I’m in Bologna, Italy at the moment, attending a wonderful annual festival of restored films called Il Cinema Ritrovato. I’ll be home next week and blogging more regularly.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting little item. Show-biz commentator Anne Thompson has posted the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows trailer under the title “Trailer Watch: Harry Potter Finale Looks Very Lord of the Rings.” (The first part comes out in November.) She remarks that it “looks dark, dangerous and epic: Lord of the Rings scale.” A few of the shots do indeed remind me of the trilogy.

The first part of Deathly Hallows is due out in November, nine years to the month after the first HP film premiered. The Fellowship of the Ring followed closely on Sorcerer’s Stone, coming out in December of 2001. At the time the two “wizard” films were seen as competitors, though both were put out by studios owned by Time Warner. Now it appears that with the delays on The Hobbit, the Tolkien film franchise will outlast the HP series. But it’s interesting to see the latest HP installment being measured against LOTR.

On June 10, Variety broke the news that another prominent child’s fantasy will take advantage of the filmmaking facilities in Wellington, New Zealand:

“The Wind in the Willows” is being developed in a live-action and animatronics version by RG Entertainment for a fall shoot in New Zealand, with Peter Jackson’s visual effects company Weta Workshop onboard.

Ray Griggs (“Super Capers,” “I Want Your Money”) will direct and produce the $30 million feature, based on the 1908 tale by Kenneth Grahame. Richard Taylor will handle special effects, and Kim Sinclair will be production designer.

This isn’t exactly a big-budget spectacle, but it comes at a time when political controversy is again heating up over the government’s 15% rebate for foreign productions spending significant amounts of money within the country. The New Zealand Herald posted a story about it yesterday. It states that the government has paid out around NZ$200 since 2003, including NZ$45 to Avatar’s producers and NZ$49 in King Kong’s producers. (The higher figure for Kong presumably comes from the fact that more of the filmmaking went on within New Zealand.) The loss to the people of New Zealand comes to NZ$36 million over that time. It’s not clear what kinds of calculations went into those figures. Do the critics take into account the amount of money spent by the productions within the company and the taxes consequently paid by the people who work directly or indirectly for the productions?

Given that other countries, including Australia, provide similar rebates, tax breaks, and other forms of support, New Zealand would be likely to lose a fair amount of business from overseas without the rebate scheme.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was made before the scheme went into effect. Its success and the prospect of having the first Chronicles of Narnia film made in New Zealand both had a major impact in the government’s decision-making process. (I discuss the situation as it developed until about 2006 in the last chapter of The Frodo Franchise.) The Wind in the Willows has been named by some of the people arguing against the rebate.

According to an article posted on Stuff.co yesterday, the habit of calling the Miramar Peninsula (or Wellington in general) “Wellywood” is about to become official. Wellington Airport, which is 34% owned by the Wellington City Council, will erect its own version of the famous Hollywood sign in a position where people on incoming flights can see it. (Those that land from the north, anyway.)

This is an artist’s depiction of what the sign, scheduled to be erected in June, will look like. For those who know Wellington, this view looks more or less east across Evans Bay, over which incoming flights pass. (If you’re traveling to Wellington, try to get yourself a window on the left side.) The old headquarters of 3 Foot 6 is off to the right a short distance, and on the other side of this ridge sits the Stone Street Studios. The airport owns the land on which the sign will sit.

Peter Jackson said of the sign, “It’s Kiwi tongue-in-cheek humour at its very best, but beneath the leg-pulling is genuine pride. Several of the most popular films ever made were form in Miramar. Within a mile of the sign is the birth place of Middle-earth and Pandora.” (That mile would include Park Road Post and Weta Ltd. as well as the studios.)

Mayor Kerry Prendergast (whom readers of The Frodo Franchise will remember as one of my interviewees) said, “The sign will be one of the first things people will see when they arrive in Wellington. They will be left in no doubt that this is the heart and soul of New Zealand’s film industry.”

