By the time we arrived in New York, however, Snyder had already blown the deal by asking 20th for too much money. Tolkien's name hadn't yet reached them either. I had a fat script, but no other film companies were then interested. It was crushing. Even today, when I flip through my screenplay, and can almost see the fabulous scenes I had imagined, I feel a heavy regret.

But the worst was yet to come. Months later, when I was back in Prague working on some other filler projects, Snyder managed to get a phone call through to Zdenka's office. (Phoning to Prague in those days was like trying to contact Uranus.) He had a preposterous order for me: Make a one-reel version of The Hobbit, and bring it to New York within 30 days! I thought he had been smoking something wilder than his contraband Cuban cigars. Not possible!

What had happened was that in the meantime, the Tolkien craze had exploded, and the value of the film rights reached outer space. Suddenly Bill had the possibility of getting a huge profit without having to finance and produce a feature film at all. Why invest money, plus a year-and-a-half of work, when you can make money without all that sweat? Not only had the Tolkien estate lawyers given Snyder the rights for peanuts, but in their ignorance of film terminology, they had left a hundred-thousand-dollar loop-hole in the contract: It merely stated that in order to hold his option for The Lord of The Rings, Snyder had to "produce a full-color motion picture version" of The Hobbit by June 30, 1966. Please note: It did not say it had to be an animated movie, and it did not say how long the film had to be!

The Tolkien estate had now been offered a fabulous sum for the rights, and Snyder's rights would expire in one month. They were already rubbing their hands together. But Snyder played his ace: to fulfill just the letter of the contract -- to deliver a "full-color film" of The Hobbit by June 30th. All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay -- all my previous year's work -- hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within 12 minutes running time -- one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before June 30, 1966!

I should have told him to shove it, but I was basically his slave at the time...and it suddenly became a sort of insane challenge.

I knew my screen story line by heart, so I just had to put it through a mind-shredder, and write a sort of synopsis, with a few key lines of dialog scattered throughout. I called on close friend, brilliant Czech illustrator, Adolf Born, well known even then, and now the premier book illustrator of the Czech Republic. We managed to work out a simple storyboard. Adolf came up with a paper cutout scheme, and I worked out some multiple-exposure visual effects and scene continuity. We worked directly under the camera to shoot it. I got an American friend here, Herb Lass, who worked as a broadcaster for the Czechoslovak Radio's foreign cultural transmissions, to come up to our apartment and record the narration on my own recording machine.

I borrowed a tape of dramatic movie music from a composer friend, Václav Lidl, which I quickly extracted and cut together, also at home. It was no problem with music rights, as I could assure him that the film would never actually be distributed, but would be -- sadly -- a mere decoy.