One Film to Rule Them All
Scott Rosenberg

During the months of lead-up to the release last Christmas of "The Fellowship of the Ring," Peter Jackson's remarkable film adaptation of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," one question kept pushing to the fore. Jackson, we kept reading, needed to please the fanatical devotees of Tolkien's fantasy classic -- people who had (like me, I freely and proudly admit) been weaned on his saga of Elves and Dwarves and Rings of Power -- or he'd never get his movie the approving buzz it would need. But he also needed to make a film that would reach beyond the cadres of Middle Earth-lovers to people who'd never cracked Tolkien's tomes -- or he'd never sell enough tickets.

As movie critics and feature writers and online scribes weighed the fate of Jackson's project, they regularly set these two goals at odds with each other. If Jackson satisfied the hobbit-heads by showing proper deference to Tolkien's work, the conventional wisdom went, he'd never get the masses into the theater. But if he did the necessary surgery on Tolkien's saga to make it a movie with mass appeal, he'd surely piss off his core audience.


Once the movie opened and the critics began raving, the common explanation for the project's success continued to parrot this perspective: Jackson had managed an extraordinary balancing act. He'd made the right trade-offs. He took the conflicting demands of fans and the general public and somehow found the perfect compromise.

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