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In June 1958, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien put pen to paper. Without letting his scrupulous English manners slip, he still made his feelings quite clear. The story, he claimed, swelling in his indignation as the letter wound on, had been ‘murdered’.

The year before, three American producers sounding not unlike a law firm from a film noir movie — Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax — had approached Tolkien’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, proposing a feature film of The Lord of the Rings. Having decried the ‘sillification achieved’ by the BBC in a 1955, twelve-part radio serial based upon his epic, written and produced by the poet Terrence Tiller (a close friend of Tolkien admirer W.H. Auden) — since lost to the mists of BBC deletion — he couldn’t see that dealing with a film version would be any less painful.

However, if not won over, he had begun to be persuaded that these filmmakers were at least responsive to the needs of the book. In the box of notes sent to the author’s house in the Oxford suburb of Headington, the trio outlined an ambitious mix of live action and animation running to three hours, including two intermissions, with the aim of shooting among the untamed expanses of the American landscape. Tolkien had been especially impressed at the quality of the concept art. How unlike Walt Disney it was, he noted appreciatively.

A few weeks later, as he had begun to read the story treatment, his heart had sunk. He simply couldn’t detect ‘any appreciation for what it was about’. Gandalf does not ‘splutter’, he contended, the Balrog does not speak and Lothlórien does not have shiny minarets. All moral import had been lost. The entire tone was childish, more of a fairy tale. And his book was most certainly not a fairy tale. The treatment did, incidentally, include Tom Bombadil.

His response goes on for several pages. Each documenting a significant narrative failing in the laissez-faire approach Zimmerman, the nominal screenwriter, had taken with the original text.

Wizards can be quick to anger.

Such a maladroit effort, if not rank trivialisation of Tolkien’s great adventure, is disappointing for fans of the genre. Not that the book wouldn’t suffer an arduous journey through a litany of scrambled attempts before it would be done justice. It was more that one of the prospective producers was meant to have had a keen respect for fantasy fiction.

Ackerman is known as the godfather of geek. He had helped fashion the concept of the fan convention; arriving at the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939 clad in a ‘futuristicostume’, he effectively invented cosplay to boot. On a business footing, he served as agent for many of the great Fifties horror and science fiction writers whose imaginations were running rife beneath the shadow of the nuclear age (and the influence of Tolkien). Writers like Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Isaac Asimov, the latter of who would create the star-spanning Foundation trilogy.

In 1958, Ackerman began his lifelong tenure as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a lavish, bustling monthly devoted to genre movies. Within its awe-struck pages were features celebrating King Kong, the 1933 classic, including the discovery of a fabled shot of a spider lurking on the cavern roof that fans had thought to be the stuff of myth. It also curated the kind of pun-heavy vernacular that saw the letters page christened ‘Fang Mail’.

For Tolkien, used to the unhurried discussion of philological esoterica among collegiate friends and the woody scent of pipe smoke at The Eagle and Child, he may as well have been from Mars.

For Peter Jackson and those filmmaking peers who shared a taste for the fantastic and the macabre, kindred visionaries like Guillermo del Toro, Fantastic Monsters of Filmland would become a friend in the dark. Here was proof that there were likeminded, monster-mad souls everywhere. Without it they may never have discovered their calling. In his old office, the secret one behind the bookcase that contained his most prized memorabilia, Jackson had his collection of back issues proudly on display.

With a rakish, pencil-thin moustache, high forehead and large horn-rimmed glasses, Ackerman suggested Vincent Price playing an insurance salesman, and he would appear in many of his beloved B-movies. He also dabbled a little in film production. And, together with his partners, was the first recorded prospector to engage with Tolkien about a film version of his great work.

We should respect the fact that Ackerman was ahead of the curve. In 1958, The Lord of the Rings was only four years old. While selling respectably, it was a long way from the cult prominence that made it a fixture of late-1960s campuses across America. An unauthorised ACE paperback edition had wriggled through America’s insubstantial copyright rules in 1965 and sold in phenomenal quantities. Indeed, by 1966 it was out-selling The Catcher in the Rye at Harvard. Students formed Tolkien societies, dressing up as their favourite characters and feasting on mushrooms. A scholarly lapel was naked without badges exclaiming ‘Frodo Lives’ or ‘Gandalf for President’.

Once official editions were issued (through the paperback imprint Ballantine Books) Tolkien would taste remarkable success. This in turn led to conspicuous quarters of the literary establishment scoffing at something they saw as childish. Among academics, to express affection for Tolkien was deemed as ‘professional suicide’.

In 1956, in his sarcastic essay, ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs!’ Marxist critic Edmund Wilson called it ‘balderdash’.

Decades on, Germaine Greer claimed that the book’s popularity was like a ‘bad dream’.

Tolkien had never expected to start, as he put it, a ‘tide’. He only wrote the book for those who might like it.

Nevertheless, Frodo’s quest to rid the world of a magical ring by tossing it back into the volcanic fires from which it was forged had touched readers around the world. By 1968, three million copies of The Lord of the Rings had been sold worldwide. A 1999 poll conducted by Amazon judged it to be the Book of the Millennium. By 2003, once again much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, and perhaps catching a tailwind from Jackson’s films, a poll on behalf of the BBC’s Big Read named it Britain’s Favourite Read. According to recent calculations the book has sold upwards of 100 million copies.

