The website for the Red Digital Cinema firm today posted this press release:

For more on the Epic camera, see here. The Epic is the successor to the Red camera, which was used on District 9 and The Lovely Bones.

Stuff.co has some anecdotes and footage from the Hobbit audition session that took place on November 23. There’s a video of a little over a minute, showing a 3 Foot 7 representative laying out the ground rules for the auditions. The text describes some of the people who showed up, including some who had been extras in the trilogy.  It also describes what procedures were carried out during each person’s five-minute session, including having his or her feet measured.

Not too surprisingly, a lot more people showed up for this extras’ casting call than did for the original Lord of the Rings films.

MGM’s filing for a prestructured bankruptcy is still due to be decided on by the judge on December 2. According to Variety, two final meetings need to take place:

The deadline for court filings of any objections to the plan is on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. And a required meeting of creditors — where they can question MGM reps — has been set to take place in Manhattan on Tuesday, two days before the court hearing.

“Attendance by the creditors at the meeting is welcomed by not required,” MGM said in a court filing. “At the meeting, the credtiors may examine the debtors and transact such other business as may properly come before the meeting.”

As I reported previously, on November 12 the judge approved parts of the plan, including giving permission for the studio to raise $500 million in loans in order to expand its currently minimal operations. That includes at least part of the reported $250 million that MGM will be contributing as co-producer of The Hobbit.

Unless some sort of drama erupts at one of those meetings, a week from now we can expect to see a resolution of MGM’s long-running financial woes.

The state-of-the-art post-production facilities built by Peter Jackson and his colleagues for The Lord of the Rings continue to win awards. This time it’s the Hollywood Post Alliance awards (whose eligibility period runs from September to September). Here are the films and people who won:

Sound – Feature Film
“District 9”
Michael Hedges, Gilbert Lake, Brent Burge and Chris Ward – Park Road Post Production

Compositing – Feature Film
“Avatar”
Erik Winquist, Robin Hollander, Erich Eder and Giuseppe Tagliavini – Weta Digital

These days, “compositing” refers to the digital combination of different visual elements into a single image. (Think green-screen work or those long shots of Rivendell combining real waterfalls, a miniature building, background paintings, and so on.)

Of course, these same companies and probably these same people will be working on The Hobbit. Congratulations to them all!

(From Variety.)

Variety reports that MGM’s bankruptcy case is moving along smoothly and quickly:

A federal bankruptcy court has cleared several hurdles for confirmation of MGM’s bankruptcy plan on Dec. 2 – including granting permission to the studio to seek a $500 million loan to ramp up operations.

In a Friday hearing in Manhattan, Judge Stuart Bernstein authorized amendments to MGM’s “pre-packaged” plan of reorganization after finding that the modifications were immaterial.

Those modifications excluded the Spyglass Entertainment library from the deal, thus reducing the stake that Spyglass will have in the revamped MGM from 5% to less than 1%. Spyglass toppers Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum will become the new heads of MGM once it emerges from Chapter 11 protection.

Bernstein also approved a $4 million breakup fee, to be paid to Spyglass if there’s a breach of its agreement with the studio along with MGM’s request to manage its cash in bankruptcy.

“Approval of these motions will help pave the way for MGM to confirm its plan,” the studio said in a statement.

The $500 million loan mentioned in the first paragraph includes part of MGM’s co-financing of The Hobbit. The court had already approved MGM’s using $40 million of cash-on-hand to start its payment on the estimated $500 million budget of the two-part film. MGM is contracted to pay half of the film’s production costs and will distribute the film outside the North American market.

The approval of the “breakup fee” of $4 million to be paid to Spyglass in case the current bankruptcy case is not successful does not mean that the Spyglass deal is off. It only means that in the unlikely event that the Spyglass deal fell through at this late date, MGM could use its cash to pay that fee.

So the co-financing of The Hobbit moves one significant step closer to happening. All this has happened only nine days after the bankruptcy case was filed, suggesting that the goal to resolve the case by December 2 should be met. In the meantime, Warner Bros. is footing the bill for the pre-production on The Hobbit.

Yesterday the New Zealand Herald posted a video reporting on a meeting of SPADA (Screen Producers and Directors Association) in Auckland. There was a discussion of factors in the recent actors’ boycott of The Hobbit; the onstage speakers were Phillipa Boyens, Richard Fletcher (a producer and the former CEO of SPADA), and Penelope Borland (current CEO of SPADA). It’s quite interesting, and at the end there was some give and take with an actor in the audience, Graham Dunster, of Auckaland Actors. Afterward the reporter interviewed Dunster and Robyn Malcolm, an actress who was prominent in speaking out in favor of the boycott. The video lasts just under 18 minutes, out of a 45 minute discussion. (“Stoush” in the title of the video, is an Australian and Kiwi term meaning a fight.)

