WHAT WENT WRONG - The Lord Of The Rings (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

The Lord of the Rings directed by… Quentin Tarantino? Planet of the Apes starring… Arnold Schwarzenegger? Hugh Jackman never playing Wolverine??? Let Part 1 of Chris & Lizzie’s three episode exploration of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings be proof that we definitively do not live in the darkest timeline.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop Bad. Just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one. Lizzie, it's great to be back. I'm feeling like Kim Cottrell scatting with her husband while he's playing the base. How you doing? I'm good. I'm feeling like Gallum with his hands on some fishes. I'm so excited for this season and so excited.

excited for what we're about to dive in. I don't know if I still will be at the end of episode three, but at the beginning here, I can't wait. It's a long journey to the cracks of Mount Doom. But before we get into that, a couple of announcements. We are back, of course, for our fifth season, we've put together an incredible lineup for y'all. Yes, and as Chris said, we do have some announcements. We've updated our Patreon to make it easier for you to participate and make your voice heard. So here's the Reader's Digest of what's going on in the land of Patreon. Now, for those of you

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That Virginia twang. That Virginia got W. WWW. What about the wrong podcast out? You'll get updates on the pod and be able to make your voice heard. We are also adding a $3 tier that we're calling full-breasted waterfowl, one of our favorite terms from Howard the Duck, that gives you access to all of our episodes ad-free. No ads, a private RSS feed. If you're already a patron at the $5, $10, $20, or $50 level, you will be

getting your RSS link to the ad-free feed via Patreon this week. And for our $5 patrons, we're adding a monthly newsletter with updates and musings on the industry. Think of these as a more in-depth ripped from the headlines. Of course, you will still be getting our below the line and ripped from the headlines episodes, beginning with an interview with the incredible casting director Wendy O'Brien. Wendy's credits include It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Abbott Elementary, Angie Tribeca, Sons of Anarchy, which I was a pretty big fan of, and many, many more. We're so excited for you all to hear that. And finally, if you hop on that $50 train all the way to full Stop Town, you'll get a limited edition, What Went Wrong, Hoodie, and let's just say it might feature

the text, Big Time Flopper. Hell yeah. Pretty excited about these. Our first poll the season is already up. It's a sci-fi extravaganza featuring Back to the Future, Galaxy Quest, Brazil, and Star Trek The Motion Picture. So if you're already a patron, make sure you get your vote in. If not, what are you doing?

It's free. Now, on this podcast, we try to highlight. the myriad ways in which unforeseen circumstances, small errors in judgment, and clashing personalities can doom the most promising of film endeavors. However, sometimes a film comes along that literally feels like a miracle. I don't mean that hyperboically.

I mean it literally. A director and a property are matched at the perfect moment, and a film is made that feels so immediately timeless that you wonder where it's been your entire life, even as you marvel at the ingenuity of each compounding set piece. and for me, the epitome of movie magic is the Lord of the Rings. I agree.

Specifically, the Fellowship of the Rings. Yes. I am thrilled. I would argue the Fellowship of the Ring is one of the greatest films ever made. However, Lizzie, this franchise was far from a surefire hit. We will learn how a scrappy, low-budget horror comedy director from New Zealand, a country of 3 million people, partnered with the studio most famous

for creating Freddie Kruger to make the most beloved trilogy of the 21st century. But first, the details, Lizzie. The details? Well, let me just say this first, going into this. This is not a small commitment,

dear listeners, that we have made in re-watching all three of the original Lord of the Rings movies. We have not done The Hobbit. yet, although I imagine that is a disaster that we will wade into in later episodes. But I just want to flag, I fucking love Lord of the Rings. I'm so excited. I did not mind sitting there for 10 hours and watching all of them. I just think this is my one little fun fact about myself when I was, I guess, 12 years old when the first movie came out, I saw it 13 times in theaters.

So God bless my dad. So much money to spend on tickets. So much is all my allowance. And so many hours of my life. And I was like madly in love with Legolas, which, you know, I'll tell you what, watching as an adult woman. Oh, everyone's hotter. Every single person is hotter. He's good looking guy, Orlando Bloom.

He's a little young now for us. I mean, you know, I guess I understand for a 12-year-old girl, but he also looks like a 12-year-old girl. He did a little bit. Yeah, the casting is. interesting with Orlando Bloom. We'll get to that in our second episode. Lizzie, Lizzie, yes. Now, this is the most monumental research endeavor that I've ever embarked upon. And so what we've done is we've broken down this trilogy into an appropriate three episodes. The first episode we will call, for lack of a better title, The Fellowship of the Ring. It's the story about how an unlikely

group of heroes came together to try to tackle the impossible adapting Tolkien's work. Sure. Episode two, the two towers will cover production and how things got underway in New Zealand halfway across the world from the studio in Los Angeles. I'm sorry. We're not even getting to them starting to shoot this in this first episode.

Lizzie, trust me. You're going to love it. And then the third one will be about, of course, post-production, the releases of the films and their legacy, the return of the king. And the king is Peter Jackson. I also just want to call out, you didn't change the titles at all.

It feels like you could have... put a little more work into that. No, the titles are perfect. Why would I change them? They're amazing. Just make little Tolkien puns? Okay, continue. No, no, no, no. None of that. We don't besperch Mr. Tolkien with puns. There's one pun later coming.

Okay. The details, Lizzie. The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy of fantasy action adventure films directed by Peter Jackson. It is based on the novel, The Lord of the Rings, divided into three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, and the Return of the King, by J.R.R.

Tolkien. The films were adapted for the screen by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philip Aboyens, and Stephen Sinclair. The ensemble cast features Elijah Wood as Frodo Baganz. Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey. And then the white, spoiler! Yep. Vigel Mortensen as Aragorn, aka the sexiest man in Middle Earth. Sean Aston as Samwise Gamgey. Arguably, also the sexiest man in Middle Earth. Yes, the stoutest man in the Middle Earth. Kate Blanchet is Galadriel. Jean-Rise Davies as Gimley.

Lizzie? Yes? Oh, that was your You Have My Axe moment, but I guess we'll just move. Oh, I'm My Axe. There we go. Orlando Bloom as Legolas, Hugo Weaving, as Lord Elron, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Sean Bean as Boramier. All so hot.

Unsung Hero of the first film. Andy Circus as Gallum. Much more handsome than he seems. Should have been gotten. and a Cavity Award nomination was ripped off. True. And many, many more wonderful actors, including Liv Tyler, Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill.

Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan. Come on. Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan. It just goes on and on. I got to stop at a certain point. Brett, from Flight of the Concords? That's just... He is in it.

The films follow the Hobbit Frodo Baggins as he and the Fellowship of the Ring set out to destroy the one ring to prevent the Dark Lord Sauron from succeeding in his quest to dominate Middle Earth with the dark armies of Mordor, battles, and hijinks ensue. I have a question written here, but you've already answered it. Lizzie, how many times have you seen Fellowship of the Ring in theaters?

13. Okay, let's keep going. A couple of points of housekeeping before we begin. There is an incredible amount of information about these films. I've done my best to consolidate it into a narrative that I hope you enjoy. My primary resource is a truly wonderful book called Anything You Can Imagine, Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle Earth by Ian Nathan. And guys, if you want to learn more about Lord of the Rings, this is the best resource that I found. This book came out in 2018.

It's exhaustively researched. Ian Nathan was actually a reporter assigned to the films, and he made a documentary of the films when they were being shot. So he was on set for a lot of this production. Second, we are just covering Lord of the Rings. As Lizzie mentioned, no Hobbit shenanigans in these episodes. We will cover them later. Further, we will not be talking about the Rings of Power either on Amazon, which maybe we will cover at a later date,

although those are a television show, not a movie. And third, I don't like the extended cuts of these films. And Peter Jackson agrees that the theatrical cuts are the definitive cuts, and he even said that he only made the extended cuts for the fans, and his preference is the theatrical cuts. So we are focusing on the theatrical cuts for this episode. How long is the extended cut of the Return of the King? Does it have 75 endings?

Yeah, I think it's four hours long. Seriously, I think it's close to four hours long. It's going to be a no from me. Without further ado, let's dive in to what went wrong on the Lord of the Rings. Now, I pick your theme, whichever one you want. That's what I like the Rohan one. Well, that one's not in the fellowship. All right.