Let us not tarry too long on the history of Tolkien and his literary genius. Reams have been written on the provenance of hobbits and the entirety of Middle-earth. Reams more will come. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892, where his father died when he was three, he was raised by his mother in the bucolic Worcestershire village of Sarehole (since consumed by greater Birmingham). She would die when he was only twelve, leaving him and his brother, Hilary, orphans. An early fascination with ancient languages and their mythological roots would lead to his creating his own, and eventually to an Oxford professorship in English Language and Literature, a journey interrupted by enlistment and the First World War.

In the dreadful lulls between fighting on the Somme (where Jackson’s grandfather also fought), and while recuperating from trench fever in Staffordshire, Tolkien began to conceive of the vastness of his fictional world, a world that would have its origins in the languages he had devised. He never felt he was writing fantasy but a form of history, a record that would reveal who might have spoken such words and where they might have lived. He saw his book as an attempt to recover a mythology for Britain, which lacked the equivalent lore to that of the Germanic, Nordic and Icelandic sagas he loved. Through a process he called ‘sub-creation’ grew a backdrop for his later books, a world of intricate construction: races, languages, myriad tales of wars and upheaval and a vast, vital geography against which it all played out.

‘I always had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere, not of “inventing”,’ recalled Tolkien.

Philippa Boyens, who would work so closely with Jackson and Fran Walsh on the writing of the adaptation to come, always valued the ‘wholeness’ of Middle-earth. ‘That you can escape into something that feels utterly real,’ she says. ‘I like that obsession. I like all the detail.’

Laughing, she recalls that whenever any questions from the cast or crew became too entangled in the brambles of Tolkien’s mythos they were always fielded to Boyens as the trio’s Tolkien nerd. She always impressed upon her fellow filmmakers how much underpinned the books.

‘It’s such an immersive thing, because as much as he delved into and loved those languages, he loved them because of their connection with who the British are as a people. And that profoundly affected him, and that probably has a lot to do with his childhood.’

Watching the encroachment of industry and the concomitant loss of a tradition; the stark impressions of the battlefront that stripped bare notions of class; the devotion to nature (especially trees); learning; fine company; a dignified, if antiquated properness in his relationship with women: all were ingredients in the wholeness of the book. But deeper still, in Tolkien’s early loss of his parents, Boyens sees the loneliness of Frodo expelled from the childlike idyll of the Shire to venture into the adulthood of Middle-earth.

Composed first for his children, Tolkien would publish The Hobbit in 1937, a lighter, charming prelude to The Lord of the Rings, which would eventually follow in 1954. He never intended his second novel to be divided into three books, or considered a trilogy. This was a necessity brought on by soaring paper costs following the Second World War (another global conflict that overshadowed his writing). It was a single, epic story, over 1,000 pages in length, made up of more than half a million words.

His response to Ackerman and co. provides an insight into how the author generally perceived the idea of transforming his work into film entertainment.

Tolkien had visual sense. In among the treatment’s atrocities, he could appreciate, ‘A scene of gloom lit by a small red fire with the wraiths approaching as darker shadows.’

He revealed actorly qualities too. In the 1950s, disappointed by that 1955 BBC version, he recorded his own radio play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son, in the poem’s full alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. There is a little existing footage of him from a BBC documentary from 1968. He plays well to the camera: warm, curious and knowingly dotty, throwing in an occasional faraway look in his eye as he gazes off into the distance, perhaps to Middle-earth.

Even so, Tolkien didn’t regard movies, or drama in general, as legitimate art. We are left to wonder if Sir Ian McKellen’s wry Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen’s robust Aragorn might have swayed him, but he considered the idea of acting to be a ‘bogus magic’. It was pretending.

Nevertheless, as early as 1957 he had written to his publisher Stanley Unwin that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of an animated version of the book — evidently having no faith that live action would stand up to the exotic creatures and fantastical locations therein. In another oft-quoted letter to his publisher, in his qualified way he even welcomed the idea.

‘And that quite apart from the glint of money,’ he added, ‘though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.’

He was no fool about the business.

Tolkien reasoned, with a foresight that would have made him more adept at dealing with Hollywood than his quiet, donnish persona would suggest, that he could either strike a deal through which he would lose control but be correspondingly compensated financially, or retain a degree of control but not the fiscal win.

‘Cash or kudos,’ he explained to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter.

With few signs of either cash or kudos emerging out of granting a six-month option to Ackerman and his associates, as the biography succinctly puts it, ‘negotiations were not continued’.

*

From that enshrined afternoon when, bored by marking uninspired English papers in his Northmoor Road drawing room, Tolkien had turned over a sheet and quite from nowhere written the line ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ a river of events will flow and churn over the years toward a quiet backwater in New Zealand. Those of a mystical bent might call it fate.

But there was a long way to go yet.

Nigh on a decade had passed when, in 1967, Tolkien was approached for a second time about the film rights, this time for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

While he welcomed the financial security the popularity of the novel had granted him, Tolkien had grown guarded if not threatened by the side effects of his success. He had no interest in fame and its attendant adulation. Especially wearisome were those fans who arrived on his doorstep uninvited with all their infernal questions, which he patiently endeavoured to answer. He took to setting an alarm clock in another room. When it rang, he politely claimed this signalled another appointment. Unwisely still to be found in the Oxford telephone directory, he would get calls deep into the night from faraway readers with a poor grasp of time-zone differences.

