| davem |
04-23-2006 06:45 AM |
John Boorman's Lord of the Rings
Some of us already knew that John Boorman was planning to film LotR, but what would it have been like?
I've found two pieces about the script & wondered if anyone wanted to comment (we should perhaps all be grateful to PJ after all).
Quote:
(Summarising an article in the magazine OUTRE by co-writer Rospo Pallenberg. The pair went on to produce Excalibur)
"The chore that was given to us by United Artists was one movie and, at the time, they produced long movies with an intermission. [The script] is 176 pages with an intermission on page 81, after the fellowship goes down the rapids, and you have a sense that they have now reached a great landscape as the river widens." The musical theme for "The Road Goes Ever On" accompanies this closing scene.
The script's first half, then, would have depicted most of The Fellowship Of The Ring. Following the intermission, "we accelerated as we continued the story, and dropped things out. We were propelled by what we liked, and invented as we went along."
The screenplay takes liberties with the book, which would have upset Tolkien purists. Perhaps the most provocative change occurs in Lothlorien where, before gazing into Galadriel's mirror, Frodo must become intimate with her (this does not cause friction with husband Celeborn because he is not featured.)
The adaption is also highly creative and inventive (ideas which Pallenberg still hopes to use in some other epic project). The history of Middle-earth is told in an interesting way, although the writer would do it differently today. "I devised kind of a Kabuki play in which the story of Sauron and the creation of the rings was explained to a gathering in Rivendell. [Reading the script] 'A play has begun. The stage is the table (a huge round table). The acting is stylized, emphatic. As in Kabuki Theater, the costumes are flamboyant, and symbolize beings and entities of Middle-earth.' In other words, with this device, we tried to simplify the backstory. But I think if I were to revisit the scene now, I would think of a faster way of doing it."
New material for the dwarf Gimli came from Pallenberg's fondness for the character. "I remember liking him a lot. I knew quite a bit about Wagner's operas and the German literature. I was sympathetic to him, and I tried to work him in wherever I could. I believe it was I who came up with idea where they bury Gimli in a hole, throw a cape on him, and beat him up to utter exhaustion to retrieve his unconscious ancestral memory." This ancient knowlege allows Gimli to know the word for entering Moria, and to find insights about the ancient dwarf kingdom.
Pallenberg contributed another original idea to the Moria sequence. "I had a rather fanciful idea involving these orcs that are slumbering or in some kind of narcotic state. The fellowship runs over them, and the footsteps start up their hearts. John liked that a lot."
He mentioned another change. "There's a duel between the magicians, Gandalf and Saruman. I was inspired by an African idea of how magicians duel with words, which I had read about. It was a way of one entrapping the other as a duel of words rather than special effects flashes, shaking staffs, and all that. I tried to keep away from that a lot, and Boorman did too. [Reads from script]:
GANDALF: Saruman, I am the snake about to strike!
SARUMAN: I am the staff that crushes the snake!
GANDALF: I am the fire that burns the staff to ashes!
SARUMAN: I am the cloudburst that quenches the fire!
GANDALF: I am the well that traps the waters!
"John Boorman and I didn't give too much importance to the Christian component of Tolkien's work. It came across as a tad heavy-handed at times. It is a story of redemption, and that seemed to be enough."
{jumping ahead to elswhere in Plesset's article}
Pallenberg continued, "Because it had to be one movie, and we couldn't waste time with too many complicated effects, I was an advocate of eliminating all flying creatures. I thought it would make it too rich, and it would depart too much from the ordinary. John Boorman agreed on that. At Minas Tirith, instead of a flying steed, the Nazgul Chief rides a horse that 'seems to have no skin. Its live, raw, bleeding flesh is exposed.' I still have this feeling that the dazzle can take away from the fundamental drama. We always tried to do things on the cheap, simply. When you saw a castle in the distance, it could have been made out of anything, even gleaming, high-voltage transmission towers. You saw those in the distance between the trees and then, suddenly, you were inside it. John Boorman is tremendously clever at that."
{jumping further ahead to the article's concluding paragraph}
The script ends with Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, Galadriel, Arwen, and Elrond leaving Middle-earth on a sailing ship. A rainbow arcs over the vessel. Legolas, who is watching from shore with Gimli, says, "Look! Only seven colors. Indeed, the world is failing." "I think that's the ideology of the picture," said Pallenberg. "That is from me, not Tolkien. From a physics standpoint, it's incorrect to say that there could be more than seven colors, but what it's saying is, 'we live in a diminished world.'"
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And
Quote:
BOORMAN(from Three Rings for Hollywood which also gives synopses of other script treatments for LotR.)
In spite of his grave doubts about the suitability of The Lord of the Rings for the movies, Tolkien sold the film and merchandise rights to United Artists in 1969 for just over £104,000 (Harlow and Dobson 16). In 1970, the studio asked John Boorman, later known as the director of Excalibur and The Emerald Forest, to make The Lord of the Rings. With his collaborator Rospo Pallenberg, he condensed the work into a single two and a half hour script which he felt was “fresh and cinematic, yet carried the spirit of Tolkien” (Boorman 20). Boorman says he received a letter from Tolkien during the writing process, asking how he planned to make the film, and wrote back reassuring him that he planned a live action version. However, by the time Boorman had finished the script, the executive who had asked him to take on the project was gone, and the new management was unfamiliar with the book. Boorman said, “They were baffled by a script that, for most of them, was their first contact with Middle Earth [sic],” and rejected it (Boorman 21). He tried taking the script to other studios, including Disney, but with no luck. Boorman eventually used some of the special-effects techniques and locations developed for The Lord of the Rings in other films, most notably Excalibur in 1981.
