I’ve already had two people write to me about the TimesOnline story (from the May 25 Sunday Times print edition, “Hobbit movies meet dire foe in son of Tolkien,” which TheOneRing.net linked to earlier this evening.

My reaction on reading it is that this is probably a tempest in a teapot, with the Times over-dramatizing the upcoming June 6 meeting in the lawsuit the Tolkien Trust brought against New Line. The author claims that Christopher Tolkien will use the occasion to try and halt the production of The Hobbit. I don’t buy it. There’s absolutely nothing new here except the brief quotation from Christopher Tolkien (if indeed it is from him and not from some intermediary), “one last crusade.” That phrase is given no context. Who knows where it comes from? When it was said? The Times doesn’t give any indication. Obviously it’s not in the lawsuit, and the Times hasn’t interviewed Christopher for this story. The rest of the description of Christopher’s putative “crusade” comes from the text of the original lawsuit, in which Christopher is one of the plaintiffs. more »

For all those who missed the one-hour online question-session and chat with Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro this afternoon (3 pm Eastern Time), a transcript has been posted on Weta’s site. I couldn’t get the version on their home page to print, but if you just want to read it, that’s adequate. There’s a link to a PDF copy that prints out easily, in case you want to relive, study, and savor the whole thing—and obsessively file it away, like me. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up writing another book! more »

Variety reported today that Guillermo Del Toro will be co-producing Hater, based on the David Moody novel, along with Mark Johnson. Mark is the producer of the Chronicles of Narnia series and was one of my interviewees for The Frodo Franchise. I talked with him in Auckland in June, 2004, just as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was gearing up for production. Mark acquired the rights to Hater and approached GDT to direct, but he can’t because of his lengthy commitment to The Hobbit. Interviewed by Daily Variety, GDT revealed a few specific bits of Hobbit-related information that I hadn’t heard before. more »

As I’ve noted in past entries, MGM, which will co-produce the two Hobbit films and distribute them abroad, is rebuilding itself. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was one of the great studios, but for years it languished as essentially a library into which Ted Turner could dip in programming Turner Classic Movies. Now it is ambitiously aiming to distribute 20 films a year. The appointment of Mary Parent to run MGM’s Worldwide Motion Picture Group about eight weeks ago has been followed by a flurry of announcements of new projects. more »

In regard to yesterday’s post about the upcoming 20-questions session on The Hobbit, reader Andrés Carrandi has kindly sent me links to the two original 1998 sessions which Peter held after New Line announced the LOTR project. (Thanks, Andrés!) I had written that Ain’t It Cool News, which hosted those events, no longer had them in its archive.

Luckily, it turns out that they are archived at the big German fan site, Der Herr der Ringe. You can find the August one here and the December one here. If you never read them and want a dose of Rings nostalgia (and who doesn’t?), they’ll well worth perusing. Peter’s answering those questions from fans did a lot to convince people that Tolkien’s novel was in good hands.

Strange to think that the tenth anniversary of the first one is only a few months away!

In The Frodo Franchise I described the two online 20-questions sessions about the Lord of the Rings project that happened in August and December of 1998. Those sessions were hosted by Harry Knowles on his Ain’t It Cool News site. (Both of them seem no longer to be on the site. I hope at some point they can be reposted as important historical documents.) Fans sent in questions, which were winnowed down by Harry and answered by Peter Jackson. New Line requested that the question sessions end, so no more of them happened.

By now the benefits of direct connections between filmmakers and fans via the internet have been more widely recognized by the studios. Peter and Guillermo Del Toro have announced that they’ll be doing the same sort of thing for The Hobbit with a live online chat session on May 24. They’re calling it “An Unexpected Party.” Here’s the announcement I got via email today from Weta News, which is hosting the event and some links for registering for it:

Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro invite you to a live internet chat about The Hobbit.

Peter and Guillermo would love to answer your questions and hear your comments about our new adventure into Middle-Earth.

Please register now to make sure you don’t miss out on the Unexpected Party and get regular updates on the movies.

Weta are excited to be hosting this one-hour live online chat on our website www.wetaNZ.com. Please check the start time for your time zone below:

A conference has been scheduled for 8:45 am on June 6. It’s called a “Case Management” conference and was filed for by one of the Tolkien Trust’s attorneys. James Peterson (of Godfrey and Kahn here in Madison), who has been keeping me up to date on the lawsuit and explaining the legal implications to me, tells me that such a conference could be held for a wide variety of reasons. His guess is that either the plaintiffs want to ask the judge to set a schedule to get the case moving or there is some information about a settlement to discuss with him.

