#john boorman lotr

[cityoftheangelllls]

I find myself thinking a lot about what the world (and the Tolkien fandom) would have been like if those unmade film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had been made. ESPECIALLY the animated ones.

I'm a huge animation buff so I often get sad when I read about the earliest attempts to adapt LOTR and The Hobbit into animated films. I understand why Tolkien rejected them, as he was very particular about how his works should be adapted and even thought that they were impossible, if not nearly impossible, to show on film. I'm especially fascinated with Disney's attempts to adapt LOTR and The Hobbit around the 60s - 70s, and I'm glad some concept art of Bilbo survives. Sadly, it never came to be, since Tolkien hated Disney, especially because of how the dwarves were depicted in "Snow White" and how he thought of the Disney company as money-hungry. As far as I know, Disney is still banned from adapting any of Tolkien's works, but I'm still curious to see how they would have approached his works, at least The Hobbit. I often think about how the characters would have appeared, whether there would have been any musical numbers, and how the story itself would have been presented. LOTR, not so much, since it's far too dark and complex for younger children.

The animated adaptations that ended up coming out - Rankin/Bass's The Hobbit and The Return of the King and Ralph Bakshi's unfinished LOTR - are still very near and dear to my heart, even though they are undeniably flawed. But honestly, I need more animated Tolkien in my life. Animation is SUCH an underestimated art medium and it's perfect for fantasy stories. I would love it if another animated film of The Hobbit, a theatrical version, came out, especially if it was done in 2D animation, or if an anime series of either LOTR or The Hobbit was created.

I understand why many Tolkien fans would be surprised if they came out with another LOTR or Hobbit film adaptation after the Peter Jackson movies. The PJ LOTR trilogy has become the default for how we view Tolkien's characters today, not because they introduced new generations to Tolkien, but how they were groundbreaking in terms of cinematography, casting, SFX, writing, storytelling, etc. I love them too even though they have their faults (I'm looking at you "Go home Sam" scene and Faramir and Frodo's portrayal) PJ's Hobbit films, on the other hand, are just...okay. There's a lot I like about them, but I have a lot of problems with them, mainly with how they bloated the story and relied heavily on CGI, much of which looked cheaper than it did in the LOTR movies. Still, the character designs have also become the ultimate designs for many fans.

I wasn't a fan about how many Tolkien fans complained about the Amazon series being a "remake". To me, it wasn't a remake, it was another adaptation. And then it turned out to be a prequel to LOTR.

I'm also wondering if The Silmarillion is ever going to be adapted to the screen. From what I've heard, PJ wasn't going to make any attempts to do it, due to it being so complex. I personally think it would be best to film it as a TV series. Hell, I would pay to see a miniseries adaptation of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. That way, there would be more time to pay attention to the details in the books. I feel the same way about Harry Potter.

#regarding the john boorman film i couldn't give less of a shit about it since it sounds like something ken russell would make #lotr #the hobbit #tolkien #random thoughts from angie #Lord of the rings #Jrr Tolkien #Jirt

[danman007]

Unpopular Opinion on The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien's original novel is better than Peter Jackson's film adaptation. Jackson’s films lacks the soul of Tolkien's written word and was just a vehicle for Jackson's VFX company(Weta). A far better fantasy film, and more Tolkienesque, than Jackson's LOTR, is Sir John Boorman's Excalibur.

#The Lord of the Rings #J.R.R. Tolkien #John Boorman #Excalibur

[gellavonhamster]

Something I remembered after watching Excalibur (1981) is that its director John Boorman was initially supposed to adapt The Lord of the Rings, but the studio executives changed, and the new ones rejected the script. According to Three Rings for Hollywood: Scripts for The Lord of the Rings by Zimmerman, Boorman, and Beagle by Janet Croft (available to read for free on academia.edu here), “Boorman eventually used some of the special-effects techniques and locations developed for The Lord of the Rings in other films, most notably Excalibur in 1981.” The paper then describes what this LOTR movie would’ve been like, and it’s bonkers: Galadriel seducing Frodo, Aragorn healing Eowyn in a manner that is “so blatantly sexual it is not surprising Boorman marries them immediately”, Gandalf performing some “primitive rebirthing ritual” on Gimli so that he remembers “his forgotten ancestral language”. Aragorn gives one shard of Narsil to Boromir to use as a sword because Arwen told him to do so in a vision, and then “all three ritually kiss the swords and each other”. But also Arwen is thirteen years old, apparently? Also “Pipeweed seems equivalent to marijuana in its effects, and the hobbits’ beloved mushrooms are hallucinogenic” (okay, this at least I can get, haven’t we all joked about pipeweed being, well, weed?). And the history of the Rings was going to be narrated in a “highly stylized sequence” that “combines elements of Kabuki theater, rock opera, and circus performance, and could almost be imagined as a later retelling of the legend by a tribe of decadent Dark Elves who had seen one too many Cirque du Soleil productions.” Wow. I know I would’ve probably been mad at the fact of this movie’s existence if it had been made, but I also cannot help wondering what it would’ve been like, especially since while Excalibur is a mixed bag for me, I definitely loved its aesthetic. Could’ve been like Coppola’s Dracula adaptation but for LOTR. Fascinating.

