by David Hughes
By now, the book had become one of the publishing sensations of the decade, and every studio in town was clamoring for the film rights. This time, it was another 60s phenomenon — The Beatles — who became linked to the project, a move apparently instigated by John Lennon. “We talked about it for a while,” Paul McCartney told Roy Carr, author of The Beatles at the Movies, “but then I started to smell a bit of a carve-up because, immediately, John wanted the lead.” According to Carr, however, Lennon was interested in the role of Gollum, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr opting for Frodo, Gandalf and Sam respectively. Whether related to The Beatles’ ambitions or not, United Artists successfully acquired the rights to film The Lord of the Rings in the autumn of 1969, for the sum of $250,000.
It was around this time that Heinz Edelmann, designer and art director of The Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine, became interested in pursuing the idea of an animated adaptation. At the time, Edelmann was doubtful that stories of action, suspense and thrills could be depicted as straight animation, and proposed to make the film “as a kind of opera, or a sort of operatic impression”, more closely related to Disney’s Fantasia than, say, The Sword in the Stone. He intended to approach it “As one does an operatic version of any book,” he told Outrè magazine, “[to] sort of try for a distillation of the mood and the story, but not follow every twist of the plot.” For instance, “One could have packed 300 pages of wandering into a five-minute sequence set to music.”
Edelmann has said that his version of The Lord of the Rings would not have been stylistically similar to Yellow Submarine: “The artwork would have been completely different: much less colour, and unrealistic, but without the art nouveau touch Yellow Submarine has.” Neither did Tolkien’s original illustrations for the book, which were all based on medieval art, appeal to Edelmann, who saw the story more in terms of an Akira Kurosawa film. “If you look at all the fantasy films done in the last thirty years,” he said in 2001, “there is a strong Japanese ethnic influence in the staging, in the buildings, and especially in the costumes. I think at that time we might have been the first to think in those terms. The Lord of the Rings is such a classic right now that almost no artistic freedom is possible. Back at that time, when it was new and Tolkien was still alive, it would have been a contemporary version, and I think that would have given us much more artistic freedom.” Nevertheless, he added, “I would have loved to have done it. Sometimes I do still think about it, but it would have been an awful amount of work. Maybe it’s better that it has remained just a concept.”
Ultimately, United Artists decided that animation was not the best way to proceed, and in June 1970 announced that John Boorman, the young British director who had come to Hollywood’s attention three years earlier with his gritty thriller Point Blank, would helm a live-action version. Boorman had originally wanted to make a movie about the legend of King Arthur, but when United Artists offered him the chance to turn Tolkien’s fantasy tale into reality, he leapt at it, bringing aboard Rospo Pallenberg to work with him on the script. They conceived of several approaches, from a straightforward adaptation, to what Pallenberg later described as “like a Fellini movie in a never-land, or in a big studio, like Moulin Rouge! — sort of all fake.” In the end, a more straightforward approach prevailed, with the studio hoping to combine all three volumes of the book into one film — an endeavour which proved challenging to say the least. “At the time, they produced long movies with an intermission,” Boorman explained. “[The script] is 176 pages with an intermission on page eighty-one, after the Fellowship goes down the rapids, and you have a sense that they have reached a great landscape as the river widens.” After the intermission, “we accelerated as we continued the story, and dropped things out. We were propelled by what we liked, and invented as we went along.”
Among the script’s inventions was the opening, in which the camera would invade J.R.R. Tolkien’s own study, disturbing him at work, followed by a brief history of Middle-Earth, conducted by what Pallenberg described as “a kind of Kabuki play in which the story of Sauron and the creation of the rings was explained to a gathering in Rivendell.” Pallenberg wrote new scenes for several characters, including a love scene between Frodo and Galadriel (husband Celeborn was not featured). He also claimed a particular affinity and sympathy for the dwarf Gimli, for whom he wrote a new scene in which Gimli was buried in a hole and beaten to utter exhaustion in a bid to recover his unconscious ancestral memory, and thereby remember the word necessary to enter Moria and discover other insights about the ancient dwarf kingdom. “I had a rather fanciful idea involving these orcs that are slumbering or in some kind of narcotic state,” he added. “The Fellowship runs over them, and their footsteps start up their hearts. John liked that a lot.” Another original idea was a unique duel between Gandalf and Saruman, inspired by African magicians who duel with words (an idea subsequently explored, incidentally, in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). “It was a way of one entrapping the other as a duel with words rather than special effects flashes, shaking of staves, and all that,” he explained. “I tried to keep away from that a lot, and Boorman did too.”
