Stephen Colbert is co-writing a new Lord of the Rings movie, Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema announced.

“We’ve got a very special partner that we’re working with,” said filmmaker Peter Jackson in a video shared across social media at midnight on Wednesday before introducing the comedian and Late Show host via video call.

Colbert is a Tolkien fan — he even had a cameo appearance in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in 2013. He will co-write a new movie with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, and LOTR veteran screenwriter Philippa Boyens. Its working title is Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past. 

Colbert said in the video with Jackson that the film will adapt six early chapters — “Three is company” through “Fog on the Barrow-downs” — from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. These chapters were not part of the first film.

“I thought, ‘Oh wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story,’” Colbert said. “‘Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”

Colbert said he and his son, McGee, worked out what they thought might be a framing device for the story.

“It took me a few years for me to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call,” joked Colbert to Jackson.

Warner Bros. sent the film’s synopsis in a release: “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo – Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”

Shadow of the Past is one of two upcoming films in the Lord of the Rings franchise. Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum in the films, is directing The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which takes place in between the fictional timelines of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Warner Bros. has not announced a release date for Shadow of the Past, but it will come after The Hunt for Gollum, which is expected in Dec. 2027.

“I did not think I’d have the time,” Colbert laughed in the video about finding the hours to work on the new movie. But, he said, “It turns out I’m gonna be free starting this summer.”

Last year, CBS announced that it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days after Colbert publicly criticized Paramount — CBS’s parent company — for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Trump over claims that CBS interfered in the 2024 election by airing edited segments of an interview with Kamala Harris. The Late Show will air its final episode on May 21, more than 30 years after David Letterman first hosted in 1993.

Paramount is also set to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive nearly $111 billion merger deal.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta finish a television show and I’ve gotta write a movie script, but I will see you all in the shire,” Colbert said in the video.

The artist who goes only by the mononym Naoshi is a master at spinning tiny grains of sand into something grand.

She specializes in sunae, the Japanese art of making images out of colored sand. In her tidy Alhambra home studio, she meticulously assembles out-of-this-world tableaux in saturated, punchy hues.

Naoshi’s pieces usually center around a chic ingenue sporting food-focused fashion — think bonnets made of bonbons and boba tea skirts. One of her earliest characters, Ice Cream Girl, is a go-getter with a scoop for a head, inspired by a character she drew as a child. Another of her stars is a fierce fast-food warrior clad in a cheeseburger skirt, wielding ketchup and mustard laser guns and flanked by a squad of fighters who happen to be anthropomorphic pizza and hot dogs.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

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(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.

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But not all of the artist’s works have a gourmet bent — she also creates celestial goddesses and nature-inspired divas, and made a series devoted to the Major Arcana of tarot. Her “It” girls often keep company with a coterie of tiny monkeys, kittens or creatures with confections for heads. Their vibrant, jam-packed settings depict anything from an oceanic rave to a rainbow-hued big top performance to a joyride through the cosmos. And no matter the motif, she always makes sure her subjects are “playful, sweet and dreamy.”

“When I was a child, I had the experience of making sunae using a kit,” she recalled during a recent interview. “That memory stayed with me very strongly.”

Harnessing that nostalgia, she started creating and selling small DIY sunae kits of her own design in 2004.

Food-focused characters dominate Naoshi’s work, including picture books and sand art kits.

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“I began making [them] with the hope that they could become a fun and memorable experience for someone else as well,” she said of the kits, which range from easy to challenging, accommodating budding artists of any age and skill set.

But whipping up one of her full-scale smorgasbords of sprinkled donuts, popcorn and nigiri for a gallery display isn’t mere child’s play. The technique involves attaching an original sketch to an adhesive backing, cutting it out, strategically sprinkling sand on the desired areas, then removing any misplaced grains one by one. Each piece takes her anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

Originally from Japan (Yokohama by way of Iwate), Naoshi first visited Southern California in 2010, when she participated in a Sanrio anniversary exhibition in Santa Monica. There, she displayed her work and held a sand art workshop.

“It was such a really inspiring experience, I began to feel that I wanted to challenge myself as an artist in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s always so sunny and the food is so good! In Japan, a lot of people wear black and white, but in L.A. everything’s so colorful. I get inspiration all the time.”

Since taking the leap to living in the L.A. area in 2014, she has exhibited her work at Gallery Nucleus, Corey Helford Gallery and La Luz de Jesus Gallery, to name a few. She has also conducted workshops and sold merchandise — from art prints to T-shirts to washi tape — at such spots as Leanna Lin’s Wonderland, Popkiller and Pygmy Hippo Shoppe.

Jars of colorful sand and sweet artwork fills Naoshi’s studio.

Establishing herself in a new country was not without its challenges. “The culture is totally different,” she explained. “I felt stress every day.”

Early obstacles included overcoming the language barrier, as well as learning how to navigate the city’s vastness, how to open a bank account, and where to find markets and restaurants where she could buy her favorite Japanese delicacies.

“I eventually started to enjoy the act of challenging myself,” she said of her transition phase. These days, she high-fives herself for successfully filing business taxes on her own and she has become a regular at Katsu-Jin, a Tonkatsu spot in South Pasadena.

