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Originally Posted by Essex
What about the stuff from unfinished tales? im thinking in particular of the smoke rings episode with gandalf and saruman that is crying out to be filmed!!!! or is this 'untouchable' from copyright sense too?
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Everything apart from LotR & TH is copyrighted as far as I'm aware, & that copyright belongs to the Tolkien Estate. CT, who owns the rights to all his father's writings that were unpublished at the time of his father's death has total control. Given his stated position that the works are 'unfilmable' I can't see him agreeing to the UT material being used.
This would especially be the case if the scriptwriters intend to add material (ironic perhaps, in that Tolkien's will authorises CT to alter, add to, or destroy the material as he sees fit). Yet CT's clear intent from the start has been to treat it with the utmost respect. One suspects that Tolkien only named him his Literary Executor because he knew CT would take the approach he has.
CT considers his father's work to be great literature. PJ seems to consider both LotR & TH as 'first draft screenplays' for action movies. I cannot see that any agreement could be reached between them. I suspect this would be less of a problem if PJ intended to film TH as is - a 'simple' children's tale. As I said, my suspicion is that PJ intends to film TH in the style of LotR, & bring in extra material to that end.
I suppose that there is a chance that by the time work on TH begins CT could have passed away & the rights will have passed on. At that point, who knows? However, even then I can't see any agreement between PJ & the Estate being reached.
As to the idea that any of Tolkien's work is 'crying out to be filmed', well, we'll have to agree to disagree there.....
If we look at the statement on the Tolkien Estate page re Children of Hurin we find the following:
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The rights in « The Children of Húrin » are owned by the Tolkien family via the Tolkien Estate, and the book rights have been sold in a worldwide deal to the Tolkien publishers HarperCollinsUK. There are no plans for the foreseeable future to license any other rights in the work (whether film or otherwise).
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I think we can see CT's name written all over this addendum....