The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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the journey through Mordor and the martyrdom of Frodo, has been cut in preference for battles; though it is the chief point of the Lord of the Rings that the battles were of subordinate significance. Actually the skill of the artists could, I believe, have made the Mordor journey deeply impressive, and cuts elsewhere would have been justified, if they allowed them the opportunity.)
To speak frankly, the Story-line before me gives the impression of being hasty (and overheated). I am prepared to be told that it took Mr. Zimmerman weeks or months; but the impression will remain that it is nonetheless the product of a hasty reading of the original, which has failed to appreciate the tone and significance of the narrative. It appears to be based primarily on the memory of this reading (altered by the adapter’s private imagination), and the resulting script does not seem to have been compared very carefully with the book.
This seems to me to be shown by various points, which I do not cite as of great importance in themselves, but as evidence for my opinion.
There is a constant needless alteration of points of detail. As I have pointed out many of these in the page by page notes there is no need to cite them here. I will point to only one significant case. On p. 48 we read: He bends near to Eowyn and touches her lips lightly with his, then feeds her from a bowl of specially-prepared herbs. Compare this with my Vol III p. 144 [e.g. ‘Once more Aragorn bruised two leaves of athelas and cast them into steaming water; and he laved her [Éowyn’s] brow with it, and her right arm lying cold and nerveless on the coverlet’, bk. V, ch. 8]. The differences no doubt would be pictorially slight and unimportant; but I feel that they (especially the substitution of lips for brow in the circumstances) reveal insensitivity and/or haste – since this is only one instance out of a large number.
Events are coloured by anticipation of others later, to the destruction of carefully devised differences. For instance Rivendell is described as a ‘shimmering forest’, without any justification in the book (p. 10). This is a confusion with Lórien. (Mr. Zimmerman entirely misconceives Lórien and wilfully alters it to suit his own taste.) …
Granted the necessity for drastic reduction, I think that Mr. Z. is often mistaken in the methods that he employs for shortening. One may cut, or one may compress. In general, he prefers the more dangerous method of compression.
There are, of course, cuts – and the selection of the things to cut does not always meet the author’s approval. But usually the adapter compresses in various ways: he merely flips or glances at an event or scene; he combines or confuses two distinct scenes; and most unsatisfactory, he compresses the time and/or space of the action.
There are plenty of events and scenes in the original. In less space the canvas would become overcrowded. The first method has this effect. There are fleeting glimpses of things that have lost all significance or function in the economy of the story. It is like flipping over the illustrations to a long tale that is half forgotten. [Special Collections and University Archives, John P. Raynor, S.J., Library, Marquette University]
In the letter as sent, Tolkien wrote that Zimmerman ‘and/or others’
may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about. … The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies. [Letters, p. 270]
On 16 June 1958 Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin that he did not want ‘to kill the project, which I think promised well on the pictorial side’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins), but he continued to be annoyed with it. Although he left matters in his publisher’s hands, he felt that the proposal could not be accepted without ample payment in compensation. In the event, Ackerman allowed his option on a Lord of the Rings film to lapse in early 1959.
By then at least one other enquiry had been made, and more soon followed. Among these the most promising was that by William L. Snyder, doing business as Rembrandt Films, who planned to make a feature-length motion picture of The Hobbit. Tolkien and Allen & Unwin reached an agreement with Snyder in April 1962. Negotiations were complicated, however, by questions that now arose about the validity of Tolkien’s American copyright in The Hobbit, and ‘in the end’, as Rayner Unwin recalled, ‘only the advance of $15,000 and a share of any profits earned in countries that were signatories of Berne [the Berne Convention] remained. But we were not in a strong position’ (George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), p. 109).
Artist-animator Gene Deitch recalled in his online book How To Succeed in Animation being handed the task of making a feature-length animated Hobbit by William L. Snyder in 1964. Deitch and his friend Bill Bernal developed a screenplay in which they ‘introduced a series of songs, changed some of the characters’ names, played loosely with the plot, and even created a girl character, a Princess no less, to go along on the quest, and to eventually overcome Bilbo Baggins’ bachelorhood!’ After The Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback, Deitch ‘back-spaced elements’ from that book into the film script to allow for a sequel. But with Snyder’s option due to expire on 30 June 1966, and the property having become more valuable due to the explosion of Tolkien’s popularity in the United States, a film had to be produced quickly; but Snyder’s contract with Tolkien and George Allen & Unwin specified neither the nature of the film nor how long it needed to be. Deitch therefore produced a twelve-minute film of The Hobbit within a month’s time, composed simply of cartoon stills or three-dimensional constructions, in which the only action was created by movement of the camera. It incorporated art by the Czech illustrator Adolf Born, narration by broadcaster Herb Lass, and music by Václav Lidl. The film story departed drastically from Tolkien’s book, omitting all of the dwarves and giving Bilbo as companions Gandalf, a watchman, a soldier, and a princess on a quest to regain jewels stolen by the dragon Smaug from the town of Dale. Bilbo encounters Gollum, finds the magic ring, and himself kills the dragon. On 30 June 1966 the film was shown in a small room in midtown Manhattan to anyone Deitch could bring in from the street.
In the late 1960s the Beatles planned to make a film of The Lord of the Rings, with themselves as Gollum (John), Frodo (Paul), Gandalf (George), and Sam (Ringo), but were unable to purchase the rights. Already by mid-1967 Allen & Unwin began to negotiate with United Artists, who wished to purchase film rights to both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (though their interest was chiefly in the former work). A deal was struck at last in 1969. In the process, United Artists also secured any rights to a Hobbit film that might still be controlled by William L. Snyder: this avenue was thought less expensive than litigation to decide whether Snyder’s twelve-minute film had been too slight to fulfil his contract and the Hobbit rights had reverted to Tolkien.
In 1970 United Artists asked the director John Boorman to make a film of The Lord of the Rings. With Rospo Pallenberg, Boorman developed a two and one-half-hour script for a live action motion picture; but new management at United Artists chose not to pursue it, and it was eventually abandoned. Janet Brennan Croft has commented on the many liberties Boorman and Pallenberg took with Tolkien’s book when writing the script: ‘Characters, events, locations, themes, all are changed freely with no regard for the author’s original intent. Situations are sexualized or plumbed for psychological kinks that simply do not exist in the book.’ These include the seduction of Frodo by Galadriel, and the marriage of Aragorn and Éowyn. ‘Pipeweed seems equivalent to marijuana in its effects, and the hobbits’ beloved mushrooms are hallucinogenic’ (‘Three Rings for Hollywood: Scripts for The Lord of the Rings by Zimmerman, Boorman, and Beagle’, unpublished paper (2004), p. 4).
In 1976 the Saul Zaentz Company acquired the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in a complicated deal also involving the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. Zaentz now commissioned Ralph Bakshi, a sometimes controversial maker of animated feature films, to produce an animated version