The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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July 17 : 2008

a documentary with LOTR connections and some interviews

Today TheOneRing.net announced that its team will be interviewing Richard Taylor and John Howe at Comic-Con. That event will happen at the Weta Workshop booth (#2615) at 4:00 on Thursday, July 24.

The interview is in connection with a forthcoming documentary on Renaissance martial arts, Reclaiming the Blade, produced by Galatia Films. Richard and John will be in the film, as will Viggo Mortensen, Karl Urban, and Bob Anderson (who taught the main actors swordfighting for the trilogy). John Rhys-Davies will narrate. These Comic-Con interviews will discuss Richard and John’s other project as well.

Immediately after the interview Richard and John will autograph mini-posters for the film. The interview itself will be recorded on video, which will then be posted both on TORN and on the Reclaiming the Blade website.

Snooping around the latter, I discovered that Galatia has posted some short videos on YouTube. One, from April 23, has excerpts from an interview with Richard at Weta Workshop. Another, posted March 26, features Mortensen and Anderson. Check out the index page, with links, here.

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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.”