In 2002, the internet was set abuzz by news that the Beatles had approached J.R.R. Tolkien about doing a film version of Lord of the Rings starring the Fab Four:
Once upon a time, the Fab Four—having slain the pop charts—decided to set their sights on the Dark Lord Sauron by making a Lord of the Rings feature, starring themselves. One man dared stand in their way: J.R.R. Tolkien.
According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the ’60s—and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.
McCartney told Jackson about the failed scheme when the two bumped into each other at the Academy Awards: “It was something John was driving and J.R.R. Tolkien still had the film rights at that stage but he didn’t like the idea of the Beatles doing it. So he killed it,” Jackson told the Wellington Evening Post in 2002.
“There probably would’ve been some good songs coming off the album,” said Jackson.
That Tolkien didn’t care for the Beatles will come as no surprise to fans of either one, but Tolkien’s letters give us a hint that his opposition to the Beatles may have had a more personal dimension.
In 1953, Tolkien purchased a house on Oxford’s Sandfield Road, a cul-de-sac at the time of his move that later was opened to through traffic. In a 1964 letter to Christopher Bretherton, Tolkien complained about “radio, tele, dogs, scooters, buzzbikes, and cars of all sizes but the smallest” making noise “from early morn to about 2 a.m.”
“In addition,” Tolkien wrote, “in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable.”
Tolkien’s complaints about the “Beatle Group” are particularly striking given that he had purchased the Sandfield Road property to provide a quiet place for his ailing wife Edith. Tolkien wrote in a 1953 letter to his publisher that the move to Sandfield Road was prompted by “a doctor’s ultimatum” to find a house on “high dry soil and in the quiet.”
Tolkien’s annoyance at Sandfield Road’s first garage band is understandable. Yet if its practice sessions helped us avert the disaster that would have been a Beatles Lord of the Rings, we owe its anonymous members no small amount of thanks.
February 13th, 2013 | 4:57 pm
He was probably afraid they’d change the title to Lord of the Ringos.
February 14th, 2013 | 9:54 am
I sort of wish it had happened. I’m not saying it would have been faithful to the story or even good, but it would have been very interesting–like the 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park.
February 14th, 2013 | 9:57 am
Thank God for small mercies. A Beatles version of Lord of the Rings would’ve made the 1979 Ralph Bakshi version look like David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia….
February 14th, 2013 | 1:26 pm
“He was probably afraid they’d change the title to Lord of the Ringos.”
LOL!
February 14th, 2013 | 8:21 pm
The fact that there was the Bakshi movie and it did not prevent the production of the Jackson trilogy demonstrates that the existence of a Beatles version would not have prevented the Jackson trilogy either. Certainly the BBC Radio production did not prevent the Jackson trilogy. A good story can be presented in different ways at different times. How many Jane Austen novels have been produced in multiple TV and movie versions? For Pride and Prejudice, for example, just in the last ten years I have seen the BBC mini-series, the Bollywood version, a modern dress version set in Utah, the very nice Keira Knightly movie, and a fantasy version Lost in Austen in which a modern day woman trades places with Elizabeth Bennet. A musical version by the Beatles would probably had some interesting aspects, and some nice music, and may have been sort of a Monty Python version, like The Life of Brian and The Holy Grail, a bit tongue in cheek.
February 15th, 2013 | 11:04 am
LOL. Comments should have been closed after Mr. Nickol’s post.
February 16th, 2013 | 6:13 am
Scouse Hobbits. Didn’t Bill Bailey do a sketch about that?! “Eh up Frodo, we’re off to Mordor…”
February 16th, 2013 | 1:45 pm
We are the Hobbitses, we are from Shirepool.
February 16th, 2013 | 3:44 pm
Let us not forget the Lampoon’s version, ‘Bored of the Rings’.
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