The smashing success of Lord of the Rings has other studios looking for fantasy properties of their own. It was only natural that C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books would be among the first selected, with the seven-book series having sold in excess of 85-million books worldwide. In some sort of filmdom cargo cult, it is being filmed, in large part, in New Zealand.
The most interesting part of the story: Unless I misread the Variety piece, the five main characters in Narnia will all be CGI, a la Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Having a live action film in which all the main characters are computer generated is a first, as far as I know. While white-collar workers in North America worry about offshoring, actors apparently need to worry about being erased altogether.
Related posts:
It’s a seven book series: The Magician’s Nephew, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Last Battle
Fixed. Thanks. It’s been years ….
From Washington Monthly:
Creative Class War
Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the ’90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.
When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand.
Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America’s international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood. When Hollywood produces movies of this magnitude, it creates jobs for directors, actors, and key grips in California. Because of the astounding level of technical innovation which a project of this size requires, in such areas as computer graphics, sound design, and animation, it can also germinate whole new companies and even new industries nationwide, just as George Lucas’s Star Wars films fed the development of everything from video games to product tie-in marketing. But the lion’s share of benefits from The Lord of the Rings is likely to accrue not to the United States but to New Zealand. Next, with a rather devastating symbolism, Jackson will remake King Kong in Wellington, with a budget running upwards of $150 million.
Peter Jackson’s power play hasn’t been mentioned by any of the current candidates running for president. Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs–everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the “safe” jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents’ fate.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0401.florida.html