As I reported here on April 21, both sides had agreed to a 30-day extension of New Line’s deadline to file a response to the Trust’s original complaint. That new deadline is tomorrow, May 14. Part of the explanation for the rationale behind the request for an extension was this:

Whereas, the parties are not submitting this request for any dilatory or improper purpose. Rather, the parties have engaged in discussions relating to a potential resolution of this matter; in conjunction with these discussions, Defendants have agreed to provide certain documents to Plaintiffs in connection with Plaintiffs’ audits of the motion pictures at issue in this matter, and the parties are in the process of discussing the logistics of this process;

My hope, of course, is that those discussions have continued and that the upcoming conference means that a settlement is within sight. The fact that New Line and MGM have officially signed Guillermo Del Toro to direct The Hobbit would seem to hint as much. Maybe we’ll hear some good news in a few weeks!

(If you’ve somehow missed all the news about this lawsuit, I’ve also got a long entry on it here.)

Regular reader Paulo Pereira has written to ask whether I think the current difficulties in the Screen Actors Guild negotiations will have any effects on the Hobbit production. SAG agreements are due to expire on June 30, and at this point it looks like the moving-image industry won’t get back to the negotiating table with the union until May 28. A rival union, the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, has insisted on carrying on its own negotiations first. It’s a complicated situation, summed up by Variety yesterday.

Fortunately the current mess is highly unlikely to affect The Hobbit. As I’ve pointed out, there is much to be done in pre-production, primarily scripting and designing. Principal photography won’t start until sometime next year. The Hollywood industry couldn’t possibly allow any potential strike to last long, especially in the wake of the damage done by the recent writers’ strike. A lot of the making of television series for the fall season goes on during the summer, so there’s pressure on both sides to get the situation resolved.

Currently the main issue for The Hobbit going forward is the Tolkien Trust’s lawsuit against New Line. As I reported recently, the current deadline for the studio’s response is May 14, so we should hear something about that soon. Indications are that the two sides are talking and that they feel progress is being made. Luckily, all the information that has been made public suggests that the two Hobbit films will go forward as announced.

On May 2, MrCere posted an interesting little essay on TheOneRing.net, “The Dragon Problem: What Challenges Await GDT and WETA?” GDT is of course Guillermo Del Toro, now the officially announced director of the two Hobbit films. Weta is specifically Weta Workshop, that half of Weta Ltd. that deals with the creations of physical props and costumes and of detailed maquettes for scanning. The talented people there will be deeply involved in the creation of Smaug. more »

Thanks to alert reader David Platt, who called my attention to a rumor that started circulating on the internet this past Thursday. The Flicks.co.nz site, reported that Peter Jackson had shut down the production of The Lovely Bones as a result of a disagreement. He and his art director supposedly could not come up with a design for the sequences in heaven that would satisfy both. Moreover, there have been claims that the film’s release would be delayed from March 13, 2009 to the autumn of 2009 as a result of the rift.

Many sites have picked this up, and while calling the claim a “rumor,” most treat it as the truth. For instance, Phil Brown, on Martiniboys.com, editorialized under the title, “Has Peter Jackson Gone Mad with Power?” Brown posits a Peter Jackson who goes about firing people right and left, citing Mark Wahlberg’s replacement of Ryan Gosling in The Lovely Bones and Howard Shore’s departure from the King Kong team. Brown goes so far as to speculate whether Peter can work well with Guillermo Del Toro.

Well, Ryan Gosling really is too young to plausibly play the father in Bones (the same reason Stuart Townsend was replaced as Aragorn by Viggo Mortensen), and Howard Shore has said that he will be scoring the Hobbit films. Shore’s departure could not have been horribly contentious, if he wants to come back.

News sites have been slower to acknowledge that on May 3 ComingSoon.net posted a story strongly suggesting that the rumors were nothing more than that. (The original story on Flicks, linked above, has an update mentioning the ComingSoon posting.) They got their information from a spokesperson at DreamWorks/Paramount:

Turns out, the movie was never scheduled for March 13 at all, there has not been a delay of “rfit,” and a fall 2009 launch was always the plan. DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider cleared up the issue by telling ComingSoon.net, “It was a very smooth shoot with no dissent, and all heaven sequences requiring sets or Art Dept involvement were completed on schedule in March. The only shooting remaining involves blue-screen VFX elements, which will be shot in June.

That seems plausible to me. It’s pretty specific, for one thing, rather than being some vague claim that all is well. VFX elements, which are bits that will be combined into digital effects shots, would typically be the last things filmed. In 2003, I briefly visited the studio in Wellington where the last shooting for The Return of the King was going on, and those were for effects elements.

So I think that Peter probably has not gone mad with power.