Thanks to alert reader David Platt, who called my attention to a rumor that started circulating on the internet this past Thursday. The Flicks.co.nz site, reported that Peter Jackson had shut down the production of The Lovely Bones as a result of a disagreement. He and his art director supposedly could not come up with a design for the sequences in heaven that would satisfy both. Moreover, there have been claims that the film’s release would be delayed from March 13, 2009 to the autumn of 2009 as a result of the rift.

Many sites have picked this up, and while calling the claim a “rumor,” most treat it as the truth. For instance, Phil Brown, on Martiniboys.com, editorialized under the title, “Has Peter Jackson Gone Mad with Power?” Brown posits a Peter Jackson who goes about firing people right and left, citing Mark Wahlberg’s replacement of Ryan Gosling in The Lovely Bones and Howard Shore’s departure from the King Kong team. Brown goes so far as to speculate whether Peter can work well with Guillermo Del Toro.

Well, Ryan Gosling really is too young to plausibly play the father in Bones (the same reason Stuart Townsend was replaced as Aragorn by Viggo Mortensen), and Howard Shore has said that he will be scoring the Hobbit films. Shore’s departure could not have been horribly contentious, if he wants to come back.

News sites have been slower to acknowledge that on May 3 ComingSoon.net posted a story strongly suggesting that the rumors were nothing more than that. (The original story on Flicks, linked above, has an update mentioning the ComingSoon posting.) They got their information from a spokesperson at DreamWorks/Paramount:

Turns out, the movie was never scheduled for March 13 at all, there has not been a delay of “rfit,” and a fall 2009 launch was always the plan. DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider cleared up the issue by telling ComingSoon.net, “It was a very smooth shoot with no dissent, and all heaven sequences requiring sets or Art Dept involvement were completed on schedule in March. The only shooting remaining involves blue-screen VFX elements, which will be shot in June.

That seems plausible to me. It’s pretty specific, for one thing, rather than being some vague claim that all is well. VFX elements, which are bits that will be combined into digital effects shots, would typically be the last things filmed. In 2003, I briefly visited the studio in Wellington where the last shooting for The Return of the King was going on, and those were for effects elements.

So I think that Peter probably has not gone mad with power.