When United Artists came to him with this new offer, he may have seen it as a chance to deflect attention. Now seventy-five, and lacking the energy to deal with another adaptation he was always going to find fault with, he most likely wanted to wash his hands of the whole business. He could use the money to establish a trust fund for his grandchildren’s education. So he agreed to part with the filmmaking rights in perpetuity to both books for what now looks like a parsimonious £104,000.

It was a remarkably generous contract. To paraphrase the pertinent details: ‘Filmmakers had the right to add to or subtract from the work or any part thereof. They had the right to make sequels to, new versions, and adaptations of the work or any part thereof. To use any part or parts of the work or the theme thereof, or any instance, character, characteristics, scenes, sequences or characters therein …’

In other words, the studio was legally entitled to do just about anything it wanted with the books. It remains entirely permissible for the current rights holder to devise a sequel to Frodo’s journey.

Six years later, in 1973, Tolkien would pass away without having seen a single frame of his work on screen.

UA, as it was known, certainly in Hollywood, seemed a suitable berth for Tolkien’s books. Proudly founded in 1919 by the collective of actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and, granddaddy of the movie epic, director D.W. Griffith, it was an attempt by the artists to control the means of production. To resolve, they hoped, the eternal ‘art versus business’ conflict that had dogged, and goes on dogging, the film business from its very inception. A similar philosophy would later underpin Jackson’s filmmaking collective.

UA stutteringly lived up to its billing. While the great dream of artists at the wheel would falter — they were too busy acting and directing to find time to steer a film company — and the company would gradually be run along more traditional Hollywood models, it nevertheless endeavoured to maintain a veneer of artistic intent.

Among its library of adaptations are definitive versions of Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Around the World in 80 Days, West Side Story, the James Bond movies (cherished by Jackson), Midnight Cowboy, Fiddler on the Roof and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The latter produced by Saul Zaentz, who will prove significant.

Former head of production at UA, Steven Bach, who tells his fateful tale of Hollywood hubris and artistic ambition run amok during the making of Heaven’s Gate in the book Final Cut, reports that from the time they made the deal with Tolkien those rights languished for a further decade. They just couldn’t find a way, or at least a way they considered commercially viable.

Eminent playwright Peter Shaffer (who wrote the stage play of Amadeus) had written what Bach considered an elegant script for a single film version, but it never gained momentum.

In 1969, the English director John Boorman was a hot property. Born in London’s studio suburb of Shepperton, the debonair former documentary maker had made an instant impact with the gritty, modernist Lee Marvin thriller Point Blank, and a brutish tale of duelling Second World War veterans in Hell in the Pacific. His films, thus far, were steely and masculine, but with a touch of the metaphysical at their fringes.

Filled with the zest and fearlessness of youth, and considerable talent with which to wield it, he had approached UA with the ambition of creating an epic out of the Grail legend and King Arthur.

‘Well, we have The Lord of the Rings, why don’t you do that?’ they replied.

Boorman embraced the challenge put before him and over six months, squirrelled away at his tumbledown rectory in County Wicklow, he and co-writer Rospo Pallenberg conjured up something dizzyingly strange and knowingly sacrilegious. The finished 176 pages¹ shatter much of the book’s grandiosity.

Boorman had a taste for the lusty and pagan, and while Tolkien may have admired his evocation of nature (Boorman would go on to make The Emerald Forest) he would have been appalled by all the sex. Before he is ready to look into her mirror, Galadriel seduces Frodo, informing him, ‘I am that knowledge.’ Boorman is dragging chaste Tolkien towards puberty, but completely overcompensates: Aragorn revives Éowyn with a magical orgasm, and even plants a hearty kiss upon Boromir’s lips at one point. The director also gets carried away with the book’s reputation as a hippy totem. Wild flowers are a chronic leitmotif, and the Council of Elrond turns into a Felliniesque circus performance with dancers, jugglers and a lively dog that symbolizes fate. To read it all is to be mildly disturbed yet mesmerized …

Gone are hobbit holes, Bree and Helm’s Deep. Gimli opens the doors to Moria with a jig, while Merry and Pippin are played as a Halfling Laurel and Hardy. There is much cavorting and way too much singing. Sillification lies perilously close. But there are some striking inventions, such as the Fellowship discovering they are walking across the bodies of slumbering Orcs in Moria. And Boorman goes some way toward taming the book’s gigantic architecture into a single, three-hour film.

UA didn’t understand a word of it.

During his seclusion, there had been a major reshuffle at the studio. The script, which had cost $3 million to develop, was tossed out. Boorman later claimed such shortsightedness mainly came from the fact that, ‘No one else had read the book.’

Boorman is too rich a filmmaker to dismiss outright what might have been, however provocative and untamed. After briefly attempting to keep his live-action vision alive at Disney, he would channel much of the effort he put into The Lord of the Rings back into the Arthurian legend with the altogether splendid — and altogether grown-up — Excalibur. Bursting with Boorman’s visual exuberance, it is earthy, witty, fantastical (at times surreally so) and highly libidinous. It is also an ‘absolute favourite’ of Jackson’s — he has Mordred’s golden armour (made from aluminium) in his collection. Visually, it would have a huge influence on him as director and, coming full circle, on the sensibility he would give to The Lord of the Rings: the exotic contours of the armour; the scabrous weaponry; the mossy, lyrical Irish landscapes. It has the heft of the real.

