The road goes ever oon
I don’t know which is more lamentable here:
The revelation that the Tolkien estate has apparently received zero dollars for the (phenomenally good) movies New Line made of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy…
or…
The inability of the New York Times, at this very late date, to spell the author’s name right in a headline.
Surely the paper’s staff is riddled with people weaned on “The Hobbit” and the trilogy — people whose brains, at the first peripheral-vision scan of that misspelling, light up with red “error” messages shooting from axon to dendrite?
[This image is from the National Edition on paper, distributed here in the Bay Area. One can only hope that it got fixed for the later editions...]
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February 12th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
The latter, surely. This is exactly why copyright laws need to be rewritten if not outright abolished: some jerks, who had absolutely nothing to do with the writing of the books, sit on their “intellectual property” and lie in wait until there is a profitable opportunity to sue someone, and then pounce. How does this benefit the public interest (which copyright is, under the US Constitution, supposed to be doing)? It doesn’t. “Unabashed and insatiable greed?” Perhaps they should look in the mirror.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Well, in that case, the jerks are new line, even peter jackson had to sue them to get paid.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Didn’t his heirs read about Frodo and Sam hiding from the orcs, and travelling to Mordor, and how the ring corrupts, and how the Shire is corrupted at the end of the book and so on ..
February 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I think the name mispelling would be more lamentable by Tolkien. He is dead and gone. I’m not sure why his grandkids, who had nothing to do with the books, should get a pile of money. I believe he sold the film rights in the 50s.
That being said, this is a wierd echo of the writer’s strike; off-screen talent never seems to get much credit or $$$.