Fans have long dreamed ''Lord of the Rings'' director Peter Jackson would tackle J.R.R. Tolkien's ''The Hobbit,'' but a nasty legal battle with New Line Cinema has made it impossible. Now, at last, a cease-fire may be at hand
Last month, in the academic journal Science, paleontologists presented new evidence that they had discovered an overlooked relative of prehistoric man. Officially, they've labeled the species Homo floresiensis unofficially, they're calling them ''hobbits'' but by any other name what they've found are the 18,000-year-old fossilized remains of a three-foot-tall hominid with a recessed chin and a brain the size of a Wiffle ball.
As it happens, they're digging for hobbits in Hollywood, too. The kind with a thing for finger bling and a knack for raking in billions at the box office. Up until a few weeks ago, it was looking as if this breed might be extinct as well, wiped out by dark lords more powerful than Sauron himself entertainment lawyers. But now the legal battle that's kept The Lord of the Rings' prequel, The Hobbit, hung up for years a bitter feud between Rings director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema co-chairman Robert Shaye may finally be nearing resolution. For once, there's reason to be cautiously optimistic. At this writing, no agreements have been announced and details of the negotiations are sketchy (neither New Line nor Jackson's camp would comment to EW on any aspect of this story), but sources close to the talks tell us that they're detecting a lot less frost in the air, and that a deal may be reached that could help usher J.R.R. Tolkien's maiden Middle-earth masterpiece to screens before the end of the decade. ''There has been a dιtente,'' says one insider. There is now the beginning of a discourse between Peter Jackson and New Line that's running parallel to the litigation proceedings.''
Okay, so it's not the sort of declaration of peace that sets church bells clanging. But it is a vast improvement from just 10 months ago, when Shaye and Jackson duked it out in the press and the studio co-chief angrily told a reporter that the director was too arrogant for his tastes, adding ''I don't want to work with that guy anymore.'' Besides, in Hollywood, any movement on this long-stalled project is major news. It was The Hobbit, after all, that first introduced the world to the lovely and terrifying universe of Middle-earth. The novel is set about 60 years before Lord of the Rings, and for many readers who dove into Tolkien's work as kids, it retains a warmer glow in memory than the daunting and sometimes slow-moving trilogy. Its hero is one Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming homebody hobbit who gets dragooned by one wizard and 13 dwarves into an adventure during which he relieves a dragon named Smaug of an ill-gotten treasure and the wicked Gollum of a certain all-powerful ring. Only a few LOTR cast members make return appearances in this earlier tale. But the story has precisely the same themes of loyalty and unexpected bravery that made the Rings series huge. And by huge we mean gargantuan, with each film earning about a billion dollars worldwide between 2001 and 2003, along with 17 Oscars, including ones for Best Director and Best Picture. In Hollywood, in other words, The Hobbit is that rarest of magical creatures a sure thing.
And that's what makes this lawsuit mess so mystifying. What disagreement over Lord of the Rings could possibly be so important, so personal, that both sides would blow a potential billion dollars in revenue over it?
The irony is that once upon a time, Peter Jackson and Bob Shaye gave each other the greatest gifts of their careers. In 1998, Jackson's bid to make LOTR as three separate films as opposed to two, or even one had been rejected by virtually every studio in Hollywood. Shaye and New Line were his last hope, a fact the director camouflaged by calling a couple of times to reschedule the appointment with New Line because of his supposedly hectic itinerary. Jackson and Shaye made for an odd pair: a shy Kiwi perennially in short pants and bare feet, and one of the last real Hollywood mavericks, who was so fond of his sunglasses that Jack Nicholson once took to calling him ''Bobby Shades.'' What Jackson and Shaye did have in common was a kind of fearlessness and an absolute indifference to what other people thought was financial or creative suicide. Shaye greenlit Jackson's dream of a trio of $100 million fantasy films about elves and dwarves. (Not even Harvey Weinstein had the stomach for that; he told Jackson he'd sign on for only two. Because he was an executive producer, he wound up with a cut of the box office anyway.) And Jackson gave Shaye a $3 billion franchise and a new image for his company. New Line, which Shaye launched 40 years ago by discovering such camp classics as Reefer Madness and marketing them out of his apartment, is no longer best known for A Nightmare on Elm Street or Austin Powers.
