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.
and then it was so good, no one got in his way while he bent the Hobbit over and abused it out back behind the bleachers. I'm getting tired of people getting "so good" that no one is allowed to tell them "no". Even the Jacksons, the Scorseses, and the Lucases need an editor.
I actually got mad yesterday when I saw that Apple is giving Scorcese money. I'm so fucking over Scorcese. One of Shamalyan's assistants told me once that it took him seven drafts to realize that Bruce Willis was dead. Which was the last time anyone made Shamalyan write seven drafts of anything.
I actually really, really like some Scorsese. but I really don't like much of it. And the Irishman just made me mad, mad, mad. I have SO MANY bad ideas.... but my wife, my confidants, my limited financial resources, and my lack of fame and/or power prohibit a lot of them from coming to fruition. I guess when you're that famous/rich/powerful - no one tells you "no".
Aw man... Bakshi was EVERYTHING in the 70's! His Heavy Metal and The Hobbit were core elements at my coming-of-age. When I think of The Hobbit, I think about what it sounded like when my Dad read it to us, as children, and Bakshi's animation. Those are still my touchstones for the visual version of Tolkein. ... which may be why I never finished Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Shit, Bakshi was everything in the '80s. We recently subjected my daughter to The Secret of Nimh and that dude is fuckin' weird. It occurs to me that we basically traded the Disney/Bakshi duopoly for Disney/Dreamworks and culture is definitely worse off for it. For the record, Bakshi had nothing to do with Heavy Metal. He had everything to do with Rock & Rule, which is somehow weirder.
Welll sheeeeeit. Heavy Metal wasn't Bakshi after all. My childhood is ruined. (Or, misinformed.) That rotoscoping of the mob scene from LOTR was - in my head - from the Heavy Metal movie, with Black Sabbath's "Mob Rules" behind it: All my childhood memories are seeping together into one primordial soup...
Heavenly Creatures is interesting, weird, good and memorable. It's also a capital-A Art Film and, in my opinion, what probably helped sell Lord of the Rings because it showed that he's got range. You look at Heavenly Creatures and go "I'll bet I'll see more films by this guy" while you look at Frighteners and go "I wonder what that guy's up to." There are Goth Girls of a Certain Age who were pretty heavily into Heavenly Creatures. They don't get along well with the Goth Girls of a Certain Age who were pretty heavily into The Craft and Poison Ivy II.