at the reading

[calimac]

At last night's annual festive gathering to read short selections by the fire (it's a gas fire now, and it's controlled with a remote: o such a brave new world we live in), my offerings were non-fiction and came from library books rather than my collection.

There's a long-standing rumor in Tolkien fandom, dating back to the Sixties themselves, that the Beatles were once seriously thinking of filming The Lord of the Rings. That rumor turns out to be true, though the casting list often given apparently isn't. The full story is told by Denis O'Dell, a movie producer who worked with and for the Beatles for much of the group's career (and is not to be confused with Denis O'Brien, George Harrison's later-day shady business partner) in his memoir At the Apple's Core (Owen, 2002). Seeking to resurrect the Beatles' moribund movie contract with United Artists, O'Dell suggested to the studio a film of LotR as a project big enough to attract interest. (He says it was easy because UA already owned the rights. Something is wrong here, because this was early 1968 and other sources say the film rights weren't bought till the following year.)

That idea sold, the next step was to tell the Beatles about it. So O'Dell went to India where John, Paul, and George (Ringo had already gone home) were sitting at the feet of the Maharishi and writing songs for The White Album. "Rather than each having to read the books from cover to cover, each was given one of the books. Paul read the first, The Fellowship of the Ring, John read The Two Towers and George The Return of the King." Amazingly, this worked and they liked the idea.

Now to find a big-name director. David Lean had the epic sweep (and would have been appropriate because, unknown possibly to Lean himself and certainly to O'Dell and everybody else involved, Lean's brother had founded the original Inklings) but was otherwise occupied. Well, then, how about Stanley Kubrick? He hadn't read LotR either, so O'Dell sent him a copy. Kubrick liked the book, but the Beatles lost interest and the project squelched to a halt after Kubrick declared unequivocally that it was unfilmable by him or anybody else.

Bless Stanley Kubrick! Based on subsequent evidence to date he was, sad to say, absolutely right. I've always had a high opinion of Kubrick, but never higher than when I read this.

For my other reading, another movie story: William Shatner's amusing account in his memoirs, Up Till Now (Dunne, 2008) of making a movie entirely in Esperanto, a language neither he nor anybody else on set knew.

One of our other attendees announced triumphantly that her long-mislaid copy of William McGonagall had been found, and we had a fine reading of the epic adventures of a man setting out to buy a Christmas goose. Also saucily chosen, but without McGonagall's unique, shall we say talent, a selection from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which redoubled my absolute determination to ignore this book and all others like it. Also a recording of Christmas carols for Cthulhu, a project with some potential, but during which I could hear the bottom of a barrel being vigorously scraped.

Comments

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the Shatner film in Esperanto? Arden brought it & showed it at Mythcon one year (hmmm, perhaps the most recent Berkeley Mythcon chaired by a certain someone)... very bizarre!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, but I figured he might enjoy hearing the story from the actor's viewpoint. He did.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Huh; I had no idea that Edward Tangye Lean had founded the Inklings.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Tangye Lean later became a broadcaster/journalist/author of some reasonable note, but there'd be little reason to remember him save them, in his undergraduate years at Oxford, he founded a literary society, as many other undergraduates before and after him have done. He called it the Inklings. Unlike most others in his position, he invited some dons to be members, and C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien joined. After the group trailed out of existence, the name was transferred to the group of Lewis's friends who gathered for a similar purpose. The story is told briefly in a letter by Tolkien published on p. 387-8 of his Letters.