There's invariably tension between studios and filmmakers during production. New Line learned quickly that despite being grateful for the job, the director and his partner, Fran Walsh, were not people to be shoved around. So there were scuffles and hurt feelings of varying magnitudes on both sides, all of which was compounded by the industry perception that Shaye had literally bet his studio on The Lord of the Rings. The first public indication that all was not well came around 2003. The second LOTR installment, The Two Towers, had earned its billion dollars, and it began to dawn on cast members that they weren't exactly sharing in the wealth. (Two sources close to the production recall a principal player receiving a merchandising residual check for 45 cents.) Eventually, after the bigger-name actors hinted they'd be too busy to do further publicity for the films, New Line coughed up extra bonuses. (The second-tier performers have since filed a lawsuit alleging that the studio withheld merchandising revenues.) Then came rumblings from producer Saul Zaentz. He had bought the film rights to the LOTR trilogy and The Hobbit from United Artists back in 1976 UA partner MGM retains distribution rights to The Hobbit and in 2004, Zaentz filed a lawsuit too, claiming that New Line wasn't paying all it owed him in royalties. His case was settled a year later for an undisclosed sum, but by then Jackson was elbows deep in his own audit of New Line's financial records.
Nobody enjoys getting audited, but it's a fact of life in Hollywood. Shaye, however, seemed to have taken Jackson's audit personally. ''It rankled him,'' notes one observer. ''Like, 'I gave this guy his shot where does he get off?''' Shaye had apparently forgotten that Jackson was not just some cuddly Kiwi. When New Line began planning to sell the LOTR props and costumes at auction, Jackson intervened and said that he'd like to have them, both for sentimental reasons and for a museum he hoped to set up one day. The studio balked. Jackson then pointed out that he had never signed a contract for the extended Return of the King DVD. He informed New Line that he'd be happy to accept the costumes and props as his fee the suggestion being that he might not work on the DVD otherwise. Those extended cuts had become far richer revenue streams than anyone could have predicted. Jackson got his props. The relationship between the filmmakers and the studio at that point was said to fall somewhere between hellish and nonexistent.
November of 2003, Jackson and Walsh sat in their private theater in New Zealand, making last-minute tweaks to the trilogy's final film, The Return of the King. ''The ghosts are looking good, but to my eye the heroes are a little big,'' Jackson said of a sequence known as the Paths of the Dead. He drew circles on the screen with a laser pointer, then moved on to the close of the movie where Sam Gamgee returns home and embraces his family. The shot needed the slightest tweak. Jackson asked his special-effects team how long it would take. Ten days, he was told. ''No, no, no, no,'' he responded. ''Ten days would cause cardiac arrest in L.A.'' Walsh smiled. ''That's not such a bad thing,'' she said. As tittering spread throughout the theater, Jackson turned around: ''Show of hands, everybody?''
If the audit irked Shaye, the worst was still to come. In February 2005, Jackson filed his suit against New Line, claiming the studio had been dragging its feet providing documents to his auditors. The lawsuit asks for no specific dollar amount in damages, but insists that Jackson be allowed to examine the studio's books, looking into matters such as how New Line, a division of Time Warner, sold the ancillary rights to his films. (Entertainment Weekly is also owned by Time Warner.) In several instances, New Line struck deals with companies within the Time Warner family, such as Warner Bros. Records and the TBS cable network. If Jackson can show that New Line could have signed more profitable deals with outside companies, he might be able to demand some significant lost revenue.
In any case, once the lawsuit was filed, The Hobbit was roadkill. New Line did approach Jackson about making the movie at least once, in the fall of 2006, promising to settle the dispute (and pay him an appropriate amount) if he agreed to make the film. No dice. Jackson continued to insist a settlement had to come first. He'd already gone on to make King Kong. For Universal.
