The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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November 4 : 2009

An entertaining and discreet interview with GdT

We’re still in that frustrating period where we know things are going forward on The Hobbit, but the filmmakers are not allowed to tell us anything. They’ve all signed confidentiality agreements, and besides, they don’t want to reveal spoilers. Yet the studio also wants to keep our interest up.

TheOneRing.net alerts us to an interview with Guillermo del Toro on Total Film. I enjoyed reading it. Guillermo is a charming and entertaining interviewee. I can’t say that I learned much of anything that I didn’t know before. Hints of design decisions, but nothing very specific. But that is the point of interviews at this stage: to entertain without revealing. The interview concludes by saying that principal photography begins in “late spring.” Or late autumn, if you live in New Zealand.

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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.”