Back in 1995, Peter Jackson started looking for a project to show off the expanded digital-effects capacities he and his colleagues had built up for The Frighteners. With what at the time was naive optimism, they settled on The Lord of the Rings and set out to track down who had the production rights for it. Those rights belonged to producer Saul Zaentz, who was not inclined to sell them to anyone, let alone a little-known director from New Zealand.

Peter and company had, however, one advantage. Having distributed his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures through Miramax, Peter had an in with that art-film company and its co-founders, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Indeed, he was required to give them an option on his next film. Through a happy coincidence, Zaentz owed Miramax a big favor, since the company had rescued his project The English Patient when Fox abruptly pulled the plug on its financing just before shooting began. After much negotiation with Zaentz, Harvey Weinstein acquired the trilogy’s rights, agreeing to produce a two-part adaptation of Tolkien’s novel with Peter to direct.

In retrospect, it seems impossible to believe that fans would have been satisfied with two features, especially when such elements as Galadriel and Lothlórien would have been left out entirely. But that version of the film went through 18 months of pre-production at Miramax.

Miramax was not a free agent, having been bought by Disney in 1993. In 1998 Michael Eisner, then head of Disney, declared that LOTR would be made as one inexpensive feature-length film or not at all. Peter declined to go forward and persuaded Harvey to put the film into turnaround for a few weeks, giving him a chance to try and sell the project to a different studio. Only one studio was interested, but that one was New Line, whose founder Bob Shaye wanted LOTR made as three features. The price was 5% of the trilogy’s revenues. Eisner had so little faith in the proposed adaptation, that he split the 5% between Disney and the Weinsteins!

(I tell this story in more detail in the first chapter of The Frodo Franchise.)

The Weinsteins subsequently left Miramax to form The Weinstein Company, probably in part using their considerable income from the trilogy. Their best-known recent film is Inglourious Basterds.

On Wednesday The Wrap announced that Disney is closing Miramax. Some of the firm’s important films, like Pulp Fiction and sex, lies, and videotape are mentioned, but there’s no reference to its key role in allowing LOTR to get made. After the Weinsteins’ departure, Miramax was a shadow of its former self, but it still had employees (80 have lost their jobs) and films scheduled to be released (six remain in limbo). Disney claims that the brand will not disappear, but it’s hard to imagine what they could do with it at this point.

On Friday TheOneRing.net posted a story about Variety‘s story of the same day, concerning New Line’s successful transition into making a smaller number of medium-budget genre films. Many of those who clicked on the link, however, must have run afoul of Variety‘s new pay-wall. Being a subscriber, I’ll pull out some more bits of information and try to tease some inferences out of them.  (For those who subscribe or who want to sign up to get a few Variety articles free, the story is here.) more »

Variety reported on January 18 that the first round of bidding for MGM’s assets is over. It hasn’t been disclosed which companies made bids, but according to the story:

Time Warner, India’s Reliance Entertainment, Lionsgate, AT&T, Liberty Media, Summit Entertainment and News Corp. are among the most likely bidders. More than a dozen companies have signed nondisclosure agreements allowing them to review MGM’s internal financials.

MGM’s assets include the 4,000-title library, the right to make new James Bond and Pink Panther movies, the Lion logo, the United Artists operations and half ownership of the two “Hobbit” movies.

None of the bids apparently topped $2 million, which was MGM’s target figure. The second round of bidding begins next week, with negotiations going on in the interim.

Reliance may seem an odd member of this group, but it’s a wealthy Indian company that has gone in for co-financing Hollywood films, including especially those of Warner Bros.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the process of extracting MGM from its financial woes will have much impact on the ongoing production of The Hobbit. Whichever company ends up winning the auction, it will be obliged to honor the contract between MGM and Warner Bros. as it currently exists. Warner may well end up being the new owner of MGM’s assets, in which case the production/distribution rights to The Hobbit will be reunited decades after their separation.

(Note: As I’ve mentioned,Variety online recently became subscription only, so I’m no longer supplying links to stories, but I’ll try to quote and summarize  the most salient portions in reporting on them.)

It’s been a while since I posted. I’m currently in Berlin, busily doing research on statuary fragments at the Egyptian Museum. The city has experienced it’s biggest snowfall in decades, so I’m trudging through snowy, icy sidewalks on my way to and from the S-Bahn.

There hasn’t been a lot of LOTR/Hobbit news recently, but I spotted an interesting article in the New York Times. It’s about Avatar and whether it’s new motion-capture technology will have an immediate impact on Hollywood filmmaking. The basic answer is, not much, not yet. The next round of big fantasy films have either started without the new technology (e.g., Iron Man II) or won’t be out for a long time (e.g., Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, made with much the same technology).

The most interesting passage for us fans is that The Hobbit is still not planned to be in 3D, and given that the pre-viz is being edited, I suspect it’s a bit late for a change of mind on that. Here’s what the article says on that subject:

So far, Guillermo del Toro, who is expected to direct the first of a two-part fantasy series based on “The Hobbit” for release in 2012, has stuck with a plan to film that movie with more conventional, 2-D techniques, even though Mr. Jackson — a powerful force behind both “Avatar” and “Tintin” — is among his producers.

Executives of Warner’s New Line Cinema unit, one of the studios behind the project, have in the past said that they believed that 2-D would be well suited to the sense of intimacy they anticipated from “The Hobbit” and its fantasy universe — and nothing about “Avatar” appears to have changed that plan.

As far as I know, there’s nothing significant about that mention of 2012 as the release date for The Hobbit.

One subject that keeps coming up in the article is how much Avatar cost. I’m sure New Line, Warner Bros., and MGM have no desire to lay out hundreds of millions of extra dollars for a technique that neither the director nor the fans are clamoring for. Avatar got made the way it did because James Cameron was bound and determined to follow his own vision of the project. As with Titanic, it turns out he was justified, but not everybody is quite that enthusiastic about 3D and especially this very expensive new process for creating it.