> "Ultimately, they couldn't get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn't like the idea of a pop group doing his story. So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There's no doubt about it.
I'm a Beatles fan. Tolkien was right to be skeptical, it would have been terrible. No doubt in my mind: campy, perfunctory, self-mocking. Please recall how "nerd" material was treated before the 2000s, if you'd like some precedent for what this would have looked like.
Yes. The breakthrough was "Batman", 1989, which redefined the fantasy/superhero genre. Before that, fantasy/superhero stuff was silly, unrealistic, or both. "Batman" changed that.
Of course, where that got us was franchises with endless sequels.
I think the sequels are easy to ignore and tolerable bycatch if it means you get strong films amongst them - Batman Begins, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Logan, Infinity War (even just for a great villain), and (last but definitely not least) Into the Spider-Verse, etc. That last one is a relevant example given how many Spider-Man films there are and how few of them I've bothered watching.
From "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien" we see what he agreed with his publishers:
"Stanley & I have agreed on our policy : Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author's veto on objectionable features or alterations."
It might have been interesting to see how Tolkien might have vetoed things, or demanded changes. We see from his letters how strongly he viewed many things.
We also see at least one critique of a film-proposal - though off-hand I cannot remember who's film-script it was..
> Gollum that's funny for five seconds and then just incredibly irritating.
This is the canonical Gollum of the original text. Only half-kidding.
Now that I think about it, the Beatles probably could have made all those songs and rhymes from the source material really sing.
Only a matter of time before someone uses voice cloning and video generation AI models to make this, and when they do, I’ll probably watch it, or at least watch a YouTube personality do a deep dive on it.
If I’ve learned anything from here it’s that “AI” getting to this point is hardly a given within any relevant time frame. Of course, luckily we are surrounded by experts who I am sure will gladly point out why I’m wrong.
It is a fun kool aid to drink though. Super AI enabling us to do things like “computer compose the best symphony for me that has ever been made in the style of the Beatles and successfully trade on the stock market to make me rich .”
An AI composing a beautiful symphony is a lot more likely than an AI being unusually successful at the stock market. For the latter it would need to outcompete other stock market AIs.
I mean, 'compose the best symphony' is not easy because it's subjective, but certainly 'sing these lyrics in the style of the Beatles' is not future tech, it's now.
Similarly, AIs have huge successes on the stock market already, the reason you still can't really reliably make money doing this as an individual is because individuals don't have access to the same amount of information/data quality, they don't have high speed connections to exchanges, they're normally taking risks with their own money (that they can't afford to lose) and they don't have the compute that big firms can throw at it.
I’m not 100% sure Tolkien is right for Kubrick. Maybe but I’d be concerned that he’d make it a little too ponderous and symbolic. He’d nail the spooky dark aura around the ring though. But with the Beatles? Nah no way.
Peter Jackson’s adaptation was so authentic it looked at places just like my mental imagery looked as I was reading the book. That’s a tough thing to pull off in and of itself.
Spielberg would have made it campy. Lynch would have made it surreal, might have been cool but like his Dune would be a weird cult film take. (I like Lynch’s Dune but it’s weird.)
For some reason I think Ridley Scott could have done it if he could have gotten his head out of sci fi.
One of Jackson’s smartest move was hiring all the various Tolkien illustrators to work on set design mockups. Really made everything feel right for many people.
Kubrick for sure could've worked in a collab env, like he did with Spartacus (yeah, he distanced himself from it though). If you're interested in how Ridley Scott version might've looked like, look no further than Legend.
Um, Ridley Scott directed Legend which came out in 1985. While it wasn't a critical or commercial success, I thought and still think it is an amazing film, and one of the best pieces of cinematic "high fantasy" out there.
I don't know, the Peter Jackson LOTR seems to owe a great deal to the 1973 Ralph Bakshi animated version. Some shots are nearly identical. And 1973 < 2000.
Well, I disagree with you about the non-camp quality of the 1978 Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, but even if that were true, are you saying that changes the track record of SF and fantasy movies in that period?
The Bakshi movie definitely isn’t camp. It plays itself way too straight (so to speak). If it reads as corny today it’s because it’s such pure, guileless 70s kitsch.