A mere 44% of 9000 residents polled by Stuff.co in an online survey approved of the sign, and the comments on the story are mostly negative. Some don’t want the sign as part of the view, and some object to the expense (an undisclosed sum) in a bad economic situation. Still, as the story points out, the film industry pumps about $285 million (NZ dollars) into the city’s economy, and that doesn’t count the tourism benefits. About 100,000 people are reported to have visited the Weta Cave last year.

[March 11: More controversy on the already controversial sign. The New Zealand Herald reports:

Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast has said local movie mogul Sir Peter Jackson was adamant it should be "an exact copy" of the Hollywood sign.

However, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Leron Gubler said the staggered Hollywood lettering was trademarked.

"If they do that with the Wellywood sign then I would think that would be a violation of our trademark...I am checking that with our attorney," he told The Dominion Post.

Wellington Airport said it a statement yesterday: "We are confident we will meet all our legal obligations in relation to the sign."

I for one hope they can go ahead with the project. Of course, I don't have to look at the sign on my daily commute. On the other hand, that area is already disfigured by smaller but noticeable signs warning pet owners about poison set out to combat the pesky local possums (unless those have been taken down since my last visit). ]

[March 18: I’m getting pretty tired of the “Hitler is angry” reworkings of the scene in Downfall where Hitler erupts in a savage tirade. It’s just too easy to adapt to any situation by adding a bunch of subtitles unrelated to what’s actually being said. But I have to admit,  “Hitler is angry about the Wellywood sign” is pretty funny. Lots of in-jokes for those who know the city, including a couple that mystified me. There are also references to the giant Gollum that climbed over the airport for a few years and to the lengthy epilogue of The Return of the King. (Thanks to Harriet Margolis for alerting me to this clip!)

We all know that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens are powerful filmmakers. Here I’m not talking about their creative abilities, which are obvious, but about their power within the film industry to go after projects that appeal to them personally. The Lord of the Rings (and Peter’s other films, as we’ll see below) gave them the financial clout to proceed without a studio attached. more »

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written a brief account of the critical reaction to Avatar. He’s surprised to find that there’s a backlash among some of the fanboys that one might expect to love the film, while critics for major news outlets are raving about it. Kind of a reversal of what one might expect. Douthat thinks the professional critics are deliberately brushing aside what he (and many others) perceive as problems with the plot and dialogue, enthusing about the film largely on the basis of its spectacular visuals. He points out that the best effects-heavy films have tights stories and good dialogue–and holds the LOTR trilogy up as one of those that new blockbusters should be measured against.

Today Michael Fleming posted an interview with James Cameron on his Variety blog. Cameron has said in several interviews I’ve read that he decided to make Avatar because the creation of Gollum in the LOTR trilogy made him realize that CGI technology had evolved far enough to make his film possible. In this new interview, though, he praises the trilogy as a whole more enthusiastically than I have seen previously.

Variety is starting to put up a selective pay-wall, so in case you can’t get through to the interview, here’s the relevant passage (though the interview as a whole has some interesting things to say about the future of 3D):

When I see a movie that excites me visually, the feeling is extraordinary. I went to see `Lord of the Rings’ for entertainment, but you begin to think, is this something I can incorporate? That’s how this works and it goes in cycles. Peter Jackson inspired me with consummate filmmaking and the specificity of the CG that made me feel a doorway opening that enabled me to make `Avatar.’

Cameron is already talking about making two sequels to Avatar, and I would not be at all surprised if he once again chose Weta as his special-effects house.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles on Avatar and interviews with James Cameron recently. Of course, there’s so much coverage that I couldn’t possibly get through all of it. But on the whole I was disappointed at how little information there was on Weta Ltd.’s role in the film’s groundbreaking special effects.

The Hollywood Reporter’s article by Alex Ben Block, posted December 10 and published in the December 11 print edition, is the big exception. It doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty details of the technology involved, but it gives the facts and figures to show just how much Cameron’s film relied on Weta to innovate the new techniques and to slog through the laborious process of rendering a huge number of effects shots. Here’s the section of the article on Weta: more »

Mike Goodridge, editor of Screen Daily, has seen Avatar. Not only that, but he spoke briefly with Peter Jackson about the film, since Weta Digital has been deeply involved in the motion-capture computer animation for the film. In a brief piece on Screen Daily.com, he reports on both film and interview.

