Peter Jackson is giving out a lot more news at Comic-Con that we might have expected. I thought he might insist on sticking to the upcoming horror film District 9, which he produced, but he was generous with bits of news on all his projects.

Some of the accounts circulating on the internet are old news-like informing us that The Hobbit is to be made in two parts, with the first one due out in December of 2011. Here’s what I’ve gleaned that really is news, at least to me. Some of these accounts will overlap, but just so we can parse the subtle nuances . . .

Peter held a private news conference for a lucky few journalists. Among them was McCere, of TheOneRing.net, who has posted two entries with extensive quotations. The first was on the scripting process:

“We are about three weeks I would say, give or take a little tailwind, we are about three weeks from turning over the first script for the first film to the studio.”

The handed-in script is a big step to making the dream of the film a reality, Jackson explained because it allows the studio and filmmakers to come up with a shooting schedule and a budget. The budget for the first film will be an indicator of the budget for the second film, giving studio and filmmakers a chance to start negotiations with actors, agents and to put all the needed pieces in place to make a movie.
The process is getting to the 1st-draft stage isn’t as simple as some might imagine.

“We worked on an extended treatment of the two films which we pitched to the studio on a long conference call. That was about three or four months ago. That went well and they liked the idea. (Before) none of us where really sure if it should be one film, or if it should it be two films,” he said.

“There was talk about doing ‘The Hobbit’ as one movie and making an ‘Hobbit,’ and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ bridge movie. We didn’t really know ourselves but as we worked through the story line we thought ‘Well obviously we could squeeze ‘The Hobbit’ into one movie, but In a three hour movie you would be amazed at how much of the story you would have to lose.”

“The book, well the book is what the book is and we just worked through a process and included all the events that we would like to see in the film, plus the fact that we wanted to embellish a few things and put a little extra narrative that includes Gandalf and what he was doing with the Necromancer and various side stories that are happening. So we decided really that the two movies we are doing would actually would be ‘The Hobbit.’ “

And a second, on what the scripting process means for planning, especially budgeting, scheduling, and casting:

“People assume we have a green light and we are making the movie, which we don’t. We have to deliver the script and the studio has to approve the script and then we have to budget that script because we have no budget yet. They aren’t going to make the film with an open checkbook so we have to figure out how much it’s going to cost and if that is going to be okay.

“So we have a process to go through. Once we get the script delivered we can break it down, we can do the budgeting, we can figure out schedules and we can move on to the second script that we have to obviously start writing immediately.”

“And then we can start casting the movie. Once we have a budget and once the studio green-lights the movie, at that point we can start casting. Everybody assumes then we have been casting and they are waiting for announcements which isn’t the case at all.”

TORN has posted a five-minute video podcast of Quickbeam (Cliff Broadway) talking to McCere (Larry Curtis) about the PJ interview.

Entertainment Weekly online got a sit-down video interview with Peter (why? presumably because it’s owned by Time Warner), and although it covers some of the same ground as the McCere account, here are some quotations I transcribed from it. First, on the scripting, casting, etc.:

The truth of the matter is that we’re about three weeks away from finishing the script. I mean, the truth of it is, and this may seem really weird, but we haven’t actually got a greenlight yet. Like the studio haven’t said “yes” to us making the film. They want to see a screenplay, and they want to see a budget, which are perfectly reasonable things to ask for.

So we can’t offer any actors any roles until we go through a process of delivering a script that the studio like and want to make and then delivering a budget that is a safe and sensible budget for them to go with. So that’s going to take us a couple of months, and then we’ll cast the movie. So there’s a lot of fan speculation about casting, but everyone is a little bit ahead of the game. They just have to be patient for a couple more months.

I think Peter’s pretty clear and straightforward here about how the filmmaking process works and why he can’t satisfy the fans by making any firm casting announcements. As Larry says in the podcast, “All the casting rumors are silly at this point.” Cliff finds it amazing that the film’s not official yet.

So let me, as a film historian, try and explain a little more for fans frustrated by how long all this seems to be taking.

Since the beginnings of Hollywood back in the World War I era, the script has been crucial for the planning of any film. Not just because it tells the actors what to say, but because it gives a shot-by-shot description of things that set designers, cinematographers, special-effects people, and all the other specialists who work on a film need to know. Up to the last few editing decisions and the computer rendering of images, these specialists are consulting the script, because that’s what allows all their separate efforts to be combined seamlessly into what we see on the screen.

Think of it as a blueprint. A architect can’t say how much a building will cost to make until that technical plan is complete. Or think of it as a prototype for a major new model of car. The prototype might take a long time to create and it might involve a huge investment even before the company decides whether to go ahead and manufacture that model on a mass scale. That’s the stage we’re in now with The Hobbit, and until the scripts are ready, New Line Cinema doesn’t really know what it’s committing itself to.

