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In 1956, in his sarcastic essay, ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs!’ Marxist critic Edmund Wilson called it ‘balderdash’.
Decades on, Germaine Greer claimed that the book’s popularity was like a ‘bad dream’.
Tolkien had never expected to start, as he put it, a ‘tide’. He only wrote the book for those who might like it.
Nevertheless, Frodo’s quest to rid the world of a magical ring by tossing it back into the volcanic fires from which it was forged had touched readers around the world. By 1968, three million copies of The Lord of the Rings had been sold worldwide. A 1999 poll conducted by Amazon judged it to be the Book of the Millennium. By 2003, once again much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, and perhaps catching a tailwind from Jackson’s films, a poll on behalf of the BBC’s Big Read named it Britain’s Favourite Read. According to recent calculations the book has sold upwards of 100 million copies.
Let us not tarry too long on the history of Tolkien and his literary genius. Reams have been written on the provenance of hobbits and the entirety of Middle-earth. Reams more will come. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892, where his father died when he was three, he was raised by his mother in the bucolic Worcestershire village of Sarehole (since consumed by greater Birmingham). She would die when he was only twelve, leaving him and his brother, Hilary, orphans. An early fascination with ancient languages and their mythological roots would lead to his creating his own, and eventually to an Oxford professorship in English Language and Literature, a journey interrupted by enlistment and the First World War.
In the dreadful lulls between fighting on the Somme (where Jackson’s grandfather also fought), and while recuperating from trench fever in Staffordshire, Tolkien began to conceive of the vastness of his fictional world, a world that would have its origins in the languages he had devised. He never felt he was writing fantasy but a form of history, a record that would reveal who might have spoken such words and where they might have lived. He saw his book as an attempt to recover a mythology for Britain, which lacked the equivalent lore to that of the Germanic, Nordic and Icelandic sagas he loved. Through a process he called ‘sub-creation’ grew a backdrop for his later books, a world of intricate construction: races, languages, myriad tales of wars and upheaval and a vast, vital geography against which it all played out.
‘I always had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere, not of “inventing”,’ recalled Tolkien.
Philippa Boyens, who would work so closely with Jackson and Fran Walsh on the writing of the adaptation to come, always valued the ‘wholeness’ of Middle-earth. ‘That you can escape into something that feels utterly real,’ she says. ‘I like that obsession. I like all the detail.’
Laughing, she recalls that whenever any questions from the cast or crew became too entangled in the brambles of Tolkien’s mythos they were always fielded to Boyens as the trio’s Tolkien nerd. She always impressed upon her fellow filmmakers how much underpinned the books.
‘It’s such an immersive thing, because as much as he delved into and loved those languages, he loved them because of their connection with who the British are as a people. And that profoundly affected him, and that probably has a lot to do with his childhood.’
Watching the encroachment of industry and the concomitant loss of a tradition; the stark impressions of the battlefront that stripped bare notions of class; the devotion to nature (especially trees); learning; fine company; a dignified, if antiquated properness in his relationship with women: all were ingredients in the wholeness of the book. But deeper still, in Tolkien’s early loss of his parents, Boyens sees the loneliness of Frodo expelled from the childlike idyll of the Shire to venture into the adulthood of Middle-earth.
Composed first for his children, Tolkien would publish The Hobbit in 1937, a lighter, charming prelude to The Lord of the Rings, which would eventually follow in 1954. He never intended his second novel to be divided into three books, or considered a trilogy. This was a necessity brought on by soaring paper costs following the Second World War (another global conflict that overshadowed his writing). It was a single, epic story, over 1,000 pages in length, made up of more than half a million words.
His response to Ackerman and co. provides an insight into how the author generally perceived the idea of transforming his work into film entertainment.
Tolkien had visual sense. In among the treatment’s atrocities, he could appreciate, ‘A scene of gloom lit by a small red fire with the wraiths approaching as darker shadows.’
