Sunday
(0)I recommend a longish piece that Michael Jennings has just put up about the truly extraordinary Hollywood machinations which resulted in the three Lord of the Rings movies getting made, by an "insane bearded New Zealander". I haven't seen any of these movies, but I enthusiastically concur with this concluding observation:
… At least one insane bearded New Zealander is now insanely rich. And I think a world in which insane bearded New Zealanders can become insanely rich by making ludicrously over-ambitious movies is better than one where this is not the case. …
Quite so. The insane New Zealander is obviously quite a character, but even more extraordinary is the person who produced these movies, someone called Bob Shaye. It's a real feet-in-the-gutter but eyes-on-the-stars story.
I took the liberty of looking at the Jennings site meter, to see if saying this here could be expected to make any difference to anything. Apparently, it might. I think Jennings deserves a lot more readers than he's now getting.
That's most kind of you.
From what I have read, my description of Bob Shaye as "one of the more obnoxious people in Hollywood" is pretty accurate. What is the case, however, is that he is one of the very few Hollywood moguls who actually loves movies. This is also true of the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, and is also true of the people running Dreamworks (Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg). Not-coincidentally, these are all young companies being run by their founders. The older studios (including Warner Bros) are run by corporate MBA types with little passion for film, and it really shows in the product they produce. (Warners are perhaps the worst studio in this regard).
Posted by Michael Jennings at December 8, 2002 09:16 PM
