The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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December 23 : 2007

watching sound mixing for the water horse

Over on Observations on film art and Film Art, I’ve just posted an entry about LOTR producer Barrie Osborne’s upcoming children’s fantasy, The Water Horse (being released on Christmas Day). I got to watch some of the sound mixing at Peter Jackson’s post-production facility Park Road Post during my visit to New Zealand this past May. In the entry, I talk about that and reminisce about watching sound mixing on Return of the King.

Naturally the settlement of Peter’s lawsuit against New Line Cinema and the news that he will be producing The Hobbit had to come while I was out of the country! I was in Italy, giving a paper at a conference and visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum. Exciting stuff, but it meant I didn’t have time to digest all the news coverage and write about the new situation.

That digestion got set back even more when on our way home my husband and I were delayed 24 hours by the big snow-rain-fog storm that has snarled air traffic in the Midwest this weekend. We got bussed from Minneapolis to Madison last night and arrived at 2 am. As soon as jet-lag and holiday activities permit, I’ll be posting a summary of the recent Hobbit-related events.

In the meantime, I notice that people are checking out my older entries about the Hobbit project and the New Line lawsuit. Some of the entries in the Hobbit Project category provide background information that might aid an understanding of what the lawsuit was all about.

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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.”