Stephen Colbert is many things – late night chat show host, perpetual thorn in the side of President Trump and, some would suggest, a comedian – but few have hitherto described him as a Hollywood screenwriter. Which is why it was some of the most jaw-dropping news that the entertainment industry has seen in recent months that it has been announced that Colbert will be co-writing the latest Lord of the Rings film, currently subtitled Shadows of the Past, and that his co-screenwriter will be none other than his son Peter McGee, along with regular Rings writer Philippa Boyens.
Everything about the story is, to put it mildly, perplexing. Colbert has only ever co-written one film before, 2006’s forgotten romantic comedy Strangers With Candy, and while he has numerous writing credits, they are mainly on his chat shows The Colbert Report and its successor, Late Night with Stephen Colbert. He is, admittedly, a long-standing fan of Tolkien who had a brief cameo in the Hobbit picture The Desolation of Smaug as a spy, but it seems very strange that the producers of Lord of the Rings should entrust their lucrative IP to an untested, if high-profile, figure such as Colbert. His son, who is optimistically billed as a “screenwriter”, has no previous film credits, bar serving as a studio production assistant on the satirical animated comedy Tooning Out the News, which was – you can probably guess this one already – co-created, executive produced and written by Colbert.
There can be little doubt that Colbert is excited by the opportunity that he has been offered to switch from the field of late-night talk shows and political satire to the vast expanses of Middle Earth. In a conversation broadcast with original Rings director Peter Jackson, Colbert declared, sycophantically, that “You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me. But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in The Fellowship of the Ring that you never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter Three Is Company [Chapter III] through Fog on the Barrow-Downs [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
Well, this is the question that audiences will have answered in 2028, or whenever Shadows of the Past comes to fruition. But the wider question is why on earth is such a perverse exercise in mutual ego massage being funded, at presumably vast expense, by a Hollywood studio, in the form of Warner Bros. The original Lord of the Rings films were undeniably terrific, but subsequent attempts to continue the IP – whether it’s the Jackson-directed Hobbit pictures, the deeply tedious Amazon series The Rings of Power or the proposed Andy Serkis-directed The Hunt for Gollum – all smack of something between greed and desperation. In the films and novels alike, it is the hapless Gollum searching after “my precious”, in the form of the eponymous ring. In real life, it now seems as if it is Warner Bros, the keepers of this particular kingdom, who have a similarly all-consuming level of greed, mixed with a perverse desire to surprise. Hence the unlikely presence of Colbert on screenwriting duties.
If the picture was to be a martini-dry exercise in snappy one-liners, with the hobbits trading topical quips like they were at the Algonquin hotel with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley et al, it might stand a chance. But unfortunately, the plot synopsis sounds a lot less intriguing than that, being all about long-buried secrets, the War of the Ring and the hobbits retracing the steps of their first adventures. It has the hallmarks of another tedious cash-in, but Colbert’s involvement is what takes it from being merely annoying into positively perverse. Will it be any good? Highly unlikely. Might it be a must-watch for all the wrong reasons? Highly likely, alas.
Comments