Moving on. The saga of the Lord of the Rings begins with the books, the Lord of the Rings. And that begins with John Ronald Rule Tolkien. Did not know. That's what those stood for. Better known is, yeah, exactly. J.R.R. Tolkien. I see why he abbreviated them.

Yeah, exactly. The Rurger, John Roder, Riddish. All the Tolkien fans are already so mad. They're so mad at us. He was a high-fantasy novelist and, more importantly, philologist, which is someone who studies languages. He was born in 1892 in Bloomfontein, South Africa. It was then known as the Orange Free State.

It was later annexed by the Brits, and now it is known as the Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa. Anyway, he was a British descent. He was born in South Africa. He then traveled to England with his mother at the age of three for a vacation. While he was in England, his father died back in South Africa. So he and his brother were then raised in England from the age of three on. Yeah.

Okay. He was homeschooled. He was very smart. And he took a particular interest in plants and languages. And apparently he could read by the age of four. I'm assuming that's very advanced. I don't remember when I learned to read. Neither do I.

His mother died when he was 12, and he was subsequently raised by a Catholic priest, who was a friend of the family. This is Father Francis Xavier Morgan. So in his early teens, J.R.R. Tolkien started to invent languages, first with his cousins and then on his own. He learned Esperanto, which is the world's most widely used constructed language. It was a language constructed at the end of the 19th century

by a gentleman who wanted to create a language that could be universal across the entire world. It was designed to be very easy to learn. At the age of 16, Tolkien started this somewhat scandalous courtship with an older woman, meaning she was 19, and she was Protestant. And this was a pretty big deal. Her name was Edith Mary Brat.

And he would later say that he deeply admired her willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in World War I. It was a tough time for Mr. Tolkien. In August of 1914, Britain entered World War I, and Tolkien shocked his friends, family, and relatives when he decided not to enlist immediately. He did not want to go to war. He delayed enlistment as long as he could by finishing his degree, but then at a certain point, he received so much pressure from the people around him that he finally was commissioned as an infantryman.

Because of his education, he got promoted within the military, so he was commanding men beneath him. However, he had a distaste for the hierarchical nature of the military. And you can see a lot of Aragorn not wanting to be the king in Tolkien, not wanting to command men. He would later say, quote, the most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And also think about all of the kings represented in this they are highly dysfunctional. Yeah, you've got Theodin and Denethor who are both either under the influence, like not doing great or under the influence of somebody else like Wormtong. Yeah.

So he did see combat in France at the Somme in July 1916. He survived multiple assaults. Two of his friends were killed. He went to war with three friends. four hobbits, Tolkien, plus his three friends, two of them died. He then contracted trench fever. Trench fever is a disease that was spread by lice. Lice were a huge problem in the trenches.

He was transported back to England in November of 1916, and adding to this weight that he carried, the entire regiment that he was a part of, was basically annihilated almost immediately after he returned to England. So everybody that he had been stationed with was pretty much killed in an assault shortly after he was brought back from the war. Wow. So after the war, he worked at the Oxford English Dictionary,

and he worked on the etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W, just in case you couldn't have a specific enough job. Okay. He worked in translation for years, culminating in a lecture on Beowulf in 1926, in which he argued that the monsters in the poem were as important as the linguistic elements. And this was Tolkien's first public argument that fantasy should be taken seriously. That mythology was important not just for what it represented, but for the stories themselves. So this was a big point of contention in Tolkien's life.

He really wanted fantasy to be taken seriously, and it'll affect how the books were later adapted. So Tolkien started inventing fantasy stories to tell his children. One such tale came about in the 1930s was called The Hobbit. He had no intention to publish it. However, Susan Dagnall was a friend of his, and she worked for a publisher in London, and Unwin. She came across a copy of his manuscript, and she's like, dude, submit this for publication. And he's like, all right, right, oh, right, oh, and he did. It was published in 1937. Nothing would ever be the same. So The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was published in 1937. It was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and has sold over 100 million copies to date.

Wow. It follows the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he takes up a quest with the Wizard Gandalf. and 13 dwarves to reclaim the dwarves home and treasure from the terrible dragon smog. It was so stupendously successful that the publisher said, John Ronald Ruh Tolkien, you need to write a sequel, ASAP, and he said, no problem, and he spent 17 years writing the sequel called The Lord of the Rings. He wrote it, obviously, for 10 years in earnest,

but it was spaced out across 17 World War II, interrupted this. Actually, a lot of the book was written as missives that he sent to his son, who was actually fighting in World War II. And so he would write portions and send it to his son. It was intended to be released as a single volume. However, it was released in three parts across 1954 and 1955 because there were soaring paper costs following the end of World War II. And so the book would be too expensive to both release and price if they just did it as one volume. Also, it would have been like a thousand pages. A thousand pages.

It was over a thousand pages. Yeah, it would been very, very long. So the three volumes were the Fellowship of the Ring, the two towers, and initially the War of the Ring was supposed to be the third book. But the publisher wanted to change it because World War II had just happened. So they changed it to the return of the king. It became one of the most successful trilogies and history, despite actually a really mixed initial critical reaction.

So Tolkien was always being cut down by the literary establishment. It was like, these are children's books, these are not serious books, these books are a joke. Now, eventually it would, of course, become incredibly successful and has now outsold The Hobbit. It's sold over 150 million copies worldwide. Of course, the journey from book to screen, as we've learned in this podcast, is littered with false starts, and the Lord of the Rings would prove no difference. So, as the one ring was lost and a poor suitor stumbled upon it, first, much is the same with the text to the Lord of the Rings. So it was first adapted in 1955 by the BBC.

They released a 12-part radio play. It was written by the poet Terence Tiller and J.R.R. John Ronald Rule Tolkien hated it. He hated it. He said that it was a, quote, syllification of the text. And so his frustration was always that people were going to take his fantasy and make it unsurious. The thing that he had tried to make serious, they were going to make it unsurious. Well, am I wrong also in thinking that, like, to your point that the stories he was writing initially were for children, like the Hobbit was very much was geared towards children.

The Lord of the Rings very much was not. Was not geared for children. Like, intentionally was geared towards adults. We'll actually get to this later. He never thought of this as fantasy. He actually viewed it as instead a form of history specifically for the languages that he, He loved creating. So who created these tongues? What were their stories? He wanted to create a rich history for black speech and elvish. And excuse me, with different kind of Elvis?

Because there's multiple different kinds of Elvis. Actually, there's like a kind of a bunch. There's two main ones that you're going to hear across the course of it is Quina and Cinderie. But there's more than just that. Lizzie finally got married last July. So just wanted to do you guys that update. All right. Let's keep going.

He also saw these books as a chance to create four. Britain, the kind of mythology that Germanic and Nordic cultures enjoyed. So... Wow, you can see that big time. He was trying to make up for last time. In 1957, and this was actually before the book had become extremely popular, the book didn't really take off until about 10 years after its publication. Oh, wow.

Three American... So it sold fine, but then it really took off in the 60s. Okay. In 1957, three American producers, Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton, Grady Zimmerman, and Al Brodax approached Tolkien about adapting the books into a three-hour film. Now, remember, this was the era of the roadshow film, right? So you would make a three-hour movie with two intermissions, and yeah, it would just like gone with the wind approach, effectively,

to this movie. Okay. All three books into three hours. It would combine live action and animation, and they assured Tolkien that the animation would be both adult and sophisticated. Now, Tolkien hated Walt Disney's style of animation because he thought it was silly

and he would never bless something in that style. Apparently, Tolkien liked the concept art that they showed him. Unfortunately, the treatment that they sent him was terrible, according to Tolkien. He said it was childish and simplistic. They basically rendered the complex story into a fairy tale, which you would have to do

to get it down to three hours. He apparently wrote them a multi-page letter basically telling them to fuck off. and signed it. John Brattle Brutton. John Browell, John, Roe, Tom. So Ackerman, Zimmerman, and Brodox said, all right, guess we can't do anything with this,

and they left him be. And it wasn't for another 10 years that a new suitor emerged. So now we're in? So in 1967. Okay. So 1967 United Artists, the studio that had been formed in 1919

by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Griffith. They were a group of artists that wanted to make films with pedigree that were creatively full of integrity and not beholden to the studio system. And they had amazing bona fides in terms of adapting books for the screen. They had or would go on to do Wuthering Heights of Mice and Men, around the world in 80 Days, West Side Story, the James Bond movies, Midnight Cowboy, Fiddler on the Roof, and they would eventually do, importantly, one flew over the cuckoo's nest. Oh, wow.

