[Kalimac]

I don't know about having Saruman die offstage; logically I can see why they might need it but I'm not sure that a non-LOTR reading audience would get it. I'm not insulting anyone's intelligence, it's just that having a main villain die offstage is very unconventional and people might be thrown by it. However, there are a lot of occasions where the villain *appears* to die offstage, only to come back two scenes later (AHA! Thought you'd beaten me, did you?) and finally proceeds to die in a close-up shot so that the audience knows that this time it's for real. If I had not read LOTR, I'd probably spend most of ROTK thinking "OK, when's Saruman going to pop up and wreak havoc?"<P>As for Pippin and the Palantir - that wouldn't be too difficult; you can always have him find it in the wreckage (assuming that it was in a room low enough to be flooded, which seems counterinstinctual somehow). But Pippin absolutely must touch it before Gandalf takes it. To have him know no more of it than Merry does, and yet succeed in making 2000% more havoc with it, makes Pippin look like the clueless character of FOTR, and surely he's more grown up than that now.