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Old 12-21-2007, 08:46 AM   #121
Sauron the White
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I would remind everyone here that when I started this thread my intention was not to build a case for legal action or litigation taken against Christopher Tolkien, The Tolkien Estate or anyone else. It was motivated by a desire for future filmmakers to , as far as is possible withing the confines of changing mediums from one art form to another, "get it right".

Over the last several pages we have become enmeshed in legal arguements about copyright, enforcement, penalites and other "legal aspects" as one poster put it. I have stated several times that I am not a lawyer, did not attend law school and am at a disadvantage in arguing the technical legalities of a situation.

There are going to be two more movies about Middle-earth. Like it or hate it that is now the reality of the situation. It has been announced that one will be of THE HOBBIT while the second will use material from the Appendicies to bridge the gap of years betweent HOBBIT and LOTR. This caused the usual speculation about what can be used and portrayed and what cannot be portrayed in a film.

I stated here that I do not want to be here five or ten years from now arguing about the rightness or wrongness of what was placed in those movies. Did they confine themselves strictly to the Appendicies or did they go beyond and include material they could only have gotten from other Tolkien sources outside of HOBBIT and LOTR? I would like to avoid that if possible.

I said there now exists a situation where the current film rights holders could make a movie containing the following events taken from the Appendicies:

- Feanor is shown to be the greatest of the Eldar making the Silmarils filling them with the radiance of the Two Trees
- Morgoth stealing the Silmarils
-Morgoth destroying the Two Trees by poisoning them
- Morgoth retreating to his great fortress of Thangorodrim with the Silmarils
- Feanor leading his people into exile
- War between the Eldar and Edain against Morgoth and his forces
- the defeat of the Eldar and Edain
- the union of Beren and Luthien and their lineage
-Beren and Luthien steal a Silmaril from the Iron Crown of Morgoth
-Luthien becomes mortal and gives birth to Dior
-the city of Gondolin with Turgon as its king
-the wedding of Earendil to Elwing
-the overthrow of Morgoth
-the ship of Earendil is set into the heavens

At the same time, the Estate owns all rights to THE SIL and that would include potential film rights to those exact same events plus more. So we have an area of overlapping rights.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg since the Appendicies go on for many more pages giving accounts of far more Middle-earth history than just those major First Age events. Again, the right to include all that in a film in held by New Line Cinema.

I said more than once that I think everyone would benefit if both parties, the Estate and current film rights holders sat down like two civilized people and said lets see what we can do about this. Is there a way that material can be shown on screen taken from the Appendicies but do it in such a way so that it is as accurate as possible when compared to the larger Tolkien writings that many people know so well?

I believe that if this could be done, the movies would be more accurate, be better and everyone wins. I agree that they will never be as accurate or as faithful as some people want them to be. When you change from one art form to another, things are lost, things are changed, things are added, things are gained - in short its not the same thing.

My entire thrust was to say that given that the currents rights holders are between a rock and a hard place in depicting many Appendicies events accurately, it would be in everyones interest to sit down like two civilized parties and try to reach some steps to improve the situation.
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Old 12-21-2007, 08:59 AM   #122
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White View Post
Nerwen .. when you accuse me of something, please stick to that when reposting my previous thoughts so we can see if you were correct or not. That is only fair.
There is a disturbing trend here - not only here but on other boards also - where instead of directly meeting a persons point head on, people like to rephrase, paraphrase, change the meaning or wordsthe person used in an attempt to twist the original argument to bettermeet their own response.
Sauron. I have never attempted to twist your words.

All I am doing is trying to find out what your current position actually is. You seem to change it constantly. So I state things in my own words and ask you if that's what you mean. That's all.

And I did quote you directly. In my last post I gave a lengthy quotation from you. Here it is again:

Quote:
Is it not possible, that a sharp legal staff with some innovative thinking, could well claim that they own the films rights to that material and anything published later and made known to the public can be used by them as well since it only details material which they already owned and had use of?

Could it not be legally argued that CT causing to be published the SIL after his fathers death, was the unfair diminishing of rights his father had already sold and were legally owned by others?
You attack my use of the phrase "legal aspect" when referring to this quote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White View Post
Legal aspect? legal aspect? What in the world is a legal aspect? Sounds like the broadest possible term you could come up with that takes in nearly everything that has anything to do with contracts, rights or the law. It says nothing about me urging anyone to sue anybody else as you claimed wasthe cornerstone of my argument.
I did indeed want to be as broad as possible. I was sure that if I used any more specific term you would fall back on your usual tactic of claiming that's not what you meant... without having to state what you do mean.

You are clearly nitpicking in order to evade my main point. Do you deny that you were talking about law in this post? I drew attention to it because you have recently started claiming that the question is a purely ethical one.

I challenge you to find anywhere that I said you were urging lawsuits. For someone who claims other people are twisting his words, you seem rather adept at it yourself.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White View Post
Please show me where I said the film rights holders can sue the Tolkien Estate for damages caused by publishing THE SIL. Please show me. I never said it. Some type of action may have come up in the discussion in passing over the last three pages but that was never my point.

Obviously you could not locate what I did not say and could back up your accusation.
It wasn't an accusation. I was asking you if that's what you meant. At that stage you were still talking about Christopher Tolkien having harmed Zaentz/New Line by diminishing the value of their film rights to LotR.