At the time, the possibility remained that The Beatles might be involved, perhaps even playing the four hobbits, a prospect which Pallenberg relished, despite the fact that it would have been difficult to apply roles to each of the group’s members. “It was presented to me as, ‘Let’s see if we can try and keep the four hobbits on sort of an equal basis — [though] obviously, Frodo was the protagonist — so we did that,” Pallenberg added, opining that Paul McCartney would have been his ideal Frodo. “They were the emotional anchor to the whole piece. We also anchored a lot of the film on how the ring corrupts, and we were fascinated by Tolkien’s idea of ‘stewardship of the land’.”
New Zealand director Peter Jackson, who would bring a live-action Lord of the Rings to the screen thirty years after Boorman’s aborted attempt, sympathised. “When you’re faced with adapting the twelve hundred pages of The Lord of the Rings it’s obviously an incredibly daunting task,” he told the makers of The South Bank Show. “It’s daunting in several ways. One [is that] just as a book, it’s very dense and there’s a lot of characters and it has... layers, [so] that you can scrape away one layer and there’s more information below, and you can scrape that away [and] there’s more information, which is exactly what makes it such a wonderfully beloved book. To somehow translate that particular aspect of the book into film, it’s virtually impossible. What you can do is you can take the story, you can take the characters, and you can make a movie that presents on film the moments that people remember from the book. Tolkien did a lot of things in his story that if you were a film-maker you would choose not to do — it’s as simple as that,” he added. For example, “His villains are very difficult to put onto film. Sauron, his ultimate evil in the story, is unable to take physical form by the time the events of The Lord of the Rings take place, and he manifests himself as a giant flaming eyeball. Now, you know, to have a movie in which your principal villain is a flaming eyeball is not a decision that you would make if you were writing an original screenplay.” Added Boorman, “[We] used to get the giggles about some of the issues. There was one I remember clearly when Gandalf is vanquished. The text is, ‘He fell beyond time and memory’, and we puzzled about how you put that on film.”
Perhaps the biggest hurdles for Boorman to overcome in the process of adapting the book were the technical challenges. Making the hobbits appear smaller than life would have been accomplished with oversized props and locations, and forced perspective. Flying creatures were excised from the story, so that instead of having the Nazgul chief swoop in on a flying steed, it rides a horse with no skin — just exposed, bleeding flesh. “I still have this feeling that the dazzle can take away from the fundamental drama,” Pallenberg suggested. “We always tried to do things on the cheap, simply. When you saw a castle in the distance, it could have been made out of anything — even gleaming, high-v
oltage transmission towers. You saw those in the distance between the trees, and then suddenly you were inside it. John Boorman is tremendously clever at that.” Nevertheless, Boorman had other ideas that might not have proved so cost-effective, including a model of Middle-Earth so large it would have displayed the curvature of the Earth, and filled an entire studio. Principal photography would most likely have taken place in Ireland (which would have opened up tax incentives for the production), with interiors being shot at Ardmore Studios. Said Pallenberg, “As I drove around, taking breaks from writing, I saw all sorts of places. I remember there was one view that he could pass off as the Shire — it looked down towards a little village that was called Anamoe, I believe.”