Nicol Williamson’s whimsical, meddling Merlin has more than a touch of Gandalf about him.

Jackson has never had the opportunity to meet Boorman, who at 84 still lives in rural Ireland, but his manager Ken Kamins once represented the English director and has stayed in contact.

‘John sent a nice note through Ken once,’ recalls Jackson, ‘saying that he loved The Lord of the Rings, and he was very happy that I got to make it.’

Boorman has gone on record saying how grateful he is that he didn’t get to make his film. That may have prevented the project from ever passing to Jackson, whose trilogy he thought was a marvel akin to the construction of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. There was something secret and vast about the films, a work of almost divine providence.

Then there was the tale of the Beatles. How the Fab Four, at the height of their own impossible fame, had sought out the great Stanley Kubrick at his St. Albans estate to help create a multimedia musical of The Lord of the Rings in which they would star and, naturally, provide a backbeat.

Testament to Jackson’s lifelong passion for the Beatles can be found in the vision of a homemade cut out of the Sergeant Pepper-era foursome found in the sky blue, wheelchair-enabled Ford Anglia in Bad Taste. Jackson had wanted to spot Beatles songs throughout the score, but the rights were far beyond his debut film’s paltry budget.

One of the unforeseen spoils of his success would be a chance to meet a genuine hero. When Jackson encountered Paul McCartney at the Oscars following The Return of the King’s glorious haul of trophies there must have been a thousand questions stored away in his head, but he ‘pinned him down’ about that story of a Tolkien adaptation.

Like Boorman, McCartney had praised Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s book. He was a huge fan of the films. Each Christmas, as was the habit of many families, he would make a ritual outing with his kids to catch the next instalment. Quite how McCartney, one of the most famous faces on the planet, managed to frequent what sounded like his local multiplex so casually raises a sceptical Jackson eyebrow. The director suspects the pop icon probably found other means of seeing the films, but the compliments were sincere. And now he had McCartney’s undivided attention, he decided to see if there was any truth to the Beatles’ attempt to bring their youthful brio to Middle-earth?

It was true, said McCartney. The band had been on the third film of a three-picture deal with UA. The deal had thus far proved fruitful with the success of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. Considering where to go next, and having collectively read the book, The Lord of the Rings seemed a perfectly sensible avenue for the band. It was John Lennon who was spearheading the concept.

‘Paul was going to play Frodo, George was going to play Gandalf, John was Gollum, and Ringo was Sam, I think,’ Jackson can’t help but chuckle. ‘And he said that they all showed up at Stanley Kubrick’s house to try and persuade him to be the director. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that.’

During his lengthier dalliance with a potential adaptation, Boorman had wondered if he might cast the Beatles as the hobbits.

Kubrick, with four Liverpudlian superstars standing on his doorstop uninvited, did the decent thing and asked them in for tea. He listened to their offer, was very polite, but admitted it wasn’t for him. He was in the middle of planning a colossal life of Napoleon, which would eventually be scuppered when MGM decided that epics were no longer commercial.

‘Did you try another director?’ Jackson asked. There was also talk that Lennon was going to approach David Lean next.

‘No, Tolkien killed it,’ McCartney replied. The author’s misgivings were never given, but can perhaps be assumed.

According to UA, it was Yoko Ono. The Beatles split a year later.

*

So it wasn’t Kubrick or Boorman or the Beatles, or even Walt Disney — rumoured to have craved the rights in the sixties, only to be met with Tolkien’s disdain for his pretty fairy-tales — who first brought the book to the big screen. Instead, it was a maverick animator named Ralph Bakshi, an artist determined to rattle convention. That is except when it came to The Lord of the Rings, which he treated almost as Holy Writ. However, the flawed results still spoke more about the titanic complexity involved in both bringing the book under control and getting Hollywood to grasp its potential.

While he had loved Disney, the grown-up Jewish street kid who once fished comic books out of dumpsters, set himself the task of tearing down the fairy-tale edifice of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the parade of pearly classics that followed. He had learned his trade on children’s cartoons like Deputy Dawg, Mighty Mouse and the 1967 Spider-Man TV series, but he hungered to take animation into adult realms. Offbeat, darkly funny and controversy courting films of the 1970s like Heavy Traffic, Coonskin and America’s first X-rated cartoon, the cult favourite Fritz the Cat. When it came to fantasy, he showed pedigree. The impressive Wizards is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the powers of magic and technology battle for supremacy — it’s elves versus tanks — which Bakshi insisted was an allegory for the creation of the state of Israel. It is a film Jackson much admires.

An avid science-fiction reader, the curly-haired, Slavic-featured Bakshi had cherished the idea of transforming The Lord of the Rings into an animated epic since the fifties. He was convinced he had an understanding of Tolkien that outweighed any other suitor. Learning that Boorman and UA were attempting to condense its three books into a single film, he declared it to be madness.

‘Or certainly a lack of character on Boorman’s part,’ he added sniffily. ‘Why would you tamper with anything Tolkien did?’

