New Line Cinema’s $300-million, three-film gamble on the “Lord of the Rings” may well be the film company’s crowning achievement — or its undoing.
An audacious move by New Line founder and co-chairman Robert Shaye, this project puts the spotlight on a company walking the razor’s edge between an independent past and its current corporate reality. The first film in the series, “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” appears poised to be a sensation when it opens in theaters Wednesday. Early positive critical response has turned the 300,000 “Rings” Internet fan sites into hives of excitement. Independent market research shows strong audience interest, close to “Harry Potter” levels.
“The potential for ‘Rings’ has been realized in the first movie,” Shaye said. “But that doesn’t mean my hands aren’t sweating.”
Shaye needs “Rings” to do more than just make money. He’s hoping the project will be such an enormous hit that it will ensure New Line’s future as a stand-alone studio within AOL Time Warner Inc. “There is no question that our autonomy is at risk,” Shaye said.
Concerns earlier this year about cost overruns on “Rings” and general out-of-control spending at New Line led AOL Time Warner top brass to take away Shaye’s ability to “greenlight” another movie project of this magnitude.
“Bob pushed a lot of chips to the middle of the table,” said Richard Parsons, co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner and the executive in charge of New Line. ” ‘Rings’ is a huge bet.”
The built-in audience for the project is staggering. More than 100 million copies of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy trilogy have been sold around the world, more than 30 million in the U.S. Publication of the series followed Tolkien’s 1937 introduction to the imaginative world of Middle-earth, “The Hobbit.”
That deep base of instant recognition for “Rings” encompasses both Baby Boomers and their Generation X and Y children. Even before New Line considered buying the project, there were 400 online sites devoted to Tolkien’s work. “Rings” is a densely packed quest that follows the diminutive, hairy-footed hobbit Frodo Baggins through worlds populated with spiritual elves, grizzly dwarfs, giant wizards, horrifying orcs and pathetically weak men. It’s a “boy-centric,” sword-fighting tale with brief glimpses of godlike women who periodically inspire good folks to keep up the struggle. “Rings,” however, will be remembered in Hollywood for its daring.
“Titanic,” the most expensive movie to date, cost $200 million. Although “Rings” will be shown in theaters as three films, it was made as one project, shot all at once during a 274-day production, at a cost estimated to eventually reach $300 million. No one in Hollywood has ever defied the odds and made one sequel, much less two, for a film that has yet to be released. But this isn’t a traditional movie in any sense. For instance, the first film is really just Act 1. The payoff, the point where the plot is tied up in a neat package, doesn’t arrive until the final film, to be released in two years.
Running the show is Peter Jackson, a writer-director whose biggest previous budget was the $17 million “The Frighteners,” a box-office bomb. Jackson launched Kate Winslet’s career with his 1994 “Heavenly Creatures,” an artful exploration of matricide. He also is known in New Zealand for his “splatter” films, most notably one involving pornographic puppets.
Nearly every frame of “Rings” involves intricate special effects, initially all to be created by a tiny New Zealand company, Weta, owned and operated by Jackson. Sporadically throughout the movie, various pointy-eared elf characters lapse into a language known only to the most devout “Rings” fanatics, the ancient Elvish. Jackson uses subtitles, a known audience turnoff, to deliver key dialogue.
All of this potential for disaster was managed by a New Line executive with little experience making movies. Mark Ordesky is president of New Line’s Fine Line division, which specializes in picking up offbeat foreign and independent film festival fare.
New Line opted against using the tried-and-true Hollywood safety net, topping the marquee with a big star whose name alone draws a crowd. Although Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett and Viggo Mortensen are recognizable, few in Hollywood would call them box-office insurance. And, as if to make the final hurdle, marketing, as difficult as possible, New Line decided to open the movie around the globe on Dec. 19. A simultaneous worldwide splash may sound exciting, but it forces this smaller studio to orchestrate a vast international network of events instead of using a more manageable U.S. launch to create a ripple of excitement that can be built upon internationally.
“It was a monumental undertaking,” Shaye said. “I don’t think anyone understood [at the outset] how monumental.” So, why did Shaye say “go” when rival movie companies screamed “no” to this project?
“It was a potentially huge franchise, a smart move for us,” he said. “We could justify it by spreading the costs over three years.”
Shaye believed his company could make “Rings” in New Zealand for less than half of what a major studio would spend to make it in the United States, he said. But, in the end, it was all about Jackson, said Shaye, who knew the independent director from years earlier when he wrote a “Nightmare on Elm Street” episode for the company.
“Peter was incredibly passionate, an informed passion,” Shaye said. “He was dedicated to being true to the spirit of Tolkien.”
Jackson walked into New Line’s offices for the “Rings” pitch meeting in the summer of 1998 armed with a videotape of sample special effects shots and a two-decade-long Tolkien fascination. He had spent 18 months wrestling with the “Rings” material at Miramax Films before giving up on that studio’s demand that the story be squeezed into just one film. Trying to interest other studios, Jackson had only one bidder. After hearing Jackson’s pitch, Shaye brashly announced, “Let’s make it with three movies!”
“New Line reported to Ted then,” said Parsons, noting that AOL Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner no longer has line responsibilities at the corporation. “He gets the credit or the blame.”
Shaye now shares the chairmanship of New Line with his old friend Michael Lynne. But he founded the company in 1967 on the money he made peddling a 30-year-old B-movie that became a cult classic, “Reefer Madness.” He built the company into a full-fledged independent film studio on the strength of the horror series “Nightmare on Elm Street.” A Hollywood outsider headquartered in New York, Shaye elevated one of his youngest staff members, Michael De Luca, to head production, and together they relished championing the rejects from the mainstream film industry and turning them into box-office sensations, including “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber.” Although there was a dismal stretch in the mid-1990s with expensive flops such as “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and “Last Man Standing,” Jackson knocked on New Line’s door after the company’s release of two huge hits, “The Wedding Singer” and “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.”
Turner, who would sometimes refer to Shaye as “Brother Bob,” had given New Line a long leash. Not only was Shaye undaunted by the “Rings” risks and Jackson’s relative inexperience, he put a fellow Tolkien devotee, Ordesky, in charge of the project.
“I was absolutely convinced, I was sure, that this was a great idea for a movie,” said Ordesky, who keeps a tiny pewter Frodo, a childhood keepsake, on his desk.
“I was obsessive,” said Ordesky, who read and re-read the trilogy several times as a teenager.
Ordesky had been a fan of Jackson’s since the director’s early films, including “Bad Taste,” about cannibalistic aliens. “I had vowed then that I would find a way to make a film with him.” Still surprised that he was given the “Rings” reins, Ordesky said New Line isn’t like any other AOL Time Warner unit. “Bob is big on advocacy. If you advocate it, you own it.”
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“Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” opens Wednesday, Dec. 19; the review will appear in that Wednesday’s Tempo section (this paragraph as published has been corrected in this text).
