A full week after the theatrical release in North America, cyberspace will be host to the LOTR Trailer. According to the Wall Street Journal. We have independent confirmation from our Ringer Staff member Leo (lordoftherings.nl), who is always on the ball!
Day: January 10, 2001
Ringer Spy IM sends in word from The Wall Street Journal Website.
I was looking at WSJ online and they have an article about LOTR (the one I just posted -Xo), along with the article, they have an image of what must be the new look of the official site!
From: The Wall Street Journal
New Line Cinema Gives ‘Rings’ Trilogy
A Big Push on Web for Obsessive Fans
By ANNA WILDE MATHEWS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The first installment in New Line Cinema’s “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy won’t hit theaters until December. But this Friday, the studio’s “Rings” Web site will begin serving up behind-the-scenes tidbits such as how makeup artists glued hair on the feet of the movie’s mythical Hobbits.
It’s a resource that only the most obsessive fans of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy saga are ever likely to plumb thoroughly — and they’ll get plenty of time to try. The new, more elaborate version of the site is the center of a five-year online promotional push that may represent the most ambitious Web effort yet by a Hollywood studio. With military precision, New Line plans to roll out a stream of information on the making of the “Rings” movies several times a week from now in to 2004, when all three movies will have been released.
The goal is to have “new stuff happening constantly, so [Web users] will want to keep coming back,” says Joe Nimziki, president of theatrical marketing for New Line, a unit of Time Warner Inc. The site’s content will be available in 10 foreign languages, including Finnish, Japanese and Swedish.
The online push for “The Lord of the Rings” series may be a sign of where Hollywood is going in its quest to exploit the Internet. Film Web promotions have largely been limited to sweepstakes, basic games and publicity photos. No site thus far has been able to match the online success of 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,” which managed to create hype with a series of mysterious online teasers.
Hoping to do the same, some filmmakers are starting to view their Web efforts as long-term projects that can stoke interest in films and their tie-ins long before — and after — they hit theaters. Starwars.com (starwars.com), for one, continues to draw hundreds of thousands of monthly users.
For the coming film “Tomcats,” Revolution Studios started an online contest, in which users would vote on casting extras, a year before its scheduled release this spring. Threshold Entertainment, which owns online entertainment site TheThreshold.com (thethreshold.com), plans to launch Internet prequel episodes more than a year in advance of a planned animated film titled “Food Fight.”
But few such efforts will be as high profile, or high stakes, as New Line’s project for the “Rings” epic, which follows the quest of a band of adventurers to destroy a magic ring sought by a powerful evil lord. The studio — which declines to discuss its online expenses but says partner companies are sharing them –chose to film all three “Rings” movies in one marathon shoot in New Zealand. Though the productions are on schedule, the projected cost of the effects-rich trilogy is now at $270 million, up from earlier estimates of about $180 million. The films will be released in the holiday seasons of 2001, 2002 and 2003.
The launch of the new version of the site (lordoftherings.net) was carefully timed to coincide with the U.S. debut of the theatrical trailer on Friday. (The trailer won’t be shown online until Jan. 19, after it has been shown in other theaters around the world.)
Online interest in the films is already ferocious. New Line launched the first version of the site in May 1999 and soon was providing basic production facts as well as message boards and community sites for “Rings” fans. Today, Tolkien aficionados have on their own created about 400 Internet destinations, flooding the Web with information including grammatical deconstructions of the novels’ made-up languages and weather conditions at New Zealand airports. An online preview trailer from New Line drew about 1.7 million downloads in 24 hours in April, and more than 35,000 people have joined online clubs that users set up using the studio’s Web site.
The challenge for the new version is to “expand the audience while respecting the core audience,” says Bob Friedman, co-chairman of world-wide marketing for New Line. The updated site is designed to satisfy both those who are looking for the basics on “Rings” stars like Liv Tyler and Elijah Wood, and for Tolkien worshippers who require a steady diet of much more detailed information.
Michael Regina, a Montreal college student who edits news on TheOneRing.net (theonering.net), says he plans to be sitting at his basement computer when the new online material goes live at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, so he can rush to post summaries and comments. He has been getting more than a hundred e-mails a day about the new trailer and site.
The current site already gets about 100,000 visitors a month, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research firm. But so far they tend to skew toward middle-aged men, with relatively few female users. To reach new fans, the studio has worked closely with the online arm of E! Entertainment Television, which has a following among women. New Line has also forged an alliance with software firm RealNetworks Inc., which will create a button on its popular Web video player that guides users directly to a “Rings” Web channel. The studio also hopes to work with the American Film Institute on a Web-based educational curriculum built largely around the making of the trilogy.
The new version of the “Rings” Web site will include interviews with people who worked behind the scenes, such as a production worker who helped make boulders for the set and a sculptor who will discuss stylistic differences in the furniture used by the Elf and Dwarf characters. New Line will also offer features accessible only to people who download a special “Rings” browser.
The site will build up its trove of information gradually. It will begin with descriptions of the film’s crew, listing the names of every member, right down to the employees who handled the horses. Eventually, it will include interviews and videos of nearly every crew and cast member.
The site will also explain the construction of the Hobbits’ village and how actors were transformed into Hobbits, from the application of foot hair to the making of their pointy Latex ears. Later, an interactive map of the story’s setting, Middle-earth, will highlight sections dedicated to other races in Tolkien’s fantasy world and their home regions.
