XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: steuard@slimy.com   
      
   [I've posted this on my blog, but it clearly belongs here, too.]   
      
   Peter Jackson confirmed recently that he will make The Hobbit into   
   three movies, rather than two as formerly planned. To my eye, this is   
   a spectacularly bad idea. Why, you ask?   
      
    * The Hobbit is shorter than any of the three volumes of The Lord of   
      the Rings. Stretching it into two films already seemed like it   
      would require a lot of filler; three just seems like madness.   
      
    * Given that the book was aimed largely at children, one might have   
      hoped that the movie would be good for kids, too. But a three-part   
      series already makes that implausible, and almost every bit of new   
      material I can imagine adding to the main story would make it more   
      mature in tone.   
      
    * Harry Potter worked as a series of films because it was seven   
      self-contained stories. The Lord of the Rings held up as three   
      films because it was truly epic in scale. But The Hobbit is (for   
      the most part) a simple adventure story, much of it just a series   
      of loosely connected episodes with just one major plot arc from   
      beginning to end. Yes, it has an epic backdrop, but that's not   
      central enough to the main story to sustain an epic-scale film   
      trilogy.   
      
    * One of the stories that Jackson fears "would remain untold" without   
      a third film is "the Battle of Dol Guldur". Mr. Jackson, if I don't   
      know how the White Council "attacked" Sauron to drive him out of   
      Mirkwood, I'm pretty sure that you don't, either. Apparently you   
      think it was a battle. Why am I not surprised?   
      
    * Copyright law puts Jackson in a bit of a Catch 22 here. He has the   
      rights to make a movie based on The Hobbit and LotR (including its   
      appendices). He emphatically does not have the rights to use   
      material from Tolkien's other books such as The Silmarillion or   
      (most notably) Unfinished Tales. (Nor will he: the Tolkien Estate   
      is rich enough that its priority is protecting Tolkien's legacy,   
      not making more money. And Christopher Tolkien abhors the way that   
      Jackson warped the essential themes of LotR.)   
      
      That's a problem. If I wanted to expand upon the story told in The   
      Hobbit, the first place to look is absolutely "The Quest of   
      Erebor", a section of Unfinished Tales containing a scene that   
      Tolkien removed from the concluding chapters of LotR shortly before   
      its publication. In it, Gandalf explains much of the backstory to   
      The Hobbit: why he was involved at all, what his interactions with   
      Thorin were like when Bilbo wasn't there, and all sorts of other   
      details that would be impossible to guess specifically from the   
      appendices to LotR. Other sections of the book are relevant, too,   
      as are bits from other books.   
      
      Jackson can't use any of that material without opening himself to a   
      lawsuit that would have a good chance of blocking release of the   
      films entirely. But if he invents his own clearly-different   
      replacements, he's deliberately changing Tolkien's story. Of   
      course, he's done that before with less justification, but for the   
      previous films he still claimed repeatedly that he was doing all he   
      could to bring Tolkien's vision to life. This time, making that   
      claim could get him into deep trouble.   
      
      The easiest way to avoid those issues would be to make The Hobbit   
      into just one film, or maybe two, and simply not address them in   
      substantially more depth than the original book did. But these are   
      essential topics for tying the new story together with the old one,   
      and it would be hard enough to avoid delving into them in two   
      films. In three, it seems all but impossible.   
      
   After writing all that, I saw a wonderfully concise statement of the   
   issue that someone shared on Facebook: "Bilbo's reaction to the   
   announcement of a 3rd movie was actually already quoted in The Lord of   
   the Rings: 'I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over   
   too much bread.'"   
      
   Anyone else have thoughts on the three-movie idea?   
      
          	    					Steuard Jensen   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)