I’ve just returned from my trip to New York, where I got together with Rick Porras, co-producer of LOTR, for a chat about his work on the trilogy, followed by a signing. That went very well, and we had some enthusiastic fans who asked many interesting questions. I’ll put together a report on that as soon as I’ve had a chance to go through my photos and my audio recording of the dialogue and the Q&A.

In the meantime, after much emailing back and forth, I managed to arrange a radio interview with Jim Freund of WBAI. He has long been the host of a sci-fi and fantasy program, “Hour of the Wolf,” which airs early on Saturday morning. more »

On October 5 at 1:30 pm, I’ll be at the Intellectual Property bookstore in Austin for a brief presentation, Q&A, and signing. It’s located on the edge of the University of Texas campus at 24th and Guadalupe. Check their website for a map and information on parking.

On September 20, The Hollywood Reporter and The Dominion Post (Wellington’s newspaper) broke the story that progress has finally been made in the lawsuit Peter Jackson brought against New Line Cinema way back in March of 2005. The Dominion Post site is subscription only, but immediately the story was on stuff.co.nz, a New Zealand news site. (The piece is dated Sepember 21, but of course they’re a day ahead of us.) TheOneRing.net quickly picked up on this, and a few other sites have noted the judge’s decision. On September 21, the Los Angeles Times posted the longest and most informative news story I’ve seen so far. Oddly, Variety has not mentioned the decision. more »

Kent Williams, film reviewer for Isthmus here in Madison, interviewed me a few weeks ago. The result is in the current print issue (February 21) and available on its website.

Ever vigilant, TheOneRing.net has posted a link to a brief story on Stuff.co.nz, a major online Kiwi news source. That story proclaims that “Peter Jackson has won the first round in his fight with Hollywood studio New Line over the profits from The Lord of the Rings.”

It continues, “A judge has fined New Line, the film trilogy’s financial backer, $125,000 ($NZ169,000) for failing to turn over court-ordered documents in the case.”

New Line has also been given three weeks to produce relevant audits of its files.

Up to now there had been no public announcement of what damages Jackson is seeking, but now his lawyers have told the New York Times that New Line may owe him as much as $100 million.

As more information about this decision emerges, I’ll try to sort out the implications.

My first visit to New Zealand actually preceded my serious research on The Frodo Franchise. In November of 2002 I was at a film conference in Australia. I planned to spend a week in New Zealand on the way home. While wearing my other hat as an Egyptologist, I have been gradually visiting museums around the world to see fragments that originally came from Tell el-Amarna, the site where I work. There were some pieces of Amarna statuary in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. It was a long way to go to see some pieces of stone that would take less than an hour to examine. I took advantage of the visit, however, to get a few days of sightseeing in and arranged for a bus trip from Dunedin to Queenstown. more »

Browsing through Amazon recently, I came across a DVD called T & T’s Real Travels in Middle Earth. Naturally I was intrigued and ordered a copy, hoping it would be something that I could recommend to those who may never get to New Zealand to see the Lord of the Rings locations for themselves. Alas, it proved disappointing, and I am more inclined to warn fans to avoid it. more »

When I was working on The Frodo Franchise, I bought quite a few things on eBay. The thought was that I might need to photograph licensed products to use as illustrations. All the novel-related licensed objects that appear in the picture on page 11 came from eBay. I ended up with, to say the least, a lot of stuff I didn’t use in the book. Still, some of it is fun to have for its own sake and some is proving useful for publicity photos. Yesterday I got my picture taken for a local newspaper story. I was standing looking over the top of my Kia promotional standee. more »

Now the The Frodo Franchise is out, I’ve been doing some radio and print interviews. These sometimes allow me to talk a little about my three visits to New Zealand during 2003 and 2004, when I was conducting interviews for the book. I also got to tour most of the filmmaking facilities created by Peter Jackson and his colleagues. Overall I spent about ten weeks there in Queenstown, Auckland, and mostly Wellington.

I have a lot of exciting memories from those days, of course. I’d like at intervals to share some of those with you on this blog. My interviewees were also extraordinarily helpful, and I was not able to use nearly all the information they provided me. I’m hoping that, with their permission, I can transcribe some sections of those interviews (a big task, since originally I just took notes on them) and post them here. more »

In Chapter 10 of The Frodo Franchise, I discuss the positive impact that The Lord of the Rings had on New Zealand’s film industry. Peter Jackson and his colleagues built up a world-class set of filmmaking facilities in Wellington. A large group of film artists and technicians gained a high level of skill that they are now applying on other films. The national government recognized the value of LOTR and boosted funding to institutions that support filmmaking, most notably Film New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission. more »