Great mystery has surrounded the upcoming Lord of the Rings series being produced for Amazon Prime. Very few details have been revealed until today, when a whole “fellowship” of creators were announced on Amazon’s social media pages.
The announcement came in the form of a short video, which can be viewed below. Vulture has extracted the names and posted them in an article on their website, along with a few added descriptions.
— Gennifer Hutchison (Breaking Bad), Jason Cahill (The Sopranos), and Justin Doble (Stranger Things) are joining as writers and executive producers.
— Former HBO production chief Bruce Richmond, who helped oversee Game of Thrones and recently left the cable network, is onboard as an exec producer, as is former Bad Robot exec Lindsey Weber (10 Cloverfield Lane), who left the J.J. Abrams production company last fall to join Team Amazon.
— GoT writer Bryan Cogman and Stephany Folosom (Toy Story 4) will be consulting producers, while Ron Ames (The Aviator) is onboard as a producer.
— Helen Shang (Hannibal) will be a writer and co-producer, while Glenise Mullins will serve as a writing consultant.
— Non-writing exec producers on the show include Gene Kelly (Boardwalk Empire) and former Amazon exec Sharon Tal Yguado. (Fun fact: Non-writing GoT exec producer Carolyn Strauss was head of HBO Entertainment before she joined the GoT team.)
— The creative tech team today includes costume designer Kate Hawley (Suicide Squad), production designer Rick Heinrichs (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), visual-effects supervisor Jason Smith (The Revenant), Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, and illustrator and concept artist John Howe.
Among the more surprising announcements was Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey. Shippey is highly regarded as one of the most respected Tolkien scholars in the world. Catholic author Joseph Pearce, wrote about Shippey on his blog and said, “I think highly of Tom Shippey’s work, as I think highly of Tom Shippey himself. I would recommend the man and his work to anyone.” While Shippey is not religious, he does not dismiss Tolkien’s Catholicism, even though he may not understand it all.
For more details that were released, check out our previous article about Amazon’s series.
Philip Kosloski
Philip Kosloski is the founder of Voyage Comics & Publishing and the writer and creator of the comic book series, Finnian and the Seven Mountains.