THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING The Abridged Script By Rod FADE IN: INT. NEW LINE STUDIOS PETER JACKSON is meeting with various NEW LINE EXECUTIVES. PETER JACKSON ..and that's my proposal. What do you say? EXECUTIVE #1 Wait, so, you want three hundred million dollars to create nine total hours of film for an adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? PETER JACKSON Nearly twelve hours for the full editions. EXECUTIVE #2 And you want us to greenlight this based on your previous work of... (consulting a memo) A movie about rat monkeys and flesh eating zombies and an unfunny comedy ghost movie starring Michael J. Fox? PETER JACKSON Right. And I want all the money up front, because I demand that I be able to make all three films at the same time. The executives stare at JACKSON as if he just took a shit on their rug and autographed it. Miraculously, he is allowed to adapt the trilogy and ACTUALLY FUCKING PULLS IT OFF. Lord of the Rings: The Abridged Script Lord of the Rings was a fucking miracle. People don't know. When Disney says "Fantasy movies lose money" they weren't wrong. Willow was a catastrophe. Dragonslayer was so expensive they didn't actually finish it. Krull? Who the fuck watched that? John Boorman nearly blew himself up on Excalibur and Ridley Scott nearly blew himself up on Legend. But as with most things, It doesn't work until it does. When I found out that the guy who did Dead Alive also did The Frighteners I was pretty goddamn amazed. When I found out that they'd given him $300m to go play with Tolkien I couldn't believe it; neither could anybody else. Not mentioned in the article is that the damn thing was so expensive that New Line had to partner with Fox and Warner just to swing it; I can't remember the deal but I think Fox got domestic distribution and Warner got foreign. One thing I think it had going for it that doesn't get mentioned much - Ralph Bakshi had taken it on in 1978 and had failed. So there was already a playbook of what not to do, and so long as Peter Jackson promised not to repeat anything that didn't work, he couldn't be blamed too completely for failure. Neither could anybody else. So it was never going to be an Ishtar or Howard the Duck. And then the trailer came out and it looked so goddamn good it made you want to buy a burger king glass.