Re: Countdown to Release | SPOILER THREAD

[Ally]

It won't be 'The Hobbit' as such, but that doesn't mean it will be bad
Have faith in PJ

[Eldorion]

Sadly, these films not being The Hobbit are the least of my concerns about them at this point.

[Mrs Figg]

I understand the concerns, it could be all buttered too thin, but on the other hand I like the flexibility of mind that says, lets change our ideas lets rewrite things, its a risk he is taking but who better than him to understand all this, I doubt the studio would take these risks without good planning and solid reasoning, its their money at stake, they were already nervous after cinemacon, it must be a persuasive argument, there is too much at stake for a half baked plan.

[Eldorion]

You mean thin, sort of stretched ... like butter scraped over too much bread?

I suspect that the studio is on board with this plan because it gives them three films of $$$ instead of two, and once you have a mega-popular franchise, you're going to make boatloads of cash even if the quality goes down. Case in point: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.

I'd like to be more optimistic but even though I've thought about this a lot, I don't see how this would end well. I'd like to be proven wrong, but I'd like having only two Hobbit films max even better.

[Lancebloke]

Petty - what do you think. Might give PJ a ring when I get home...

They could get Cate to tell the story of Turin somewhere in the middle, slaying of the father of dragons to make Bilbo feel better (not sure why they would meet.... sure that could be made up).

Could try and explain where the swords came from... maybe a fall of Gondolin movie in the middle?

Maybe a flashback to the battle of the last alliance from Elrond's POV trying to explain why he is uncomfortable getting the (now tight) set of armour on to go to Dol Guldur.

They could tell the story of fall of the north kingdom and the subsequent entombing of the 9 (or however many tombs there are).

A Dol Guldur board meeting explaining the construction of Barad Dur (like when the dude in Star Wars epi.3 disappeared with the death star schemeatics at the end)..

Options are endless

[Eldorion]

(I really hope that is a joke post. Please don't read this forum PJ.)

[Ally]

To be fair to PJ, I don't think he would do it personally for personal wealth. The studio, for sure. But I've been watching him now since the LOTR docos, and the production videos & stuff, and I genuinely think he loves making movies in ME with a cast, production team etc, that he really loves working with
He's always like "oh no last day and the cast is like "love you family "

[Eldorion]

That's a fair point, Ally. It makes sense with what we know about PJ from the past too; he never did seem good at saying "enough is enough". I suppose that makes this a little more palatable but the end result for the films likely won't be very different if they do go through with this.

It's a little funny to think back to the long years when PJ insisted that he wasn't going to direct in Middle-earth again. I am glad we got him and not GDT though. I don't think GDT's style would have fit The Hobbit at all.

[Norc]

I can live with an extended backstory for dale and the trading between Men and Elves and more backstory about the dwarves' history, it would make sense to try an get the audience to conect with the story this way, but to bring in more, that has nothing to do with the hobbit or the dwarves' battle against Smaug, e.g Moria, Frodo and the Ring, Aragorn, the White Council and Sauron, is just.. well scary. I want the Hobbit. Not every single saga of middle earth crammed into two, possibly three, movies. there is no need for it. And as Eldo points out, there isn't much story-material so that they can make a bridge movie, so PJ making things up is a big nono (just take Tauriel, maybe not completely his idea, but you get my point). If they want more Middle Earth movies, then take the goddamn Silmarillion, Beren and Luthien, Hurins Children! Not the barely 300 pages long CHILDREN'S BOOK "the Hobbit"! Let us focus on Bilbo and his journey and not the bloody dwarves, elves, men, wizards and villains!

[Mrs Figg]

the newest Star Wars trilogy was the most boring load of drivel ever, at least whatever PJ does is top notch, from the actors he chooses to the Weta cgi, everyone loves ME. I do agree its more like a family for PJ and everyone seems to have a blast, I suppose in a production that large its a minor miracle it all gets done on time, it must seem chaotic and lumbering like a great big Oliphant, but its probably amazing to be actually on set.

