Stephen Colbert has been tapped to write Lord Of The Rings: Shadow Of The Past with Phillipa Boyens and Peter McGee
Well they saw God never closes a door without opening a window. And while the door is definitely closing on CBS’s The Late Show on May 21, a window has opened for host and irredeemable Tolkien tragic Stephen Colbert. Probably a round one, of the sort you might find in a hobbit hole. To mark Tolkien Reading Day, New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Pictures have announced that Colbert will co-write a new film, Lord Of The Rings: Shadow Of The Past, with Phillipa Boyens and Peter McGee.
According to Variety, the announcement was made across Warner’s social media accounts, with Tolkien cinematic honcho Peter Jackson giving a brief (and fairly uninformative) update on Andy Serkis’ upcoming The Hunt For Gollum before crossing to Colbert to deliver the news.
According to the official synopsis, “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo – Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”
But as Colbert tells Jackson in the clip above, it’s also based on some elements of Tolkien’s The Fellowship Of The Ring that didn’t make it into the film.
“You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert says. “But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on that ya’ll never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three is Company’ through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’. 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?'”
Having finally gotten around to reading The Lord Of The Rings (just getting into The Two Towers – Gandalf’s back), I can tell you those chapters concern a battle with a barrow-wight and an extended encounter with Tom bloody Bombadil, a character of no small controversy in Tolkienology. But you can pick your own side in that scrap.
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