*Впадает в еще большую лирику*
Давным-давно, в далекой-далекой галактике моя подруга Hack, у брата которой имелся компьютер с выходом в
Сеть, принесла мне на дискете следующее:
"The Sunday Times", 25th May, 1997.
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Hobbits to risk all in dark land of Middle Hollywood
by Nicholas Hellen
Media Correspondent
The hobbits are about to embark on their most dangerous journey. The paunchy little creatures, who survived terrifying adventures in Middle Earth, are bound for film stardom in Hollywood.
Saul Zaentz, the owner of the screen rights to The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings _ and producer of
the Oscar-winning The English Patient _ has disclosed plans to capture J R R Tolkien's flights
of fantasy on screen with the latest digital special
effects and a cast of top Hollywood actors.
Wholesale revisions may be required to condense the complex tales, which began life in the late 1920s as the doodlings of an Oxford University philologist bored with marking examination scripts, and became an American campus cult in the 1960s and 1970s.
Despite the prospect of generous royalties from the
film and the merchandising that will accompany it,
Tolkien's family are unhappy with the venture, which
they believe will tarnish the magic of the epic tales. Priscilla Tolkien, the author's only daughter, said: "I am against a film being made."
John Tolkien, his eldest son, feared commercial pressures would inevitably detract from the books.
"It may be a very good film. But the stories were
created for one medium and would inevitably have to be distorted to fit another," he said.
Their fears are supported by one expert who warned
that the stories would require the addition of a
love interest to appeal to cinema audiences. Frodo,
the nephew of Bilbo Baggins, may have to give up his loyal servant, Sam Gamgee, because viewers might wrongly suspect homosexual overtones in their relationship.
Brian Sibley, who adapted The Lord of the Rings for
BBC radio, warned that some of Tolkien's social
assumptions were dated. "Frodo might have to be
given a female companion instead," he said.
Tolkien, who died in 1973, resisted the commercialisation of his work during his lifetime.
Humphrey Carpenter, his biographer, said the author
constructed forbiddingly complex maps and linguistic
guides to Middle Earth because he regarded his books not as imaginative fantasies, but as real histories,of which he was the chronicler.
In one letter, written in 1937, he urged his publishers to keep his work out of the clutches of
Walt Disney. "Let the Americans do what seems good to them by means of illustrating The Hobbit in America," he wrote, "as long as it is possible to veto anything from, or influenced by, the Disney studios, for all whose work I have a heartfelt loathing."
Christopher, Tolkien's youngest son, said a film
could make his father's worst fears about the
disruptive effects of publicity come true. A cult of
obsessive fans pestered his father in old age,
forcing him at one stage to move to a secret address. Christopher, who is his father's literary executor, said Tolkien addicts had also forced him into hiding. He now lives in a former farmhouse in a
forest in the south of France. "In 1975 we literally
had to flee," he said. "It got absolutely
insupportable to continue living in Britain."
Zaentz predicted that the Tolkien films will become
box-office hits, but insisted he would not allow the
myth to be tarnished.
"We have rejected countless proposals on the way,"
he said. "We will only approve work which is
sensitive to the detail. The films could be as much
of a landmark as The Wizard of Oz."
Three big Hollywood studios are vying for the movie rights _ Universal, the makers of Jurassic Park and
its sequel, The Lost World; Dreamworks SKG, the
studio part-owned by Steven Spielberg, and Miramax, a division of Disney.
The directors John Boorman and Peter Jackson have declared their interest.
A previous attempt to bring Tolkien's creation to
the screen ended unhappily. In 1978 Zaentz produced an animated version of the first half of The Lord of the Rings, which was released to mixed reviews. It earned about ё15m at the American box office, and plans for a sequel were abandoned.
The publishers of The Lord of the Rings, which has
sold a total of 50m copies, and The Hobbit, which
sold 35m, are anxious to protect Tolkien's stories.
David Brawn, a senior manager at HarperCollins, said: "A bad piece of casting could cause severe
damage."
The hobbits' fans are also likely to prove themselves formidable guardians of Tolkien's creation. Sibley, whose radio adaptation starred Ian
Holm as Frodo, Sir Michael Hordern as Gandalf and
John Le Mesurier as Bilbo Baggins, warned Zaentz not to tamper with the books. "People not only have a clear idea of what they should look like; they even know what they should sound like," he said.
Wayne Hammond, author of several books on Tolkien, agreed: "Danny DeVito might be suitable as a hobbit, with Sean Connery as one of the elder kings. But everybody who has read the books has conflicting images in their minds."
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