He revealed actorly qualities too. In the 1950s, disappointed by that 1955 BBC version, he recorded his own radio play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son, in the poem’s full alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. There is a little existing footage of him from a BBC documentary from 1968. He plays well to the camera: warm, curious and knowingly dotty, throwing in an occasional faraway look in his eye as he gazes off into the distance, perhaps to Middle-earth.
Even so, Tolkien didn’t regard movies, or drama in general, as legitimate art. We are left to wonder if Sir Ian McKellen’s wry Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen’s robust Aragorn might have swayed him, but he considered the idea of acting to be a ‘bogus magic’. It was pretending.
Nevertheless, as early as 1957 he had written to his publisher Stanley Unwin that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of an animated version of the book — evidently having no faith that live action would stand up to the exotic creatures and fantastical locations therein. In another oft-quoted letter to his publisher, in his qualified way he even welcomed the idea.
‘And that quite apart from the glint of money,’ he added, ‘though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.’
He was no fool about the business.
Tolkien reasoned, with a foresight that would have made him more adept at dealing with Hollywood than his quiet, donnish persona would suggest, that he could either strike a deal through which he would lose control but be correspondingly compensated financially, or retain a degree of control but not the fiscal win.
‘Cash or kudos,’ he explained to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter.
With few signs of either cash or kudos emerging out of granting a six-month option to Ackerman and his associates, as the biography succinctly puts it, ‘negotiations were not continued’.
*
From that enshrined afternoon when, bored by marking uninspired English papers in his Northmoor Road drawing room, Tolkien had turned over a sheet and quite from nowhere written the line ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ a river of events will flow and churn over the years toward a quiet backwater in New Zealand. Those of a mystical bent might call it fate.
But there was a long way to go yet.
Nigh on a decade had passed when, in 1967, Tolkien was approached for a second time about the film rights, this time for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
While he welcomed the financial security the popularity of the novel had granted him, Tolkien had grown guarded if not threatened by the side effects of his success. He had no interest in fame and its attendant adulation. Especially wearisome were those fans who arrived on his doorstep uninvited with all their infernal questions, which he patiently endeavoured to answer. He took to setting an alarm clock in another room. When it rang, he politely claimed this signalled another appointment. Unwisely still to be found in the Oxford telephone directory, he would get calls deep into the night from faraway readers with a poor grasp of time-zone differences.
When United Artists came to him with this new offer, he may have seen it as a chance to deflect attention. Now seventy-five, and lacking the energy to deal with another adaptation he was always going to find fault with, he most likely wanted to wash his hands of the whole business. He could use the money to establish a trust fund for his grandchildren’s education. So he agreed to part with the filmmaking rights in perpetuity to both books for what now looks like a parsimonious £104,000.
It was a remarkably generous contract. To paraphrase the pertinent details: ‘Filmmakers had the right to add to or subtract from the work or any part thereof. They had the right to make sequels to, new versions, and adaptations of the work or any part thereof. To use any part or parts of the work or the theme thereof, or any instance, character, characteristics, scenes, sequences or characters therein …’
In other words, the studio was legally entitled to do just about anything it wanted with the books. It remains entirely permissible for the current rights holder to devise a sequel to Frodo’s journey.
Six years later, in 1973, Tolkien would pass away without having seen a single frame of his work on screen.
UA, as it was known, certainly in Hollywood, seemed a suitable berth for Tolkien’s books. Proudly founded in 1919 by the collective of actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and, granddaddy of the movie epic, director D.W. Griffith, it was an attempt by the artists to control the means of production. To resolve, they hoped, the eternal ‘art versus business’ conflict that had dogged, and goes on dogging, the film business from its very inception. A similar philosophy would later underpin Jackson’s filmmaking collective.
UA stutteringly lived up to its billing. While the great dream of artists at the wheel would falter — they were too busy acting and directing to find time to steer a film company — and the company would gradually be run along more traditional Hollywood models, it nevertheless endeavoured to maintain a veneer of artistic intent.