So, furthermore, Tolkien was old. Much like Bilbo in Lord of the Rings, he felt like butter stretched over too much bread. He was tired of this world. He was tired of fans showing up at his door. It's actually striking the descriptions of him how much it feels like Bilbo before the party at Bag End in Fellowship of the Ring. And so at 75, he saw this as an opportunity to offload the ring, much in the way that Bilbo did to Frodo. He thought, well, I can dispense of these rights and I can secure some money to set up a trust for my family so that my children and grandchildren or my grandchildren can go to school and be taken care of. So he sold the screen rights to United Artists for both the Hobbit and of the Lord of the Rings for 104,000 pounds.

That feels like not enough. How did that happen? Extremely, extremely low. And the reason it happened is because everyone, in Hollywood believed that this movie was unadaptable. So there was no demand. Everybody thought that the book, nobody knew, how are you going to do all the monsters? It's too long. The mythology is too confusing.

There are too many characters. Even though it was popular, nothing had ever been done like this before. I mean, this is before Star Wars. This is before a genre trilogy had ever shown the world that it could make money. Am I wrong in thinking that that's like, like just under a million bucks now?

So that would be the equivalent of roughly $2.2 million today for the rights of all the books. Amazon paid $250 million for the rights to the Rings of Power. I believe the full budget, including buying the rights, was close to a billion dollars. But to show, though, he sold it for $2.2 million in today's dollars, and today it sold for over 100 times that for just the television rights, just for reference.

All right. So United Artists struggled to get the film off the ground. They first brought on English director John Borman, who would Lizzie go on to direct deliverance? Yes. Listen to our episode.

United Artists spent $3 million developing Borman's script, a 176-page film of all three books that infused Tolkien's work with a whole lot of sex. Excuse me? That's right.

Departures from the source material include Galadriel seducing Frodo. Well, that's... I see it. I see it. Everyone wants to see that. Aragorn reviving Aewen with a magical orgasm and Aragorn and Boramir kissing.

Whoa. The fans do want to see that. Yeah, I was going to say. So in a twist of fate, United Artists wouldn't know what to do with the movie. Borman would instead go on to later direct Excalibur, a very sexy movie about the Knights of the Roundtable, and Excalibur would actually later influence Peter Jackson's approach

to the design of the Lord of the Rings, specifically the armor. So things still come full circle. Now next up was a real natural fit for this property, Lizzie. And that's the Beatles. Um... Yeah, that's right. The Beatles had a three-picture deal with United Artists. Wait, were they going to be the...

Hobbits? Oh, we're about to get there. No. They had done a hard day's night and help. I do love both of us. They decided that the Lord of the Rings was the move. John Lennon apparently was the real driving force on this one. That tracks.

He was nuts. Do you want to guess each of them would play? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, my God. Two were going to play Hobbits, and one was going to play Gandalf. Okay, well, John obviously had to be Gandalf. John was actually not going to be Gandalf.

John wasn't going to be Gandalf. Was he Frodo? going to be in it. John was going to be on the sidelines. So you can, I'll give you the other three. Paul, George, and Ringo. Okay, George is Gandalf. George is Gandalf. That's right. Okay. Great. Well, Ringo has to be Mary or Pippen. There's no way that he's, unless he's Sam. He's Sam. Ringo is Sam. Which is great. Totally makes sense. Ringo is Sam and Paul was Frodo. Paul was Frodo. Yeah, that's how they were going to do it. Yeah, it was fun. So they had it all worked out. They actually went to Stanley Kubrick's house. They knocked on

his door. He invited them in and they were like, Mr. Kubrick, would you like to make the load of the rings with us? And he said, no. He politely passed. He was actually supposed to make a Napoleon film for MGM that fell apart and would later be revived by Ridley Scott. And that's coming out this fall. So the Beatles moved on and ended up breaking up the following year anyway. Now in a tragic turn of events, Mr. Tolkien passed away in 1973 without ever seeing a frame of his stories put to film. But the rights still sat with United Artists. Now, unbeknownst to many, Jackson's Lord of the Rings was not the first Lord of the Rings adaptation to be made for film.

Animator Ralph Bakshi, who had achieved a bit of notoriety with his animated adaptation of R. Crum's X-rated comic strip Fritz the Cat, a movie about an anthropomorphic cat living through a satirical version of New York in the 1960s had wanted to make Lord of the Rings forever. Now, Fritz had been produced and financed in part by Saul Zenz. Remember that name? It's going to come up again. Saul Zens was a music mogul turned movie producer

who had gone on to produce. One flew over the cuckoo's nest for United Artists. Okay. So in 1976, Zens says to Baxi, I will back a movie version of Lord of the Rings that you animate. He bought the rights from United Artists for Lord of the Rings. He paid just over $3 million to pay them back for the money they'd put into Borman's script. And the plan was for Bokshi to make two films. The first would end just after the Battle of Helms Deep. Okay, that makes

sense. And that's as far as they got. Yeah. They only had an $8 million budget. Boxi had to cut a lot of corners. I saw the movie when I was younger. I actually have pretty fond memories of it, but it was considered a failure financially. It was titled The Lord of the Rings. It gross $30 million worldwide, but plans for a sequel were scrapped. And Ralph Bakshi, it hit him pretty hard. He had pretty sour feelings about this all the way through Jackson's adaptation. He really felt like he had gotten short shrift and that he knew how to adapt this well.

And even Jackson said that the first half of Bakshi's adaptation works really well before the story starts getting too compressed and you just can't follow what's going on. Yeah. Well, that happens to a certain extent at the end of Return of the King. It does, yeah. In New Zealand, literally, on the opposite side of the world, a 17-year-old Peter Jackson rushed into Wellington to see the film version of the books that he'd never read, the animated The Lord of the Rings. He didn't particularly like the movie in the end. He had been excited about it, a sword and sorcery movie from the guy that did Fritz the Cat.

but it did inspire him to pick up the books a few years later when he was on his way to Auckland to begin an apprenticeship. And so began Peter Jackson's journey to bringing Tolkien's world to life. Now, a quick sidebar on Jackson. He was born, Sir Peter Roberts Jackson, not sir when he was born, but now. He was born on October 31, 1961. That's right, he was born on Halloween, which is amazing. He was born in Pukarua Bay, a coastal town in New Zealand, 20-month. miles north of Wellington, and at the age of nine, he stayed up late watching Martin C. Cooper

and Ernest B showed Sacks King Kong, the 1933 version. He was obsessed. From that moment on, movies were to be his life. He started making short films by himself in his pubescent years, and he decided, I'm going to get into practical effects. He was obsessed with Rick Baker, the Howling, American Werewolf in London, and he just made these gore-fest splatter films where he would make, like, gross alien vomit. He literally would drive past the butchers on his way home from school and be like, do you have any brains and blood that you can give me for my movies? Ew.

And this all culminated in his first feature film, The Truly Homemade Bad Taste, a movie about aliens who decided to turn Earth into a fast food restaurant with humans on the menu. And if you haven't seen it, it's amazing. It is so fun and so janky and so creative. His parents bought him a 16-millimeter. camera. He starred in it, and he hired and cajoled everybody he knew to be in it or work on it.

He shot it on the weekend, every weekend over a period of four years. This movie was his film school. No one was making movies. I mean, I don't want to say no one, but he was so far from Hollywood. He just had to do it himself. But more important than the film, Bad Taste, which eventually he took to the can film market. He sold the distribution while he was living in his parents' basement. He gets himself to the canned film market, and he does a midnight screening of this movie, and he sells it to 10 territories worldwide. Like, this guy was doing it on his own. But more important than the film were these two relationships that he formed while making it. The first is with, I would call him at the time, a puppet designer, although really he is just an artist and an artisan,

and he makes everything for movies. And that's Richard Taylor. Richard Taylor, who would go on to be one of the chief creative forces, behind Lord of the Rings and his wife, Tanya Roger, who would also be a key creative force behind the Lord of the Rings, were making puppets for a New Zealand TV show when they heard about Jackson and his endeavor to make a sci-fi horror film in his parents' basement.

