Film Rights to First & Second Age

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Your restated argument is no stronger. You're claiming that UA somehow bought everything to do with Numenor? No. First off, JRRT and thus his estate explicitly retained plenary rights over the written word. A claim based on derivative film rights doesn't affect that in any way, shape or form.

Put yourself in the position of the holder of those film rights. You bought the rights, have yet to use them fully, and then see the heirs of the author rewrite the stuff you already own, albeit in far more detailed fashion and much fuller treatment. What would you as rights holder say about this?

"Rewrite the stuff you already own?" Rubbish. Hollywood owns nothing but the right to make films. They don't own the underlying tales. "Rewrite" is of course bogus as well, since you know as well as I do that this material had been written long, long before 1968. If you want to regard The Silmarillion as something already in existence in 1968 (essentially true), then Tolkien did *not* sell those rights (and, I remind you, copyright applies to unpublished as well as published works). If you want to consider it as something Christopher 'wrote', then the film rights to it weren't even in existence to be sold in 1968, Christopher owns it, and no film rights are for sale.

The claim you're advancing is breathtaking in its audacity: you're asserting that, because the subsidiary material to The Lord of the Rings contains a synopsis of certain stories, that the author was thereby precluded from publishing the full-length originals? Again, that Saul Zaentz somehow 'owns' Numenor to the exclusion of its creator?

You can't get out of it by trying to differentiate the Estate- Tolkien's heirs own precisely as much copyright as he did himself: Christopher from a legal perspective merely stepped into his father's shoes.

It's really very simple: UA bought, and New line holds a temporary license in, the words contained between the covers of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Nothing else. If they want to try to expand the synopsis in the Appendices into an entirely bogus film-script, I suppose they could; but their right to do so is in no way 'diminished' by the fact that the genuine article exists beyond their control.