#talk talk talk #lord of the rings #j. r. r. tolkien #gella talks lotr

[tom-bombadil-is-transgender]

mark my words I'm gonna read the entire john boorman lotr script if it kills me

#just downloaded a pdf yesterday #ill actually probably lose it #i had to take breaks reading articles about it because i felt so unhinged #please please google it if you see this #lotr #lotr movies #the beatles #i promise thats relevant but i wont say why as motivation to look it up

[overthinkinglotr]

Can I just ask what...is the contest for the Boorman adaptation? I mean... This is not a normal movie script, right?

YAY OBSCURE LOTR ADAPTATIONS TALK TIME!!! (We’re talking about the context of John Boorman’s LOTR, the one where Frodo has sex with Galadriel)

OK SO

Yes, John Boorman’s screenplay is so completely baffling and incoherent that it seems like it can’t possibly be real. I really don’t know for sure if the draft that’s floating around the internet is really the Real Thing. However-- the weirdest aspects of that screenplay seem to be corroborated by other sources?

Some sources say the screenplay exists in physical form at Marquette University, but idk if that’s the version that’s online. Maybe it is!

And I’ve come across multiple sources discussing the scene where Gimli gets beaten up and buried alive to “unlock his magic ancestral memories,” the infamous poorly written Frodo/Galadriel sex scene, etc.

But again! I personally don’t know how reliable all these sources are. A lot of the old Reliable Sources discussing the screenplay have kinda just Vanished off the internet, and finding Definitive Confirmation would take some digging. That someone else can do, because I’m not good at this. :P

But I’ll throw information at you and you can decide what’s real--

Here’s what I DO know for certain is true:

In the 1970s, John Boorman approached United Artists with a pitch for a movie based on Arthurian legends (which would later become the film Excalibur.) UA turned him down, thinking Arthurian legends weren’t marketable enough.

They instead commissioned him to write a screenplay for a live-action film adaptation of Lord of the Rings.They were kinda like “Lord of the Rings, Arthurian legends....same thing, they both have a wizard and a medieval sword guy in it. But Lotr is popular right now, so well have this guy write a tolkien thing. Someone who likes arthur legends will also be good at writing lord of the rings, because they’re basically the same.”

(But like...they’re not, obviously. King Arthur legends are a bunch of folklore that doesn’t have one single ‘plot.” Writing a King Arthur film means using a few characters and some famous imagery and throwing them in a medieval setting to vibe together, creating the film’s plot by cherry-picking the Arthur stories you like most and throwing them together in a blender. But Lord of the Rings isn’t like that! It isn’t a collection of folkloric stories with no clear plot! Lord of the Rings is ultimately a single story with a single coherent plot! Someone who wants to adapt their own take on something as plotless as  folklore might really Struggle to adapt a plot-heavy book like LOTR!)

So anyway, John Boorman wrote this screenplay for them.

But John Boorman’s movie was never made.

Why was it never made?

Here’s where we get into some SUPER FUN “unreliable narrator” territory!!!!

John Boorman’s claim:

According to John Boorman in his biography, the film was never made because UA was tight on money and the special effects required were simply too expensive for the 1970s.

Boorman really did try very hard to make his screenplay good! According to Boorman, he and his writing partner Rospo Pallenberg  “covered all the walls of a room with a breakdown of all the scenes in all three volumes,” “drew a map of middle earth,” “wrote detailed analyses of all the characters,” and spent several weeks devising a structure for the film. Then they wrote the script together-- Boorman wrote one scene, Pallenberg the next.

