably be coming out of the holding pattern and hearing lots of news about it on a regular basis from here on out.

--John R.