Malcolm acted in the LOTR trilogy, playing Morwen, the mother who puts her children and sends them to safety in Edoras when their village is attacked by orcs.

For those who want a written summary, see here.

Although there is still some dispute about facts, the meeting apparently represents some progress toward the actors and production people being willing to sit down together and work out solutions without the results being tied to a specific film production. Indeed, Stuff.co.nz reported yesterday that the actors and SPADA have agreed to meet at a hui (a Maori word for a social gathering):

SPADA board member Richard Fletcher said communication was the key to healing the wounds created by the conflict.

“We can only move forward if we’re going to talk.”

Actor representative Peter Elliott agreed.

“It’s time to put our big boys’ pants on and get in the room and start talking.”

The date hasn’t been set yet.

While he was in Savannah Film Festival, Ian McKellen spoke to show-biz site PopEater:

McKellen is currently enjoying the six months of the year when he doesn’t work — we love his life! — but he said that when he returns to the trade, he hopes it will be as Gandalf.

“I expect my next job, if all goes well, I will play Gandalf in ‘The Hobbit,'” McKellen told us.

“I’m still waiting for a contract.”

When we told McKellen that we would love to see him in the role, he told us to “pass that onto Warner Bros.” So as a service to Sir Ian, that is exactly what we are doing. Get on the ball WB!

That sounds to me, though I could be wrong, that the negotiations process is over and Ian is just waiting to sign on the dotted line. He gives a pretty strong nudge there, and on November 6 he posted a link to the PopEater story on his Facebook page.

There’s a minute-and-a-half clip of the interview with Ian, charming as always. I’ve copied-and-pasted the quote above from the website, but the transcription is slightly off, and it’s not absolutely complete on the Hobbit situation, so the clip is worth watching.

Reuters has posted a summary looking at the factors that caused the Hobbit boycott called by the Australian and New Zealand actors’ unions to fail. It’s not exactly news, but it does give a good runthrough. It also suggests where the unions’ tactics were faulty. As the article points out, with many locations around the world offering various incentives to big-budget productions from Hollywood and elsewhere, such struggles are likely to become more common.

Gary Barber says that he and Roger Birnbaum will take over the running of MGM in about a month:

Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum will be running MGM within three or four days after a federal court approves the Lion’s reorganization plan on Dec. 2, Barber said Friday.

But that’s all Barber would reveal about his new gig when appearing at AFM’s annual finance conference on Friday in Santa Monica. Even before Barber took the stage, moderator P. John Burke of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld sternly instructed that Barber wasn’t able to discuss MGM.

MGM’s bankruptcy filing, now awaiting a judge’s decision, involves a prestructured plan. The details have already been worked out, so once the studio receives approval on December 2, there’s no reason why the plan could not be implemented immediately. The studio’s request to retain money enough during the hearing to finance its current operations means that $40 million will be available to help co-produce The Hobbit. The remainder of MGM’s half-share in the production will be provided via a loan once the studio emerges from the bankruptcy process.

The quotation comes from a Variety article posted today.

The Independent has a fairly long story on Guillermo del Toro, past, present, and future. Along with talking about his Mexican films and discussing his At the Mountains of Madness project, he describes the problems that drove him to quit The Hobbit and move his family back to North America:

While the film now has a tentative start date of next February (with British actor Martin Freeman due to play Bilbo Baggins), del Toro is the one who has seemingly suffered the most. After spending two years in pre-production, he had received no assurances that it was a go-project, due in part to financial problems at MGM, one of three studios behind it. “It was starting to weigh [on me] in a way that was not positive for me or the project,” he says. “People need to fathom this – yes, of course a director sticks with a project for ten years… I’ve done it myself. But to relocate your entire family life, home, for a period that long without any certainty that it will get made or when it will get made… it started to become very worrisome.”

He is married to his high-school sweetheart Lorenza, and del Toro had brought her and their two daughters, Mariana and Marisa, out to Wellington to live while he worked with Jackson on the project. “I really loved the country and could’ve lived there,” he says. Does he regret the time spent, now he has quit? “I tell you in my life, I try not to deal with regrets. I have a huge heartbreak. I have incredible sadness. I have disappointment. I have heartache. I have a piece of me that is dented forever. But no regrets. I don’t believe in regrets. It’s a huge part of me. And I believe it was the best for me and the project.”

(The story doesn’t mention the fact that Guillermo is one of the four scriptwriters and presumably will have a connection with the film, even though he is no longer directing it.