> "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.
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.