And they were like, this guy sounds nuts, we have to go meet him. So they went and met him, and he showed them bad taste, and they were like, whatever you want to do next, we'll do it with you. Like, we are 100% in. I love that New Zealand is small enough that they were just like,

we've heard about a man in his mother's basement. Yes. We had about this man in his basement. We're going to go to say him. So the next, and I would argue somewhat more important, for professional and personal reasons, to come into his life through bad taste, is Fran Walsh, now known as Dame Fran Walsh.

She was a writer on this supernatural New Zealand television series, and while she was on set, she was shown a copy of bad taste by a mutual friend of hers and Jackson's. Now, she and Jackson actually met because that series that she was writing on, he did, like, one special effect for on one episode. So they'd technically cross paths,

but they didn't remember each other. So Walsh saw it, and she was like, this guy's nuts. Like, I've never seen this level of creativity and ingenuity. I need to work with him. So she offered to help him complete the film. They would not only become professional partners, but romantic partners as well.

So the two would go on with, Richard Taylor and Tanya Roger to make Meet the Feebles, which, again, if you haven't seen it, is insane. It is a deranged Jim Henson Muppet parody that I just can't even describe it. It's everything. Drug overdoses, sex, like a character's butt gets ripped out of his anus. It's, it is just like if we put Jim Henson on acid and made it X-rated. It's amazing. And it's all puppets. And it's literally, it was just Jackson running down the street as two guys were holding puppets up, you know, in front of the camera. It's so funny.

And then kind of their, I wouldn't say first legitimate, but their first movie that kind of break them out internationally somewhat was called, in New Zealand Brain Dead. It's called Dead Alive in the United States. And it's a zombie comedy that culminates with the lead character using a lawnmower, held up with the blades held out to, like, slice through a horde of zombies in his mother's home. and it's one of the bloodiest films you'll ever see. So that puts them on the map kind of internationally.

And I think, Lizzie, you were about to nod at the movie that... I was thinking Heavenly Creatures. Yeah. The movie that broke them out. Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson and Company's first prestige film. The story of the notorious 1954 Parker-Holm murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand, starring the then-unk-Unknown, Melanie Linsky and Kate Winslet, as Pauline Parker and Juliet at Home, young teenage girls who create a fantasy world together,

and end up murdering Pauline's mother when she threatens to separate them. Now, I love Heavenly Creatures. I'm not sure if you guys have seen it. I would highly recommend you take the time to watch it if you haven't. As we'll learn, Heavenly Creatures is really the turning point for Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings in so many ways. But really quickly, I need to acknowledge one more Lord of the Rings adaptation that did happen that's often overlooked. and that is the 1981 BBC radio serialization of the story.

So the BBC again did another radio play in 81. Okay. I mentioned it because I haven't listened to it, but I've heard it's very good. And it also starred a young Ian Holm as Frodo. Oh, that's right. I have heard about this. Yeah. So Ian Holm played Frodo, and actually Jackson remembered that. And Ian Holm was one of two people Jackson was insistent needed to be in,

the trilogy, when he eventually went to make them, the second one was Cape Blanchette as Gladriel. And so it was Ian Holm and Kate Blanchett that he kind of went in knowing he wanted in it. So Heavenly Creatures pulls Jackson out of the horror gutter in the eyes of the Hollywood elite. And sorry, what year is Heavenly Creatures? It's 1994. Okay, so we're getting close. Yeah, so he had done Meet the Feebles in 89. He did Brain Dead in 92.

And then he did Heavenly Creatures in 94. There's also a mockumentary he did in there called Forgotten Silver that I've heard is very funny. It's a mockumentary about it apparently like a New Zealand. It's claiming a New Zealand man had invented film, and it's, I've heard very good. I haven't seen it. Now, Heavenly Creatures opened the 51st Venice Film Festival in 1984. It won the Silver Lion. It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson obviously shared that nomination. And I should note, Fran Walsh was the driving force behind the, this movie. She is the person who brought this case to Jackson's attention, and it is the movie that she had been buying to make. It nearly swept the New Zealand Film and Television Awards as well in 1995. So Heavenly Creatures may seem as film as far away from the fantasy of Middle Earth as one can get, but that one person would be wrong. The bond formed by the two lead characters is rooted in the shared creation of a fantasy kingdom called Borovnia, like Tolkien and himself, these two girls created an entire alternate reality with its own history, writing novels,

and creating languages for this world that they together planned to get made into Hollywood films before murdering one of their mothers. So in order to create this fantasy world, Peter Jackson, who was shooting the film in New Zealand and didn't have access to the special effects houses of Hollywood, turned to Richard Taylor and Tanya Rogers, who had done the puppeteering and gore work. on Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead. And Taylor, as a remarkable artist and designer, created 70 different suits

for all of the different characters of Barovnia, like all of these fantastical creatures. He, to be fair, had been doing commercial work. He did, like, a GM commercial. He did the aliens for a TV adaptation of Stephen King's Tommy Knockers. And he was actually working on the mythical beasts for Hercules and Zina Warrior Princess,

the TV shows at the time. Now, they also realized they needed not just practical effects, but digital effects as well. And this is the birth of Weta. So Weta, if you're not aware, is now Weta, I believe is called Weta FX, is now one of the largest visual effects companies in the world. Yes, one of the best. And it rivals the likes of ILM and digital domain. At the time, in 1993, it was one rented computer in a New Zealand department. that had the rough shower of today's cell phone.

So Richard Taylor's company became Weta Effects, and this new digital company became Weta Digital. And Weta is the name of like a cricket-like bug in New Zealand. It's the nickname of this bug. So they created it because when they basically, they all saw in 1993, they all see Jurassic Park, and they're like, holy shit, this is crazy, we need to do this. So they say, oh, a silicon graphics indigo computer,

great. We will lease one of them. IELM, I believe, has like a thousand. Sure, they have like a factory. They had to mortgage their house to do it. They get one of these computers, and they created 14 visual effects shots with that computer for heavenly creatures. And that is the beginning of Weta Digital. And it should be mentioned, again, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Richard Taylor,

Tanya Roger, and Jamie Selkirk, who was the editor. that they had been working with. So Selkirk had edited all of Jackson's films. They all were the creators of Weta originally. So it's not just Jackson, it's this entire group. So the world hadn't yet noticed, but something revolutionary is happening in New Zealand. Now the only problem was they needed to figure out

how to keep the money flowing because this shit was expensive. So they are renting computers and nobody's sending work to them, like ILM is getting work, like digital domain is getting all of James Cameron's work. So enter, unfortunately, Harvey Weinstein. I was wondering when that toad was going to enter this.

Well, he shows up in a lot of the movies because one of the orcs is designed to look like him. But he in the 90s was as powerful a figure as could exist in Hollywood. Consider him the Sauron of our story. Evil, yes, but ultimately necessary in our hero's journey to bring the unadaptable world of Tolkien to the screen. Heavenly Creatures was purchased and distributed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein's prestigious Miramax films. Miramax was founded in 1979 by the two brothers, and they had been on a crazy hot spreek.

They had done My Left Foot, sex lies and videotape, reservoir dogs, pulp fiction. All of Quentin Tarantino stuff. Yeah. In 1993, they had sold Miramax to Disney for $75 million. Okay. So as a condition of the deal to distribute heavenly creatures, Harvey Weinstein locks Peter Jackson up in what's called a first look deal with Miramax. So this means that Miramax has first right of refusal

on any script that Jackson wants to make. He has to make his next movie with Miranax, basically. And it's during this period that the fate of Lord of the Rings truly hung in the balance. So it's really important, because the timeline will get confusing, but it's really important to understand that most directors, successful directors, have multiple projects and development at all times.

And this was certainly true of Jackson. Not only had he made heavenly creatures, he had actually written a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel for New Line, which was called Nightmare on Elm Street Dream Lover. And it sounds amazing. Basically, the rough plot, kids are no longer afraid of Freddy, so they actively take sleeping aids

in order to go and torment him in their dreams. And it just sounds like a totally fun meta take on the world. And he had actually partnered with Robert Zemeckis to create a horror segment for a film spin-off of Tales from the Crypt that Zemeckis was going to do. Yeah, Zemeckis was going to direct it, and Walsh and Jackson were going to write the script. That anthology fell apart, but Zemeckis liked Jackson and Walsh's idea and told them to develop it into a feature film. So they were working on that in the meantime.

