The new Brian Sibley biography of Peter Jackson reveals his yearning to return to his roots – filming low-budget sequels to splatter comedy Bad Taste. The book also talks about other projects PJ and Fran have considered directing, including a film about the NZ/Australian forces at Gallipoli in WWI and a film about an American WWI flying ace. [More]
Category: Original TORn
TORN Staffer MrCere sends this along: Colin Havard: An Inkling’s Son Remembers J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis. Presented with Mike Foster, today at St. Louis Community College, South County Education & Training Center, 4115 Meramec Bottom Road, St. Louis, Missouri. Mark Colin Havard, the son of Dr. Robert (Humphrey) Havard of Oxford, who was the personal physician of Tolkien and Lewis as well as a member of the famous “Inklings” fellowship, occasionally attended Inklings sessions along with his father. [More]
Cheley sends in word of an event at the London Heathrow Thistle Convention & Events Centre. Dominic Monaghan is slated to appear at a CelebEvents event on June 9th, 2007. Take a look at the link for more info. [More]
In an extract from his biography of Peter Jackson, Brian Sibley, tells of the director’s early struggles to make The Lord of the Rings. In 1994, the director Peter Jackson and his writing partner Fran Walsh, fresh from the success of Heavenly Creatures, were signed to an exclusive three-year “first look” deal by the Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein. “First look” deals allow a studio to pay overheads for writers and directors to come up with ideas. The studio then gets the option to turn those ideas into films. With the deal signed, Jackson and Walsh set to work on the screenplay for their adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series: by 1997, they had completed a draft script that abbreviated the trilogy into two films.
Having completed their 92-page outline, Peter and Fran flew to New York for creative meetings with Miramax, which took place in a room nicknamed “the sweatbox” after the small airless rooms where, in the early days of film, movies got shown and discussed. In the middle of summer, with no windows and no air-conditioning and the obvious tensions involved in presenting a treatment for an ambitious movie project, the room lived up to its name. [More]
The Forbes.com website ranks 13 celebrities pushing up daisies on their income and proves that death need not be an obstacle to making money, with the group collectively earning 247 million dollars in the last year…J.R.R. Tolkein, the creator of the Lord of the Rings epic, slid three places since last year, but the success of the film trilogy, DVD sales and offshoot merchandise have continued to make a killing for the English writer. [More]
From The Hollywood Reporter (via movieweb.com): Sands hopes to resuscitate MGM with several big new films. He’s packaging the fourth “Terminator” film — it will be titled “Terminator blah blah, not Four,” Sands joked — with a new star likely to fill the Arnold Schwarzenegger role. “It’s like the “Batman” or “Superman” franchise in that it lends itself to having different actors in the roles,” he said.
Sands is in discussions with New Line Cinema to get the rights to produce two prequel films to “The Lord of the Rings” series, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, he said. Other projects he mentioned include a sequel to “The Thomas Crown Affair,” set to star Pierce Brosnan, and a remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, according to The Hollywood Reporter.