Those who have read the “About Kristin Thompson” page to the bitter end know that although I’m a film historian by trade, on the side I’m an Egyptologist as well. I’m currently on my way to Egypt, where I’ll be staying in the expedition house at Tell el-Amarna for three weeks. Ordinarily we have internet access of a sort, through a dial-up line that on average about 18 people share (and it’s also the only phone line). This year I’m told that the crucial cable has been stolen (!), and we’re unlikely to regain our access anytime soon.

I’m due back home on April 15, and once there I’ll be blogging again. Of course, it’ll be just my luck that some major developments in the Hobbit project, the folding of New Line Cinema into Warner Bros., and/or the Tolkien Trust lawsuit against New Line will happen while I’m gone. We’re certainly due for some news after a quiet few weeks. I’ll try to catch up quickly with anything that happens between now and then.

I know some of you check this blog regularly—some daily—and I didn’t want any of you to think that I’ve given up blogging. Quite the contrary. I’ll miss it while I’m away, but I hope I’ll be discovering fascinating things about the ever-enigmatic Amarna period. During my previous season I finished registering the statuary fragments. This year, I start the reliefs!

Variety reports that the HBO series Flight of the Conchords has won the international prize from the Royal Television Society in the U.K. The show stars music/comedy duo Bret McKenzie, better known to many LOTR fans as the elf Figwit, and Jemaine Clement.

Patrick Goldstein has a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times talking about Mary Parent, the new head of MGM. If all goes well, she’ll be the one in charge when the studio begins co-producing the two Hobbit films along with New Line. Goldstein analyzes the problems that MGM faces as a studio that was virtually out of business for years and has so far had a conspicuous lack of success in trying to start distributing and producing films again. The article paints a fairly grim picture, but it also suggests that if Parent is willing to take on the oversight of MGM, there must be hope for its successful revival. He certainly makes it clear that the studio was lucky to get her. There’s a brief reference to The Hobbit but no news about it. The article is an interesting read, though, if you want to know more about the other studio involved in that project.

We’ve all been assuming that Mordor was purged of evil activities when the Ring was destroyed. Yet my husband, in Hong Kong for the Film Festival, spotted this ominous booth at the accompanying Hong Kong International Film & TV Market, aka Filmart exhibition. Perhaps the Dark Lord has crept back yet again, or maybe one of the Ringwraiths survived and has set up shop as a film distributor. Or maybe it’s just some particularly clever orcs going into business in the wake of their previous employer’s demise. more »

Today Warner Bros. announced that Toby Emmerich, the president of production at New Line Cinema since 2001, will become the president and chief operating officer for the new, pared-down company. He replaces Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, who departed the company after the February 28 announcement that the mini-major that Shaye founded in 1967 would be downsized and absorbed into Warner Bros. Emmerich joined New Line in 1992 as an executive in its music division. more »

In Chapter 9 of The Frodo Franchise, I discuss the effects the Lord of the Rings trilogy has had on the film industry. A major part of that discussion relates to the extraordinary boost that LOTR gave to the international independent and foreign-language film market. For those who might look down their noses at the film as just another Hollywood blockbuster franchise, it should be a real eye-opener to see how the various foreign distributors around the world, most of them relatively small independent firms, benefited and what they did with the profits. more »

Variety blogger Anne Thompson is reporting today that Steven Spielberg will direct the first of the three planned Tintin movies, with Peter Jackson directing the second. She got the news from an interview with Andy Serkis (undated, unfortunately, but March 13 or earlier judging from the first comment) that appeared on indieLONDON. The films will be done in digital 3-D using motion capture. Serkis has of course had a great deal of motion-capture experience, having played Gollum and King Kong. (In the interview he talks a little about working on The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.) Now he’ll be returning to New Zealand to play Captain Haddock. According to him, principal photography begins in September, but he said he would soon be going to Wellington to do some preliminary work.

No word yet on who will direct the third film.

Back on February 25, when Variety announced that Time Warner was going to fold New Line Cinema into Warner Bros., it all seemed so simple. New Line’s staff would be severely cut back, it would abandon its current offices and move onto the Warner Bros. lot, and Warner would take over distribution of all but the firm’s immediately upcoming films. Most of the top executives would leave, right away in the cases of Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, after the transition in the cases of Toby Emmerich (president of production) and Rolf Mittweg (head of international distribution). Apart from The Hobbit and a few of its other successful franchises, New Line would be confined to low-budget genre fare of the type that defined it back in the 1980s and early 1990s. more »

When it comes to the companies involved in the Hobbit project, most of the attention lately has been on New Line Cinema. Between the settlement of Peter Jackson’s lawsuit against the studio in December, the lawsuit filed against it by the Tolkien Trust on February 11, and Time Warner’s announcement later that month that it would fold New Line into Warner Bros. But the two Hobbit films are to be a co-production with MGM, owned by Sony.

MGM was not producing films by the time that Sony bought it. Its main value was in its fabulous library of films made since the company’s founding in 1924. Another precious asset it owned was the film-distribution rights to The Hobbit. As New Line and MGM announced on December 18, they will co-finance the two films. New Line was originally supposed to distribute them in North America, and MGM would distribute abroad. Now presumably Warner Bros. will take over New Line’s distribution.

MGM has not sat entirely on the sidelines. Its chairman and CEO, Harry Sloan, was widely credited with having helped break the impasse between New Line and Jackson, leading to the settlement. Since taking over MGM in October of 2005, Sloan has been rebuilding it as a production studio and distributor. The firm will take back the rights to the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises after the current project in each series is released by Sony. It was Sloan who back in September of 2006 broke the news that MGM intended to make “one or two installments” of The Hobbit and expressed the hope that Peter Jackson would direct. That ended the long silence over the project that had been caused by the lawsuit.

Today Variety announced that MGM has named Mary Parent chairperson of its Worldwide Motion Picture Group. Parent was formerly vice chairperson of Worldwide Production at Universal before becoming an independent producer. Now she will be “responsible for oversight of MGM’s worldwide theatrical production, distribution, marketing business affairs.” Sloan refers to the hiring of Parent being key “as we commence production on some of the biggest film franchises in Hollywood”—including, of course, The Hobbit films. It would seem that Sloan is making solid progress in building up the company to cope with such a major undertaking.

By the way, the article refers to Guillermo Del Toro as “currently in talks to direct the two pictures.” The Tolkien Trust lawsuit has presumably put those talks on pause.

Variety reports that Warner Bros. is courting New Line’s president of production, Toby Emmerich, to stay on and replace Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne as the head of the pared-down studio. Previous stories had speculated that Emmerich would be among the many people exiting New Line, once the process of folding it into Time Warner’s larger production house, Warner Bros, is completed.

According to the story, New Line “would make six to eight pictures per year with budgets below $50 million. However, planned New Line pics ‘The Hobbit’ and proposed sequels to ‘Wedding Crashers’ and ‘Austin Powers’ would exceed the $50 budget guideline.” This suggests that although New Line will be much smaller, the changes in its overall approach may not be quite so draconian as earlier coverage claimed. It would still concentrate on low-budget genre fare while making the occasional larger film in one of its successful franchises.

New Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes made New Line his high-profile first sacrifice in his efforts to improve the stagnating value of the corporation’s stock. Now he has moved on to dealing with the far more important problem of what to do about AOL. Perhaps as a result, the pressure to slice and dice New Line is easing a trifle and it can retain a little more of its previous identity.

Emmerich was head of New Line’s music department in early 2001, and he became production president when Shaye fired Michael De Luca from that post. Although Emmerich held that position during the period when The Lord of the Rings was finished and released, he had no direct involvement in that project.