Fronting up at Comic-Con

Wellington director Peter Jackson spoke last week at the 40th annual Comic-Con in San Diego — the largest comic book and popular arts convention late last week — much to the delight of 6,500 fervent fans, who he complimented for their enthusiasm. “I wish you could take the amount of energy in here, bottle it and give it to Hollywood executives to drink,” he said. Jackson was on hand to promote the trailer for science fiction thriller, District 9, which was filmed in South Africa by protégé Neill Blomkamp. The Comic-Con crowd ate it up, but it went ballistic when the Lord of the Rings director started riffing on another project, the big-screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Jackson said he expected to deliver a script to Warner Brothers in three or four weeks and hoped to be in a position to start offering roles to actors within two months — assuming studio executives approve of his script. “Drop Warner Brothers a line and encourage them to be kind to us,” he told the crowd.