Also, I realized rewatching it recently for the first time in forever that the Lemmiwinks episode of South Park is an homage to the Bakshi movie!
I really think you are right, but there's a contrarian part of me now imagining something that is almost identical with that Ballad of Bilbo Baggins video that was allegedly forced on Leonard Nimoy by terrible TV producers, magically turned good through the Beatles touch.
Who knows, as unlikely as it certainly is, perhaps knowledge of the Nimoy TV sequence was what made Tolkien protect The Beatles from embarrassing themselves on middle earth.
It wasn't forced, he did it as a favor to Charles Randolph Grean, who had produced his record albums and was responsible for that skit on the "Malibu U" variety show.
On a personal level I can absolutely empathize, but respectfully, I don't see why that should be the state's concern. The goal of IP law should be to promote the creation of good art, not to make sure artists' wishes are respected.
So, for example, theft should be illegal, because a world of unrestricted IP theft might be one in which we would get a lot less art. But allowing Tolkien to block adaptations of his bestseller 14 years after publication was probably not good for art.
Do bad adaptations prevent good adaptations? Lynch's Dune flopped but Villeneuve had a $165m budget.
We can't know the contrapositive but I don't see why giving the author a veto makes good outcomes more likely, especially decades after a book is published.
No doubt in my mind: campy, perfunctory, self-mocking. Please recall how "nerd" material was treated before the 2000s,
I don't remember comic books being "nerd" material before the 2000s (like say computers or computer programming). They were "children's" material, and for whatever reason the market moved toward older teens and adults. The main comics weren't written/illustrated to be "campy, perfunctory, self-mocking", though an adult may have regarded them that way. Similar story with videogames.
> I don't remember comic books being "nerd" material before the 2000s (like say computers or computer programming)
I'm not sure how comic books got into this. But comics were definitely for nerds: basically, socially-inept people who did things like reading instead of going out to parties. Computers were not central to the definition of nerd.
Comics had quite a lot of breadth to them even before the 2000s. Consider Footrot Flats, which no self-respecting city nerd from America would have known of, but which two generations of Australian and New Zealander farmers grew up reading.
This only would have worked if it was animated. The 1977 Hobbit film which was produced for NBC [1] was a excellent adaptation, and Yellow Submarine is in the same style. I would argue Yellow Submarine also has many of the same themes, if not more absurdist than fantasy.
Also fun fact I just realized you can stream Yellow Submarine for free on archive.org [2]
> The 1977 Hobbit film which was produced for NBC [1] was a excellent adaptation
I've not seen the 1977 Hobbit film, but I note that your reference [1] prominently says: "The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson called the adaptation "execrable"; the author Baird Searles called it an "abomination" and an attempt that had "failed miserably", regretting the quality of the animation and of the soundtrack, and the omission of key plot points."
The 1977 Hobbit has its issues, but having watched it recently I feel like it does well with capturing the vibe of the book, especially the first half (it does really fall apart later). I personally find Peter Jackson's version of the Hobbit unwatchable for the same reason... he takes the LOTR vibe and imposes it onto a much more innocent story.
The thing that I like about the Hobbit 77 film is that it realizes the material is a child's fantasy book. It's a breath of fresh air in a our current era -- where VCs seem to understand that any attempt to profit off of the American taxpayer's defense spending requires some Tolkien reference in the company name.
The existence of the '77 animated adaptation is our last reminder that the Generals green-lighting all this spend are literally mid-witted man-children.
That Thiel named his company Palantir has always struck me oddly.
In the books, the palantir were "seeing stones" gifted to men by the elves, and could be used to see events remotely, and to communicate mind-to-mind by users. But after Sauron acquired one, using them became perilous as the Dark Lord could limit what users saw, effectively controlling their information flow, even if he could not overwhelm or twist them directly via the mind-to-mind contact. While Aragorn does manage to wrest one free of Sauron's control, allowing him to save the day at a key moment, overall they are a powerful tool for the forces of evil.