Among its library of adaptations are definitive versions of Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Around the World in 80 Days, West Side Story, the James Bond movies (cherished by Jackson), Midnight Cowboy, Fiddler on the Roof and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The latter produced by Saul Zaentz, who will prove significant.
Former head of production at UA, Steven Bach, who tells his fateful tale of Hollywood hubris and artistic ambition run amok during the making of Heaven’s Gate in the book Final Cut, reports that from the time they made the deal with Tolkien those rights languished for a further decade. They just couldn’t find a way, or at least a way they considered commercially viable.
Eminent playwright Peter Shaffer (who wrote the stage play of Amadeus) had written what Bach considered an elegant script for a single film version, but it never gained momentum.
In 1969, the English director John Boorman was a hot property. Born in London’s studio suburb of Shepperton, the debonair former documentary maker had made an instant impact with the gritty, modernist Lee Marvin thriller Point Blank, and a brutish tale of duelling Second World War veterans in Hell in the Pacific. His films, thus far, were steely and masculine, but with a touch of the metaphysical at their fringes.
Filled with the zest and fearlessness of youth, and considerable talent with which to wield it, he had approached UA with the ambition of creating an epic out of the Grail legend and King Arthur.
‘Well, we have The Lord of the Rings, why don’t you do that?’ they replied.
Boorman embraced the challenge put before him and over six months, squirrelled away at his tumbledown rectory in County Wicklow, he and co-writer Rospo Pallenberg conjured up something dizzyingly strange and knowingly sacrilegious. The finished 176 pages1 shatter much of the book’s grandiosity.
Boorman had a taste for the lusty and pagan, and while Tolkien may have admired his evocation of nature (Boorman would go on to make The Emerald Forest) he would have been appalled by all the sex. Before he is ready to look into her mirror, Galadriel seduces Frodo, informing him, ‘I am that knowledge.’ Boorman is dragging chaste Tolkien towards puberty, but completely overcompensates: Aragorn revives Éowyn with a magical orgasm, and even plants a hearty kiss upon Boromir’s lips at one point. The director also gets carried away with the book’s reputation as a hippy totem. Wild flowers are a chronic leitmotif, and the Council of Elrond turns into a Felliniesque circus performance with dancers, jugglers and a lively dog that symbolizes fate. To read it all is to be mildly disturbed yet mesmerized …
Gone are hobbit holes, Bree and Helm’s Deep. Gimli opens the doors to Moria with a jig, while Merry and Pippin are played as a Halfling Laurel and Hardy. There is much cavorting and way too much singing. Sillification lies perilously close. But there are some striking inventions, such as the Fellowship discovering they are walking across the bodies of slumbering Orcs in Moria. And Boorman goes some way toward taming the book’s gigantic architecture into a single, three-hour film.
UA didn’t understand a word of it.
During his seclusion, there had been a major reshuffle at the studio. The script, which had cost $3 million to develop, was tossed out. Boorman later claimed such shortsightedness mainly came from the fact that, ‘No one else had read the book.’
Boorman is too rich a filmmaker to dismiss outright what might have been, however provocative and untamed. After briefly attempting to keep his live-action vision alive at Disney, he would channel much of the effort he put into The Lord of the Rings back into the Arthurian legend with the altogether splendid — and altogether grown-up — Excalibur. Bursting with Boorman’s visual exuberance, it is earthy, witty, fantastical (at times surreally so) and highly libidinous. It is also an ‘absolute favourite’ of Jackson’s — he has Mordred’s golden armour (made from aluminium) in his collection. Visually, it would have a huge influence on him as director and, coming full circle, on the sensibility he would give to The Lord of the Rings: the exotic contours of the armour; the scabrous weaponry; the mossy, lyrical Irish landscapes. It has the heft of the real.
Nicol Williamson’s whimsical, meddling Merlin has more than a touch of Gandalf about him.
Jackson has never had the opportunity to meet Boorman, who at 84 still lives in rural Ireland, but his manager Ken Kamins once represented the English director and has stayed in contact.