But there is another side to the story. Ralph Bakshi, in a recent interview, talks about taking on the project several years later, and clearly exaggerates a bit for effect:
And here comes the horror story, right? … Boorman handed in this 700-page script … [The studio executives said] ‘[H]e’s changed a lot of the characters, and he’s added characters. He’s got some sneakers he’s merchandising in the middle. … [W]e don’t understand a word Boorman wrote. We never read the books.’ (Robinson 4)
It was only 176 pages, and there weren’t any sneakers, but it wouldn’t have helped to have read the books, because Boorman took off in his own direction quite early in his treatment.
To put it bluntly, Boorman’s script has only the vaguest connection to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Considering Tolkien’s appalled reaction to the much lesser liberties taken by Zimmerman, it is unlikely he would have appreciated Boorman’s script at all. 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. (Tolkien would not have approved of Frodo’s seduction by Galadriel, for example, and Aragon’s battlefield healing of Éowyn is so blatantly sexual it’s not surprising Boorman marries them immediately.) Ideas that later worked brilliantly in Excalibur, Boorman’s retelling of the King Arthur legend, are here as out of place as a dwarf in Lothlórien.
Boorman was simply too full of his own creative spark to limit himself to what was in Tolkien’s book. For example, consider this strange sequence of events. After the destruction of the Ringwraiths at the Fords of Bruinen, Frodo is carried into the sparkling palace of Rivendell, where in a vast amphitheatre full of chanting elves he is laid naked on a crystal table and covered with green leaves. A thirteen-year-old Arwen surgically removes the Morgul-blade fragment from his shoulder with a red-hot knife under the threatening axe of Gimli, while Gandalf dares Boromir to try to take the Ring (Boorman and Pallenberg 28-32).
Sound familiar? How about this sequence outside the Gates of Moria? Gandalf leads Gimli through a primitive rebirthing ritual, making him dig a hole and crawl into it, covering him with a cloak and violently beating and verbally abusing him, until he springs forth with recovered memories of his forgotten ancestral language and speaks the Dwarvish words needed to open the doors (Boorman and Pallenberg 59-60).
To give Boorman his due, parts of the script have a compelling brilliance, though they are still unlike anything Tolkien wrote. The sober exposition of the Council of Elrond is recast as a fantastic medieval masque representing the history of the Rings. This highly stylized sequence combines elements of Kabuki theater, rock opera, and circus performance, and could almost be imagined as a later retelling of the legend by a tribe of decadent Dark Elves. It is strangely effective, and gets the necessary back-story across, but it is definitely not a straightforward adaptation of Tolkien’s work.
And that is where the key problem lies. At this point Tolkien was still alive, and as he insists in his introduction to the first authorized American paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, a certain courtesy (at least) is due to living authors (Hammond 105). This is what he says in response to the changes in the Zimmerman script:
…I am not Rider Haggard. I am not comparing myself with that master of Romance, except in this: I am not dead, yet. When the film of K.S. Mines was made it had already passed, one might say, into the public property of the imagination. The Lord of the Rings … is still the vivid concern of a living person, and is nobody’s toy to play with. (Tolkien, Letter to Ackerman and Others, Draft)
Boorman’s abundant creativity, inspired by Tolkien’s work, needed another outlet than the straitjacket of adapting a living author’s writings. Eventually he found it in Excalibur, returning to the Merlin-centered project he had been working on before he was offered The Lord of the Rings (Boorman 20). Boorman’s imaginative remaking of the story of King Arthur worked because the Matter of Britain is undeniably part of the “public property of the imagination.” He could get away with combining the characters of Morgause, Nimue, and Morgan le Fay, for example, because other artists had taken similar liberties over the centuries. Some might consider Tolkien’s stories “public property of the imagination” now, close to fifty years after their initial publication, but at that time they were relatively fresh from his pen, and he could legitimately claim they were his alone to play with....
Here’s how each script handles Bilbo handing the Ring over to Gandalf after the party. The Bakshi film follows the book fairly closely, with Bilbo sealing the Ring in an envelope, and Gandalf catching the envelope as he drops it. Boorman, as expected, does his own thing and has Bilbo drop it in Gandalf’s hat....
Boorman followed his own vision: he strengthened and sexualized Galadriel’s role, turned Éowyn into Aragorn’s warrior-queen, and made Arwen an ethereal teenager.
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Now Boorman/Pallenberg's treatment is certainly weird, - more so, one could argue than Ackerman's & we could certainly imagine Tolkien being highly offended (once the laughing fit had passed) but a number of questions spring to mind on reading these ieces: what do we make of this version - would it have been interesting to watch, would it have brought a new dimension to LotR, were Pallenberg & Boorman on medication?
I suppose one could argue that an artist adapting a work for different media must be free to make some changes, & if we want the original story we can read the book. Personally, I'd be interested to read Boorman/Pallenberg's script in full if only for the sake of curiosity ... |
