"Zardoz" director John Boorman almost made a "Lord of the Rings


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If you think John Boorman?s Zardoz was bat-###### weird, take a moment to consider how his unmade adaptation of JRR Tolkien?s The Lord Of The Rings would have turned out. By his collaborator Rospo Pallenberg?s own admission, ?We were propelled by what we liked, and invented as we went along.?

 

The film would have opened on Tolkien working in his study, before a Kabuki theatre style presentation on the background history of Middle-Earth, at Rivendell. There was a brief possibility The Beatles would have played the four hobbits. Boorman?s co-writer Rospo Pallenberg said ?It was presented to me as, ?Lets see if we can try and keep the four hobbits as a sort of equal basis?- obviously Frodo was the protagonist ? so we did that.? Pallenberg envisioned Paul McCartney as Frodo. Wouldn?t Ringo?s finger adornments have confused the issue of ?the one, true ring?? And would he have sang ?When I?m Eleventy-One??

 

When we first meet Aragorn in Boorman and Pallenberg?s script, he uses the two shards of Narsil as twin blades. On the road to Moria, he has a vision of Arwen, which prompts him to give one shard to Boromir. Later, the three of them kiss the swords and each other. Boromir gives his sword back to Aragorn as he lies dying. On the field of battle outside Minas Tirith, Narsil magically reforges before Aragorn is proclaimed King of Gondor -shades of the legend of King Arthur, which Boorman originally wanted to adapt, and eventually did, as Excalibur. Arwen the elf maiden is a thirteen year old, and removes the Mordor-blade fragment from a naked Frodo, covered with leaves, in a ceremony at Rivendell after the dark riders are swept away at the Ford of Bruinen. She does this under Gimli?s threatening axe blade, while Gandalf dares Boromir to take the ring. Aragorn does not get together with Arwen ? instead he marries Eowyn, after delivering some blatantly sexual, divine King healing powers to her on the battlefield. And poor Shadowfax? He ends the film as a symbol of reconstruction, pulling a plough on Pelennor Fields.

 

Here John Boorman elaborates on his attempt to film The Lord Of The Rings, from his autobiography, Money Into Light:

 

?After I made ?Leo the Last? for United Artists, they asked me what I wanted to do next. I gave them a treatment I had written about Merlin. David Picker, then in charge of production, did not respond to Merlin, but asked me instead to make ?The Lord of the Rings,? the film rights of which they had bought without having any idea what to do with it. 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 film-making 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://cinetropolis.net/the-great-unmade-john-boormans-the-lord-of-the-rings/

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