‘John sent a nice note through Ken once,’ recalls Jackson, ‘saying that he loved The Lord of the Rings, and he was very happy that I got to make it.’
Boorman has gone on record saying how grateful he is that he didn’t get to make his film. That may have prevented the project from ever passing to Jackson, whose trilogy he thought was a marvel akin to the construction of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. There was something secret and vast about the films, a work of almost divine providence.
Then there was the tale of the Beatles. How the Fab Four, at the height of their own impossible fame, had sought out the great Stanley Kubrick at his St. Albans estate to help create a multimedia musical of The Lord of the Rings in which they would star and, naturally, provide a backbeat.
Testament to Jackson’s lifelong passion for the Beatles can be found in the vision of a homemade cut out of the Sergeant Pepper-era foursome found in the sky blue, wheelchair-enabled Ford Anglia in Bad Taste. Jackson had wanted to spot Beatles songs throughout the score, but the rights were far beyond his debut film’s paltry budget.
One of the unforeseen spoils of his success would be a chance to meet a genuine hero. When Jackson encountered Paul McCartney at the Oscars following The Return of the King’s glorious haul of trophies there must have been a thousand questions stored away in his head, but he ‘pinned him down’ about that story of a Tolkien adaptation.
Like Boorman, McCartney had praised Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s book. He was a huge fan of the films. Each Christmas, as was the habit of many families, he would make a ritual outing with his kids to catch the next instalment. Quite how McCartney, one of the most famous faces on the planet, managed to frequent what sounded like his local multiplex so casually raises a sceptical Jackson eyebrow. The director suspects the pop icon probably found other means of seeing the films, but the compliments were sincere. And now he had McCartney’s undivided attention, he decided to see if there was any truth to the Beatles’ attempt to bring their youthful brio to Middle-earth?
It was true, said McCartney. The band had been on the third film of a three-picture deal with UA. The deal had thus far proved fruitful with the success of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. Considering where to go next, and having collectively read the book, The Lord of the Rings seemed a perfectly sensible avenue for the band. It was John Lennon who was spearheading the concept.
‘Paul was going to play Frodo, George was going to play Gandalf, John was Gollum, and Ringo was Sam, I think,’ Jackson can’t help but chuckle. ‘And he said that they all showed up at Stanley Kubrick’s house to try and persuade him to be the director. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that.’
During his lengthier dalliance with a potential adaptation, Boorman had wondered if he might cast the Beatles as the hobbits.
Kubrick, with four Liverpudlian superstars standing on his doorstop uninvited, did the decent thing and asked them in for tea. He listened to their offer, was very polite, but admitted it wasn’t for him. He was in the middle of planning a colossal life of Napoleon, which would eventually be scuppered when MGM decided that epics were no longer commercial.
‘Did you try another director?’ Jackson asked. There was also talk that Lennon was going to approach David Lean next.
‘No, Tolkien killed it,’ McCartney replied. The author’s misgivings were never given, but can perhaps be assumed.
According to UA, it was Yoko Ono. The Beatles split a year later.
*
So it wasn’t Kubrick or Boorman or the Beatles, or even Walt Disney — rumoured to have craved the rights in the sixties, only to be met with Tolkien’s disdain for his pretty fairy-tales — who first brought the book to the big screen. Instead, it was a maverick animator named Ralph Bakshi, an artist determined to rattle convention. That is except when it came to The Lord of the Rings, which he treated almost as Holy Writ. However, the flawed results still spoke more about the titanic complexity involved in both bringing the book under control and getting Hollywood to grasp its potential.
While he had loved Disney, the grown-up Jewish street kid who once fished comic books out of dumpsters, set himself the task of tearing down the fairy-tale edifice of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the parade of pearly classics that followed. He had learned his trade on children’s cartoons like Deputy Dawg, Mighty Mouse and the 1967 Spider-Man TV series, but he hungered to take animation into adult realms. Offbeat, darkly funny and controversy courting films of the 1970s like Heavy Traffic, Coonskin and America’s first X-rated cartoon, the cult favourite Fritz the Cat. When it came to fantasy, he showed pedigree. The impressive Wizards is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the powers of magic and technology battle for supremacy — it’s elves versus tanks — which Bakshi insisted was an allegory for the creation of the state of Israel. It is a film Jackson much admires.
