On Friday TheOneRing.net posted a story about Variety‘s story of the same day, concerning New Line’s successful transition into making a smaller number of medium-budget genre films. Many of those who clicked on the link, however, must have run afoul of Variety‘s new pay-wall. Being a subscriber, I’ll pull out some more bits of information and try to tease some inferences out of them.  (For those who subscribe or who want to sign up to get a few Variety articles free, the story is here.) more »

For anyone who has been wondering what ever happened to co-presidents of New Line Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne after they left the studio, Variety has a story on their new projects. Their production company Unique has announced a slate of eleven films, including a musical based on a children’s story by Paul McCartney, with McCartney involved, and some fantasy films. They have a first-look deal with Warner Bros. and apparently enjoy being back to the hands-on production that characterized NL before it grew into a super-indie with LOTR.

Yesterday the New York Times published a major story by Michael Cieply on the current state of New Line Cinema. It’s based largely on an interview with president and COO Toby Emmerich and Richard Brener, who oversees production, but there are quotations from Peter Guber (working on a project for NL) and founder and ex-president Robert Shaye, among others.

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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. more »

Back on December 16, I wrote a short entry on “The Irony of New Line’s Success.” At that point I was linking to a Patrick Goldstein story in the Los Angeles Times online. Now Dave McNary offers more indication of that irony, plus some interesting new information, on Variety’s website. more »

It’s been just over ten months since the February announcement that Time Warner was folding New Line Cinema into its main film-production wing, Warner Bros. That happened very quickly, and a large majority of the New Line staff got laid off, including bosses Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne. I blogged about it here and here.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the irony of the fact that most of New Line’s films this year (all conceived and finished or put into production under the old, independent New Line) have been quite successful. It had three films go over $100 million in domestic box-office grosses: Sex and the City, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and now Four Christmases. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay grossed less—but it cost a lot less to make, so it was a success. Only Pride and Glory has been a disappointment. I had vague thoughts of blogging on the subject.

Now I don’t have to, because it turns out that Patrick Goldstein, of the Los Angeles Times, has been thinking along the same lines. He’s written a piece, “Back from the Dead, Hollywood Style.” Take a look at the comments, too. It sounds as though Warner Bros. may have spent more than necessary to market these pics, thereby losing some of the cost savings supposedly accruing from the New Line absorption.

Goldstein seems to have some sort of special relationship with Bob Shaye. He published a very useful interview with Bob Shaye on December 11, 2001, just before The Fellowship of the Ring came out. (Unfortunately the LA Times online doesn’t go back that far.) It was very helpful when I was writing The Frodo Franchise, and I quoted it several times. Goldstein has written quite a bit on New Line and Shaye since then, so he may be a bit partial to the studio. Still, it remains to be seen whether the films New Line has put into production since February will be as successful as these leftovers from the previous regime.

In Chapter 9 of The Frodo Franchise, I discussed how The Lord of the Rings had a positive impact on independent and foreign-language film markets around the world. Shortly after a major slump hit those markets in 2001, the first part of the trilogy pumped money into the overseas distribution companies that had helped finance LOTR. They in turn put that money into buying more films, helping bring the slump to an end.

For many international independent distributors, New Line was a major source of films. Now with the studio absorbed into Warner Bros., it is no longer distributing its own releases. Warners has its own international distribution system, and it now handles all of New Line’s films.

On “Observations on film art and Film Art,” I’ve just posted an entry on how other companies are moving in to supply overseas distributors. It’s clear from what some of the people running those companies say that the impact of Rings is still being felt. The distributors who benefited from the trilogy are still around and still buying films. As I said in the book, “The international art cinema has emerged the better for this ‘Hollywood’ blockbuster.”

Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times has scored the first interview with New Line Cinema’s founder and ex-president Bob Shaye since the indie studio was folded into Warner Bros. (This online version is longer than the one that appeared in print yesterday.) There’s a little discussion of Shaye’s new company, Unique Features, but mostly the talk centers on New Line. Shaye betrays a lot of emotion over Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s decision to fire most of New Line’s staff. He also remarks, “I just wish he’d let us go a different route and buy the company, but that just wasn’t in the cards.” Why not? I suspect that New Line’s library of past hits, including The Lord of the Rings, made it too valuable to part with, and the revival of the studio’s most lucrative franchise with The Hobbit and “Film 2” and all their potential ancillaries makes New Line a very desirable asset, even in its reduced form.

The interview makes for an interesting read, and the comments section gives a good indication of how controversial a figure Shaye remains within the industry.

Variety reports that Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne’s new independent production company has been named “Unique Features.” In mid-June, the pair signed a three-year first-look contract with Warner Bros. That means that they must offer any project they undertake to Warner Bros. for distribution. If Warner doesn’t want the film, they can shop it around to other distributors.

As fans know, Shaye and Lynne departed New Line, the company that Shaye founded in 1967, early this year as part of the downsizing that accompanied Time Warner’s absorption of New Line into its main film production/distribution wing, Warner Bros. Apparently there are not enough hard feelings to prevent the pair from setting up this new arrangement with their former parent company. Unique Features plans to make two to three films per year.

Despite New Line’s problems in recent years, as we all remember, it was Shaye who in 1998 undertook to produce The Lord of the Rings as three feature films and to allow all three to be made simultaneously in New Zealand under Peter Jackson’s supervision. Fans of the film trilogy owe a lot to Shaye, and I for one wish the new company well.

I am currently abroad, attending the wonderful festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, in Bologna, Italy. All week they’re showing restored prints of old films, retrospectives of major directors (Lev Kuleshov and Josef von Sternberg), and all sorts of goodies. Being away from my desk, I can’t blog very well.

Naturally there has been a major development in the Tolkien Trust lawsuit, and I’ve missed it. I would imagine anyone who reads my blog regularly reads TheOneRing.net as well, so you are all probably more up to date than I am at the moment. But for a short, very informative account of the latest, see here. TORN has also linked to a Variety story summing up New Line’s current situation and upcoming slate of films.

So much has happened to New Line this year that once I get home (next week), I plan to write a long entry summarizing the main events since Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes first announced that he was going to fold New Line into parent company Warner Bros. Shortly after that I’ll be blogging from Comic-Con. I also plan some reviews of the new scholarly anthologies on the film trilogy. Here at the festival I ran into one of the editors of a German anthology, which he says he’ll send me. My high-school German is kind of rusty, but I’ll try to figure out enough to give general information about it.