With Boorman’s version slain, he approached UA with his own offer to adapt what the studio was beginning to suspect was unadaptable. It should be an animated film made in three parts, he informed them. They had offered him Boorman’s script to read, but he wasn’t interested. Bakshi would begin again from scratch and, aside from a few necessary nips and tucks, remain faithful to Tolkien’s quest.

In a vivid picture of Hollywood dealing at its most wilfully entangled, with UA unconvinced by his overtures the headstrong Bakshi decided MGM would be a much better fit for both him and Tolkien. A fact that occurred to him in part because they were literally down the hallway. Since its heyday, UA’s West Coast operations had occupied a wing of MGM’s Irving Thalberg Building in Culver City. Dan Melnick, head of production at MGM, was a man he knew had actually read The Lord of the Rings. Melnick would surely have a grasp on the potential of his project. He was right. Melnick paid back UA’s $3 million outlay on Boorman’s script, and the deal was struck. MGM would make the film, UA distribute it.

UA were evidently relieved to wash their hands of Middle-earth making. Bakshi and MGM were welcome to the meadows of the Shire, Rivendell, Rohan, enchanted Lothlórien, sulphurous Mordor and all those other bafflingly named locations that poured incessantly out of that accursed book.

Except Hollywood is more than a match for Middle-earth when it comes to internecine warfare and figuratively hurling heads over the battlements. Within weeks, MGM had gone through a violent takeover, changing ownership, firing Melnick and delivering the news that ‘they weren’t going to make that fucking picture’ to Bakshi.

Here the tale takes a significant turn. The unflagging animator turned to another friend, onetime music mogul turned movie producer Saul Zaentz, whose relatively small investment into Fritz the Cat had paid off nicely. The titillating tale of a tomcatting tomcat had made $90 million around the world.

Fiercely independent, and like Bakshi of East Coast Jewish immigrant stock, Zaentz had come from a music industry background and held no truck with the rigmarole of studio politics. What he did have a taste for was the grandeur of the ‘important’ literary adaption. Through his company Fantasy Films (named for the jazz label Fantasy Records he joined in 1955 rather than anything heroic), Zaentz had invested some of his Fritz the Cat rewards into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was nominated for nine Oscars (including one for Brad Dourif, Wormtongue to come, as Best Supporting Actor), winning five, including Best Picture. Something he would repeat with an adaption of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and, pertinently, The English Patient.

Stout and bearded, with a high domed forehead and glasses like window panes, Zaentz came with ironclad convictions, especially about art, and could spin from charm to confrontation mid-sentence. Once described as a ‘buccaneer’, he was a deft and deadly dealmaker.

In 1976, spying an opportunity, Zaentz readily agreed to back Bakshi’s film.

With their hands full with the ensuing calamity of Heaven’s Gate (currently grinding through its monumental production in Montana, overschedule, overbudget and by 1981 a flop of such epic proportions it effectively destroyed the studio — a warning to any who dared let the inmates run the asylum), UA relinquished the rights to Zaentz for $3 million. Through his newly fashioned Middle-earth Enterprises, Zaentz now retained the film, stage and game rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as per Tolkien’s original agreement in perpetuity. The Tolkien Estate retained all literary rights.

In an absurd hangover from the project’s brief tenancy at MGM, which would have a huge bearing in the future, the rights to make a filmed version of The Hobbit remained with the studio. The rights to distribute such a film were now the preserve of Saul Zaentz.

Reconsidering his version as two films — Zaentz’s financial largesse went only so far — Bakshi still intended to embrace the volume of Tolkien’s book, capturing the scope and violence of Middle-earth. He felt children would want to be scared, and adults appreciate the sophistication of Tolkien as seen through his eyes.

As was his wont, Bakshi’s approach was far from traditional. For the heft of the world, the ranks of Orcs and men, he pursued a technique known as rotoscoping. In simple terms the animator traced over live footage for added realism. Live-action scenes of extras made up with animal horns, teeth and dressed in furs as Orcs and Nordic-looking riders were shot on the plains of La Mancha in Spain before animation began (Belmonte Castle stands in for Helm’s Deep). While static, the heavy, inky backgrounds have the gothic imprimatur of Gustave Doré woodcuts. Slashed with brushstrokes, the intensity of Bakshi’s apocalyptic imagery can be hard to shake.

In the portrayal of evil he revealed his grasp of Tolkien. The Nazgûl snuffle like bloodhounds, their limbs convulsing in their drug-like craving for the Ring. The interpretation of an alien-looking Gollum, voiced with an unforgettable toddler’s wail by the English actor Peter Woodthorpe was, until Andy Serkis coughed up his hairball performance, definitive.

But Bakshi would later wail that he had been under intense pressure over time and budget (estimated at $8 million). He was forced to cut corners, compromise his vision. The clichéd foreground figures are often no better than Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Frodo, Merry and Pippin are virtually identical; Sam looks like a melted gnome; and the Balrog is a laughable bat-lion hybrid. The script by Chris Conkling and fantasy author Peter S. Beagle (who had written an introduction to an American edition of the book) is faithful but abbreviated. Frodo sets forth with the Ring with barely a summary of what is before him, the film chalking off the major pieces at an unseemly gallop before it all grinds to a confusing halt after The Battle of Helm’s Deep, awaiting a sequel that would never come.

