To escape from the depression that Topher Grace felt from playing David Duke in "BlacKkKlansman," he undertook an ambitious project: cutting down the notoriously long "The Hobbit" trilogy into a manageable length. His goal was simple, as he told Indiewire, "I think that maybe 'The Hobbit' should've been one movie, and many people would agree. Money drives a lot of those franchises. It's better when the art leads."
Grace was right when he said that he wasn't the only person who felt that the story that "The Hobbit" told could be communicated in a shorter runtime, as the AV Club reported that a fan had already managed to cut the seven-hour trilogy down to four hours. That fan cut was completed in 2015, shortly after the release of the final film in the series "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies." While shaving nearly three hours off was impressive, Grace managed to deliver a cut that told the entire saga in the timeframe of a standard feature-length film, two hours.
When asked by Indiewire why he chose such a demanding project to work on, he said, "For me, this is just a great way to relax. There's something really zen about it."
