The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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July 15 : 2010

Elijah Wood presents the Trilogy–in Italy

The Giffoni Film Festival turns 40 this year. It’s the largest children’s film festival in the world, held in a small Italian town a bit inland from Salerno, on the Amalfi Coast. The festival offers new films, which compete for prizes and are judged by children from all over the world.

This year the festival will also present a marathon screening of all three parts of the LOTR trilogy. (No indication whether these are theatrical or extended versions.) The website promises “unseen videos and backstage action” along with the screening. It’s not mentioned on the website, but Variety has announced that Elijah Wood will be there in person to present the program. He was honored by the festival in 2006 and must have enjoyed the experience.

It’s a beautiful part of Italy, though no doubt packed with tourists at this time of year. At some point during his visit Elijah might see and even visit a real “Mount Doom,” Vesuvius itself, a short way to the northwest. (It looks terrific on Google Earth!)

(Vesuvius is hard to miss. It dominates the horizon in that region. Scroll down to the bottom of this entry on the other blog for a shot of it from Pompeii.)

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    The Frodo Franchise
    by Kristin Thompson

    US flagbuy at best price

    Canadian flagbuy at best price

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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.”