Perhaps Bakshi should have been forewarned of growing indifference when the studio removed any mention that this was Part One of two films, which only contributed to the general confusion. The $30 million his film made around the world was deemed insufficient reward by Zaentz and UA and the sequel was postponed forever.²

‘I was screaming, and it was like screaming into the wind,’ lamented Bakshi. ‘It’s only because nobody ever understood the material. It was a very sad thing for me. I was very proud to have done Part One.’

Was the book impossible to adapt? The sheer size of it could have filled out a mini-series. This was War and Peace set in a mythological universe. Scale was an issue on many levels for a live-action version. The lead characters, though fully grown, stood four foot tall at most. There was a host of exotic creatures: Orcs, trolls, mûmakil — elephants on growth hormone — giant eagles, Ringwraiths, grouchy arboreal shepherds called Ents, and fell beasts like winged dinosaurs. Then there was Gollum, who was less part of the peregrine biosphere than a fully rounded character, arguably Tolkien’s most vivid creation. And what of those battles, swarming with untold armies? Sergei Bondarchuk’s 100,000-strong 1966 adaptation of War and Peace had the Red Army at its disposal.

If animation was the only realistic approach, it almost inevitably reduced Tolkien’s grandeur to something childish.

Bakshi would have his part to play. In 1978, the seventeen-year-old Jackson raced into Wellington after school to catch the New Yorker’s animated vision. Spectacled, permanently wrapped in a duffle coast and movie mad, he wasn’t any kind of serious Tolkien fan but he was obsessed with fantasy. Like so many who saw it, parts impressed him but he left baffled. Was there to be another film?

‘My memory of the movie is that it was good until about halfway through then it got kind of incoherent,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t read the book at that stage so I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But it did inspire me to read the book.’

Weeks later, due to attend a training course in Auckland before commencing his apprenticeship as a photoengraver, Jackson paused at the concourse bookshop to pick up some reading matter to fill the twelve-hour train journey. There he spotted a movie tie-in edition of The Lord of the Rings.

‘It was the paperback with the Bakshi Ringwraiths on the front. That was my first copy of the book.’

He still has it somewhere.

‘In some respects if I hadn’t seen his movie I might not have read the book, and may or may not have made the film …’

*

In 1996, Jackson’s career was going places. Quite literally: he had made it to the Sitges Film Festival, thirty-five miles southwest of Barcelona. In a satisfying sign that his reputation as a filmmaker was reaching beyond the shores of New Zealand, the annual jamboree devoted to fantasy cinema had invited him to screen his new film, a zombie comedy (or zomcom) called Braindead. Back home, after three peculiar horror films, he was still regarded warily by the establishment.

‘You’ve got to understand that, until Heavenly Creatures, he was an embarrassment in New Zealand. He wasn’t someone to celebrate,’ says Costa Botes, a friend and frequent collaborator through the early days. ‘Because of the films he was making there were certain factions of the industry actively gunning for him.’

Not a natural explorer, Jackson had been reluctant to go. He was persuaded when he saw the guest list. Here was an opportunity to meet some of his heroes in the flesh. Talents who had helped shape him as a filmmaker like Rick Baker, the genius make-up effects specialist feted for the still-extraordinary werewolf transformation in An American Werewolf in London. Or Freddie Francis, the cinematographer who had created the ghoulish, sweet-wrapper hues of the Hammer Horror movies (that cherry red blood that ran down Christopher Lee’s chin). Or Stuart Freeborn, the English make-up artist who had helped design Yoda. Or Tobe Hooper, the young director who had shocked the establishment with his debut horror movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

‘At that time Tobe Hooper and I looked quite similar,’ recalls Jackson. ‘Dark, shaggy hair and beards. And Stuart Freeborn couldn’t figure out who was who. I would go down to breakfast, and Stuart would go, “Hello Tobe.” And I would just go, “Hi Stuart.” I didn’t even bother to correct him. It was kind of fun, there was all these interesting characters. That was the only time I ever met Wes Craven.’

Craven was the horror maven who began the Freddy Krueger phenomenon with A Nightmare on Elm Street at New Line.

Grouped in the same hotel, guests would congregate for breakfast and dinner, guaranteed to find an available seat alongside a fellow traveller. Jackson and Fran Walsh instantly bonded with Rick and Silvia Baker. They would head out for walks along the cliff-top where the views of the Mediterranean were stunning.

‘But there was this really pushy American guy who would tag along with us,’ says Jackson. ‘We’d be literally heading out the door and he would be there: “Do you mind if I come too?”’

Naturally, there were a lot of fans around, begging signatures and photos, proof that they had met their heroes (or heroes to come).

‘We got to the point where we wanted to sneak out of the hotel and not have this guy follow us. I didn’t know who the hell he was.’

Then one afternoon he asked if they were coming to see his film.

‘Oh, you’ve got a film?’ said Jackson, taken aback. ‘You’re not a fan?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he replied, the words rattling out of his mouth like winning coins from a slot machine. ‘I’ve got a film! It’s called Reservoir Dogs.’

Twenty-five years later, Jackson howls with laughter. ‘It was Quentin Tarantino … I remember that when it got to the ear-cutting scene, Wes Craven stood up and walked out because he couldn’t handle it. And Quentin was saying, “This is the greatest thing in the world, Wes Craven walked out of my movie.”’

