Peter Jackson on how Tolkien stopped a Beatles LOTR film (2021)
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
We lost what could have been an interesting piece of art.
We should have more adaptations in the world not fewer.
Art has asymmetric upside – bad art doesn't really harm anyone (usually just gets forgotten) but good art enriches millions of people's lives.
It might have been amazing. It might have been bad-but-interesting. We'll never know!
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.
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.
If Tolkien had been alive he probably would have put an end to Jackson's efforts, too.
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.
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.
Of course, where that got us was franchises with endless sequels.
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!
And I present The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. https://youtu.be/BC35cQKHwzg?si=KWIbiEpEVb36tqh1
Thanks, I hate it.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Spaced-Out-Leonard-William-Shatner/dp...
... ?
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.
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 .”
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 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'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.
"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..
Also fun fact I just realized you can stream Yellow Submarine for free on archive.org [2]
I've not seen the 1977 Hobbit film, but I note that your reference [1] prominently says: "The Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson called the adaptation "execrable"; the author Baird Searles called it an "abomination" and an attempt that had "failed miserably", regretting the quality of the animation and of the soundtrack, and the omission of key plot points."
The existence of the '77 animated adaptation is our last reminder that the Generals green-lighting all this spend are literally mid-witted man-children.
In the books, the palantir were "seeing stones" gifted to men by the elves, and could be used to see events remotely, and to communicate mind-to-mind by users. But after Sauron acquired one, using them became perilous as the Dark Lord could limit what users saw, effectively controlling their information flow, even if he could not overwhelm or twist them directly via the mind-to-mind contact. While Aragorn does manage to wrest one free of Sauron's control, allowing him to save the day at a key moment, overall they are a powerful tool for the forces of evil.
Plus from talking to the Palantir engineers, the CEO and Thiel are both weirdo nerds, so it's fitting.
Tolkien didn't like the consequences of technological progress. While engineers were not inherently evil in his works, they were at a high risk of becoming evil, or at least instruments of evil. Think of characters like Sauron and Saruman, or Fëanor and Celebrimbor. If you give a Tolkienian name to your tech company, you are implying that you are one of those guys.
Your glaring anti-military prejudice aside, the "spend" you refer to is Congress's job, not that of senior officers.
Not going to lie part of my childhood died a little :(. "Help" is them though I watched that too.
To this day I go out of my way to ward people away from that terrible film.
That movie overglorified the Beatles beyond credibility, and it was genuinely painful to watch.
That said, I do think this movie missed out on a lot of potential, by not exploring what the actual significance of the Beatles to the world would have been: it never really asks what the world would be like had the Beatles never existed, which I think is a really interesting question, and instead develop a typical Hollywood plot.
Also being a New Zealander it was very jarring that this fantasy world I had grown up with turned out to be... where I live. I get people dig the scenery, but I kept thinking "did we pull over there once to use the toilets?" or "is that where they shot that ad for Toyotas?"
Had they gotten the rights, would it even have been made?
Noticed the Weta Digital mention and was very confused