Fox Searchlight joins the race to tell the life story of the author behind The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings
• Peter Jackson's Hobbit philosophy: More is better
• News: Ian McKellen almost quit acting over Hobbit's greenscreen
Hollywood is to capitalise on the current appetite for all things JRR Tolkien with a biopic of the fantasy author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, reports the LA Times.
Tentatively titled simply Tolkien, the film will examine the writer's early academic career at Pembroke College, Oxford, as well as his struggles as a second lieutenant and later signals officer on the western front of the first world war. In particular, the screenplay by Ireland's David Gleeson (Cowboys and Angels) will show how these experiences informed Tolkien's creation of the high fantasy genre.
Gleeson is described as a "Tolkien superfan and scholar of sorts" on the subject of the man who set out to create Middle Earth. As well as 1937's The Hobbit and its three-part sequel The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), Tolkien wrote many other stories that were collected by his son Christopher after his death in 1973 in multiple volumes, the best known of which is perhaps The Silmarillion.
Tolkien was also an esteemed scholar of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and a noted academic of the period. He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke from 1925 to 1945 and was Merton professor of English language and literature at Merton college, Oxford from 1945 to 1959. He and C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, were close friends for a period and members of an informal literary group known as the Inklings.
The Tolkien project is being put together at studio Fox Searchlight by producer Peter Chernin of Chernin Entertainment, which has brought films such as The Heat and Rise of the Planet of the Apes to cinemas in recent years. It will follow in the celluloid footsteps of films such as the Oscar-nominated 2004 JM Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, which told the story of the creator of Peter Pan, and this year's London film festival hit Saving Mr Banks, which chronicled the history of the spiky inventor of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, and her tussles with Walt Disney over the film adaptation of her book.
If producers can draw on the vast audiences for films based on Tolkien's work, the new biopic should find plenty of traction. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy took more than $3bn across the globe, and the New Zealand film-maker's current three-part adaptation of The Hobbit is already well on the way to repeating the feat.
The new biopic could yet run into objections from Tolkien's heirs. An earlier attempt at a story about the writer's work as a codebreaker during the second world war, tentatively titled Mirkwood, stalled after the Tolkien estate refused to offer its support. It's also worth noting that rival studios Warner Bros and MGM have overseen both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films, so Twentieth Century Fox-owned Fox Searchlight might struggle in any attempt to tie Tolkien's life too closely to his famous works.
*More on the film adaptations of The Hobbit*
• Peter Jackson's Hobbit philosophy: More is better
• News: Ian McKellen almost quit acting over Hobbit's greenscreen Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
• Peter Jackson's Hobbit philosophy: More is better
• News: Ian McKellen almost quit acting over Hobbit's greenscreen
Hollywood is to capitalise on the current appetite for all things JRR Tolkien with a biopic of the fantasy author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, reports the LA Times.
Tentatively titled simply Tolkien, the film will examine the writer's early academic career at Pembroke College, Oxford, as well as his struggles as a second lieutenant and later signals officer on the western front of the first world war. In particular, the screenplay by Ireland's David Gleeson (Cowboys and Angels) will show how these experiences informed Tolkien's creation of the high fantasy genre.
Gleeson is described as a "Tolkien superfan and scholar of sorts" on the subject of the man who set out to create Middle Earth. As well as 1937's The Hobbit and its three-part sequel The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), Tolkien wrote many other stories that were collected by his son Christopher after his death in 1973 in multiple volumes, the best known of which is perhaps The Silmarillion.
Tolkien was also an esteemed scholar of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and a noted academic of the period. He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke from 1925 to 1945 and was Merton professor of English language and literature at Merton college, Oxford from 1945 to 1959. He and C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, were close friends for a period and members of an informal literary group known as the Inklings.
The Tolkien project is being put together at studio Fox Searchlight by producer Peter Chernin of Chernin Entertainment, which has brought films such as The Heat and Rise of the Planet of the Apes to cinemas in recent years. It will follow in the celluloid footsteps of films such as the Oscar-nominated 2004 JM Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, which told the story of the creator of Peter Pan, and this year's London film festival hit Saving Mr Banks, which chronicled the history of the spiky inventor of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, and her tussles with Walt Disney over the film adaptation of her book.
If producers can draw on the vast audiences for films based on Tolkien's work, the new biopic should find plenty of traction. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy took more than $3bn across the globe, and the New Zealand film-maker's current three-part adaptation of The Hobbit is already well on the way to repeating the feat.
The new biopic could yet run into objections from Tolkien's heirs. An earlier attempt at a story about the writer's work as a codebreaker during the second world war, tentatively titled Mirkwood, stalled after the Tolkien estate refused to offer its support. It's also worth noting that rival studios Warner Bros and MGM have overseen both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films, so Twentieth Century Fox-owned Fox Searchlight might struggle in any attempt to tie Tolkien's life too closely to his famous works.
*More on the film adaptations of The Hobbit*
• Peter Jackson's Hobbit philosophy: More is better
• News: Ian McKellen almost quit acting over Hobbit's greenscreen Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.