For all you Tolkien fans out there, this weekend was the premiere of the little fan-film that could: the Hunt for Gollum.
Taking place in between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it concerns a young Aragorn as he hunts down the monstrous Gollum. Gollum, whose mind and body was twisted during his ownership of Sauron’s Ring, has left his cave determined to take back the ring from Bilbo Baggins, the “thief” who took it from him years ago.
But the real interesting story comes from that of the filmmakers. This high-quality work of fandom was shot in three days in September 2007, by a large group of Hobbit lovers — all for free. The film obviously had to be a non-profit, in order to avoid conflict with the Tolkien estate. Here’s a copy of the trailer:
May 4th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
The Gollum fan film is getting a ton of coverage all over the net, and I’m not surprised as I’ve been writing about its production progress on my daily fan film blog, fancinematoday.com for months. For what it’s worth, if you want to find out more about fan films in general, I wrote the first book about the history and future of ‘em, Homemade Hollywood, which just came out.