Free Tales From Development Hell by David Hughes

the animated approach Tolkien would have preferred. “I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization,” Tolkien wrote to his publisher Rayner Unwin on 19 June 1957, “and that quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.” Referring to an earlier bowdlerization of the book for a dramatised reading produced for radio by the BBC, he added, “I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC.” Although a writing associate of Ackerman’s, Morton Grady Zimmerman, set to work on a treatment for the proposed film, while production designer Ron Cobb began scouting suitable locations in California, Ackerman found it difficult to interest the few producers he knew in such an ambitious undertaking. “I had gone to school with James Nicholson, who was the president of American International Pictures, and I thought perhaps that he would be interested,” he says, “but the scope wastoo great for him. I no longer recall just who else I approached, but nobody obviously was prepared to produce it at that time.”
    In April 1958, Tolkien admitted in a letter to Unwin that he was “entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it.” He had recently received Zimmerman’s synopsis of the book, described as a “story-line”, and while Tolkien claimed ignorance of the adaptation process, he did know the difference between a film ‘treatment’ and what he saw as ill treatment. “This document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety,” he wrote, adding that Zimmerman seemed “quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent,” he went on. “He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the [Lord of the Rings] at a great pace, and then constructed his [storyline] from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original.”
    Tolkien, a lifelong philologist, was principally peeved with the constant misspelling of Boromir as ‘Borimor,’ but there were other slights, and overall Tolkien felt “very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original.” Nevertheless, there was one redeeming feature about the whole affair, and it was an obvious one. “I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money,” he wrote, referring to his encroaching retirement, and promising to restrain himself, “and avoid all avoidable offence.” In a letter to Ackerman circa June 1958, Tolkien begged understanding of “the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.” Although hardly an avowed cinemagoer, Tolkien understood the medium well enough to note that “the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of an unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” His commentary on Zimmerman’s synopsis was thorough in scope and condemnatory in tone. “He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.”
    Bryan Sibley, author of a later (and widely acclaimed) BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and the official ‘making of’ books for Peter Jackson’strilogy, believes that some of Tolkien’s criticism may have been unfair. “The problem was that,