The low point came last November, when Shaye actually ''fired'' Jackson from The Hobbit. Jackson took the fight directly to the people. ''[We were told] that New Line would no longer be requiring our services on The Hobbit,'' Jackson wrote in a memo posted on the fansite TheOneRing.net. ''This was a courtesy call to let us know that the studio was now actively looking to hire another filmmaker.'' Shaye erupted. In January 2007, he blasted Jackson in a now-famous public tirade. ''I don't care about Peter Jackson anymore,'' he railed to the Sci Fi Wire website. ''He thinks that
we owe him something after we've paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars!''
Shaye didn't appear to be bluffing. New Line began dangling The Hobbit in front of other directors. Like Sam Raimi. (''Peter Jackson might be the best filmmaker on the planet right now,'' the Spider-Man director told EW in March, but ''if Peter didn't want to do it...'') Not that anyone thought it was the greatest idea. ''Frankly, anybody else would be a secondary choice,'' says one high-profile movie executive. ''It won't be the movie people want.'' It certainly wouldn't be what Ian McKellen wanted; the actor, who played Gandalf in the trilogy, has been waging a one-wizard campaign to get Jackson back behind the camera, asking both sides to settle their differences. ''I should have relished revisiting Middle-earth with Peter,'' he wrote on his website. Viggo Mortensen's character, Aragorn, doesn't figure in The Hobbit's plotline, but even he can't imagine the film being made without Jackson. ''He's the ideal candidate,'' Mortensen tells EW. ''In their heart of hearts, New Line [knows] he's ideal.'' Many fans would argue that Jackson isn't merely ideal for The Hobbit, but indispensable. His vision is now synonymous with Tolkien's as is the work of his F/X houses, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. ''Would fans go see the movie if someone else directed it?'' asks the editor-in-chief of TheOneRing.net, Michael Regina. ''Maybe 90 percent would, but they'd be upset about it. It would break their hearts.''
It wouldn't be the sunniest scenario for Bob Shaye and New Line, either. In fact, time may be running out to launch the movie. On some not-too-distant date, the rights to The Hobbit will revert back to Zaentz. Most insiders guess it's 2010. To make the movie then, New Line would have to renegotiate assuming Zaentz would want to do business with them again on much more expensive terms and with plenty of competition from other studios. And there may be another deadline: Shaye and studio co-chair Michael Lynne reportedly have only until late 2008, when their contracts with New Line are said to expire. Not much time to add one last Tolkien triumph to their legacy.
But the real pressure on New Line right now is coming from the courts. Last month the company was fined $125,000 for failing to provide requested accounting documents. Even in the weeks before that ruling, there were signs that New Line's hard line was beginning to buckle. ''Notwithstanding our personal quarrels,'' Shaye told the L.A. Times this August, ''I really respect and admire Peter and would love for him to be creatively involved in some way in The Hobbit.''
Finally, an olive branch.
Of course, even if the lawsuit is settled tomorrow, there are still a few details to iron out before The Hobbit could get made. Like a script, for instance, which nobody has actually written. In the past, Jackson has suggested that he would make two films, with the second one filling in the story arc between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of Rings. Although Tolkien never wrote a novel bridging the eras, he did scatter clues in shorter pieces and epilogues that could form the basis of a screenplay. This is not unprecedented. Jackson, Walsh, and screenwriting partner Philippa Boyens enhanced the Rings love story between Mortensen's and Liv Tyler's characters with material from Tolkien's extensive appendixes.
Still, it's hard to imagine Jackson having time to direct one Hobbit movie, let alone two. He will soon begin shooting his adaptation of the best-selling novel The Lovely Bones in Pennsylvania. And after that, he's scheduled to make Tintin with Steven Spielberg. There's speculation that New Line might offer him a deal to executive-produce The Hobbit, letting him pick a proxy director and oversee the production. That might be enough to keep fans' hearts from breaking, but would it be enough for Jackson? Amazingly, after all he's been through eight years making Rings and several more in court fighting over it the Shire still holds him in its spell. In fact, Jackson may turn out to be the only person who never once lost hope in the movie. Even in 2003, when his relationship with New Line was quite bleak, Jackson was still giving editions of The Hobbit as gifts. ''Great book,'' he wrote in one copy. ''Wonder when the movie's coming out??''
I like the Second of the three parts.To me it was the best.GTO
