The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis: How Warner Bros. Bent a Government to Its Will and Crushed an Attempt to Unionize The Hobbit
About this ebook
After the third Lord of
the Rings movie premiered in 2003, fans of the series eagerly
anticipated production and release of its prequel, The Hobbit. It turned
out they had a while to wait, as a series of troubles delayed
production for years.
Then, in September 2010, when almost
everything seemed resolved, U.S. and international actors unions issued a
pub-lic alert advising their members "not to accept work on this
non-union production."
Warner Bros. threatened to rip the
troubled production from the country and events quickly spiraled out of
control. New Zealand plunged into crisis. Saving the Hobbit was do or
die for the local film industry, and the government scrambled to avoid
disaster.
Protests and rallies erupted and the island nation's currency fell on the possibility of losing the half-billion dollar project.
Director
Peter Jackson vowed to "fight like hell" to keep the shoot in New
Zealand. But then studio executives flew in from Los Angeles like
colonial masters ready to bring down the hammer.
What happened next was almost unbelievable - and proved, if nothing else, that not all Hollywood drama is on the screen.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Jonathan Handel (jhandel.com) is an entertainment and technology lawyer at TroyGould in Los Angeles and a contributing editor for The Hollywood Reporter, where he covers entertainment labor and select other matters.
Handel is also the author of ENTERTAINMENT RESIDUALS: A FULL COLOR GUIDE, which describes the union reuse/royalty payments that are common in the entertainment industry and ENTERTAINMENT UNIONS AND GUILDS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY, and HOLLYWOOD ON STRIKE!, which chronicles the Hollywood writers strike of 2007-2008 and the ensuing Screen Actors Guild stalemate that lasted through mid-2009.
Handel is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He has taught at USC, Southwestern and UCLA Law Schools.
Handel's writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Business Journal, Daily Journal, Huffington Post, Forbes.com and IMDb.com. He has also appeared as a commentator over 1,000 separate times in international, national and local television, radio, print and online media.
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Co-author Pip Bulbeck is The Hollywood Reporter's Australian correspondent.
