Looks like a final piece of news for The Cimmerian, at least for the month of May: according to TheOneRing.Net, Guillermo Del Toro is apparently leaving production of the upcoming film adaptations of The Hobbit.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The financial and legal wrangling going about the project looked like they weren’t going to be over anytime soon, and with over two years going, I can’t blame Del Toro from moving on. While I think Del Toro may have surprised us with the films, Jackson (pictured above with Del Toro) & company are still in control, and that will always be a source of intense division among fans.

The question now becomes, who will step up to the plate in Del Toro’s absence?

If there’s one thing that can be said for Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s that it doesn’t nearly muck up Tolkien’s source material to the degree the many adapters of Howard’s work have. For all the alterations made to the story and characters, it could so easily have ended up even worse: Arwen joining the Fellowship and lending a sword at the Hornburg, Sauron laying the smackdown on Aragorn at the Black Gates, Frodo pushing Gollum over the precipice at Mount Doom, and other heinous elements in the early two-film script. At least they didn’t add in superfluous secondary characters beyond Lurtz in Fellowship and Sharku in Towers, and the odd cameo of someone’s adorable kids. Or Peter Jackson.

With Boyens, Walsh & Jackson doing the script for The Hobbit, my hopes weren’t particularly high, but I at least had some idea what to expect. I thought. Unfortunately, as reported on TORN, a list of major roles for The Hobbit was posted on spoilertv.com, and it’s… well, you guys might want to have a seat and a dram ready before reading this.

WARNING: The review below has been written in full “snark” mode. Luckily, it isn’t four thousand words long, as that other overview was, indicating that things aren’t that bad.

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First editions of The Lord of the Rings published in 1954 and 1955 by George Allen & Unwin.

On this weekend that we are honoring what would have been The Professor’s eleventy-eighth birthday I’m going to discuss Tolkien collectibles –a subject so vast that I will only be able explore it in the most general terms. From books to action figures to replica movie props to artwork, there are countless items of Tolkien-related memorabilia on the market. With such a vast array of choices there are interesting items available for collectors on any budget, from first editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that run tens of thousands of dollars to “Frodo Lives” buttons from the 1970’s that cost a few bucks.

There are a number of online references and resources for Tolkien collectors. One of the most useful is TolkienCollector.com which has page after page of useful information in numerous different categories, including a detailed description of the differences between the various editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit-Movie.com site has a page dedicated specifically to collecting books and has a basic listing of prices.

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Casting for The Hobbit has apparently begun, the news of which means that I’m back to split feelings of incredible exhilaration, and a terrible, impending doom. The Hobbit was my introduction to fantasy literature and made me a lifetime reader, both of the fantasy genre and of literature in general. It’s an important, central work for me and for many others.

While of course we’ll always have the book, regardless of what we get in the final film product, my fervent hope is that producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo Del Toro get the movie right. It’s too important to screw up.

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Two pieces of Hobbit-related news for your perusal: apparently, Something is Coming, and casting is underway… including a female role.

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, the dramatis personae of The Hobbit was pretty much of exclusively male composition. The film trilogy boosted the presence of Arwen to mixed reaction, and the roles of Galadriel and Éowyn were slightly expanded. It’s possible that this casting call could be for a minor role–perhaps as the voice actress of one of the many animals in the book, which could certainly be interpreted as female–but as the report mentions, such an early announcement indicates a featured role, rather than a lesser one.

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Earlier this year, Leo Grin reported on the debut of The Hunt for Gollum, a fan film chronicling Aragorn’s search for the fallen hobbit during the Watchful Peace prior to the outbreak of war. It was well-received, and is probably one of the finer examples of fan cinema in terms of technical achievement. However, like Leo, I have to lament the fact that it wasn’t truly a Lord of the Rings adaptation, but a New Line Cinema Lord of the Rings fan film: the cinematography, costume, music and character design was exactly like in the films.

It’s really hard to criticize the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The sheer amount of love, effort and perseverance which went into production from every member of the crew is breathtaking and infectious, practically unprecedented, and the sort of thing we rarely see in such a project. It undoubtedly led people to seek out more Tolkien to read, and though Jackson, Boyens & Walsh took some unfortunate, unnecessary and downright infuriating liberties with the script, they were certainly more respectful and appreciative of Tolkien than, say, Paul Verhoeven was with Robert A. Heinlein, whose first few chapters of the novel Starship Troopers left him “bored and depressed”–not that it would stop him from adapting it. Or John Milius was of Howard. I tend to swing between two extremes: on the one hand, great appreciation of the score, cinematography, creature design and environments; on the other, dislike of the additions and alterations of the script, plot and characters. When it reached the highs, it was stratospheric: when it plumbed the depths, it was subterranean.

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Andy Serkis, the actor whose voice and mannerisms brought to life the character of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Lord of the Rings, has now taken on another unsavory character sprung from the well of imagination that was the Inklings. This time, Serkis is trying his hand at Screwtape, the epistolary demon from C.S. Lewis’ classic, The Screwtape Letters (which book was dedicated to JRRT).

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I’m not sure whether this qualifies as old news, but it’s news to me, and so I thought it worth sharing with readers of The Cimmerian. According to thehollywoodreporter.com, New Line Cinema has settled a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate and can now press ahead with its film adaptation of “The Hobbit.” From that source:

Good news for all those J.R.R. Tolkien aficionados waiting for a film adaptation of “The Hobbit.”

