explains Director Jack Peterman, "Lordo Ringfellow's Great Uncle Bibbo goes on a ten-year journey to find a magical ring, fights a dragon, gets married, loses the ring, finds it again, and finally gives it to Lordo."

He takes a deep breath. "Then Lordo goes on a twenty-year journey to get rid of it, and hikes through forests and mountains and has all these adventures, then gets halfway around the world and realizes he forgot the ring on the nightstand."

Another deep breath. "So then Lordo goes all the way back and repeats the entire quest from the beginning, and he's about halfway through when he wakes up suddenly, and you realize the first three books of RingLord were just a dream sequence."

Another deep breath. "Then Lordo goes back to bed, and the 200-page chapter on Lordo sleeping starts." Peterman picks up a nearby copy of RingLord to make his point. He leafs through several pages and starts reading. "'Lordo licked his licks slightly and turned in his sleep. His pillow was beginning to get warm. If he'd been awake, he might have turned it, but as he was asleep, he was unable. Inhaling, our hero quickly exhaled, then inhaled again as his eyes fluttered.'"

Jackman flips forward a good hundred pages. "'...snoring slightly, but not too slightly. Had he been awake, he might have gotten himself a glass of water as he had an hour previously. But even that water was working its way downwards, and would soon spell disaster for Lordo's sleep, in the form of a trip to the bathroom. Lordo turned again. His leg shifted slightly..." Peterman closes the book.

"It get a bit tedious." This was the problem facing Peterman and his writing crew in the summer of 1999, with production on the films already starting and sets being constructed. How on Earth could they condense a book over 40,000 pages long with over 500 distinct characters, telling a story across a scan of fifty years, with most of it told in real-time?

"We tried just taking every fifth word," explains screenwriter Leonida Soyben. "We tried just taking the adjectives, then the vowel sounds. Nothing worked." With only five days until principal photography and no script written, Peterman had a burst of inspiration.

"We were sitting around with the book," remembers Soyben, "and we'd had to read it at least once all the way through, so of course we were all just inconsolable. Suddenly Jack gets this look on his face. He turns to us, and he says 'What if we ignored the books entirely?'"

RingLord I: Lordo Ringfellow & Friends was born.

One month earlier, Peterman was having a hard time convincing anyone that the RingLord books should be filemd at all. Most Hollywood executives at the time thought Tolhouse's epic was "too expensive"; "unfilmable"; "punishingly, punishingly stupid." As a director, Peterman was hardly a sell himself; known mostly for the New Zealand slasher films The Bloodening and Gorefist IV: The Wrath of Gorefist, few studios were willing to entrust such a big-budget gamble to such a fat nobody.

But Peterman was determined. One week earlier, he'd eaten in an Arby's in Hoboken, New Jersey and — already justifiably irritated simply to be eating at Arby's —  became livid when he took a bite out of his roast beef sandwich and found it to be nothing but a roll of toilet paper in a bun. He walked his meal back up to the front and complained loudly.

"Suddenly this fat dude's all in my face killing my buzz," remembers RingLord author Jeff Tolhouse of the encounter, "and I'm just like, 'Chill, dude, it's just a little TP.' I mean, you can eat, like, rolls of toilet paper and not even die. I gave this one chick fucking bleach instead of Sprite the week before. Now that bitch had a right to be upset."

Eager to hurry Peterman out of the restaurant before his boss could hear, Tolhouse gave Peterman the film rights to the RingLord books if he promised to leave. Peterman agreed, on the grounds that he also be given a free refill on his Dr. Pepper, and within moments, one of the biggest deals in film history was finalized. With the rights to RingLord: The Movie securely in his glove compartment next to some breath mints, Peterman realized what he had to do next: find the books and actually read them. 

"When I first read RingLord," he recalls, "it was like this enormous light bulb going off in my head. I remember being totally swept up in the story, and how awful it was, and how it just seemed to go on for ever. And I remember thinking, 'If we could just get rid of the majority of the characters and story, this would be dynamite in a bottle.'"

Studio executives at White Line weren't convinced, however. "When Jack first showed us this idea he had to turn RingLord into a series of films, we thought he was drunk," remembers White Line producer Kenneth Burke. "I mean, I know less about RingLord than anyone, but even I knew the books were really long and not very good. Don't they teach RingLord in most Special Needs classes?"

Peterman on that same meeting: "I remember being very nervous and really drunk, because I'd started drinking early that morning and I hadn't stopped. I told them I wanted to make RingLord into a series of films, and I think I tipped over a tray of coffee, and then -- silence."

Luckily the silence — and the ice — was soon broken by the best medicine of all, laughter, as Peterman found himself being laughed out of the building. Just as he was being thrown out into the parking lot, however, he called out the last piece of his vision that would seal the deal.

"He told us he'd hire nobodies and make it for nothing," says Burke with a smile.

"Acting talent," says Peterman. "That was the first thing, absolutely most important thing, that had to go." If RingLord I: Lordo Ringfellow & Friends was going to succeed on its promised shoestring budget, Peterman and his team simply couldn't afford talented, highly paid actors.

Today, of course, with big-name stars like Colin Farrell and Lucy Lawless lining up for roles in RingLord III, Peterman's celebrity and money woes are over. "We even had Sean Connery asking if he could play the magician Galfgab. I explained to him that the role had already been filled — for the past two films, actually — by Sir Ian MacCallum."

Peterman wrings his chubby little baby-hands. "On the other hand... man, Sean Connery. Maybe we could get Connery to act out all three movies, then release new DVDs and digitally add him in?" Peterman's eyes light up and, without even realizing, he starts cackling with evil mischief, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth. 

"Three years ago, however, Colin Farrell was out of the question. Will Ferrell was out of the question. Corey Feldman was out of the question — I mean, honestly, pause to consider how bad it was. Corey Feldman will sing at your wedding or put on an adult show in your living room for $20 or an armload of whatever he can find in your basement." With purse-strings tight, Peterman and his crew had to be inventive. The solution?

"Community theater," says Soyben. "All tolled, I think we got about 99% of our cast for minimum wage, and in the case of the Dark Lord Sorvon's Mexican Armada, considerably less."