Last year, Naoshi released “The ABC of Sunae,” a mini-encyclopedia of sorts that traces the global origins of sand art in its various forms, including the ceremonial sand paintings of the Navajo in the American Southwest and the spiritual sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists. She also takes readers behind the scenes of her approach to the craft, showing off her preferred tools and providing step-by-step photos of the process.

“The biggest challenge of working with sand is that there’s no room for mistakes,” she said while sitting at a worktable stocked with dozens of small sand-filled glass jars, all arranged by color. “Once the sand sticks, it’s almost impossible to make corrections. So if there’s even a small part I’m not satisfied with, I have to start over from the very first step.”

The intricate nature of sunae means that if Naoshi makes a mistake, she has to start all over.

A stark white workspace filled with natural light, her trusty craft knife, a steady hand and a keen pair of eyes are all essential for keeping her girls’ cheeks rosy and for making their backdrops sparkle. And she maintains sanity by working to a soundtrack of her favorite Japanese pop songs and the bouncing beats of Basement Jaxx.

“Sand may be the opposite of an efficient or convenient material,” she said, “but its soft texture and the time I spend deeply focusing on the process feels almost meditative to me.”

A professional cornhole player who is a quadruple amputee has been arrested in connection with a fatal shooting.

Dayton Webber, 27, is accused of killing a man in the front seat of his car during an argument on Sunday in his hometown of La Plata, Md.— about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. — according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office said in a press release that passengers in the backseat saw Webber shoot Bradrick Michael Wells, also 27, before he pulled over and asked them “to help pull the victim out of the car.” They refused and left, at which point Webber “fled with the victim still in the car.” All of the passengers knew each other, authorities said.

Nearly two hours later, a resident of Charlotte Hall, Md., about 14 miles away, called police to report “a body in a yard,” the sheriff’s office said. Responders identified Wells and pronounced him dead at the scene.

Detectives found Webber’s car over 100 miles away in Charlottesville, Va., and got a warrant for his arrest. They were helped in their search by Virginia’s Albemarle County Police Department, which said in a separate statement that one of its officers spotted Webber’s vehicle at a gas station and used surveillance footage to track him down.

Webber was arrested at a local hospital, where authorities said he was “seeking treatment for a medical issue.” He was charged as a fugitive from justice, and public records show he was booked into the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on Monday.

The sheriff’s office says Webber is awaiting extradition back to Maryland, where he will be charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder and “other related charges.”

Jail superintendent Col. Martin Kumer told NPR in an email that the court “did not address extradition” at its Tuesday morning hearing. He said Webber’s next scheduled court date is “sometime in April,” though his attorney could potentially ask for one even sooner.

Dayton Webber was booked into a Virginia jail on Monday.

Charles County Sheriff’s Office

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Charles County Sheriff’s Office

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NPR has reached out to Webber’s attorney and Albemarle County court for comment but did not hear back in time for publication. The Charles County State’s Attorney’s office declined to comment.

Authorities say the murder investigation is ongoing, and are asking anyone with relevant information to call or submit tips online.

Webber’s path to pro cornhole 

At 10 months old, Webber was diagnosed with a bacterial infection, Streptococcus pneumoniae, that turned so aggressive he was given last rites.

“They had actually given me a 3% chance of living, and the only way that they were able to save me was by getting the infections out of my system,” he said in a 2024 ESPN video. “They had to amputate my arms and legs to keep me alive.”

That didn’t stop Webber from pursuing and excelling at sports, including football and wrestling. In fact, ESPN profiled him in 2010, after the then-12-year-old finished fourth in his weight class in the Southern Maryland Junior Wrestling League.

Webber said at the time that it was his favorite sport, adding, “I like using my strength and being fit.”

“Sometimes when I watch my teammates in certain situations I wish I had hands, but I just try to do things my own way,” added the rising seventh grader, who said he wanted to be a priest or a Secret Service agent one day.

Over the years, Webber learned how to write, fish and hunt. Videos on a YouTube account believed to belong to Webber show him firing guns using his upper arms. He wrote in a 2023 Today piece that he “even taught myself how to drive by racing go-karts.”

In the piece, Webber said he started playing cornhole — the lawn game in which players throw bean bags at a target on a sloped wooden board — in the backyard with friends, then weekly at his local American Legion.

“I loved it so much, I never missed a Friday,” he wrote.

Webber was crowned Maryland’s best cornhole player in 2020. He explained in the piece he wrote for Today that he doesn’t wear his prosthetics in competition because they don’t allow the same level of sensitivity or control, and has adapted his technique to throw the bags by their corners for more leverage. He said that while others often underestimate him, he hoped his experience would inspire people to “take chances and pursue their dreams” too.

Webber turned pro in the 2021-2022 season, becoming the first quadruple amputee in the history of the American Cornhole League. The governing body, founded in 2015, organizes tournaments that are broadcast on ESPN and CBS Sports.

The league confirmed to NPR on Tuesday that Webber has not been an active participant since late 2024. Nonetheless, it issued a statement acknowledging the allegations and declining to comment on them while proceedings are ongoing.

“This is an extremely serious matter and our thoughts are with all those impacted, including the family and loved ones of Bradrick Michael Wells,” it said.