But at the same time, Jackson really wanted to make a fantasy movie, an original fantasy movie. The only problem is every single new idea he came up with and pitched to Fran Walsh, she would just say, that's Lord of the Rings. And then he would come up with a new one and she'd go, that's Lord of the Rings. And he'd come up with the new one and you'd be like, Lord of the Rings. And so eventually she was like, dude, you should just do Lord of the Rings. And so they turn in the script to Zemeckis in 1994. It's the story of a small town psychic investigating a ghostly serial killer posing as the grim reaper, which became the frighteners. And a lot of people haven't seen this movie.

No. Starring Michael J. Fox. It's really fun. Zemecas really liked the script. And he said, Jackson, you should direct this. And Jackson says, great, because that means it's got a ton of visual effects shot. for all these ghosts. So Weta can do it. So Weta can do the visual effects. So it gets set up at Universal Studios with the budget of 26 million. What a digital is going to do the special effects. It actually had more special effects shots than any film ever made at the time of its release. Wow. Yeah. It looks great. You should definitely check it out. The Grim Reaper stuff is remarkable. A lot of what they do, you can see the influence of it, not only in Lord of the Rings with the NASGOL, but later with the de Mentors in Harry Potter as well. So, Weinstein actually had to let Jackson kind of fudge the start date of his first look deal so he could go direct the frighteners.

Again, this is important because when Weinstein gives you an inch, he takes a mile in the other direction. So the movie gets shot in 1995. It has an 18-month post-production period. Weta. This company's been around for less than three years, and they're doing more shots than ILM did on Jurassic Park, for example. That's crazy. Universal sees the rough cut, and they're like, this is great. Zemeca is.

says, guys, this is a summer movie. It's going to be a blockbuster. Don't release it in Halloween. Let's pull it into July. So Jackson's like riding high. And in the meantime, Jackson says, fuck it. He calls his manager, Ken Kamens, remember that name. He goes, Ken, you know he hands the rights to Lord of the Rings? And Ken says, let me find out. And Ken calls around. And sure enough, he discovers that the rights still sit with Saul Zense, that music mogul turned producer who had bought them in the 70s. Well, he calls Harvey Weinstein, Ken Kamens, and he lays it out. He says, Pete wants to do Lord of the Rings. But this guy, Saul Zens, owns the rights, and I doubt he'll part with them easily. And Harvey Weinstein goes, I am an evil bastard. Don't worry, Zence owes me a favor.

Oh, Jesus. Well, it turns out that the year prior, the English patient was falling apart. Anthony Mingela's war romance film starring Ray Fines was supposed to be financed by Fox, but they pulled the plug just weeks from production. Was it because they realized it was really boring? Yeah, they did. Who's going to watch this movie? In swoops Harvey Weinstein and Miramax. Yeah.

And he basically says, Saul, you owe me one. And so the original plan, now that Saul is going to, I guess, relinquish the rights to Harvey Weinstein, was for Jackson to direct the Hobbit as a proof of concept and then expand to make Lord of the Rings, assuming the Hobbit was successful. Okay, weird legal thing. The rights to film, not distribute, but to film an adaptation of the Hobbit,

actually somehow were owned by MGM because of a weird contract snafu in the 70s. So long story short, Weinstein says, ah, fuck it, we'll just do Lord of the Rings. So he gets into negotiations with Saul Zenz. The film rights around Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and everything. Like all of the rights are very weird across the board. Oh, they're all very messy now.

They're like extremely complicated. And especially because there's like additional works like the unfinished sales and Silmarillion. Yeah, exactly. Those are not included in the same. It's all a mess. Yeah. So Weinstein says, that's fine. I just want the rights to the Lord of the Rings.

And Pete, you're going to do them the same way that Boxi was going to do them. Two films shot back to back. Hollywood had done two films shot back-to-back before. They'd never done three. So nobody could conceive of this as a trilogy. It was like, it's just going to be two films, back-to-back, period. So this period of Jackson's life is both remarkably stressful and incredibly insane in terms of the options and opportunities he seemed to have. Negotiations to make Lord of the Rings stall out immediately.

Saul Zenz is driving a hard bargain and Harvey Weinstein is a monster, so it's like two kaiju's fighting in the middle. the ocean. And in the meantime, Jackson's wrapping up post-production on the frighteners. And he's like, holy shit, we have built this incredible company, Weta Digital, and all of these artists are going to leave. Because I have no work I can give them, because they've only done things that Jackson has directed, for the most part. So rival effects houses, we're hearing of the great work done by this outfit. And they're... Yeah, they're going to poach them. They're ready to poach. So Jackson calls his manager again. Ken Kamens, this guy sounds awesome. Like, what a, he is such an, I don't want to undersell how instrumental he is in getting these movies made.

And Pete, Pete says, Ken, I need to name it my next movies. I'm a least wedder if I don't. And Ken goes, Pete, don't worry. I got you. So he lines up two more opportunities for Peter Jackson. So what's called door number one, Lord of the Rings. Okay. Door number two is a little property called the Planet of the Apes.

Oh. So he gets peed in at Fox. And for Planet of the Apes, Jackson and Walsh pitch a movie that they call the Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes. And it's one of the more interesting films never made. Here's his description of the pitch. Quote, Fran and I had devised a storyline that continued the... I'm not going to do the accent the whole time.

That continued the Apes saga from where it left off in the fifth movie. We imagined their world being in the midst of an artistic renaissance, which made the ape government very nervous. It was a time of amazing art, and we wanted Roddy McDowell to play an elderly chimpanzee that we based on Leonardo da Vinci. The plot involved humans rising in result and a half-human, half-ape central character that was sheltered by the liberal apes, but hunted down by the guerrillas. Not only did they get Roddy McDowell to agree to come return for this film, the project was supposed to be produced by James Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger. as the half-human half-garilla. So this movie, Door Number 2,

was going to be Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh writing and directing Planet of the Apes produced by James Cameron starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is just a mind-fuck. That's just a name salad of Hollywood names and terms. Yes. Now let's look at Door Number 3. Universal, Home of the Frighteners, which they're very excited to release.

says, we'd love to lock Mr. Peter Jackson up for another movie, and they say, Ken, has Pete ever had any interest in King Kong? And Ken calls his client, and Pete's like, oh, my God, that's the movie that made me want to make movies. And he has, for four to six weeks, the choice of Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and Planet of the Apes. But the problem is, if he doesn't pick one of them fast, this revolutionary digital effects company that he started is going to fall apart. Now, ironically, Weta would end up doing the effects for Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and the Planet of the Age. Yes. Which I think is so cool.

Like, what a boss move. So, Lizzie, which door do you think he chooses? I think he takes door number one, but maybe I'm wrong. He did not. He chose door number three. So Jackson was concerned that Weinstein wouldn't be able to get the rights to Lord of the Rings, and he loved King Kong. So he called his manager, Ken, and said, look, I need you to tell Harvey, I'm going to direct King Kong.

And Ken calls Harvey Weinstein, and you don't tell Harvey no and live in the 90s. And he says, hey, Pete's going to go make King Kong. And he'd be happy to make Lord of the Rings from you when King Kong is done. Weinstein just goes apoplectic on him. And he's like, are you fucking kidding me? I let him out of his contract to direct the Frighteners. Now he's going to go make another movie with Universal. So Kamens tries to reason with Weinstein.

He's like, we don't even have the rights to Lord of the Rings. Just let him do Kong. We'll do Lord of the Rings right after. And then Weinstein just hangs up on him. Just dead silence. Now, in the end, Jackson navigated it very well. He calls Universal and Ken and says, hey, let's let Miramax co-finance King Kong.

We'll go 50-50 on it together. And then Universal can co-finance Lord of the Rings. And so everybody gets to play with everything and we'll distribute the risk. And Weinstein says, fuck that. I need something else because I'm Harvey Weinstein. And that's something else? There's a script that was sitting at Universal languishing called Shakespeare in Love. Oh, wow.

And Weinstein said, give me that script and we have a deal. So Peter Jackson inadvertently cost saving Private Ryan It's deserved Best Oscar win, Best Picture Oscar, because... Of Shakespeare in love. Harvey Weinstein got Shakespeare in love as part of the deal. Which, by the way, we are going to cover at some point. Yeah, we're going to cover at some point.