Reservoir Dogs would be picked up for distribution by a small American indie, Miramax, named after the owners’ mother and father, where this Angelino video-store clerk turned frenetic, inspired, outrageously brilliant filmmaker would be nursed toward greatness. That same company would swoop for Jackson as well in the not-too-distant future.

Also on the list of that year’s festival was Bakshi.

They didn’t socialise. Bakshi showed no interest in that side of things, remaining aloof from the gaggle of eager filmmakers, his career in the doldrums by the early 1990s. Maybe it was because he was more distant than the others that Jackson requested a picture with the director of The Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t something he asked of anyone else — he was a peer now not a fan.

‘He didn’t have a clue who I was.’

Years later, he would. However, unlike Boorman and McCartney’s gracious approval, Bakshi responded to Jackson’s success with indignation. Why hadn’t he been sought out for the benefit of his wisdom? Asked to be involved? He turned bitter in interview whenever Jackson’s films were brought up. Some wounds never heal.

‘I heard reports that they were screening it every single day at Fine Line,’ he smarted, erroneously citing New Line’s arthouse division as having been voraciously cribbing from his film. Which wasn’t true anywhere in New Line.

Jackson remains perplexed that there should be any ill will between them. ‘I’ve read those interviews with him and he is incredibly angry. These really bizarre interviews where he said, “I’m insulted that Peter Jackson never consulted me, because I am the only other guy that had done The Lord of the Rings and he didn’t give me the courtesy of talking to me.” Why would I do that? What was there to gain from it? It was odd. I can’t even understand it from his point of view. Why would I need to speak to the guy who made a cartoon version of it? And conversely why would he expect me to?’

Maybe it was simply envy: he got to finish the story.

‘I know,’ says Jackson not unkindly.

It was also while in Sitges that he and Walsh heard that the New Zealand film commission had finally agreed to finance Heavenly Creatures. And Heavenly Creatures is where everything changed.

*

New Zealand first heard the infant cries of Sir Peter Robert Jackson on 31 October 1961 — Halloween, no less — in Pukerua Bay, a sleepy coastal town frozen in the 1950s some twenty miles north of Wellington. His doting parents, Joan and William ‘Bill’ Jackson, by every account delightfully forbearing towards the whimsical pursuits of aspirant filmmakers, were first-generation New Zealanders, emigrating from England in 1950.

Pukerua Bay offered an embryonic Oscar-winning filmmaker few outlets for his furtive, restless imagination. He forwent university, film school was unimaginable, and after some aborted attempts to involve himself in the New Zealand film community, he began his professional career working as a photoengraver for the Evening Post in Wellington.

According to legend, the biggest inspiration to Jackson and on his determination to become a filmmaker (if not yet a director) was encountering Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 King Kong at the tender age of nine on the household’s humble black and white television. It was late to be up, nine o’clock, but he was enraptured by the wonder of it all: this tale of a giant ape on a lost island that also happened to be populated by dinosaurs, who was then captured and brought to New York — Eighth Wonder of the World! And how he perishes, plunging from the Empire State Building. For Jackson, changed forever, it was everything an adventure story should be.

To gain a measure of how much King Kong means to Peter Jackson, leap forward to December 1976, about the time Bakshi began half-making The Lord of the Rings. At seven o’clock on a sleepy Friday morning, the fifteen-year-old Jackson had caught the first train into Wellington worrying over the length of the queue that would be forming outside the King’s Theatre cinema on Courtney Place.

He was there for the first showing of the remake of King Kong, a production he’d been following for months in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. But the cinema was still locked up and Courtney Place was as deserted as it would one day throng with delighted thousands as Jackson made his lap of honour in an unforeseeable future.

‘I kind of bought into the hype,’ he laughs — that boy was such a dreamer. ‘I convinced myself there would be crowds and crowds of people. There weren’t. And, like most people, I was disappointed by it.’

The film is a wreck. Big-talking mini-mogul Dino De Laurentiis, cut from similar cloth to Saul Zaentz, had boasted of using a forty-foot robotic gorilla that could scale buildings, but the technology had failed him and its motion was never captured. In the finished film it is Rick Baker in a suit. The modern setting, the absence of dinosaurs, the flat, un-wonderful ambience generated by journeyman director John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) bespoke of all that could fail in a film.

The disappointment of the King Kong remake would teach Jackson a valuable lesson, and he saw it six times. You must never forget that fifteen-year-old, too early, waiting in the cold.

The presence of Kong would cast a huge shadow over Jackson’s career, but even having finally made his own spectacular remake in 2005 (another long, wending, troubled journey to the screen), it is to The Lord of the Rings the fifteen-year-olds of all ages and sexes came back again and again, breathless in anticipation.

It was actually the year before he first saw King Kong that an eight-year-old Jackson began shooting films. With a growing interest in special effects already stirred by a steady diet of Thunderbirds, television’s Batman and the epochal moment his neighbour Jean Watson, who worked at Kodak, gave him a Super-8 camera, he also looked upon King Kong as much as a technical triumph as an emotional journey.

‘A year after we met, he showed me a Bond parody called Coldfinger that he’d made when he was fifteen or sixteen,’ remembers Botes. ‘He’d copied the editing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And he played James Bond himself. I thought, “This is uncanny — he actually looks like Sean Connery.”’

Jackson built a filmmaking career with his own hands. A fleet of homemade shorts, inspired by his love of King Kong, Ray Harryhausen and James Bond, would grow (or perhaps the word is mutate) into his first feature film — Bad Taste.

