Boorman You Wacky Man

THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED!
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way...

Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…

…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…

My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.

What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.

Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.

What Sean Did Next

ZARDOZ!! ZARDOZ!!

So, you’re a world famous actor playing a world famous character in a series of successful films, but you’re getting bored. So what do you do? Obviously the logical thing to do is quit, then star in a movie where you get to run around in a red nappy (with suspenders) shooting things, while a giant, floating, stone head yells about how a certain part of the male anatomy is evil…

Zardoz!

That’s footage from the 1974 masterpiece of insanity Zardoz, staring Sean Double-O-Seven Connory in his first major role after leaving the James Bond franchise. And giant stone heads vomiting guns isn’t even the half of it – you should see the theatrical trailer. It’s like three minutes of the worst drug trip you’ll ever have. How such a bizzare monstrosity ever made it onto the screen I’ll never know – unless it had something to do with the “star power” of Mr Connory combined with the incredible amounts of acid everyone was doing back then.

It’s too hot today.

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