Edit: X'd with Sauron the White and The Saucepan Man.
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Old 12-21-2007, 09:34 AM   #123
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Quote:
Originally Posted by STW
My entire thrust was to say that given that the currents rights holders are between a rock and a hard place in depicting many Appendicies events accurately, it would be in everyones interest to sit down like two civilized parties and try to reach some steps to improve the situation.
Well, that's something on which we can all have an opinion. Personally, I am decidedly less excited about the prospects of a film of the Silm material than I was about the LotR films and am about the prospective TH film, and I wonder whether, generally, such a film would be likely to generate anything like as much interest (and, thus, revenue). But it is not an issue which we can really come to a conclusion on. Only the parties involved themselves can do that. And, while I can see that there might be some benefit to Zaentz and co in pursuing it, I fail to see any incentive for the Estate to go along with it.
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Old 12-21-2007, 09:37 AM   #124
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White View Post
I would remind everyone here that when I started this thread my intention was not to build a case for legal action or litigation taken against Christopher Tolkien, The Tolkien Estate or anyone else. It was motivated by a desire for future filmmakers to , as far as is possible withing the confines of changing mediums from one art form to another, "get it right".

Over the last several pages we have become enmeshed in legal arguements about copyright, enforcement, penalites and other "legal aspects" as one poster put it. I have stated several times that I am not a lawyer, did not attend law school and am at a disadvantage in arguing the technical legalities of a situation.
But you started the legal arguments. You started them in your very first post. Here's that quote for the third time:

Quote:
Is it not possible, that a sharp legal staff with some innovative thinking, could well claim that they own the films rights to that material and anything published later and made known to the public can be used by them as well since it only details material which they already owned and had use of?

Could it not be legally argued that CT causing to be published the SIL after his fathers death, was the unfair diminishing of rights his father had already sold and were legally owned by others?
Subsequently you insisted on the validity of your own interpretation of copyright law over everyone else's– including a lawyer's. Your arguments showed that you knew nothing about the subject, but that didn't stop you nitpicking on every possible point and refusing to back down. It seems to me that you never had any intention of accepting an answer to the question you posed, unless it was one you wanted to hear.

At any time you were free to drop the whole copyright issue– by conceding defeat– and move on to what you say is your main point.

Well, then, how about it?
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Old 12-21-2007, 10:18 AM   #125
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What lies at the back of this, I think, is that you, StW, are bummed that Peter Jackson doesn't have film rights to all of Middle-earth; and you have an enormous chip on your shoulder vis-a-vis Christopher Tolkien because he won't play ball.

I'm sorry, Sauron, but JRR Tolkien did not dedicate his entire life to creating first drafts of screenplays for Peter Jackson. If Jackson wants to make a fool of himself trying to stretch a page and a half of Appendix B into a 'bridge' movie, that's his problem, and I see no reason at all why Tolkien's family should deign to bail him out.
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Old 12-21-2007, 11:10 AM   #126
Sauron the White
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Did any of you ever see the sketch on the Ali G Show where Sasha Cohen as Ali G goes into a book publishers office to pitch a book? He opens by remarking how much money the LOTR films have made and then says something like "now imagine this .... LORD OF THE RINGS ... the book. We would sell like billions of copies". And the publisher sits there patiently and without batting an eye points out that the LOTR films were made from books ... books that were very successful before the movies were made.

That sketch is meant to be funny. But if humor like that is to work there has to be some truth and something recognizable in it. The fact is this, - right now and for some time to come, Middle-earth, LOTR, and all in it are wound together in a nice symbiotic package that includes both the books and the films. The number of tickets sold to the movies over that three year period exceeds the number of book sold over the last fifty plus years. There are probably a whole bunch of folks out there like Ali G who think that LOTR is just a series of movies and know nothing about the books.

There are probably others who saw the movies and then went out to buy and hopefully read the books. And for many others they are reminded of LOTR everytime they see toys, posters, statues, T-shirts and all the "junk" that some here hate so much.

You can like it or not. You can hate it or not. But its a reality that LOTR is now both the books and the movies all tied up together in the mind of the public. And now we are going to get at least two more Middle-earth movies over the next few years which will only make that symbiotic arrangement all the more cemented in the mind of the public.

In another post, the Saucepan Man rejected my idea of both parties working together saying

Quote:
And, while I can see that there might be some benefit to Zaentz and co in pursuing it, I fail to see any incentive for the Estate to go along with it.
How about the incentive that the worldwide public thinks your product is mostly the movies and you don't like that impression? How about the incentive that the worldwide public is going to see more movies that you do not particularly like or approve of but right now are powerless to do anything about? How about the incentive of getting an expert adviser picked by the Estate in on the next two films giving expert advice and suggestions to help make the product more authentic so that when the next wave of millions of ticket buyers see the next two Middle-earth films, they see a product more authentic?

That is what I would like to see. An arrangement where both sides who are different parts of Middle-earth come together and benefit together. The films could gain more leeway in utilizing passages from other books when depicting things from the Appendicies in the effort to be more authentic and correct to what Tolkien wrote in much more detail. The Estate would get an expert on the inside, there to give advice, to make suggestions, and to further their own hopes of keeping it real and authentic.

Is that incentive enough?
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Old 12-21-2007, 11:41 AM   #127
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More light, less heat

With the highly informative posting of one of the Downs' most repected legal minds (thank you, SPM), I am calling a time-out. This conversation is beginning to look like a time-lapse photograph of a dog chasing its tail. The levels of friction-generated heat are beginning to be greater than the light being shone upon the subject.

I am, for a short period, closing this thread in hopes that all involved will go back and re-read (and hopefully digest and reconsider) all the relevant information posted here. When the thread re-opens (in a relatively short but intentionally vague number of days), let us see if cooler heads and better information will prevail.
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Old 12-27-2007, 05:17 PM   #128
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re-opening the thread

Let's see if anyone notices.
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