The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 

Archive for the 'Hobbit marketing' Category

February 11 : 2011

Low-key press conference introduces the dwarves and Bilbo

The publicity campaign for The Hobbit finally seems to be underway. A press conferences was held yesterday at Park Road Post, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s state-of-the-art editing, sound-mixing, laboratory, and effects facility. (It was formerly called The Film Unit, for those of you who have been watching the making-of information since way back when LOTR was still being made.)

Tehanu, whose spy reports for TheOneRing.net gave that site a high profile early in the filming of LOTR, has contributed her own account of the press conference, with comments.

A full video of the press conference is here. Unfortunately the microphones aren’t set up in a way that makes the questions from the press out in the audience easy to hear, though the actors’ responses are plenty audible. (You can hear Tehanu–dimly–at about 14:45 minutes in.) A lot of the discussion is pretty predictable, how wonderful New Zealand is and how the actors are bonding. Around the 9-minute mark there’s some discussion of the 1000+ people working on the film, the actors’ preparations, and so on. Around 10:30 in there is a mention that at least some of the songs in the book will be in the film.

About 12:30 in, there’s a discussion about the casting process. At 33:30, some information on the scale doubles.

At the end, the cast all go out into the courtyard garden for a photo op. That garden, with its little waterfall and pond, were under construction during my 2004 visits to Wellington for interviews relating to my book. It’s thriving now, and a bright Wellington summer sun was shining for the photographers.

The thing that struck me about the press conference was how low-key it was. None of the big film trade papers like Variety or The Hollywood Reporter was apparently invited. The reporters all seemed to be local, and there weren’t all that many of them. There weren’t reporters all jumping in to ask a question. Indeed, there was a long pause at the beginning, and gaps between questions. That seemed like a good idea to me. No doubt there will be big press junkets later on, but for now the publicity is being handled in a casual way that seems very Kiwi in spirit.

    The Frodo Franchise
    by Kristin Thompson

    US 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.”