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The Frodo Franchise

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS..............................................................xiPREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................xiiiLIST OF INTERVIEWS.................................................................xviiABBREVIATIONS......................................................................xxiINTRODUCTION: SEQUEL-ITIS..........................................................1PART ONE THE FILM1 / Prudent Aggression.............................................................172 / Not Your Father's Tolkien......................................................533 / Handcrafting a Blockbuster.....................................................75PART TWO BUILDING THE FRANCHISE4 / Flying Billboards and FAQs.....................................................1055 / Click to View Trailer..........................................................1336 / Fans on the Margins, Pervy Hobbit Fanciers, and Partygoers.....................165PART THREE BEYOND THE MOVIE7 / Licenses to Print Money........................................................1938 / Interactive Middle-earth.......................................................224PART FOUR THE LASTING POWER OF THE RINGS9 / Fantasy Come True..............................................................25710 / Right in Your Own Backyard....................................................282NOTES..............................................................................333INDEX..............................................................................371

Chapter One

I always got the impression that, as far as studios go, New Line definitely had a tradition of allowing the filmmaker to run with it. RICK PORRAS Coproducer, The Lord of the Rings

THE STORY HAS A CHARMING David-and-Goliath quality. A Hollywood studio entrusts hundreds of millions of dollars to an eccentric, largely unknown director from a distant country where film production barely exists. He undertakes to adapt a beloved classic book with a devoted cult following-a large cult, certainly, but hardly enough to ensure box-office success for such an expensive venture. The director refuses to leave the little country, instead building a world-class filmmaking infrastructure in his neighborhood. He shoots three long features simultaneously and creates the biggest box-office franchise in history. To top it off, despite being in the despised fantasy genre, the three parts of The Lord of the Rings win a total of seventeen Oscars.

These days, any expensive Hollywood feature that actually makes it to the screen relies on considerable luck and travels a circuitous path to completion. That said, Rings needed-and had-more lucky breaks than most, and its path was circuitous indeed. Peter Jackson has pointed out just how unlikely success might have seemed at the outset:

If you were entrusting $270 million to someone making three movies, you wouldn't choose me. You would not choose a little New Zealand digital effects company to do your digital effects, either. And you wouldn't choose Philippa Boyens, who's one of our co-writers, to write the screenplay, because she has never written a script before in her life [laughs]. I like the way that this project has, somehow, against all common sense, gotten itself made.

True in a way, but we should probably amend this to "against all apparent common sense." Hollywood studios do not make such important decisions on whims, and the executives at New Line Cinema and the many other companies that invested in and ultimately made large amounts of money on Rings had solid reasons for thinking that there was a decent chance of success.

Despite the high budget and his own lack of a track record, Jackson was able to keep a remarkable degree of control over the Rings project, partly by making the film far from New Line headquarters, partly by having sympathetic producers working with him, and partly by sheer stubbornness. (Ian McKellen described him as "a terrier" when it came to disputes with the studio.) The proof was also in the pudding. Even during the early design and shooting stages of production, Jackson and his team were able to show visiting New Line officials props, sets, costumes, and computer images that convincingly displayed the high quality of the work that was going into the films.

So it was common sense, although of a very high order, that brought Rings along its convoluted path from cult fantasy to major international franchise.

ZAENTZ AND ZAENTZ ABILITY

Projects to adapt Rings into a film began within a few years of the three volumes' original publication in 1954 and 1955. On 4 September 1957, Forrest J. Ackerman, then a literary agent, visited Tolkien and presented him with some sample pictures and a treatment for a proposed animated film based on the novel. Although Tolkien was impressed by the images, he heartily disliked the synopsis and in June of the following year wrote a lengthy critique of it ("[Morton Grady] Z[immerman] may think that he knows more about Balrogs than I do, but he cannot expect me to agree with him").

Yet Tolkien was pragmatic. For many years before the royalties for Rings started to appear, he had supplemented his modest professor's income by drudging at exam grading during the summer. Fearing that the royalties from the trilogy would decline, Tolkien was willing to talk terms: "[Publisher] Stanley U[nwin] and I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author's veto on objectionable features or alterations." Rayner Unwin soon succeeded his father as Tolkien's editor at Allen & Unwin. Inexperienced in coping with movie rights, the firm hired a Hollywood agent-who ultimately proved of little assistance. In 1959, Ackerman abandoned his project. During the previous year he had founded the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. As part of his subsequent role as the guru of horror fandom, he would also appear in cameo roles in numerous films, including Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992).

In 1967, two producers, Gabe Katzka and Sam Gelfman, set out to obtain the film rights to Rings, intending to make a feature for United Artists. Unwin writes that their inquiries started "a negotiation of nearly two years' duration that was eventually consummated in a fifty-page contract, the complexities and uncertainties of which have dogged the publishers and the author's estate ever since." In October 1969, the contract was finally signed, and "what seemed substantial sums of money" were paid. "Complexities and uncertainties" may refer to the fact that the contract granted the film rights in perpetuity, rather than the normal arrangement of a limited period of time. The lapse would prove crucial to Jackson's project.

During the two years of negotiations, Apple Films, the Beatles' production company, also became interested in adapting Rings, to star the Fab Four. Apple discovered that the rights to the novel were apparently soon to belong to United Artists. Given that the group's first...