The Boorman/Pallenberg script ended poignantly, as Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, Galadriel, Arwen and Elrond sail away from Middle-Earth in a ship. A rainbow appears, prompting Legolas, who is watching from the shore, to remark, “Look — only seven colours. Indeed the world is failing.” Although it sounds like Tolkien, the line is Pallenberg’s own. “From a physics standpoint it’s incorrect to say that there could be more than seven colours,” the writer points out, “but what it’s saying is, ‘We live in a diminished world.’” The end of Boorman and Pallenberg’s year-long endeavour was no less poignant: no sooner had they submitted the script to United Artists than the studio decided it was too risky, too costly or simply not commercially viable, and put it on the back burner. Boorman and Pallenberg had not wasted their efforts, however. A decade later, in 1981, they used the knowledge they had gained during their year of development on the unrealised Tolkien project as the basis for Excalibur, the film about King Arthur which Boorman had set out to make before United Artists persuaded him to consider The Lord of the Rings.
By the time of Tolkien’s death in 1973, word of Boorman’s stalled production had reached Ralph Bakshi, a Brooklyn-born animator best known as the filmmaker who brought Fritz the Cat to the big screen. Says Bakshi, “I was a Tolkien fan, and I thought Lord of the Rings was not only one of my favourite fantasies, but one of my favourite novels. I was doing my own stuff at the time, and I knew Disney were talking about doing it, but the Tolkien family wasn’t happy with their approach, because Disney wanted to make it a musical, tone it down, and make it more palatable for young kids.” Interestingly, both Disney’s archives and legal department dispute the notion that the studio ever pursued an animated feature based on the books. “Then I heard that John Boorman was going to do it live-action for United Artists, and had somehow condensed the three books into one script, which I thought was ridiculous,” Bakshi continues. “So I went to Mike Medavoy at United Artists and told him it should be done in animation, in two or three parts. He said, ‘We’ve spent $3 million on this script we don’t understand. I don’t know if we’re gonna make it.’ So I walked across the lot and talked to Dan Melnick at MGM, who loved the idea and immediately wrote a cheque to buy it from United Artists.”
One might think that Bakshi, whose animated features Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic had both received ‘X’ ratings, was the last person to whom J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate would give their blessing for the first feature film based on his most famous work. Not so, he says. “They had no contractual approval, but I said, ‘Unless they give me the okay I’m not doing it.’ So I went to see Tolkien’s daughter and spent two days discussing how and why I was going to make the film. I said I couldn’t do everything, but the scenes that I could do would be pure Tolkien, both in dialogue and depiction, and she loved that. She took me to the studio where Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, and gave me her blessing, and I got to work.” Chris Conkling wrote the first draft of the screenplay and delivered it on 21 September 1976. This was subsequently revised (in a second draft dated 3 May 1977) by Peter S. Beagle, with the third draft (credited to Conkling, Beagle and Bakshi) being completed on 21 September 1978, exactly two years after the first. In the meantime, however, Dan Melnick had left MGM, and The Lord of the Rings was not a project his replacement wanted to pursue.
Undeterred, Bakshi approached Saul Zaentz, who had financed Fritz the Cat (and had produced Best Picture Academy Award-winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and would later produce another, Amadeus). Zaentz agreed to back the film, which would be divided into two parts. In adapting the books, Bakshi made good on his promise to remain faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, and elected to employ the controversial ‘rotoscoping’ technique — essentially tracing over live action footage — to ground the fantasy in the kind of “nasty realism” he found omnipresent in Tolkien’s work. “His fantasy is grounded in totally realistic terms,” he explains, “and to get that kind of realism I knew I would effectively have to do a live-action picture in animation. I thought rotoscoping was the answer. After all, [Walt] Disney used rotoscoping on every film he did — Snow White and the Prince, every realistic character, every song and dance number in every Disney film was rotoscoped [from performers] in full costume — but he kept it a secret. So it was not a cheat, it was a choice. Besides,” he adds, “if we’d done it in animation, we’d still be animating the picture today!” Even so, making the film was, he says, “a logistical nightmare. I recorded the voices in England, then I filmed the live action scenes — seventy-five to 200 set-ups a day, to get it done in time — using mostly different actors, fully costumed, playing back the pre-recorded dialogue to them so that the movement and timings would match the recordings. Only then did I go back to my desk to begin animating this two-and-a-half-hour picture! It was the hardest, most devastating and nerve-wracking two and a half years of my life.”