But alas, it was too expensive to film in live-action. The technology just wasn’t there yet.

So the studio was forced to have the film made by an animator, Ralph Bakshi.

Boorman says that Tolkien wrote a letter to him saying that he approved of his screenplay (which Tolkien hadn’t read) solely because it was going to be a live-action movie. Tolkien hated animation. Boorman says that Tolkien’s death “spared him” the horrible pain of seeing his story adapted into animation. According to Boorman the problem with the Bakshi film (which he never saw) was that it was animated, and therefore inherently bad. Unlike Boorman’s script, which was an amazing work of art that would’ve been a wonderful live-action (and therefore inherently superior) movie!!! If only it was made! Boorman mentions that the working conditions on the Bakshi film were horrible (because they were) and laments that budget constraints meant the studio was forced to sell the movie to a low-down NO GOOD “ANIMATOR!” >:((((

BUT

Ralph Bakshi, obviously, tells a very different story!

Ralph Bakshi’s Claim:

According to Bakshi, John Boorman’s screenplay was so UTTERLY incoherent that it was unusable. UA gave Bakshi the rights to make a film because they had paid a million dollars for a trash script, and now they were dealing with the Sunk Cost Fallacy(tm). Bakshi was allowed to make his film because UA had wasted so much money on Boorman that they were desperate for ANYONE to use the Lord of the Rings IP in a way that wasn’t completely incoherent and could make sOME money:

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t I go make the film?’ recalls Bakshi. “So I call up Mike Medavoy and I go to United Artists, which in those days were on the same lot as MGM. In the main building on one side of the building was MGM — which Dan Melnick ran in those days — and on the other side was Mike Medavoy at UA. I went to see Mike in his office and he says,

“Look, I’ve got this (John Boorman) script and I don’t understand it. I never read the book. We don’t want to make the picture. What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to animate it. Three pictures.’

He said, ‘We don’t want the picture. What we want is our three million dollars back for the screenplay that we paid Boorman. So I’ll give you the rights, and if you can get our money back you can make the picture any way you want.’ True story.”

So it is a fun game of, which director of a failed unfinished LOTR project do you believe?

John Boorman later reused a lot of his Lord of the Rings script ideas for his film Excalibur. I haven’t seen the full thing, but the film kinda feels like proto-Game of Thrones? I feel like it adds credence to the idea that the bad screenplay was real-- a lot of the weird way Boorman writes women/gender in Excalibur is reflected in the parodically awful FrodoXGaladriel Fanfic Stuff.

Plus, I’ve seen the Andrew Davies BBC adaptation of Les Miserables! And ithat adaptation is so terrible that I can believe that the nonsense in the Boorman screenplay, like FrodoxGaladriel, can seem perfectly reasonable if you approach it from the perspective of a mediocre middle-aged male writer. :/ Anyway! But my BBC Les Mis Salt isn’t really relevant here! :D

But yeah! That’s some context I have on hand. The exciting fun story of the Lotr movie that was never made! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

#lotr #lord of the rings #john boorman lotr

[secretmellowblog]

Guys??? Exacalibur director John Boorman’s hilariously bad unproduced Lord of the Rings screenplay was taken down? It’s not online anymore???

First the amazing Finnish Miniseries adaptation of Lord of the Rings was taken down off YouTube, and now John Boorman’s screenplay has been taken down off the internet too. 

Why have all my favorite insane obscure Lord of the Rings adaptations been disappearing lately? I’m....honestly kinda sad.

 Is this a coincidence, or is it like, Amazon cracking down on obscure Lotr adaptations before their new series comes out?

All I can say is: NOTHING better happen to the precious 1966 Czech adaptation of the Hobbit or I will break into Amazon headquarters and bitch-slap Jeff Bezos

#hobitit #john boorman lotr #1966 hobbit #I NEED to do a post on the 1966 hobbi #which I love #its production history is so fascinating #EDIT:Oops wrong blog

[lindirs-gaze]

just found out about the lotr script where boromir and aragorn kiss

#borogorn stans winning tonight #lotr #boromir #aragorn #based john boorman has been RETRACTED #i was so caught up in the euphoria of aragorn/boromir #that for like a minute i lived in a world where creepy men didn't exist

[meatthawsmoth]

I recently learned that in the ‘70s, John Boorman, director of Excalibur, was slated to direct an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in one long movie. It starts off reasonable enough for a one-film adaptation of LotR...

