The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis

All was not well in Middle-earth . . .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. This short book (70 pp. plus bibliography, etc.) tells the tale.

Author Biography

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 the forthcoming books 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 the 2011 book 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 about 750 separate times in international, na-tional and local television, radio, print and online media. —— Co-author Pip Bulbeck is The Hollywood Reporter’s Australian correspondent.