Today Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, addressed New Line employees via satellite from New York to Los Angeles. Naturally the news that most of the studio’s staff of 600 will be fired as New Line is folded into Warner Bros. has left those employees nervous. Bewkes said that Time Warner wants to retain as many New Line employees as possible.

Bob Shaye, founder of New Line, and Michael Lynne, its co-president, will, however, be leaving within weeks, according to Variety’s brief account of the address. Bewkes remarked, “For everyone’s sake, they need to step back from the process.”

Overnight Variety has expanded the story I linked to yesterday. It concerns the announcement on February 28 that New Line Cinema will be severely downsized and absorbed into Time Warner’s larger production/distribution wing, Warner Bros. While the story was originally entitled “Warner Bros. gobbles up New Line,” it now bears the less negative heading, “New Line in Warner’s corner.” There is now a section referring specifically to the Hobbit project. more »

Time Warner announced today that it will fold New Line Cinema into Warner Bros. The studio name will be retained, but it will function more modestly as a small genre wing of the larger production entity. As such it will concentrate on the kinds of horror, comedy, and other low-budget films that built its success during the 1970s and 1980s. more »

In The Frodo Franchise, I devote a brief section of Chapter 9 to discussing the impact that the technical innovations devised for The Lord of the Rings trilogy had on the film industry. Two of those innovations, the Massive program for generating realistic crowd scenes and the skin-simulation system used for Gollum, are fairly familiar to fans. One other crucial innovation, however, has perhaps been even more important to the way films look in the post-Rings era: selective digital grading. more »

In a story concerning the delayed release of a New Line film (Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory), Variety refers in passing to the situation with the studio’s parent corporation. “Execs are in the final stages of negotiating a new deal with Time Warner and its topper, Jeff Bewkes, that could conceivably downsize the company. A resolution seems reasonable within the next two weeks.”

The speculation had been that Time Warner might actually fold New Line into its larger film-production wing, Warner Bros. That process might have slowed up the making of The Hobbit. Downsizing presumably would be less disruptive. Of course, the Tolkien Trust lawsuit against New Line is currently a bigger threat to the launching of the two-film project. We might also expect within the next few weeks to see New Line file its response to the lawsuit. That response should tell us a lot about how the suit will affect the Hobbit project.

[Added Feb. 28: For the outcome of the Time Warner situation, see this new entry.]

[added April 21: For an update on this story, see this new entry.]

The news that the Tolkien Trust has filed a lawsuit against New Line Cinema on February 11 has triggered confusion and consternation. Fans had just been rejoicing that the problems holding up the initiation of the Hobbit film project were solved. The Peter Jackson lawsuit was settled, the Writers Guild of America strike was over, and apparently a director had been found in Guillermo Del Toro. Now fans wonder what will happen to that project, and speculation is rampant on the internet.

A lot of that speculation rests on very little information. The initial journalistic reports of the suit on the whole did a pretty good job of presenting the bare bones of the plaintiffs’ allegation. I cited some of those reports in my previous entry on the subject. Still, they were all based on some limited information given to the news media by the Trust’s lawyers. more »

It’s official! The two-day vote of the Writers Guild of America membership ended last night with a decision to end the three-month strike immediately. Over 90% of the members voted in favor, and most seem to feel that they gained enough to make the strike worthwhile. As of today, many of them are back at work, though the effects of the work stoppage on what TV and film projects will be able to go ahead remain to be seen. (See the Variety story here.)

Ordinarily the end of the strike would mean New Line and MGM could go forward with the production of The Hobbit. I kind of doubt that the threatened downsizing of New Line, or even its folding into Warner Bros., would have stopped the project. That film (or those two films) would get made regardless where the production base was located within the larger Time Warner company. But now the Tolkien Trust lawsuit against New Line seems the kind of threat that will at least cause a significant delay.

I guess no one saw this one coming! Today the Tolkien Trust, a charity run by the estate of J. R. R. Tolkien, along with his long-time British publisher, HarperCollins, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court. The complaint is that New Line has failed to pay the author’s estate its share of the revenues from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Most of the online reports on this news appear to derive from a news conference or press release from the Tolkien trust, quoting Steven Maier, the U.K. lawyer handling the matter, and Bonnie Eskenazi, the American counsel who filed the suit. (Two basic versions of the story were put out by the Associated Press and Marketwire.) The reports differ in their details, however, with some reporters updating to add information. I’ll pull together what I’ve so far been able to find out so far. more »

On February 7, I posted an entry on the announcement by Jeff Bewkes, the new CEO of Time Warner, that he has targeted New Line Cinema for cost-cutting. There was speculation in the industry that downsizing measures might extend as far as folding the studio into TW’s main filmmaking company, Warner Bros. Today the Wall Street Journal has published “Time Warner’s New Line Cinema May Be Hung Out to Dry,” by Merissa Marr and Peter Sanders, offering an excellent analysis of the situation. Obviously whatever happens to New Line will have some effect on the Hobbit project.

I’d recommend reading the whole article, but here are some points that I found informative. more »

In my previous entry on the winding-down of the WGA strike, I said that the members would be expressing their opinions about the tentative contract agreement at meetings on Saturday evening. Those meetings were very upbeat, with the one in Los Angeles featuring standing ovations for WGA leaders. It was clear that most of the membership was in favor of accepting the contract and ending the strike.

This morning the WGA West and WGA East boards met and unanimously voted in favor of a three-year tentative deal with the film industry. The strike will end soon. WGA members have Monday and Tuesday to vote to lift the strike, and on Wednesday they’ll almost certainly be starting back to work. Monday “showrunners” for TV series will be in their offices, preparing for production to resume. (“Showrunners” are pretty much what the term sounds like—the people who run the production of series.) The studios wouldn’t be cranking up the making of TV episodes if they weren’t sure that it’s going to happen.

For a pretty upbeat detailed summary, see this Variety story. (For another that takes a different viewpoint and suggests what both sides lost in the deal, see this one.)

We shouldn’t forget that the Screen Actors Guild contract expires June 30. But the recent, successful Directors Guild of America contract helped provide a model that the WGA used in breaking the deadlock in their strike. Perhaps the SAG can use both these other guilds’ contracts to avoid a strike altogether.

In the meantime, if the deal to sign Guillermo Del Toro as the director for the two Hobbit films was all but certain, as has been reported, we should hear something soon from New Line and MGM about finalizing it.