New Line Cinema, the Tolkien estate and publisher Harper Collins have settled the lawsuit over profits from the “Lord of the Rings” films released between 2001 and 2003.

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It’s called The Hunt for Gollum, and there’s some trailers up for it right now at their website. The entire forty-minute film is set to debut on May 3.

This is the kind of thing I’m intrigued by on many levels, as a guy who has often harbored dreams of doing something similar. Think about it: they used a couple of HD prosumer video cameras in the $3000-$5000 range, some extra equipment to achieve a cinematic look (SGPro depth of field adapter, SteadiCams, computer color correction and visual effects), and a lot of donated acting, prop, and makeup help. Putting aside for a moment my loathing of the Lord of the Rings films and watching the trailer, it seems they did a good job of pressing up against true feature quality, with the usual exceptions common to fan films: somewhat subpar acting, like kids playing dress-up, along with poor choices of lenses and angles in the action scenes (too many wide lenses and not enough telephoto, odd bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, and camera skews with no motivation or coherence) which seem to give away that it was shot on a video camera. But the long shots and general quality of the images are quite stunning, the British locations magnificent, and even the Orcs seem to mirror those in the Hollywood version, at least in the little clips I saw of them in the trailers.

The main thing I am always struck by when seeing these sorts of films (there are a lot of good Star Wars ones out there, too), is that people would spend so much time and effort aping a copyrighted world, when with a few small adjustments and a good script they could make a similarly inspired and magnificent film based in a world of their own making, which would allow them to make money off of their effort, use it as a demo reel to get a job making a more expensive feature set in the same fictional universe, or any number of other options. But I suppose that a lot of people helped solely because it wasn’t just any fantasy story but one that aped Jackson’s LotR vision. I personally can’t stand that vision — that grey and drab world of misty forests peopled by unshowered Rangers and hippie elves accompanied by a soundtrack of ghostly Enya-esque wails. I think it’s beyond silly for the orchestra to boom and the camera to swoop around every time there’s a nice view or a mountain. But these guys have clearly made a great effort, achieving enough to prove yet again that independent films of this nature can and will become as cool as Hollywood fare someday soon. Amazing new cameras and computers are coming down the pike, stuff that is going to make a good homemade video every bit as stunning as most Hollywood films, even effects-laden ones. When that happens, I wonder how many Howard stories are going to get filmed? That little Solomon Kane one that made the rounds a few years back might only be the humble beginning of a big low-budget push to get Howard’s work on screen.

Too many of my waking hours are given over to thinking about the Hobbit films due in December of 2011 and December of 2012; no sooner is my attention directed elsewhere than the voluble and value-adding Guillermo del Toro is interviewed again and — sproing! — my thoughts ricochet back to the movies he’s about to make. After all, it won’t hurt to have something to which I can look forward after moving to a Hooverville and while shuffling along on Hoover leather (The Internet is of course rendering Hoover blankets obsolete). Admittedly my druthers would have been a movie about the wrath of Fëanor, the wanderings of Húrin, the fall of Gondolin, or the last days of Númenor. But any Silmarillion-based movie would be hobbit-free, and hobbits shift units and sell tickets. Me, I tolerate rather than love them, although I would never go as far as Michael Moorcock, who quipped of Sauron, “Anyone who hates hobbits can’t be all bad,” or the younger Charles Saunders, who once expressed (he has since mellowed) a profound relief that there were no black hobbits. Admiration and affection for Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin I have aplenty; I just don’t love hobbits qua hobbits. But many do; adoption agencies that offered hobbit orphans would be forced to hire extra security for crowd control.

In his magisterial two-volume The History of the Hobbit John D. Rateliff backhands “critics who would prefer The Hobbit to conform to and resemble its sequel in every possible detail.” Guilty as charged; I try and mostly succeed in cherishing the book for its own self, and almost fainted when, in the dealers’ room at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention in Austin, I came face to face with a first edition 1937 Hobbit. But reading-sequence is destiny, and I first read the “enchanting prelude” in the spring of 1971, a few weeks after hurtling through The Lord of the Rings. As a result, what really got my pulse pounding like hammers in dwarven smithies were what Tolkien, looking back from the vantage point of LOTR’s Second Edition, described as “references to the older matter: Elrond, Gondolin, the High-elves, and the orcs, and glimpses that had arisen, unbidden, of things higher or deeper or darker than [The Hobbit's] surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring.” Although not immune to the beguilingly unique properties of The Hobbit, I responded the most to premonitions and foreshadowings of the later work, the design features of the Eohippus from which the later Arabian stallion could be extrapolated. So for me “higher or deeper or darker” is the way to go in the impending movies, because so many millions of filmgoers will plant themselves in multiplex seats as vividly aware of the previously-viewed-even-if-chronologically-”later” Peter Jackson films as I was of the previously-read-although-chronologically-”later” LOTR back in 1971. Some of the posts at Tolkien-oriented and other genre sites reflect apprehension that Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson will “spectacularize” or “bombastify” the source material, inflate a children’s classic into a swollen epic, and such protectiveness is laudable, but barring an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style memory-scrub, the audience can’t be made to unsee The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Ergo higher, deeper, darker.

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