It was also a mess. A mess. So, of course, none of this would pass as intended. Work gets underway on King Kong. Weddow Workshop is building models, their beginning tests. In the meantime, Walsh and Jackson write the script, and six months into development, Universal pulls the plug on the movie. So this is right at the end of 1996.

Why? So here's why. Jackson probably should have seen the writing on the wall when the frighteners flopped. In 1996, that summer, no one knew what to make of this really quirky New Zealand humor-based movie starring Marty McFly that had horror overtones and was like pretty graphic. Furthermore, it was absolutely flattened by Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, which dominated that summer. It made $30 million against a $26 million budget.

And of course, in Hollywood, you are only as good as your most recent film. And Peter Jackson, the Wunderkin, his reputation was tarnished. It wasn't just a loss of faith in Jackson, though. So Disney had also announced a planned remake of Mighty Joe Young. If you guys remember their giant eight movie, which was really boring. And Roland Emmerich announced that his next film would be Godzilla. And Universal just felt like we're going up against Godzilla and another giant monkey. We can't make this movie.

So Jackson is devastated. Furthermore, Weta now has nothing to work on. So again, he's about to lose this company that he's. worked so hard to build. The one positive outcome, Harvey Weinstein, is now not pissed at Jackson. He's pissed at Universal. Fantastic. So Harvey Weinstein doubles down on Lord of the Rings. He gets on Zense's ass, and he's calling him every day. And in the meantime, Robert Zemeckis, who does sound like a mensch, swoops in and saves Weta. He says, Jackson, how about you do some sci-fi special effects work for a little film I'm working on called Contact? Oh, oh.

Wow, really? I didn't know they did that. Yeah. So the Carl Sagan-based sci-fi film required Jody Foster to travel through a wormhole could wedda pull off the wormhole effects. Why, yes, they can. They could, and they did. Yeah, and this led to one of Peter Jackson's more interesting credits. Additional visual effects. Peter Jackson. Contact. Oh, interesting. Which I think is pretty fun. So that gets them through the next few months. Spring of 1997, Weinstein closes on the deal for the rights to make the Lord of the Rings.

Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson celebrate with a shopping trip to Wellington to make a very important purchase, Peter Jackson's second copy of the Lord of the Rings, which he had not allowed himself to read until they got the rights because he couldn't bear to read it and then not know that it was going to get made. So then they got to work. Of course, Lizzie, as we've discussed, the plan is we're going to make two films shot back to back telling the story of three books in as streamlined to fashion as possible. They sit down and they write out of treatment. It is 92 pages long. It contains 266 sequences, and it is codenamed Jamboree, the life of Lord Baden Powell. They also used codenames themselves.

Walsh and Jackson were tormented over what to include and what to exclude, what was necessary, and what was extraneous. In particular, Jackson was trying to figure out, how do I make cinematic moments that were often told secondhand in the story or recounted later? One famous example is Gandalf's battle with the ball rock. which is actually shown in the two towers, but is just recounted later in the books. Despite making considerable progress, these two upstart New Zealanders quickly realized they needed another voice in the room,

and so they reached out to Stephen Sinclair. Stephen Sinclair was a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He had helped them on bad taste and brain dead. My understanding is that he was actually... He's Fran Walsh's ex-boyfriend, I believe. Oh, wow. And he had been, yeah, he'd been a friend of theirs, and he was happy to help,

but he didn't know a lot about Tolkien, didn't really care about fantasy that much. So when he got the treatment, he turned to his girlfriend, Philippa Boyans. Everybody's just working with their girlfriends here. Everybody's just working with their girlfriends. The girlfriends are saving the world.

Yeah. An editor who happened to be a big fan of the Lord of the Rings. So he hands it. He says, Hey, Philippa. Yeah, Pete Jackson, Frayne Wolsch, they're making the Lord of the Rings into a movie.

And she said, Oh, God, I can't wait for the emails. we get. No! She goes, they're going to ruin it. They're going to ruin. That's what's her first thought. She said, they can't. That's crazy. No one can make that film. I am so sorry for my New Zealand friends. No, I'm not. Please ridicule him. Boyans was serious. She'd read the books at age 12. She'd then read them every single year since then, every year, once per year. She was a writer, but she was not a screenwriter. And at the time, she was a teacher, playwright, editor, and director of the New Zealand Writers Guild. Sinclair showed her the treatment. that Walsh and Jackson had written.

She gave some thoughts. They thought the... Jackson and Walsh thought the thoughts were really great. So they said, let's meet. She gets together. She's like, guys, this is amazing. She got this for 10 minutes. And then she says, here's everything that you did wrong.

And they quickly were like, holy shit. This woman is amazing. We have to work with her. So what was supposed to be a one-time consultation results in a relationship that would change the course of these movies entirely. And Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh's lives, obviously, as well.

They recognized that, Sinclair wasn't that interested in this text. And basically Sinclair just stepped away and Boyan stepped in. Now, Stephen Sinclair does have a credit on one of these movies, and that's the two towers, because apparently he did have a lot of thoughts on that story that made it into the final structure that they ended up with. So that's why he's credited on that one. So Boyan's first gets brought in as a script editor for the two-film version of the adaptation, and her first job as a screenwriter came when they asked her to write the prologue to the first film.

Wellson Jackson hadn't been able to come up with one. So Boyens took a stab, and the first words she put to paper remain the first words heard as the fellowship of the ring begins. The world has changed. Intended for Gandalf to narrate initially, it became Galadriel's opening prologue, and it was basically identical to as Boyens wrote it in her first pass. And it just came to prove that she would, I mean, she goes on to be more than that. than a screenwriter on this movie. But it's the first of innumerable contributions that she would make to this project.

So the three of them get along wonderfully. And they fall into this very natural division of labor. So Boyance is... It's also, sorry, I just want to say, like, that prologue is so... Oh, it's so good. It's so good, but it seems not consequential, but it is so crucial for them to have gotten that right

because they have to set up basically the entire... It's everything. Yeah, like, it's not just the Hobbit. It's like the history. that you get in like certain appendices and things that you need. It could have been so boring, but it's so good. It could have been bad, but it's so good. And it's like, it's everything you need to know.

And obviously, Kate Blanchett is just incredible. Has one of the best voices ever. But, like, that's... To do that and pull it off, like, that is a really impressive piece of writing. I believe that her voice and Ian McKellen's voice together, representing the two halves of Lord of the Rings are so responsible for the success of these movies. 100%. So these three fall into this kind of natural division of labor.

Boyens is making sure that they're adhering to the rules of the world, but also doing justice to the themes of the book. She's the person who was kind of impressing upon Walsh and Jackson that Tolkien was so heartbroken by the loss of the countryside to the Industrial Revolution. And we can see then the contrast between Hobbiton and its pastoral vibes, as opposed to like Eisengard and its industrial vibes. Yeah, they're ripping the trees out. Exactly. She also made clear Tolkien's exploration of his experiences in World War I through the Dead Marshes.

And actually, Peter Jackson is a huge World War I fanatic. As you guys may know, he recently colorized and basically restored this incredible amount of footage from World War I. So she remained the Tolkien authority. Jackson, meanwhile, was basically mapping out the set pieces that would wow audiences. So like Aragorn fighting the ring race on Weathertop, Gandalf battling the Balrog as they were. They plummet and has a doom, the Entz, dismantling Eisengarde, shellop slayer, et cetera. And Walsh was there basically to monitor the emotional arcs of all of the characters through the story. That's awesome. She's the one who realized that the two towers was a story of addiction. She's kind of responsible for a lot of the changes to Arwen and Aowen, trying to make sure that the women in the story have some agency in these movies.

And it's really her. She was really the driving force behind Ghalem, especially, in these movies. Oh, wow. which we'll get you later. So condensing the three books into two films was very painful and omissions were necessary. So the first film, similar to Bakshi, it's decided, as you mentioned, it's a natural ending point. Let's get to the end of Helms Deep. And so that's where the first film ended.

So Battle of Helms Deep, Saruman dies. That's going to be called the Fellowship of the Ring. The second film continues from where it leaves off, and they were actually going to call it the War of the Ring. Tolkien's original title for the third book. Sure. The biggest omission from this version was Lothlorian. They actually left it out entirely. So after the Mines of Moria, when they meet Galadril and Lothlorean, they leave that out.

