Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of a lot of heinous crimes. There are no 'ifs', 'ands', or 'buts' about that. There is really no shortage of the horrible things this man did. They range from the unbelievably petty to the unbelievably unspeakable. Simultaneously, Harvey was also responsible for launching the careers of a lot of major filmmakers, actors, and artists. He had an eye for great cinema. Although, Harvey's massive ego also caused him to almost ruin Bong Joon Ho's Academy Award-winning movie, Parasite, and even The Lord of the Rings.
Yes, Harvey Weinstein was involved in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, which were based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien. Harvey also made a lot of money from the films and eventually tried to squeeze more money out of The Hobbit movies. While Harvey wasn't exactly overly-involved with the final result of Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning work, he was involved with the early financing. It was during this time when he almost completely destroyed the project. Here's how he did it...
Harvey Was The Man Who Got The Ball Rolling On The Movies
While Peter Jackson was incredibly diplomatic and kind during his 2001 interview with the now-disgraced Charlie Rose, it was in this interview where he implied that Harvey Weinstein nearly killed The Lord of the Rings.
In the interview, which came out after the release of The Fellowship of the Ring and before the release of The Two Towers, director Peter Jackson went into detail about the complicated financing of what resulted in his seminal piece of work. Ultimately, New Line Cinema took a major gamble making all three of these movies at once. It was a huge amount of money for them and they made it back and then some... which is obviously an understatement.
"You had always wanted to make the three movies at one time, " Charlie Rose said, leading Peter Jackson into a story about the financing. "But you presented the idea to [New Line producer] Bob Shaye to do 2, hoping that he would bite and say 'Why not three?'."
The short version of a very long story is that nobody wanted to make three movies from the three Lord of the Rings books. They did, however, like the idea of one movie... maybe three.
"People don't realize how close these films came to not happening," Peter explained. "It was originally a Miramax production [Harvey Weinstein's company with his brother]."
In 1996, Peter and his partner Fran Walsh started developing the project with Harvey and Miramax after acquiring the rights to the books in 1995. At the time, Peter had a 'first-look' project with Miramax. This meant that any project the rising New Zealand filmmaker had must be seen by Harvey before moving to another production company or studio. Although, Peter felt it was right for The Lord of the Rings to be made by Harvey as it was Harvey who found a clever way of getting Peter and Fran the rights to the books.
"We pitched the idea of three films but Miramax didn't really want to take that risk. So, we agreed on two."
This would have meant that the three books would have been crammed into two films, both equally out at about 2 1/2 hours each.
Harvey's Terrible Demand
As Peter and Fran were writing the scripts, Harvey and Miramax spent a lot of money on pre-production including the creation of the costumes and creatures. About $20 million was spent during this time.
"Then we ran into a real snag," Peter said, claiming that they had come up with a more definite budget that made it clear that they would need $140 million to make the two movies. However, Harvey refused and claimed he could only spend a total of $75 million on it.
"Harvey was in a real jam," Peter continued. "He said to us, 'Look, I just cannot go ahead with these two films. So, why don't we just make one?'"
Peter and Fran thought Harvey meant that they should make The Fellowship of the Ring and then see how it did commercially before making the next two. This made some sense... But that's not what Harvey meant... He decided that Lord of the Rings, all three books, should be just one movie. Condensed. Hollowed out. Concise.
"We didn't really feel comfortable with that. At all, in fact," Peter said to Charlie. "We thought it was a recipe for disaster."
Peter, however, claims that due to Harvey's financial involvement, the now-disgraced mogul had no real choice but to demand this of them.
"At that point, we literally walked away from the project," Peter admitted, also saying that the meeting with Harvey was 'gruesome', although Harvey apparently understood where they were coming from. Peter as certain that making only one movie from three books was destined to become a massive failure. It would anger the fans and wouldn't be a very good movie. But Harvey was willing to take that gamble.
So, they just walked away.
As Peter and Fran were flying 20 hours from New York back to New Zealand, believing that their project was dead and they owed Harvey a ton of money, their agent phoned up the movie mogul. Eventually, their agent convinced Harvey to let Peter and Fran pitch The Lord of the Rings to other studios. Only, they had to pitch the $140 million movies while demanding an extra $20 million to pay Harvey back. Naturally, every studio turned them down.
After an incredibly tedious and gutwrenching period, Peter and Fran landed at New Line Cinema who loved all of the work they had done previously. It was them who decided to pay Harvey out and spend the huge budget on not two but three Lord of the Rings films. So, at the end of the day, Peter Jackson got exactly what he wanted and avoided the potential disaster that Harvey Weinstein was setting up for him.