An avid science-fiction reader, the curly-haired, Slavic-featured Bakshi had cherished the idea of transforming The Lord of the Rings into an animated epic since the fifties. He was convinced he had an understanding of Tolkien that outweighed any other suitor. Learning that Boorman and UA were attempting to condense its three books into a single film, he declared it to be madness.
‘Or certainly a lack of character on Boorman’s part,’ he added sniffily. ‘Why would you tamper with anything Tolkien did?’
With Boorman’s version slain, he approached UA with his own offer to adapt what the studio was beginning to suspect was unadaptable. It should be an animated film made in three parts, he informed them. They had offered him Boorman’s script to read, but he wasn’t interested. Bakshi would begin again from scratch and, aside from a few necessary nips and tucks, remain faithful to Tolkien’s quest.
In a vivid picture of Hollywood dealing at its most wilfully entangled, with UA unconvinced by his overtures the headstrong Bakshi decided MGM would be a much better fit for both him and Tolkien. A fact that occurred to him in part because they were literally down the hallway. Since its heyday, UA’s West Coast operations had occupied a wing of MGM’s Irving Thalberg Building in Culver City. Dan Melnick, head of production at MGM, was a man he knew had actually read The Lord of the Rings. Melnick would surely have a grasp on the potential of his project. He was right. Melnick paid back UA’s $3 million outlay on Boorman’s script, and the deal was struck. MGM would make the film, UA distribute it.
UA were evidently relieved to wash their hands of Middle-earth making. Bakshi and MGM were welcome to the meadows of the Shire, Rivendell, Rohan, enchanted Lothlórien, sulphurous Mordor and all those other bafflingly named locations that poured incessantly out of that accursed book.
Except Hollywood is more than a match for Middle-earth when it comes to internecine warfare and figuratively hurling heads over the battlements. Within weeks, MGM had gone through a violent takeover, changing ownership, firing Melnick and delivering the news that ‘they weren’t going to make that fucking picture’ to Bakshi.
Here the tale takes a significant turn. The unflagging animator turned to another friend, onetime music mogul turned movie producer Saul Zaentz, whose relatively small investment into Fritz the Cat had paid off nicely. The titillating tale of a tomcatting tomcat had made $90 million around the world.
Fiercely independent, and like Bakshi of East Coast Jewish immigrant stock, Zaentz had come from a music industry background and held no truck with the rigmarole of studio politics. What he did have a taste for was the grandeur of the ‘important’ literary adaption. Through his company Fantasy Films (named for the jazz label Fantasy Records he joined in 1955 rather than anything heroic), Zaentz had invested some of his Fritz the Cat rewards into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was nominated for nine Oscars (including one for Brad Dourif, Wormtongue to come, as Best Supporting Actor), winning five, including Best Picture. Something he would repeat with an adaption of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and, pertinently, The English Patient.
Stout and bearded, with a high domed forehead and glasses like window panes, Zaentz came with ironclad convictions, especially about art, and could spin from charm to confrontation mid-sentence. Once described as a ‘buccaneer’, he was a deft and deadly dealmaker.
In 1976, spying an opportunity, Zaentz readily agreed to back Bakshi’s film.
With their hands full with the ensuing calamity of Heaven’s Gate (currently grinding through its monumental production in Montana, overschedule, overbudget and by 1981 a flop of such epic proportions it effectively destroyed the studio — a warning to any who dared let the inmates run the asylum), UA relinquished the rights to Zaentz for $3 million. Through his newly fashioned Middle-earth Enterprises, Zaentz now retained the film, stage and game rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as per Tolkien’s original agreement in perpetuity. The Tolkien Estate retained all literary rights.