Lord of the Rings prequel TV show

RobertB wrote: Msample wrote:

We’re not gonna see Silmarillion stuff, the Tolkien estate won’t license that. Plenty of stuff to mine from the appendices of Lord of the Rings though.

Do you think that the rights to the appendices in Lord of the Rings went with the trilogy? Not a rhetorical question. We need our resident lawyer on the case. I know that stuff in the back of LotR is even dryer than The Silmarillion, and I didn't think that was possible.

Some of it was already used in the movies , such as the attack on Dol Guldor, the Isildur stuff, Gollums origins, the Dwarves v Orc battle outside Moria.

Wasn't it like 200-250 MILLION just for the RIGHTS to this deal, not including the actual show? I gotta think this allows amazon access to EVERYTHING JRR ever wrote. What else would cost that much? This has got to be the Silmarillion and everything else.

Though I bet this will be the Aragorn/Gandalf power hour, what else could get people to watch?

The tale of Túrin could be quite excellent.

Middle Earth: CRIBS EP1 ft. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Special feature - Mouth of Sauron reacts to new mithril grill and swimming pool adorned with the skulls of Ithilien dead.

Here are 20 shows that I would rather watch than a Lord of the Rings prequel series:

• the Amber series, by Roger Zelazny
• the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series, by Fritz Lieber
• the Sprawl trilogy, by William Gibson
• the Books of Swords, by Fred Saberhagen
• the Budayeen Cycle, by George Alec Effinger
• the Elric series, by Michael Moorcock
• the Riverworld series, by Philip Jose Farmer
• the World of Tiers series, by Philip Jose Farmer
• the Well World series, by Jack Chalker
• the Sandman Slim series, by Richard Kadrey
• the Gentlemen Bastard sequence, by Scott Lynch
• the Black Company series, by Glen Cook
• the Wild Cards series, edited by George R.R. Martin
• the Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
• the Takeshi Kovacs books, by Richard K. Morgan
• the Ringworld series, by Larry Niven
• the Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
• the Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
• the Dying Earth books, by Jack Vance
• the Conan books, by Robert E. Howard

Well I've spotted your problem straight away - I've heard of only a few of them so that makes the audience pool probably extremely small.

Southernman wrote: Well I've spotted your problem straight away - I've heard of only a few of them so that makes the audience pool probably extremely small.

Most adult Americans read one or zero books per year, but that doesn't stop Hollywood from making tv shows and movies based on books, like say American Gods. Or comic books, like say The Walking Dead. Speaking of The Walking Dead, writer Robert Kirkman has left that show to go work on an Amber tv show. The Takeshi Kovacs books are currently being developed into a Netflix tv show.

the Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

With all due respect, if this were pitched to a TV executive, you would be told to fuck right on off! There is no way a mainstream audience could handle this. Would there be a full episode that is presented as a folklore myth but is actually an abstracted description of an ancient space battle but this is not explictly explained at all?

That said, you get Alejandro Jodorowsky on board as showrunner and I will personally finance up to $1000 of the production budget.

As much as I love LOTR because I am a good person, New Sun is to my mind the greatest fantasy novel ever written.

I would be interested to see an adaptation of Gene Wolfe's Peace that somehow preserves the unreliable narrator and perhaps some of the hallucinatory shifts with a directorial style similar to Darren Aronofsky's in mother!

Heh, yeah...that's the other thing. One of the many incredible things about Book of the New Sun is that the whole thing is from the perspective of a character who claims to have a perfect, infallible memory...but doesn't. And he also describes things solely from his frame of reference, which makes for some interesting interpretations of things that are never explictly described. I have no idea how you'd show that.

The last time I was reading this I was on a plane. A guy saw that I was reading it and asked me "how many times have you read it?"- not the usual question you ask someone in that situation. So I knew he totally understood.

I started reading it again tonight.

Peace I found really difficult...but yeah, I can see Aronofsky on that.

It's been about 20 years since I read the Book(s) of the New Sun, but certain searing images linger. I have read other Gene Wolfe books in recent years, and he still loves using an unreliable narrator, though he is better at nailing the endings now.