[Norc]

oh, it probably is... *dreamy eyes*

[Eldorion]

I just read an interesting article on Deadline. The reporter talked to Peter Jackson about the possibility of a third film and there's nothing new there, but the specifics of what PJ had to say made me extremely crabbit.

http://www.deadline.com/2012/07/the-hobbit-going-for-a-trilogy-its-possible/

That goes back to JRR Tolkien writing The Hobbit first, for children, and only after did he develop his mythology much more over the 16 or 17 years later when The Lord of the Rings came out, which is way more epic and mythic and serious. What people have to realize is we’ve adapted The Hobbit, plus taken this additional 125 pages of notes, that’s what you’d call them. Because Tolkien himself was planning the rewrite The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings, to make it speak to the story of The Lord of the Rings much more. In the novel, Gandalf disappears for various patches of time. In 1936, when Tolkien was writing that book, he didn’t have a clue what Gandalf was doing. But later on, when he did The Lord of the Rings and he’d hit on this whole epic story, he was going to go back and revise The Hobbit and he wrote all these notes about how Gandalf disappears and was really investigating the possible return of Sauron, the villain from The Lord of the Rings. Sauron doesn’t appear at all in The Hobbit. Tolkien was retrospectively fitting The Hobbit to embrace that mythology. He never wrote that book, but there are 125 pages of notes published at the back of Return of the King in one of the later editions. It was called The Appendices, and they are essentially his expanded Hobbit notes. So we had the rights to those as well and were allowed to use them. ... We haven’t just adapted The Hobbit; we’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We’ve explained it using Tolkien’s own notes. That helped inform the tone of the movie, because it allowed us to pull in material he wrote in The Lord of the Rings era and incorporate it with The Hobbit.

There is a grain of truth in this, but it's such a misrepresentation of the facts that PJ is either incredibly disingenuous or else outright lying. Tolkien did not simply plan to rewrite The Hobbit to make it more mature and LOTR-like, he actually began to do so! He got a few chapters in and then abandoned the project after being told that it just didn't feel like The Hobbit anymore. Anyone who has read the good biographies of Tolkien can tell you that he was not one to let negative feedback stop him when he felt strongly about writing a certain way. More telling is that a few years later, Tolkien did return to The Hobbit to revise it (resulting in the Third Edition of 1966) and when he did so he preserved the unique tone and nature of the book.

The Appendices, on the other hand, have no connection to Tolkien's abandoned rewrite of The Hobbit. They were in fact written several years before that project. Some of the details in the Appendices are relevant to The Hobbit, but the vast majority of them have nothing to do with it. They are, obviously, much more relevant to The Lord of the Rings and the vast backstory of that work. While there is some relevance to The Hobbit, it is only a small portion of the 100+ pages of the Appendices. They are certainly not "Tolkien's expanded Hobbit notes"; such a statement could only have been made out of ignorance or willful deception. I don't find either possibility to be particularly encouraging.

/rant

[Norc]

I fully support you rant Eldo.

but for now I just want to appreciate some of the good that came out of last videoblog.

[Pettytyrant101]

Ok deep breahths. Now. Ready.

THIS IS A FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA AND PJ IS A LIAR!

Ahh thats a bit better.

[Eldorion]

How's the ol' crabbit meter doing, Petty?

(There's really nothing to do but laugh at this, other than getting angry. )

[Pettytyrant101]

Its being redesigned by the boffins Eldo- see originally it was to read crabbit levels in releation to violation of Tolkiens name- now it has to also account for crabbit generated by excessive PJ lying and bullshit.
The boffins tell me this is proving trickier than first thought due the immense upsurge in pure shite coming out of PJ's mouth. Its going to take a whole new complicated set of crabbit mufflers (techncial boffin term) to prevent mass explosions every time PJ opens his gob.

[Norc]

i don't thikn he's lying, just that he doesn't really know. And Eldo, laughing, that's the spirit!


(we need a tabs up emoticon)

[Pettytyrant101]

Incompetence and ignorance in this area Norc, given he has been adapting Tolkien for over 10 years is probably even worse than him lying.
But I find it very hard to believe he doesn't know that the crap he is spouting about the appendix is just that- a pile of crap and untrue. Therefore liar. And why lie?- to justify churning out more crap and raking in more money using Tolkiens name to sell something which increasingly has less and less to do with Tolkien and his writing. Its disgraceful is what it is.

Bollocks to him! Enough is enough its time to call PJ out for what he is.

[Eldorion]

I think PJ knows that many of his defenders do in fact value faithfulness to Tolkien and would be very upset with him if he ever stopped paying lip service to the idea. However, he also knows from his experience with LOTR that so long as he insists that he's being faithful he'll be accepted regardless of what he actually does. However, the reaction to recent news surrounding The Hobbit seems to suggest that this may not be as true as it used to be, even in bastions of liberalism like TORn.

[Pettytyrant101]

One can but hope and try to help them see the crabbit light of truth Eldo.

