TheOneRing.net has posted a transcript of a recent telephone interview with Guillermo Del Toro, conducted by “Popcorn Taxi” in Sydney, Australia. The occasion was the opening of Hellboy II in Australia, but the interview ranges over GDT’s influences, tastes, views on fantasy, and so on. There’s a reference to The Hobbit near the end:

Well the only thing I can say is that we are now finally and officially and merrifly in progression on the scripting process. We are all actively working on it and having a grand time at it. It keeps transforming and changing and it is ‘the most beautiful’ writing experience of my life, I’m enjoying it tremendously – and there’s bound to be news soon enough. There is no big revelations at this stage, except to confirm that I myself will not be playing Bilbo Baggins.

I recommend reading the entire interview—and seeing Hellboy II if you haven’t already.

The promised September 22 meeting concerning the lawsuit the Tolkien Trust brought against New Line Cinema on February of this year has taken place. The purpose of the meeting was for the judge to announce a ruling on the amended Trust complaint. The ruling was filed on September 24. The Judge’s decision was mixed, with benefits for both sides in the case.

There are three major decisions involved. First, the Tolkien Trust had requested a rewording of the original 1969 contract, alleging that it misstated an arrangement concerning the percentage of payments due for one of the films. The judge ruled against that “on the ground that it is time-barred.” Under New York law (which holds in this case since the contract was originally filed in the state of New York), the amendment would have had to be made within six years of the original contract’s date.

Second, the judge overruled New Line’s revised Demurrer requesting that the Trust’s charge of fraud be dropped. In her first ruling, in June, the judge had deemed that the Tolkien Trust had not sufficiently argued for fraud in its original complaint. Their amended complaint has satisfied her, and she states that “This cause of action are [sic] well stated.”

Third, the judge sustains New Line’s “motion to strike the request for punitive damages.” Among the punitive damages could have been the Trust’s request that the court confirm its right to terminate New Line’s rights to produce The Hobbit.

Both the first and the third judgments were made “without leave to amend.” Thus the Trust cannot file an amended complaint concerning the contract rewording or the punitive damages. Of most immediate interest to fans is that fact that that means production of The Hobbit cannot possibly happen under the terms of this particular lawsuit.

New Line is given ten days after the meeting to respond. Given that it won the first and third points and that the judge has ruled that the Tolkien Trust has now made a sufficient case for fraud charges to be retained in its complaint, there seems little reason for New Line to file yet another Demurrer. The ruling has clarified the terms of the lawsuit. Possibly now that that has happened, the two sides will be motivated to settle out of court. If not, they will proceed in their gathering of evidence for the trial itself, scheduled for just over a year from now, in October, 2009.

(For the Associated Press’s summary of the case, see TheOneRing.net. For my earlier entries on the lawsuit, see here.)

I just received word that the hardcover edition of The Frodo Franchise is on sale at the University of California Press’s website. You can get it there (the price isn’t available from other sources) for $6.95. The sale lasts through October 31. You’ll need to enter a sale code, which is 09M5306. (I think those 0s are numerals, but if the code doesn’t work, try ‘em as letters.)

By the way, there’s a note that books on sale “May not have a dust jacket.” I think that’s because these days many university-press books are published without dust jackets because they mainly sell to libraries. That was not the case with The Frodo Franchise, so if you order a copy, it should come complete with the charming dust jacket illustrated above.

I want to let you all know that tomorrow my husband and I are leaving on a long driving trip out to see the Pacific Northwest. We’ll end up at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where we’ll spend a week and a half catching up on the latest art movies and documentaries. We’re aiming to be home by October 10 or 11.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog during all this. On September 22, of course, another meeting will be held in the Tolkien Trust vs. New Line lawsuit, and there should be a ruling on the second Demurrer. If there’s any big news, I’ll try to comment, but I’ll leave it to TheOneRing.net to keep us all up-to-date.

