It's all on the line for New Line Cinema, the studio fronting the $270 million motion picture adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy saga The Lord of the Rings - an undertaking as epic unto itself as any of the adventures set to be encountered by Frodo and company when the first installment of the trilogy opens in theaters December 19th.
At stake, beyond the mammoth financial investment necessary to produce the three movies consecutively, is the risk of bringing to life a tale so deeply entrenched in the public consciousness that any director's take on the story runs the chance of becoming a no-win situation.
Tolkien enthusiasts will have plenty to pick at, no doubt, with minor plot points and secondary characters being omited in the interest of condensing a 479-page novel into an already lengthy 3 hour feature film.
Still, it's hard not to absolve such a loyal following who in recent months have become more vocal about about their hopes and apprehensions about the upcoming movie on the numerious fan sites and newsgroups scattered across the internet - they have, after all, been burned before.
Rings mania ran high in the late 70s with the premiere of The Hobbit on network television. A prequel detailing the events prior to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit was produced by the team of Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, better known for the stop-motion Christmas favorites Rudolph and Frosty.
Crammed into an all to restrictive 78 minutes, the Saturday morning-style animated cartoon was clearly aimed at children and contained none of the peril or violence that permeated the actual novel.
Starring the voice talents of John Huston as Gandalph, Richard Boone as Smaug, Otto Preminger as the Elvenking and Orson Bean as Bilbo Bagging, the movie offered up a highly glossed-over storyline spaced between a series of inane song renditions and failed to elisit much enthusiasm among fans.
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Renegade animator Ralph Bakshi, famous for churning out such adult-oriented cartoons as Wizards, Streetfight, and the X-rated Fritz the Cat followed up the Rankin-Bass effort with the theatrical release of The Lord of the Rings, an ambitious, $8 million spectacle that perhaps looked like a good idea in the planning stages but came up short on the big screen.
Bakshi's interpretation incorporated a bizarre technique known as rotoscoping, a process which involves filming live actors and then animating over their performance. The effect creates a type of semi-realism which Bakshi hoped would make for a sense of belief and disbelief at the same time. Unfortunately, what he ended up with was a distracting and headache-inducing mishmash of set pieces that alienated viewers and infurated purists by taking liberties with the story as laid out in the Tolien's work.
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