Re: Scouring of the Shire
Indeed. Used to live near the bakery (patisserie?) on Sarehole Road. Kind of entirely the wrong side of the city for Black Country territory!
J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings could be on its way to the small screen. Deadline reports that rights to the seminal trilogy is being shopped around Hollywood, with Netflix, Amazon and HBO in rights-holders' sights. An eye-watering US200m-$250m is reportedly the price of admission. After raiding Smaug's hoard to pay for …
My apologies -- I always thought that Birmingham was part of the Black Country (especially in industrial revolution times). I didn't realise it was more tightly defined (certainly seems to be nowadays)! I have now learnt something about geography! At least I don't attempt to pronounce Shrewsbury.
Not so, just last week we were discussing if the latest Cray super computer, armed with a quad pack of AMD's finest gfx cards; could get double digit fps around Minas Tiruth without crashing every time you use a porting skill or walked through a door.
ICON
Gandalf REALLY let himself go in later years
I'm guessing they'll try to cash in on the success of that Thrones thing . Presumably whats being sold is the whole rights to middle earth to F*** in the ass any way they want , rather than the LOTR story.
So it'll probably turn into a sex and violence soap for the masses , ala Thrones.
There's an unofficial (and never published in English) *alternative* telling of the events of LOTR. The premise is that history is written by the victors and thus LOTR is propaganda written to justify the actions of the racist and technologically backward men and elves. It's told from the perspective of the enlightened (but ultimately defeated) Easterners.
The Tolkein estate has nixed any English publication (the original is in Russian) but an English translation approved by the author is available online.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
I haven't read it, but I like devil's advocate aspect of it. It was a point that first came to my young awareness in an Isaac Asimov (himself a historian as well as a Sci-fi author and biochemist) short story about using a time machine to learn more about Carthage.
All we know about Carthage is through their enemies the Romans. The Romans razed the city to the ground. According to the Romans, people in Carthage ate babies.
"Lord" sounds a bit sexist? Any suggestions for a viable substitute?
Bring it up to date.
"Baroness of the Internet"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/martha_lane_fox_virtue_signalling_website_badge
The everyday struggles of the trailblazer of the dot com revolution and member of the Upper Chamber in the land of Westminster. The epic story of how she transformed the Government Digital Service and how she hopes to bring Trust to the WWW. (Wild Wild West World Wide Web)
Cameo by Lord Sugar
....TV works on the basis of "....what can we plagiarise that's hot...."
Currently what's Hot is Game of Thrones......which in a TV executives unbelievable small mind and short attention span can be compressed into the single word "Fantasy".
Dragons, bad people, good people, heroes, scheming GoT has it all.
So let's take LoTR and reimagine it with a GoT perspective, that's bound to sell.
You might well laugh, but the TV industry, even in it's current 'Golden Age' (for all the dross out there there's still some pretty good shows made) would look at $500m for say a 7-8 year series as cheap, if it's Amazon or Netflix or Apple or a similar streaming service $500m could equate to a $4-46bn return in committed subscribers for just that show. Look at GoT, it had 31m average viewers during season 7, now let's just say that 15% of them subscribe to HBO because of GoT so that's 4.5m (rounded off), at $10 per month or $120 per year equates to about $550m of revenue per year (OK I accept you won't get 31m straight away, but the potential is there), plus the international rights which would certainly offset the bulk of licence and production costs for seasons 1 and 2.
None of us would want the quality to suffer, but the initial investment level is not that big if they can make it a hit.
Most of the appeal of GoT is the scheming and intrigue, lifted from European history. Until the most recent series, the fantasy elements have sat on the periphery, just as our maps once had areas marked 'here be dragons'.
It seems odds to cancel House of Cards on Spacey's account, when his character was fading and Claire Underwood had just risen to the top - though in this age of 45's carnival the show had lost some of its relevance.
Looking forward to another series of Wolf Hall with Mark Rylance, even if we know the ending!
"Most of the appeal of GoT is the scheming and intrigue, lifted from European history. Until the most recent series, the fantasy elements have sat on the periphery"
Which I guess is why it turned out boring as shite and I ended up dumping it after a couple of seasons. No I don't care who's screwing who or whose family has a ten generations old rivalry with another. I want magic blowing shit up and dragons setting fire to things.
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"Dragons, bad people, good people, heroes, scheming..."
What I love about GoT is that there aren't per se "good people" and "bad people", just people doing things that are 'good' or 'bad', but rarely completely good or completely bad, and in any case 'good' and 'bad' aren't that simple. Everyone is acting to maximise their own 'good', based on a worldview that is built of a number of events starting from childhood, many conflicting with each other and often traumatic. Each of many, many 'sides' has their own 'good' and 'evil', and these change as events have an effect on the characters' experiences.
LOTR, while being a fine tale rendered into an excellent film trilogy, suffers the one-dimensionality of absolute good vs absolute evil, and for all the fact that there are nuances (especially Gollum's charecter), pretty much every charecter can be put squarely in one camp or another.
In any case, LOTR TV series... ugh!
Yes, it is what's being used to justify evil and selfishness today....
But Tolkien mythology is based on the Good vs. Evil struggle - and influenced by the WW wars - and it won't be as forceful as it is if its characters weren't on one of the sides strongly, although a few ones aren't - but have to choose a side eventually. Boromir or Théoden, for example. Denethor is another example of a character who fails at the end. Anyway, when so much is it at stake - that's not a simple foreign king, it's the servant of the Evil Lord himself - people have to choose a side, and the real heroes shine....
In the Silmarillion characters are often less "pure", anyway.