The worst was yet to come. When the film ended halfway through the second book, The Two Towers, audiences and critics cried foul. Bakshi says he always intended to make a second film, but by the time the first film was released, the film’s backers had reneged on their agreement to produce a follow-up. “They screwed me royally, because they never put ‘Part One’ on the screen,” he says of United Artists, who had declined to produce the film but wound up distributing it. “They were supposed to make two films, but they chickened out.” Although two animated television specials were produced in the late 1970s, based on The Hobbit and The Return of the King, neither was related to Bakshi’s version. Bakshi took solace in the fact that the film was a favourite of the Tolkien family, and has subsequently enjoyed a critical reappraisal. “I got a letter from Tolkien’s daughter saying she loved the movie, but I was pretty despondent for years, until I started to go online [at www.ralphbakshi.com], and got thousands of emails from people around the world saying they loved the movie. I feel much absolved.” Nevertheless, Bakshi was upset that no one involved in Peter Jackson’s adaptation contacted him during the production of those films: “I sat with the book with no illustrations, so every decision about what a goblin or hobbit or wraith has to look like was coming out of my own imagination and my experience of reading Tolkien, and my fear of making a mistake with the Tolkien fans. And he doesn’t even call me and thank me. Not that I’m bitter — I just find it ungentlemanly.”
It was during 1996 that the first rumours began to circulate concerning a proposed adaptation by Peter Jackson, whose diverse output as a director ranged from the splatterfests Bad Taste and Braindead, to horror comedy The Frighteners and the award-winning drama Heavenly Creatures. It was not until 1998, however, that Miramax Films came forward to negotiate with producer Saul Zaentz (who still retained the movie rights to the saga) and underwrite a two-movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings with Jackson as writer, producer and director. When Miramax got cold feet about a production of this scale, New Line Cinema stepped in, agreeing to back not two but three films — a risky prospect which has since paid off handsomely. “That was the key to it,” Jackson said later. “Without someone committing to the three movie idea, I think it would always have remained unfilmed.”
The same might be said of Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, the two-part film adaptation of which — subtitled An Unexpected Journey and The
re and Back Again — was made possible by the success of The Lord of the Rings. “It’s a huge uphill struggle to make [films like] that,” John Boorman admits, “and as someone who’s tried to do it, I have the greatest admiration and sympathy for Peter Jackson. It’s glorious in that you know that’s what movies should be about — taking these huge risks and making something as wild and unfilmable and impossible as The Lord of the Rings.”
WE CAN REWRITE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
Why the long development of Total Recall and its unproduced sequel is a memory most of those involved would rather forget
“Ron Shusett said, ‘You’ve done the Philip K. Dick version,’ like I had done something terrible. And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘No, no, we want Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mars.’”
— original Total Recall director David Cronenberg
In 1990, Austrian action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dutch director Paul Verhoeven teamed up for what would become one of the biggest science fiction films of all time, Total Recall. Schwarzenegger, the star of such films as Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Commando, Predator and The Running Man, played Douglas Quaid, a man whose dreams of Mars come to life when he takes a virtual holiday, only to be embroiled in a desperate race to save the red planet — a scenario which may or may not be a product of his imagination.
Despite its restrictive rating, the film grossed $250 million worldwide, enough to make it the highest grossing film of the year. Yet Total Recall had an inauspicious beginning. The film was loosely based on a 1966 short story entitled ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, written by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had previously inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which despite being a critical and commercial failure, had revived interest in Dick’s writing, and led to a number of his other stories being optioned for the cinema. ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, however, had been snapped up almost a decade earlier by future Alien co-writer and executive producer Ronald D. Shusett, who, at the time, had only a low-budget suspense film W (aka I Want Her Dead) to his credit. “I think it was probably 1974 that I optioned this story,” Shusett later recalled. “Phil Dick was then not a known author at all. He was still a struggling pulp writer, [as he was for] most of his career until Blade Runner got made.”