- Tom Bombadil, Bree, several Elves of minor importance, the Watcher in the Water are all cut.

Then becomes less excusable...

- Lothlorien would have been cut; instead Galadriel and her people live in a tent by a lake.

- Everything that happens in Rohan and Isengard would’ve been cut, along with Faramir, the Ents, Cirith Ungol, Minas Morgul, and quite a bit of the Battle of Pellenor Fields.

Then come the would-be changes that are absolutely bonkers:

-   The Council of Elrond (who has a beard in this version) would have included a sort of theatre performance, complete with puppets and a medieval circus act, explaining the history of the Rings of Power.

- A hallucination sequence after the Hobbits chow down on some strange mushrooms.

- A wizard’s duel between Gandalf and Saruman based entirely on wordplay. It sort of sounds like the game between Lucifer and Morpheus in The Sandman. (”I am the snake about to strike.” “I am the staff ready to crush the snake.”)

- Gimli would have been put in a hole and beaten in order to retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory.[!]

- Arwen is replaced by a 13-year-old spiritual guide, who heals Frodo of his Morgul wound (though Elrond was ready to have Gimli cut off Frodo’s arm to stop the black magic from spreading). She later performs a magical ritual that causes Boromir to break down and kiss Aragorn after the two nearly come to blows over the pieces of Narsil. Éowyn replaces her as Aragorn’s love-interest.

- Frodo would have had sex with Galadriel (Celeborn would’ve been cut)

- The Witch-King of Angmar’s fell beast would’ve been replaced with a flying, headless, skinless horse, which admittedly sounds pretty badass.

#lord of the rings #frodo #galadriel #john boorman #weird #middle-earth #lotr #tolkien

[fanbun]

Noteworthy parts of John Boorman’s LOTR screenplay

The weirdly elaborate elf circus act with the ring jugglers.

All the parody-esque depictions of characters within the elves’ stage performance, such as femme fatale Saruman.

Arwen is “about thirteen years of age.”

Frodo stares in awe as Arwen appears out of nowhere, cuts her lip and kisses both Aragorn and Boromir, who then kiss each other.

To escape a group of wargs attacking them on Caradhras, Gandalf gets the fellowship drunk on a mysterious potion and then freezes them all in a glacier. This apparently saves them and they later defrost when bits of the glacier float down a stream.

Instead of figuring out the password to Moria himself, Gandalf forces Gimli to remember the ancient tongue by calling him “greedy dwarf,” forcing him to dig, and hitting him repeatedly with his staff.

Pippin has the nerve to correct Galadriel by saying they’re hobbits and not halflings. Galadriel glares at him. This happens twice in a row.

Everyone in the fellowship is super horny for Galadriel.

Legolas does a bird-like dance for her.

Sam: “She is a pretty flower, but she badly needs watering, she does!”

Gimli: “Galadriel! A mighty piece of stone she is, for a Dwarvish tool to carve.”

It is heavily implied that Frodo has sex with Galadriel before he looks into her mirror.

Lembas bread tastes like whatever you’re thinking about for some reason. At one point Merry thinks about Galadriel while he is eating it.

Merry and Pippin badly reenact the events after their capture to Gandalf. There are no written scenes of the orcs marching them to Isengard so this would also be the only information the audience gets about it.

Emphasis is put on Frodo mirroring Gollum’s movements and at one point his speech patterns.

Sam cradles Frodo’s head in his lap and sings him to sleep. This one is just cute.

Frodo acts like he can kill Shelob on his own but then gets stunned anyway and Sam has to save him.

Sam uses the ring to torment/overpower all the orcs in Cirith Ungol. Let me restate that. Sam harnesses the evil powers of the ring to save Frodo.

PIPPIN WEARS A JESTER OUTFIT. CAN THERE BE FAN ART OF THIS?

Denethor is mad that Galadriel chose to have sex with Frodo instead of Boromir.

Women from Minas Tirith fight at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, so Eowyn isn’t the only woman to join the battle.

Faramir doesn’t exist.

Denethor dies by stabbing himself when Aragorn hugs him.

Eowyn marries Aragorn and becomes Queen of Gondor.

Saruman is the Mouth of Sauron and he has a pet Cobra now.