The logistics for gathering such material were complex. Much of the online video comes from two documentary film crews that haunted the set for months. New Line’s senior vice president of world-wide interactive marketing and business development, Gordon Paddison, posted his own digital cameraman to New Zealand to gather three weeks of Web-only video footage. The New Line staff sifted through boxes of videotapes, eventually editing them down to brief digital segments. Mr. Paddison himself estimates he sat through about 40 to 50 hours of “Rings”-related video.
To create foreign-language versions of the site, New Line worked with its overseas distributors to translate some 70 pages of text. Mr. Paddison and his three-person staff regularly get late-night calls from their partners overseas about problems such as rendering the unique “Lord of the Rings” logo font into other languages. In one early setback, some distributors’ workers accidentally threw out CD-ROMs containing graphics for their sites; future updates will be sent via e-mail.
From New Line
From: Gary
I caught a superb program this morning on the Ovation network that other readers of this site may want to know about. It was shown this morning from 8-9 am EST, and will be shown again this afternoon (1/10/01) from 3-4 EST, and tonight at 8 pm EST. Future showtimes are:
Tuesday, January 16, 2001 – 9:00:00 PM
Wednesday, January 17, 2001 – 1:00:00 AM
Thursday, January 18, 2001 – 1:00:00 PM
It was billed as part of a series called “Masters of Children’s Literature” so I didn’t have very high hopes for it. But it covered all the bases. Lots of interview footage of Tolkien himself, his son Christopher, Alan Lee, Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s publisher George Unwin (among the very first to read “The Hobbit” — when he was 10, from Tolkien’s typed manuscript!), and many others. The movie wasn’t mentioned (this program was dated 1998), but it presents Tolkien’s life and all of his work (and not just “The Hobbit,” as I’d suspected) very fully. I’ve been following Tolkien since 1965, and I saw things here I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I particularly treasure one bit of footage: a close-up of Tolkien’s hand as he inscribed one of his books, in Elvish.
Purist fans and beleaguered heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien may hate it, but a star-studded cast in a trilogy based on Lord of the Rings is reigniting new interest in an old classic
Patchen Barss
National Post
Do Balrogs have wings? When John Ronald Reuel Tolkien published his three-volume book The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955, he never expected obsessed fans to wake him at three in the morning trying to find out the answer to this and countless other minutiae.
His children know better. With New Line Cinema planning to release a trilogy of film adaptations over the next three Christmases, Tolkien’s survivors are wishing they had magic rings that could make them invisible.
“The Tolkien family is under perpetual abuse of one kind or another,” John Francis Reuel Tolkien, J.R.R.’s eldest son told The Sunday Telegraph recently. “I am anticipating endless bother when the film actually comes out.”
The bother may start sooner than he thinks: The trailer for the movie appears in theatres on Friday (attached to the movie Thirteen Days) — almost a year before the Dec. 19 release of The Fellowship of the Ring, starring Ian McKellen, Ian Holm, Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler and Sean Bean. Note that when a trailer was released on the Internet last April, it was downloaded 1.7 million times within 24 hours.
For the unintiated, Balrogs (evil fire spirits) are one tiny part of a pantheon of elves, dwarves, wizards, goblins and men who populate Tolkien’s fantasy world, Middle-earth. It all started when the former professor of Old English reputedly wrote a single sentence on a sheet of blank paper in a student’s exam booklets at Oxford: “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
Tolkien, who died in 1973, loved creating mythologies; he told stories to his children about Hobbits, a generally sedentary race of small people who love good food and home comforts (the holes they lived in were dry and warm). Eventually, he adapted these into what was expected to be a money-losing book about one such furry-footed hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who became swept up in an adventure with a pack of rowdy dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf. The Hobbit, published in 1937, immediately made children’s recommended reading lists.
The publisher asked for a sequel and Tolkien delivered The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King (known collectively as The Lord of the Rings). They tell the story of Frodo Baggins, Bilbo’s nephew, whom Gandalf enlists to destroy a magic invisibility ring that Bilbo had found during his adventure. The ring, it turns out, is the source of power for the evil necromancer Sauron, and it must be hurled into a volcano in order to be destroyed.
Much compelling adventure ensues, including a battle between Gandalf and a Balrog in the underground caverns of Moria. “Suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall,” Tolkien wrote, unwittingly starting a decades-long debate about whether he meant this literally or metaphorically.
In the sixties and seventies counterculturalists adopted Tolkien’s books and people eagerly dropped acid while they read The Lord of the Rings. In the 1980s, the books fed the imaginations of a generation of Dungeons and Dragons gamers. The series consistently places at or near the top of public polls on favourite books of the 20th century, with sales of some 50 million. But despite the proliferation of Web sites, fan clubs and Tolkien societies, an authoritative film version has never, until now, been attempted (although there exists a made-for-TV cartoon version of the final volume, and a much classier animated movie of the first book and a half).
With a budget of $250 million, New Line’s star-studded live-action films will become definitive even for many longtime fans, meaning the producers must take a stand on many contentious issues other than Balrog wings, including whether Legolas the Elf was blond, and whether female Hobbits have furry feet.