Continuing our exploration of the curiosities surrounding Tolkien's work, Bored of the Rings, the 1969 parody of The Lord of the Rings isn't the only strange tale. Today we focus on a story revealed by Peter Jackson: a cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that was meant to be led by the Beatles but was ultimately stopped by Tolkien himself.
The Beatles' Ambitious Pitch
Can you imagine a movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings starring the Beatles? Believe it or not, the idea was on the table during the 1960s before being discarded. Peter Jackson revealed the story during a Comic-Con in San Diego while filming The Hobbit trilogy. The New Zealand director recounted that in a conversation with Paul McCartney, the musician told him that after the release of Help! (1965), the Beatles approached Stanley Kubrick to direct their next film, which would have been nothing less than an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. This happened before Tolkien sold the rights to United Artists.
In that version, Paul was to play Frodo, George Harrison was to portray Gandalf, Ringo Starr as Sam, and at the end John Lennon would surprise us as Gollum. Both the Liverpool quartet and the American director were fans of Tolkien's work, but Kubrick refused to collaborate because he felt it was too complex to adapt properly to the big screen. In fact, J.R.R. Tolkien himself rejected the idea, though for different reasons.
Tolkien was quite traditionalist and openly disliked the new musical trend brought by the Beatles. At the time, the Professor lived on Sandfield Road in Oxford, where just three houses away from his own, a band frequently used a garage for practice. In a letter to a friend, he confessed that when the band had a practice session, "the noise is indescribable".
The rest is history: the Beatles made their third film with the documentary Let It Be (1970), Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Tolkien eventually sold the rights to United Artists, which released its animated version of The Lord of the Rings in 1978. Even so, it would have been interesting to see what this adaptation by Kubrick with the Beatles and their songs would have been like (or maybe not, better not).
Source: Gizmodo