They also barely go to Rohan. Ederos was like really condensed, all of the Theodan stuff. Soron also made a physical appearance at the end of the second film, dueling with Aragorn at the Black Gates of Mordor. This actually was shot, and we will get to it in our... next episode. Arwen also had a much bigger role. She was both to fight in the Battle of Helms Deep and join in riding with the Rohiram in the Battle of Pelinor Fields. The second film was also going to open with a love scene between Arwen and Aragorn in the glittering caves, nude, following

the Battle of Helms Deep. Oh, put that one back in. There were many other differences, but the really important one is that Peter Jackson is adamant that Tom Bombadil was never in any version of the treatment or the script. Poor Tom. And as he should not be. It's a cul-de-sac we don't need to go down. So things are going well between the three screenwriters. The same could not be said for Jackson's relationship with Harvey Weinstein and Miramax.

So Jackson has three script meetings with Miramax in total. All three were held in Soho at the Miramax offices in a tiny unvaded and ventilated room with frosted glass called the sweat box. These rooms, these notes were awful. Bob Weinstein just didn't understand. He never read the books. He didn't care about it. He would just want them to do things that seemed arbitrary.

His big note that he kept bringing up is he wanted them to kill one of the hobbits. God damn it. He didn't care. He literally, he was like, they were like, well, which Hobbit? And you just say pick one. He did not care which Hobbit they'd kill. Harvey Weinstein, meanwhile, didn't give terrible creative notes, but he said the budget for all, for the both films could not be higher than $75 million. Okay.

Well, there's no way. Yeah. So he basically was like, well, that's three times the frighteners. That's plenty of money. And Jackson was like, okay, sure, because Jackson didn't know what it would cost. No, I mean, it's going to look like garbage if you do that. Yeah. So at the same time, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital are spending millions of dollars on pre-production and development. Artists are being relocated to New Zealand attempting to figure out what the hell these movies are going to look like. So Tolkien's books were often very opaque in terms of description, aside for some watercolors he'd produced of some locations and characters. Around the world, the two men, Jackson felt, that were most responsible for the perception of how Tolkien looked were two artists.

Yes. Alan Lee and John Howe. And Alan Lee is a British illustrator who had provided the art for the 1992 edition of Lord of the Rings, the one that I owned. And this is the exact copy that Jackson had purchased when beginning the script. John Howe is a Canadian illustrator who had been greatly influenced by the Lord of the Rings, specifically the world of Mordor. And he had been published in a 1987 Tolkien calendar, and his work kind of became canon for the darker elements of the series. And Jackson... I think his is what I'm more familiar with visually.

Yeah, like the NASGOL and stuff like that. Yeah, so Jackson basically was going around and buying like calendars and books and any addition he could find of Lord of the Rings and just like what art do I like? And it was always Alan Lee and John Howe. So Jackson falls in love with their art. He calls them both up and he goes, hey, I'm making this crazy movie in New Zealand. You guys want to come to come on it. And they're just like, okay, they end up meeting on the plane to Wellington, Lee and How being like, what are you doing here? And they come in and they basically say, Lee, you're going to design the life. parts of Tolkien's world and how you're going to design the dark parts. And that became the guiding light for the series. In all, Miramax put $12 million into developing these films. And it should be said, every single dollar and all this time is why everything looks so good in this movie. It looks incredible.

Richard Taylor found a blacksmith who knew how to make armor as they did in 1490. And he hired him to come and make the armor for the movie. Like, that's why things look so good in this movie. Of course, things had to come to a head. Peter Jackson realized, we can't make this for $75 million. He brings on a line producer, Tim Sanders, to budget the film. And Sanders is like, look, optimistically, it's $135 million for both of these films. Almost double what you think it is.

Sure. Weinstein goes apeshit. Great. What he hadn't told Jackson is that over $75 million, he has to be able to be. to get Disney involved. And Weinstein doesn't want to get Disney involved. Now, I don't know if it's because he doesn't want to share the credit or if it's because he doesn't think they'll green light it, but for whatever reason, or he thinks they'll take

it away. He just doesn't want them involved. He just says, I'm not interested. So Weinstein turns to Jackson and says, fine, $75 million and you have to do it in one film. What? No. Ultimatum. He says, Jackson, you fucked me.

You pissed away $12 million. you either make one Lord of the Rings for $75 million, or I'm going to fire you, and I'm going to hire Quentin Tarantino to direct the movie. Oh, my God. Literally the worst Lord of the... I mean, I love Quentin Tarantino, but no. I would like to see it just for fun, but not for...

No. I would like to see 15 minutes of it. I'm not sitting through three hours of it. So to add insult to injury, Miramax then sent Peter Jackson a top secret memo detailing suggestions on how to get the film down to two hours. Here are some of the suggestion. Lose Helms Deep.

Oh, sure. Okay. Combine Rohan and Gondor. Sure, smush them together. Combined Theodin and Denethor. Of course. Make Aowin Boramir's sister and lose Faramir. Okay.

Shorten Moria and cut Saruman. Cut Saramon. Yeah. Cut Sarmond. Wow. Well, glad he was making millions of dollars on notes like that. That's great. So Jackson flies back to New Zealand at the lowest of lows. If he makes the movie that Harvey Weinstein wants him to make, he's going to let down every Tolkien fan in the world and probably nuke his career. 100%. You are fucking dead if you make do those notes. If he doesn't make the movie that Harvey Weinstein wants him to make, he's going to have to fire everybody at Weta because he can't pay them. Oh, man. And it'll probably nuke his career.

After a day or two of thinking, he calls his manager the wonderful Ken Kamens and told him, tell Harvey to make the movie with Tarantino or whoever he wants. I can't do it. Ken, though, was a smart, savvy political operator. He calls Harvey Weinstein and says, Harvey, look, we're at your mercy. Peter can't make the movie the way you want it made. He just can't do it. But I'm asking you, what if you let him try to make the movie he wants at another studio and you get your money back?

Wow. This is called putting a movie in turnaround. If a project loses momentum with a particular studio, that studio sometimes allows the filmmakers to pitch it to rival studios who can purchase the property for the cost of however much money that initial studio has sunk into the project. The typical turnaround period is a year, sometimes as short as six months. Basically, he's offering Harvey Weinstein a chance to get his $12 million back. So Harvey says, okay, but these are the terms. You don't have a year in turnaround. You don't have six months in turnaround.

You have 28 days to find the Lord of the Rings a new home. God, he's such an asshole. Not only do you have 28 days, normally, if it goes into turnaround and then gets bought, you'll get paid back when it goes into production. He says, no, I want my 12 million. million upon signing the new deal. And I get 5% of the gross from the eventual release of all the films. So you get your money back and 5%. And all Ken could say was, okay, the clock starts now. Wait, which orc? Is it the really hideous one with the like weird tufts of hair on its shoulder and

like half an eye missing? Yeah. Yeah, the one with like the giant bulge off of his forehead. Yeah, that's It's got a Weinstein vibe to it. Yeah, we'll get into that in the second one. Okay, good. Lots of boils on that guy. So Ken calls Peter Jackson with the news. He goes, Pete, we have 28 days to save the Lord of the Rings, your career, and Weta. Oh, my God.

Buckle up. So Ken, this guy, I love him. He gets to work. He calls every studio. He plays every favor he has trying to get Jackson in the room for a chance to pitch the project. Meanwhile, Jackson and all of these one-time. wonderful artists and artisans and technicians down in New Zealand are like, holy shit, what are we going to present to try to sell this movie? And they decide we're going to make a

five and a half-minute short film. It's going to be half documentary, talking heads, you know, behind the scene stuff, half narrative with Jackson playing Frodo and a number of the actors that he's worked with in his other movies playing the other roles, like local New Zealand actors. They shoot it, they supplement it with beautiful artwork by Lee and Howe. as well as gorgeously rendered sculptures of orcs, ring race, the Balrog. Apparently these sculptures, identical to how they would appear in the films. They had already nailed down the look at these movies. It was extremely well thought out.