#Lord of the Rings #lotr #john boorman #the lord of the rings #this is long but to be fair there was a lot going on #i've been working on this for a while lol

[glorthelions]

I'm reading through that lotr screenplay from the 70s by john boorman that's been going around and I am convinced that it's how Andrew Hussie himself would have written it

#lotr #homestuck #hs #john boorman #lord of the rings #seriously #it opens to Tolkien at his desk looking at the camera #that scene where the ring is a ball chased by a dog who represents fate? #hussie #matt rambles

[downwithpeople]

my hot LOTR take is that having glanced over it the john boorman script is actually quite good and hits a nice middle ground between being bugfuck insane and properly carrying over the themes of the story. it’s easy to laugh at the bizarre shit like the fellowship getting into moria by beating the shit out of gimli in a hole to awaken his dwarven ancestral memories but little things like legolas mourning that the rainbow only has seven colours actually hits the right note of bittersweet nostalgia that’s in all of the most emotionally resonant parts of the book. i’m actually at the point now where i’m so sick of the stranglehold of peter jackson’s vision that i’d welcome an adaptation that goes off the rails a bit. it may have even prevented the legacy of fantasy movies that look so fucking boring

[danman007]

“Tolkien’s work stirs a great brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth, the ‘Unterwelt’ of my own mind. It was a heady, impossible proposition. If filmmaking for me is, as I have often said, exploration, setting oneself impossible problems and failing to solve them, then the Rings saga qualifies on all counts.” Sir John Boorman on his attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings to the screen.

“What I’m doing is setting it (Excalibur) in a world, a period, of the imagination. I’m trying to suggest a kind of Middle-Earth in Tolkien terms. I want it to have a primal clarity, a sense that things are happening for the first time. Lands and nature and human emotions are all fresh.” - Sir John Boorman

Excalibur is far more Tolkienesque than any of the adaptations of Tolkien’s work. The Peter Jackson LOTR & Hobbit trilogies, Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power all lacking the poetry and soul of Tolkien’s written word.

#Excalibur #John Boorman #The Lord of the Rings #J. R. R. Tolkien

[whisperofthewaves]

TIL there exists a Forbidden LOTR screenplay and it’s the 1970 John Boorman version.

#nothing important #I'm almost tempted to google it to check if the bits mentioned in the video are for real but I trust my man Dan from the Folding Ideas

[minotaurmutual]

I just want you all to know that there was a script for a lotr movie by john boorman in which the story of the ring was presented as a rock opera, frodo and galadriel fucked and aragorn and boromir kissed passionately with arwyn's blood on their lips. we were robbed

#i mean I could gladly go without the galadriel frodo sex scene #but the rest #we missed out big #lotr

[overthinkinglotr]

Also, do any of you remember John Boorman’s failed screenplay for his cancelled Lord of the Rings movie I talked about a while back? The screenplay where Frodo has sex with Galadriel

According to Ralph Bakshi, Boorman was paid 3 million dollars for that script.

 In fact, the reason the studio executives were willing to fund Bakshi’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings is because they were desperate to make back the money they’d lost funding John Boorman’s incoherent script.

I went to see (the head of MGM) in his office and he says, ‘Look, I’ve got this (John Boorman) script and I don’t understand it. I never read the book. We don’t want to make the picture. What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to animate it. Three pictures.’ He said, ‘We don’t want the picture. What we want is our $3 million back for the screenplay that we paid Boorman. So I’ll give you the rights, and if you can get our money back, you can make the picture any way you want.’ True story.” 

He was almost definitely exaggerating with the three million, but the point is that....i feel like this should be a Confidence Boost to you writers out there.

.john boorman got paid like 3 million dollars to write an adaptation of Lotr where Frodo has sex with Galadriel, and Denethor isn’t sad because Boromir is dead but because Galadriel had sex with Frodo instead of Boromir.

 3 million dollars for a scene where in order to escape a pack of wargs Gandalf freezes the entire Fellowship into an ice cube:

3 million dollars to write this dialogue:

I wish someone put the screenplay back online again so you could Experience it for urself......but the moral is follow ur heart and write what u want, it can’t be worse than what john boorman was paid far too much money to write

#sadly the script was taken offline #but if anyone has a copy of it.... #hit me up! #john boorman lotr #ralph bakshi lotr

[all-things-devours]

Someone uploaded a copy of John Boorman’s unproduced LotR screenplay from 1970, and it is... Wild

#tolkien #lotr