Chuck Dixon, who adapted J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into a graphic novel, shared his reaction to Stephen Colbert penning a new The Lord of the Rings movie.
Director Peter Jackson revealed Colbert was writing a new film that will be a sequel to The Return of the King and is currently titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past.
Colbert shared his vision stating, “The thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in ‘The Fellowship [of the Ring’] that ya’ll never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?'”
“And I started talking it over with my son Peter [McGee], who is also a screenwriter, and we worked out what we thought would work especially as a framing device for that story,” he added.
From there he shared that he had been working on the script with Jackson and writer and producer Phillipa Boyens for at least two years on the film.
However, Warner Bros. also released a logline for the film. It states:
Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.
Dixon reacted to this announcement telling Fandom Pulse, “In what world does it make sense to invite an utterly talentless 'comedian' to contribute to anything of value? This makes zero sense.”
As mentioned above, Dixon did a graphic novel adaptation of The Hobbit. He shared in an interview with Brother Lore how it came to be, “How I got the job was I was doing a lot of work for a company called Eclipse Comics. They were based in California. And Dean Mullaney, the publisher of Eclipse, was always looking for public domain material. In other words material that didn’t have a copyright on it.”
“And he had a guy who would do nothing but search through the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. looking for uncopyrighted properties that could be adopted into comics,” he continued. “And the guy came across, unbelievably, an uncopyrighted early manuscript of The Hobbit.”
“So Dean contacted me and said would you be interested in adapting it into a graphic novel,” he shared. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay. That would be great.’ And while I was working on it — and the manuscript was significantly different than the published novel — while I was working on it Dean was in communication with the Tolkien estate telling them what our plans were going to be.”
Dixon recalled, “And he said, ‘Look, you can either authorize us and we’ll do an authorized version of the novel or we’ll just do our own from which you will see no money.’ And so the Tolkien estate bowed and then Dean called me and said ‘Stop working on the uncopyrighted version and get our your old paperback and start working from that.’”
“So I think I was only 10 pages in. I scrapped everything I had done and I got to work on the authorized version. So that’s how that came about,” he explained.
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It feels like we’re living in The Twilight Zone, when Stephen Colbert of all people, was announced as a co-writer for Lord Of The Rings. Colbert is a talentless ‘comedian’.