[Mrs Figg]

I have talked to a Tolkien boffin about PJs saying the appendices are extended Hobbit notes and he says,

''If you are thinking of Peter Jackson's recent comments, the answer is "sort of." Jackson is perfectly right to say that Tolkien developed and contextualized the printed Hobbit story a great deal while working on the LOTR, and he included much of this extra story material in the Appendices of the LOTR. More was published later after Tolkien's death in Unfinished Tales. Remember that the LOTR grew out of The Hobbit, but that the story grew tremendously, and Tolkien had a lot to do to fit the Hobbit story into the bigger and quite different story of the end of the Third Age that grew in the 17 years after the Hobbit was published. It is all this stuff that Peter Jackson is drawing on for his film material''.

so in essence, what the heck is all the fuss about, and why is PJ being accused of lying when he is not?

[Pettytyrant101]

To quote our own Tolkien boffin Mrs Figg-

' Tolkien did not simply plan to rewrite The Hobbit to make it more mature and LOTR-like, he actually began to do so! He got a few chapters in and then abandoned the project after being told that it just didn't feel like The Hobbit anymore. Anyone who has read the good biographies of Tolkien can tell you that he was not one to let negative feedback stop him when he felt strongly about writing a certain way. More telling is that a few years later, Tolkien did return to The Hobbit to revise it (resulting in the Third Edition of 1966) and when he did so he preserved the unique tone and nature of the book.
The Appendices, on the other hand, have no connection to Tolkien's abandoned rewrite of The Hobbit. They were in fact written several years before that project. ' -Eldo

Or are you saying our Lore Master is wrong Mrs Figg?

Perhaps your Tolkien expert can point out where Radagast covered in bird shit, bunny sleds, boar riding dwarves and Nazgul tombs are hiding in the appendix! If he adds all that when he is not making a 3rd film what crap will he add when he is?

"It was called The Appendices, and they are essentially his expanded Hobbit notes"- PJ

This is a lie Mrs Figg. As Eldo has pointed out they were written before the attempt to rewrite TH. Obviously he was thinking alng those lines and parts of the appendices are relevant to TH- but a very small percentage of them- or is PJ claiming the history of the Numenoreaon Kings, or of Rohan and Gondor, or the tale of Aragorn and Arwen are just 'expanded Hobbit notes'- because that is a blatantly ridiculous suggestion.

[Eldorion]

I have talked to a Tolkien boffin about PJs saying the appendices are extended Hobbit notes and he says,

''If you are thinking of Peter Jackson's recent comments, the answer is "sort of." Jackson is perfectly right to say that Tolkien developed and contextualized the printed Hobbit story a great deal while working on the LOTR, and he included much of this extra story material in the Appendices of the LOTR. More was published later after Tolkien's death in Unfinished Tales. Remember that the LOTR grew out of The Hobbit, but that the story grew tremendously, and Tolkien had a lot to do to fit the Hobbit story into the bigger and quite different story of the end of the Third Age that grew in the 17 years after the Hobbit was published. It is all this stuff that Peter Jackson is drawing on for his film material''.

so in essence, what the heck is all the fuss about, and why is PJ being accused of lying when he is not?

I didn't deny that Tolkien expanded his conception of The Hobbit greatly after its initial publication, and I also noted that there was an element of truth in PJ's statement. However, the Appendices are not "Tolkien's expanded Hobbit notes". They have nothing to do with the abandoned rewrite that Jackson discussed for most of the quote and in fact have much more to do with The Silmarillion (not to mention LOTR itself) than with The Hobbit. I don't know who the "boffin" you talked to is, but PJ's statement is not "sort of" true. It's a gross exaggeration and is misleading at best. As I noted in my previous post, however, that doesn't necessarily mean PJ was lying as he could have been speaking out of confusion.

I note that the person you quoted mentions that Tolkien "included much of this extra story material in the Appendices". This is something of an exaggeration. Tolkien did include part of what was eventually published in fuller form as "The Quest of Erebor" in Unfinished Tales in the Appendices. This passage mentions Gandalf's and Thorin's meeting at Bree and establishes some context for the Unexpected Party, but it's only 2-3 pages long out of approximately 125 pages of Appendices (by PJ's reckoning). It's also different from the abandoned 1960 rewriting of The Hobbit -- which followed the same basic model as the original -- but is instead framed as a recollection of Gandalf's years after the events.

[Pettytyrant101]

Confusion after supposedly studying Tolkien for more than 10 years to adapt it is worse in my book. I find it highly unlikely he simply didn't know he was talking a load of crap- its a delibrate misrepresentation to justify what he is doing. In these parts we call that a lie.

[Mrs Figg]

wow aggressive! obviously I am not allowed my own opinion on this am I? If it doesnt tow the 'we hate PJ mandate'.