Yeah, I believe it. What a Digital also participated. There was one of their programmers, Stephen Regalus, I believe is his name. He showed off this groundbreaking software called Massive. Those battle scenes in the prologue of Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers, the way that they were able to make it is they developed this computer software where all the soldiers would operate as individual thinkers on the battlefield. So they could run battlefield simulations for the first time,

not having to keyframe individual characters. And this allowed them to do the, like, you know, 100,000 versus 100,000 battles. Massive battles, yeah. Yeah, this is something that ILM had not yet achieved. I mean, they were really on the cutting edge. Wow. So they put together, what I would argue is, like, maybe the greatest pitch in modern film history. I mean, it's really remarkable when you think about it.

So they're ready. Ken calls them. Only two studios want to meet. Unfortunately, he had struck out across the board. Paramount was developing the line, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, so they passed. Disney passed. They were feeling burned by Weinstein and didn't want to cross Miramax. Fox passed because Saul Zense, after they had pulled out of the English patient, had gone to the American film market as the keynote speaker and spent his 20-minute, keynote address saying Fox was the evil empire, fuck them. And so when they said, is Solzense going to make a dime off of this? And Ken had to say yes. They said, we're out. Oh, man. So they're out. Amy Pascal, then the head of Sony, passed because she didn't connect with the material. She apparently told Ken that she just didn't care for the scripts. And, you know, I guess, fair enough. You got to follow your gut. Bet she regrets that. Universal wouldn't hear it. There was just too much baggage from the Frighteners and King Kong, which had fallen apart. And they even went to

Roland Emmerich. He had just started a new production company, Centropolis, and he also passed. He also claimed he didn't like the scripts, and this was at the same time that he was making the 1999 Godzilla. So I'm just like, maybe not the greatest taste, sir. So that left just two companies. Working title, which was operating as polygram in the U.S. at the time, they had distributed Jackson's movie Brain Dead or Dead Alive in the U.S. and New Line Cinema. Yep. And of course, Newline Jackson had a relationship via Mark Ordesky, who had brought him in to do the Freddie Kruger dream lover script. Ordesky worked in Fine Line. It was New Line's Art House Division, and he had been a longtime fan of Jackson's. He had actually fallen in love with

bad taste back in 1989 when he was working in like Z film distribution, like gore, like exploitation films basically. And he had actually been trying to get Jackson onto a number of New Line movies, including not only Nightmare and Elm Street, but they were going to do a Texas Chainsaw Masker, too, and he tried to pitch Jackson as the director of it. So he had a real ally with Ordesky, and Ordeschi believed in Jackson's genius, remember his name. He'll be an important part of this. So Jackson pitch his working title first. They were obviously fans of his, they liked the project, but they were in the middle of being sold. And so they basically said, look, we're not going to be able to get you an answer for like two or three months. And he said,

I have seven days. And so they said, I'm sorry. we have to pass. And so this leaves New Line Cinema, their last pitch. Now, Ken, smart man that he is, doesn't want to make Jackson look desperate, even though Jackson is beyond desperate. So he delayed the New Line meeting as long as he could until almost like the last day of that 28 days telling New Line, oh, Jackson's just busy pitching this movie around town. Everybody's so into it.

In actuality, Jackson and Walsh were catching matinees of all the movies that they hadn't been able to see prepping the pits, so they saw saving private rights. So they saw saving private Ryan, the mask of Zorro, and they were just like in theaters. Now, New Line was not an obvious home for the Lord of the Rings, but it actually was a really obvious home for Peter Jackson, the director. So if you guys don't know about New Line, definitely listened to our episode on the island of Dr. Moreau, where we talk about the origins of the company. Brief overview, it was started by Bob Shea, who was still the head of the company when Jackson pitched in a New York apartment for $300. It was originally a B-movie distribution house, but it had become a mini-making. major studio over the years. They were responsible for distributing Sam Ramey's Evil Dead, Toby Hooper's

Texas chainsaw masker, West Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street series. The studio was colloquially referred to as the house that Freddie built, referring to the money that Freddie Krueger made. Okay, so totally makes sense for Jackson, given what he had done previously. Does it make sense for Georgia Tolkien? Not so much, but that's okay. Well, maybe not, but maybe. So in the 90s, they had a string of comedy and action hits, Rush Hour, Austin Powers, Dumb and Dumber, The Mask. But then, importantly, they started doing some prestige work.

So they did Boogie Nights with Paul Thomas Anderson. Great. And they did seven with David Fincher. Also great. And so, again, it's like bad taste, meet the feeble's brain dead, heavenly creatures. Evil dead, Texas chainsaw, Masker, Nightmare on Elm Street, boogie nights.

It kind of makes sense to line them up. To your question about Lord of the Rings, and why we'll get to that in the next episode, but we need to get through the pitch first. So Jackson and Walsh show up for this meeting, and they are immediately informed that Michael DeLuca, who is the head of New Line's production division at the time, is not attending.

He was in London visiting the set of Lost in Space. This is a bad sign. You want, like, all the decision makers in the room when you're pitching. This signals that maybe this is just a courtesy meeting. Things only get worse from there. Jackson and Walsh get shown into a conference, room where they're going to be presenting and no one's there. Mark Ordeski steps in. He looks like a family member just died. He tells them, Peter, Bob Shea would like a word with you in private

in his office before hearing the pitch. What? Not great. Jackson follows him to Bob Shea's office. Jackson sits down and apparently Bob Shea's a very direct, he's the opposite of Harvey Weinstein, no gamesmanship. He'll just tell you if he likes it or not. He says, I'm happy to hear your pitch. But simply put, this isn't going to be something that we think New Line is going to do. Oh, God. So Jackson and Bob Shea walk back to the conference room. Apparently Fran Walsh knew the minute she could just see on his face. Of course, yeah.

This is over. He goes through the motions, walks them through the sculptures, the artwork, and then they end the pitch by playing the tape, the short film that all of news, it seems like all of New Zealand has rallied together. to make this five-and-a-half-minute pitch tape, and I'm sure it was absolutely excruciating for Jackson and Walsh to sit there knowing it was already dead.

It's important to know that Ken, simultaneous to setting up these meetings for his client, had attempted to get Jackson onto another studio movie to keep his client's career going. He'd gotten Jackson into the running to helm a James Bond film, but that had fallen through. He'd gotten Jackson into the room to meet with Kathleen Kennedy

about adapting the big, friendly giant, but that had fallen through. Ken later said that he really thought it was Lord of the Rings or Bust. If this didn't go, Jackson and Fran Walsh would head back to New Zealand and continue to make films in New Zealand, but there would be no studio story for the two of them. After five and a half minutes, the tape ends with a click, and everybody just sits there waiting for Bob Shea to finally kill this project and put them out of their misery. Now, according to Ian Nathan in his wonderful book,

Peter Jackson in the Making of Middle Earth, Shay then turned to Jackson and asked, why would anyone want moviegoers to pay $18 when they might pay $27? And Jackson doesn't understand what he's talking about. So Shea clarifies.

Tolkien wrote three books. It should be three movies. Yeah. Jackson eventually. finds his voice and goes, yes, it could be three films. And New Line Cinema decided that they were going to make Lord of the Fucking Rings. Yeah.

And that concludes the first episode of the Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring. And we will get into the amazing juiciness of production in our next episode. And I hope you guys enjoyed this journey. I did not know any of this. Wow. I didn't know that the Weinsteins were that involved in the development of it. I mean, I saw their names, obviously, when we saw the credits. And I was like, that's got to come up somewhere.

But yeah, that's God. Yeah. I think we should skip what went right this week, Lizzie, unless there's something you would like to throw in there. Sure. No, that's so far what went right is really just New Zealand. So I think we can. Yeah.

New Zealand will continue to go right for all of these movies. And I would just say in general. Yeah. Hats off to New Zealand. Seems like a great place. Can we come? Yeah, exactly. We can make a podcast and bastardize your accents. So, guys, as always, leave us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy us.

Send us your movie recommendations via Instagram or Gmail, What Went Wrong Pod at gmail.com. A shout out to our full stop supporters, Soman Chianani and Tom Kristen. Thank you guys so much. really appreciate it. Thank you for your support. Thank you to all of our patrons. And without further ado, I'll let you get to part two of our coverage of Lord of the Rings, which is available now with our double episode, Season 5 Big Bang Drop. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing Music by David

Bowman with cover art from Euthano Youos.