The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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August 7 : 2011

Christopher Lee interview with some information on The Hobbit

An interview with Christopher Lee was posted on YouTube several days ago. He mentions having recently completed four days of filming on The Hobbit. That’s near the beginning of the interview. Later he refers to having had to shaved his beard in order to have Saruman’s long beard attached. He says he’s now growing his own beard back, which suggests that he doesn’t anticipate doing any further filming on The Hobbit, though one would think possibly next year there would be some pickups shot.

Thanks to davidlean for noticing this video and starting a thread about it on TheOneRing.net‘s message boards; there’s a discussion of it going on there.

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    The Frodo Franchise
    by Kristin Thompson

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    Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
    hardcover 978-0-520-24774-1
    421 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 12 color illustrations; 36 b/w illustrations; 1 map; 1 table

    “Once in a lifetime.”
    The phrase comes up over and over from the people who worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. The film’s 17 Oscars, record-setting earnings, huge fan base, and hundreds of ancillary products attest to its importance and to the fact that Rings is far more than a film. Its makers seized a crucial moment in Hollywood—the special effects digital revolution plus the rise of “infotainment” and the Internet—to satisfy the trilogy’s fans while fostering a huge new international audience. The resulting franchise of franchises has earned billions of dollars to date with no end in sight.

    Kristin Thompson interviewed 76 people to examine the movie’s scripting and design and the new technologies deployed to produce the films, video games, and DVDs. She demonstrates the impact Rings had on the companies that made it, on the fantasy genre, on New Zealand, and on independent cinema. In fast-paced, compulsively readable prose, she affirms Jackson’s Rings as one the most important films ever made.

    The Frodo Franchise

    cover of Penguin Books’ (NZ) edition of The Frodo Franchise, published September 2007. The tiny subtitle reads: “How ‘The Lord of the Rings’ became a Hollywood blockbuster and put New Zealand on the map.”