(As I explained in The Frodo Franchise, in August of 1998, when New Line announced that it had taken over production of LOTR from Miramax, it kept the original “more than $130 million” budget figure–not because they thought a three-part film could possibly cost that much, but because the three scripts had not been finished. Once they were, the budget was announced as $270 million.)

This is not to say that there’s any doubt that New Line will greenlight The Hobbit. They’ve already seen the treatment (a detailed prose summary of the movie). Peter, Guillermo, Fran, and Philippa are unlikely to come up with something that will come out of left field for the studio execs (who, according to Peter, will apparently include some Warner people as well as New Line ones).

We know that the Hobbiton set is being replanted so that it will be ready next year for filming. We know that Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis and perhaps others are just waiting for that call so that they can sign on the dotted line and get ready to pack for a really long visit to New Zealand. We know that Alan Lee and John Howe and other major conceptual artists have been working for months on the look of The Hobbit. It’s all going to happen, but it’s not official yet.

All this may seem as if the scripting phase is lasting longer than it did with LOTR, which is far from true. Actually the scripting for the trilogy lasted from early 1997 to the beginning of principal photography in October of 1999. Even then, the writers famously tweaked dialogue and other elements continuously during filming.

That scripting lasted so long because the trio of writers had to start nearly from scratch when the project went from being two parts at Miramax to three parts at New Line. But back in those days, there wasn’t nearly as much media coverage of the project as there is now–to say the least. There may have been spy reports on the internet, but there weren’t constant interviews and cover stories in magazines. The first big article with on-set photos that appeared in a magazine was in the October 2000 Vanity Fair, little over a year before Fellowship’s premiere! This time every media outlet in the world seems to have been focused on this story since before there was any real beginning.

Other PJ Projects

Empire online’s story on the Comic-Con news covers a lot of ground. (Thanks to Antonio for alerting me to it!) Here’s the latest on individual projects.

A little scrap on The Hobbit:

On the dwarves He said that he and Guillermo del Toro are particularly enjoying writing for the movies’ unruly mob of dwarves. “We have 13 dwarves to cast – it’s going to be a lot of fun. Though there’s 13 poor guys who are going to be walking around the mountains in summer wearing heavy costumes, sweating under their prosphetic make-up. It’s going to be tough. And logistically tough – imagine getting those guys through wardrobe at the beginning of each day and then shooting… They’ll be passing out from heat. It’s going to be tricky.”

On the second Tintin movie:

“My role in it is mainly to keep an eye on the production and the effects shots, as Weta are doing the visuals,” he says. As for the second movie, he reveals that production is pencilled in for the second half of 2010, a year before the first one’s release. “I’ve got to get through The Hobbit first, then we’ll move onto that. At the moment we’re keeping our options open, but I am very partial to The Seven Crystal Balls/ Prisoners Of The Sun. I’m going to read them all again before deciding which to have a go at.”

The EW interview quoted above adds some details. The first Tintin film, directed by Steven Spielberg, is currently at the first-cut stage. It will take two years to do all the animation and rendering needed for the final product. (The film has to be edited first because no one wants to pay for expensive rendering on shots that won’t end up in the final cut.) Peter drops the remark that he hasn’t decided which Tintin books to include in the second film, and that he and Spielberg would like to do a longer series if the first films succeed.

On the Temeraire books:

“That’s really exciting,” he says. “I’ve got some conceptual art that we’ve been working on and now am trying to figure out the best thing to do with that story. I’m wondering whether it should be some form of mini-series, because it’s six books and I really don’t like the idea of doing the first one as a big-budget movie and it not doing well enough at the box-office to make all the others. The six books make such a compelling series that I think a mini-series might be the way to go.”

The Dambusters is still a go, being now in R & D. They’re testing 3D cameras for the aerial footage. I’m not entirely a fan of 3D, but that does seem like one project that could really take advantage of it. (Christian Rivers is still slated as director.)

Apple is scheduled to premiere the Lovely Bones trailer online April 6, and the physical trailer will be on prints of Julie & Julia, released this coming Friday. Coincidentally, I saw the Julie & Julia trailer yesterday, attached to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I liked the latter, and I thought the trailer made Julie & Julia look pretty hilarious–so maybe I’ll go see that and get a glimpse of The Lovely Bones.

Finally, for those of us who couldn’t be there and who thus missed TheOneRing.net’s panel, here’s Dana Vinson’s then-live blog entry from the event.

And going beyond finally, TORN has just linked to some additional Comic-Con coverage. Mostly these stories cover the same ground. The New York Times story, however, is a more general one but is the first I’ve seen to mention the Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s first-ever Comic-Con appearance, promoting Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea. It’s referred to just as Ponyo, which I guess is going to be its American release title. This is my number-one anticipated movie of the summer, due out in limited release on August 14, according to the Internet Movie Data Base. I just hope that under John Lasseter, Disney will be able to market this genius’ work to the American public better than the studio has in the past. Fans of fantasy, don’t miss it!