you realize if Hollywood hadn't influenced Lucas we'd have one very-fast-moving-epic-generation-spanning movie telling all 9 chapters at once?

but then, that's about the only good thing Hollywood did to Star Wars... The greatest tragedy to me was that Lucas waited so long to continue the story instead of doing everything in as close as order as he could. The first three films practically dripped with his vision and dreams, while the newest ones lack that special something. It makes a differance when he and his team worked their ass off getting things to look right, but now all he has to do is point at a programmer and tell them to write him a code that will make a scene look like this.....

Kinda kills that special something..

And LOTR practically reeks of Hollywood.. even though it's a nice smell. Just because Peter Jackson is from New Zealand, and the movies were filmed in New Zealand doesn't make it a non-Hollywood film.. I mean come on... Arwen rescuing Frodo at the river? PPhhffffttt... she certainly did not! They just did that to give Liv Tyler a bigger role. Arwen isn't the big female heroine in the Tolkien books, Eowyn is, but Liv Tyler is the bigger star so her role had to be written bigger than it was in the book...

True.

Though I agree with her role in The Two Towers.

But introducting Glorfindel would have been way too many characters. You already had the whole fellowship. And Glorfindel's role in the whole series is so limited that he'd be a bit of an extra character.