I think it's just because he had no illusions as to the good and bad uses it would bring. I've used Palantir Foundry heavily at work, and it is good for remotely viewing events and communicating mind-to-mind to executives with pretty dashboards. Definitely nicer optics than their Gotham platform used by USA law enforcement since e.g. it helps Airbus identify issues on their plane fleets before they occur.
Plus from talking to the Palantir engineers, the CEO and Thiel are both weirdo nerds, so it's fitting.
It's not even the specific name, but simply using any name from Tolkien.
Tolkien didn't like the consequences of technological progress. While engineers were not inherently evil in his works, they were at a high risk of becoming evil, or at least instruments of evil. Think of characters like Sauron and Saruman, or Fëanor and Celebrimbor. If you give a Tolkienian name to your tech company, you are implying that you are one of those guys.
If you realize that Peter Thiel intends to use Palantir exactly for that purpose (controlling information flow, and as a surveillance system), it makes complete sense.
Having worked on three- and four-star staffs while I was in uniform I can assure you that they are decidedly NOT that. The folks who make it to that level are sharp as hell and usually do not suffer fools lightly.
Your glaring anti-military prejudice aside, the "spend" you refer to is Congress's job, not that of senior officers.
A Hard Day's Night is great because it's basically just them goofing around. The rest of the Beatles films have their charms, but they're not actors. I really can't imagine that the idea was to do a straight LOTR adaptation, it must have been some kind of parody. The whole appeal of the Beatles on screen is that they're funny.
No doubt, Help! also fits into the Beatles goofing off schema, and I think a Beatles LotR would be similar, but admit it, it would be fun, like the 1967 version of Casino Royale.
Imagine you have a friend who plays a nice song for you, and is dumfounded -nay- awestruck to the point of murder - that you aren't moved to tears by the performance because he believes the song was written by the angels themselves.
That movie overglorified the Beatles beyond credibility, and it was genuinely painful to watch.
I think the dumbfoundedness didn't arise from the inherent quality of the music, but his shock at the fact that five people in England didn't know who the Beatles were.
That said, I do think this movie missed out on a lot of potential, by not exploring what the actual significance of the Beatles to the world would have been: it never really asks what the world would be like had the Beatles never existed, which I think is a really interesting question, and instead develop a typical Hollywood plot.
I did find the lack of cigarettes amusing, so I'm guessing the parallel world really had nothing to do with the Beatles at all, they were just a byproduct
The real tragedy is we'll never know how Guilermo Del Toro's version of The Hobbit would have turned out. Studio screwed up scheduling and had to get Jackson back in.
As a fan of the books first, I even find it hard to enjoy Peter Jacksons movies. The dialogue is dumbed down, and it's all very cheesey and hollywood. Probably would've enjoyed it a lot more if I'd never read Tolkien.
Also being a New Zealander it was very jarring that this fantasy world I had grown up with turned out to be... where I live. I get people dig the scenery, but I kept thinking "did we pull over there once to use the toilets?" or "is that where they shot that ad for Toyotas?"
On a related note, Let It Be was just re-released via Disney+ a week or so ago. It’s a bit redundant in the wake of Jackson’s Get Back, and it was interesting to see what Lindsay-Hogg did with the material, but I have to say it was generally inferior to Get Back in just about every way.
On the topic of bands covering Tolkien’s work, you’re in for a treat if you have never listened to Nightfall in Middle-Earth by Blind Guardian. It is a power metal telling of The Silmarillion.
I wonder if they would have gone down the path of many bands in the late 60s and have those long spoken word poetry stretches. That said, thanks to things like that I do love how often you see Michael Moorecocks name popping up.
This was my question. The article mentioned the project was proposed by a producer. I gather the Beatles at the time were throwing money into all kinds of things that would go nowhere. I could see this as an earnest attempt to make the film, but also as an attempt to lock in access to the funding, rights to future works, who knows what else from a business perspective. Buying things just because it would be cool to have them. Let someone else figure out the details…
I'm a Beatles fan. Tolkien was right to be skeptical, it would have been terrible. No doubt in my mind: campy, perfunctory, self-mocking. Please recall how "nerd" material was treated before the 2000s, if you'd like some precedent for what this would have looked like.
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