Checking McKellen.com, as I do at intervals, I discovered that Ian is going to co-star in a remake of the classic 1960s British television series, The Prisoner. It’s being produced by American Movie Classics’ TV wing, which has taken in recent years to creating original programming. It will be shown next year.

On August 8, Ian blogged about the actors’ initial read-through of the scripts for the six-part series. (He plays the role of “Two.”) That happened in London before the cast departed for location shooting in Namibia. I bring all this up because Ian spent a third or more of that entry recalling the internet publicity for The Lord of the Rings and how anxious New Line was to control it. What he says will be familiar to readers of The Frodo Franchise, and in particular Chapter 5. Still, it’s a treat to read it in his own words–and to recall that “The Grey Book” and “The White Book” were early instances of what we would now call blogs. These days film and TV studios recognize the great value of this sort of publicity, and Ian’s new entry appears on the AMC’s own site rather than on McKellen.com.

In my various discussions of the lawsuit brought by the Tolkien Trust against New Line over payments from LOTR revenues, I have stressed that lawsuits over payments are not uncommon in Hollywood. Case in point: The Associated Press (as posted by Variety) today reports that Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount over money he says he is owed for No Country for Old Men.

Jones “claims he was not paid promised bonuses and had expenses wrongly deducted. The suit says Jones was paid a reduced upfront fee in joining the film, and that his contract had known errors not corrected before the movie was made.

Jones, 61, is asking that an auditor be named to review financial records to determine how much he should be paid.

The specific circumstances are quite different from the LOTR case, and yet on a very general level some of the claims are somewhat parallel. They involve expenses alleged to have been wrongly deducted from the revenues from which the actor was to be paid and a reduced up-front payment in exchange for a percentage later on. As I wrote based on the 1969 contract turning over the LOTR and Hobbit film rights to United Artists, Tolkien was paid a relatively low amount as an initial fee, but the 7.5% of revenues after expenses was an unusually high one for a literary property.

Jones is suing for a minimum sum of $10 million, with the full amount to be determined through an audit. The Tolkien Trust has done something similar, demanding at least $150 million and more if an audit determines that they are owed more. (It also requests that an apparent mistake in the 1969 contract be corrected.)

My point is that the suit against New Line isn’t all that strange and unusual. It gets a lot more attention than most because of the much larger sums involved, the popularity of LOTR, both novel and film, and the apparently possible threat to the making of The Hobbit. Contracts involving percentages of income usually allow studios to deduct at least some expenses, and disagreements about what counts as a legitimate deduction are likely to arise when large amounts of money are involved.

According to Variety, Guillermo Del Toro is currently collaborating with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens on the script for The Hobbit, partly via video conferencing and partly by traveling to New Zealand every three weeks. While GDT may have committed the next five years of his life to directing The Hobbit and its sequel, he’s also thinking way ahead. He has made a long-term plan with Universal, with which he’s got a three-year first-look signed in June of 2007. GDT is announced to direct four films for Universal: remakes of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Slaughterhouse-Five, and Drood, an adaptation of a forthcoming Dan Simmons novel.

The studio is also still interested in GDT’s project to adapt H. P. Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, for which he had already written a script. Ultimately he’d also like to direct a third Hellboy film: “We laid the groundwork to have a magnificent third act. I’d like to return to an action franchise with 60-year-old actor Ron Perlman, because he’ll be scratching at that age when I get to it.”

The Hellboy project depends on how well Hellboy II: The Golden Army does internationally. After a big opening weekend it didn’t do well in the U.S., but it has been more successful overseas.

The Variety story also suggests that the sudden intrusion of the Hobbit project caused some tensions between GDT and Universal. The studio’s president of production, Donna Langley, said, “We came out the other side of some tough conversations with a stronger bond and sense of long-term commitment.” For a director who specializes in horror and fantasy, the relationship makes sense. Universal’s great strength in the golden age of Hollywood was its series of monster movies: Frankenstein and its sequels, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, and others. Frankenstein is one of GDT’s favorite films, and he says, “With that one, they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands to prevent me from directing it.”