Goodridge was curious as to why actors like Zoe Saldana, Wes Studi, Sam Worthington, and Signourney Weaver would be content to perform for the motion-capture cameras and, in some cases, not appear onscreen at all. He was impressed by what he saw:

The effect is startling. Working with Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital facility in New Zealand, the Avatar team has created lifelike digital characters which carry the story arc of the film. While watching, I was so engaged by the characters I constantly had to remind myself they were not human. It isn’t like watching Roddy McDowall in an ape suit or Gollum. It’s a whole new cinematic experience.

Lumping actors in ape suits into the same category as Gollum is a dubious move. James Cameron delayed making Avatar for years because the technology didn’t exist to create the blue Na’vi characters. Peter Jackson set out to make LOTR knowing that the technology didn’t exist, but his technicians developed it and made Gollum the first appealing, believable digital character in a live-action film. (Jar-Jar Binks was created using the same basic technology, but he didn’t exactly convince audiences that digital characters were a good thing.) Cameron decided to get back into directing because of Gollum.

Peter explained motion capture performances as “a way of moving. It has nothing to do with how the characters look, which is a design of the character. It’s terrific because instead of an animator and a computer animating a character frame by frame, motion capture allows a real actor to perform.” Anyone who has watched the supplements for LOTR or King Kong knows what he’s talking about.

He also mentioned the first Tintin film, which he is more deeply involved in, being one of its producers and, if all goes according to plan, the director of the second.

Jackson went on to elucidate that on the first of the Tintin movies, which he is producing and Steven Spielberg is directing, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig are “bringing it to life” but the faces that will be seen on screen when the film is released at the end of 2011 will look like the characters from the pages of Hergé. “They are performing it as if they are doing the movie for real,” said Jackson. “And yet, what’s coming to life are characters that Hergé designed. They look as if he actually designed them himself.”

Avatar will be released on December 18, although if you live in certain countries you’ll be able to see it a day or two earlier. Then we’ll all be able to judge how far motion capture has come since the breakthrough performances of Andy Serkis as Gollum.

[Added the same day: Variety's senior film reviewer Todd McCarthy has just posted an enthusiastic report on Avatar, with kudos to Weta Digital as the lead special-effects house.]

I have to admit that I’ve never sat through the last part of the credits on the LOTR extended-edition DVDs. That’s the section where all the charter members of the official fan club had their names listed–including such notables as Elijah Wood. It takes 20 minutes for all those names to scroll by. I don’t know how many names there are, either, but there are a lot of people out there happy to have their names linked with the trilogy.

You’d think more studios would have done the same sort of thing with their DVDs, but it turns out that they haven’t–until now. Given how important online fans were to getting Paranormal Activity a theatrical release, Paramount announced that all fans who signed up at the film’s official website by November 9 would have their names  included at the end of the DVD. I’m not sure how long before November 9 the announcement was made. Stories hit the news media around November 5, as in this story in on Video Business.

The story compares Paramount’s offer to the LOTR one. For the epic LOTR, the 20 minutes was a relatively small section to add onto the end. For Paranormal Activity, which runs a mere 86-minutes, a long roll of fan names could be a big chunk of the DVD’s length.

More evidence that, although we’re coming up on the sixth anniversary of the release of the third part of the trilogy, the influence of LOTR doesn’t quit!

By now you probably all know that Howard Shore will be conducting his music for The Fellowship of the Ring, accompanying a screening of the film, at Radio City Music Hall on October 9 and 10. I wish I could be there, but I’m writing this from the other end of the continent, in Vancouver, where the Vancouver International Film Festival starts tomorrow. But I hope all the Ringers who are attending the Radio City event have a great time.

The Fellowship of the Ring isn’t the only film getting this treatment in October. Check out today’s Variety story, “A concerted effort for movie music.” I can’t say the Howard Shore’s concerts started this trend, but I’m sure the enormous success that he has had playing the LOTR music live in various venues has helped it grow. And if, as the article says, concert halls draw in new fans for live symphony concerts, all the better!