I’ve been working to a deadline on the revision of David’s and my textbook, Film Art: An Introduction. That has gone to the press now, though, so I can catch up on blogging. One item that has been sitting on my desk is Ted Turner’s 2008 autobiography, Call Me Ted.

To refresh your memory concerning Turner’s involvement with The Lord of the Rings, it arose from the fact that in 1994 his company, Turner Broadcasting System, bought New Line Cinema. In turn Turner Broadcasting System was bought by Time Warner in 1996. At that point, Miramax was negotiating with Saul Zaentz to acquire production rights to LOTR for Peter Jackson to direct. New Line eventually bought those rights from Miramax in the summer of 1998.

Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were the co-heads of New Line, which operated pretty autonomously within Time Warner. But they reported to Ted Turner. According to Turner, he had both direct and indirect influence in the decision to make the trilogy on an epic scale. Here’s the relevant passage, which is talking about the 1996-8 period (pp. 338-340):

Throughout this period I continued to spend time with the divisions that reported to me, and I enjoyed working with Mike Lynne and Bob Shaye at New Line Cinema. They were great entrepreneurs and while they had built their business primarily with smaller budget films, I challenged them to spend more money on bigger projects.

Disney’s Miramax had controlled the rights to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but when director Peter Jackson wanted to shoot the first two movies at the same time, they balked. When Jackson had brought the project to New Line, Mike Lynne and Bob Shaye had a different idea. After seeing a demo tape of how he envisioned mixing real people with hobbits and showing the new technology he planned to use for the big crowd scenes, the New Line executives encouraged Jackson to consider shooting all three films at once. Jackson loved that idea and when the concept was finally brought to me for approval, I loved it, too.

Mike and Bob were very creative but they were also great businesspeople; over the years they had figured out a way to lower their risk on movies by getting up-front advances from international distribution partners. Moving forward with an unproven, expensive trilogy was a major gamble, but when Bob and Mike told me that they wanted to do it I enthusiastically agreed. It turned out that I was giving a green light not only to what was by far New Line’s most expensive venture ever, but a project that would become the most successful trilogy in movie history. Even after the efficiencies gained by shooting the three films at once, the total production expense was more than $300 million (only slightly less than what three individual Star Wars movies might cost), but taken together these movies grossed nearly $3 billion at the worldwide box office and generated an even greater amount in home video and merchandise sales.

When the third of these films won the 2003 Oscar for Best Picture, I was right there, cheering.

One passage here is slightly misleading. Miramax’s head, Harvey Weinstein, fully intended to allow LOTR to be made as two films. It was scripted and budgeted as such. When Michael Eisner, in a fit of cost-cutting, insisted that the project be cut to a single two-hour film, Peter rebelled and persuaded Weinstein to put the project into turnaround. That’s when New Line seized the opportunity to make the film, with Shaye suggesting it be divided into three parts.

Turner’s autobiography has brief passages written by his friends and colleagues inserted at intervals. The one printed in this section is by Lynne, and it offers a few extra scraps of information (p. 339):

Ted was significantly influencing our decision making going back to 1994 and 1994 when we were doing Mask and Dumb and Dumber. We were still committed to modest budget films-I think Dumb and Dumber cost $16 million-it’s what we had always done. But there was a time when we were down in Atlanta for a management meeting and in the course of talking about the movie business, Ted said, “You know what the problem is? We’re not making enough hundred-million-dollar movies.” He turned and he looked at Bob and me across the table, and with everyone else in the room, he said, “You guys should make really, really big movies; maybe the most expensive movies that have ever been made!” We all laughed because at that point we probably had never made a movie for more than $35 million.

This was not really an actionable plan but in a funny way this statement stayed in the back of our heads and from time to time Ted would reiterate this point and keep pushing us to stretch and do the kind of big blockbusters that he had in mind. He really believed-maybe a little more than we believed it at that time-that we could deliver at the level of any major that was out there if we had the wherewithal to do it. So when The Lord of the Rings came along, the idea and the concept and the potention was so extraordariny that we decided that it was the right thing for us to do.

It seems that if Turner hadn’t taken this attitude, Shaye would not have been so willing to risk making LOTR as three films. Interesting stuff, and it adds to the account of that decision in Chapter 1 of my book. One more reason, in addition to the ones I give there, why Shaye had reasons to make that gamble.