“The book is better,â€Â has been the mantra of well-read movie-goers since talkies got their start. In this era of writers’ strikes and wooden actors, it isn’t surprising that many movies are based on popular fiction.

But what happens when your audience will devour more material than a deceased author provided?

If you̢۪re Peter Jackson, you write it yourself.

Devout fans of his Lord of the Rings movies no doubt know by now that Jackson has come to terms with New Line Cinema and has agreed to produce two more movies based in Middle Earth.

One of them will be The Hobbit. The other will be a sequel to it and a prequel to Fellowship of the Ring.

Those of you who know your Tolkien realize he merely sketched out the part of Middle Earth̢۪s timeline between The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. TheOneRing.net, a website for hopeless Middle Earth addicts, lists some of the major events found in his appendices.

Despite TheOneRing.net’s claim that “These are but a few things mentioned in Appendix B of Return of the King,” what happens between The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring is a non-story. Evil happenings begin to escalate, setting up the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In other words, there is conflict, but there is no resolution occurs until the end of Return of the King. That whole period is one big wandering narrative. Kind of like The Silmarillion, another of Tolkien’s Middle Earth histories.

It’s also worrying that the actual story of The Hobbit is being squeezed into one movie to make room for the “sequel.â€Â Though The Hobbit’s page count is similar to that of one of the books of the trilogy, the former is a lot more focused on characters and less on an epic war. The story would not fare well if treated like Jackson’s previous movies, which favored warfare over character development and cut character-establishing scenes to make way for more orc-slashin’ action.

And no, I’m not talking about the “missingâ€Â Tom Bombadil scene. I had no desire to see his bright blue jacket and yellow boots in living color, either.

But there̢۪s a reason Tolkien didn̢۪t write a book between his two most famous works. Jackson should take a cue from the master.