Made in fits and starts over four years, and because of day jobs, only on Sundays, Bad Taste began life as the short, Roast of the Day (the powerful tale of an aid worker encountering cannibal psychos in deepest Pukerua), and slowly sprouted into a feature film. Doffing a windblown forelock toward Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Jackson’s unhinged tale of a group of aliens plotting to turn humanity into fast food, would be a test of his native ingenuity and fortitude to rival that of The Lord of the Rings.

Roping in friends and colleagues from The Evening Post, cast and crew came and went over the ensuing years, written out then written back in again, Jackson more or less making it up as he went along. His parents provided the $2,500 to buy a 16mm Bolex camera. Everything else — prosthetics, special effects, Steadicam rig, props, alien vomit, stunts, acting — was homemade.

At one stage, Jackson, in the prominent role of the nitwit alien investigator Derek, would dangle himself upside down over a local cliff, a rope tied around his ankle the other end attached to a wooden post. Health and safety were for those who could afford them. He only hoped his friends would pull him back up again. If that post hadn’t held, The Lord of the Rings may linger to this day unmade.

‘It crushed all the nerves in my foot,’ he laughs; ‘it took about six months for the sensitivity to come back.’ Which might account for his nonchalance toward going barefoot on the roughest terrain.

Halfway through, they all went to see Robert Zemeckis’ thriller Romancing the Stone, then almost killed themselves replicating the sequence where Michael Douglas plunges downslope through the bushes.

Eight years later Jackson would be working with Zemeckis.

There were also times it tested Jackson’s emotional reserves. One Sunday, dropped off on location by his parents with all the props and costumes, no one else showed up. He just sat there all day. When his parents came to collect him at 5 p.m., he was close to tears. It was a lonely lesson in always working with people you could depend on.

Bad Taste would be his film school. And a film would emerge, half-crazed but hilarious, gurgling with its own outrageous pleasure at the raw act of creation. Following another arduous test of his patience, it would find distribution and stir up a cult following that exists to this day, hanging on to the hope that Jackson will eventually make good on his promise to make a sequel or two.

Significant to this tale were two key friendships that Jackson formed because of his Bad Taste. Richard Taylor, who along with his wife Tania was making puppets for a satirical Spitting Image-style New Zealand television show called Public Eye, had heard about this guy out in Pukerua Bay who was making a sci-fi splatter movie in his basement. ‘We really wanted to meet him. It turned out that his sci-fi movie was called Bad Taste. He was baking foam latex in his mum’s oven.’

Taylor would join forces with Jackson on his very next film, and begin his own journey toward The Lord of the Rings.

And this was when Jackson first met Fran Walsh. To be exact, he first saw Walsh on the set of the series Worzel Gummidge Down Under, the television offshoot about a talking scarecrow, for which he had been hired to do a few little special effects. She was one of the writers, but they hadn’t spoken. Then out of the blue Botes asked if he could show the unfinished Bad Taste to a couple of his screenwriter friends, he thought would appreciate it. They happened to be Walsh and her then boyfriend Stephen Sinclair. Walsh remembered being bowled over by how uninhibited the film was, and on zero budget.

She would volunteer her services to help complete the film, and would become not only the most important creative partner in Jackson’s life but the story of this book.

Completing Bad Taste, says Taylor, ‘Peter was bitten by the bug.’ Up until then he had thought he might get by in special effects. In New Zealand the thought that you could follow a career as a director was preposterous. But the response to Bad Taste was so powerful that it convinced Jackson this was his calling.

Jackson also committed himself to gore, and ruffling the strait-laced New Zealand film community. In 1989 came depraved puppet musical Meet The Feebles (shot in a rat-infested warehouse) followed in 1992, after a salutary false start, by Braindead, his blood-bolstered, period zomcom. The film that would take him to America — if only for a visit.

A career had been born in a deluge of sheep brains, farting hippos and a zombie baby named Selwyn. Middle-earth was another world.

‘When he finally made enough money to move into town,’ remembers Taylor, ‘it was into the tiniest house in Wellington. He bought the biggest television I have ever seen and we’d sit in his front room, dwarfed by this gigantic thing. When you stood up to make a cup of tea, there’d be half a dozen people out on the pavement, standing there watching the movie!’

*

There is one other adaption of The Lord of the Rings we have yet to mention. Indeed, it was the most comprehensive and meaningful adaption to date, one that is still held in the highest esteem by fans. It was also the only version of the book to provide any objective lessons — apart from what not to do — in how to successfully dramatize Tolkien, even though there was not a single frame to be seen.

This was, of course, the 1981 BBC radio serialization. Adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell with a fine-edged scalpel, trimming great swathes of the book without any discernible loss of the central story (it still runs to a considerable eighteen hours). They also retained a good deal of Tolkien’s dialogue, while carefully negotiating the demands of radio dramatization. Events that are reported in the book are transformed into first-hand scenes (a trick Jackson and his writers would apply). Even the battle scenes, inevitably reduced by the medium, have a dense, breathy, clanging atmosphere. All of it eased onward through the addition of a narrator (Gerard Murphy).

Above all, the vocal performances set an enviable standard: Michael Horden swings appreciably between avuncular and steely as Gandalf; Robert Stephens’ smoky basso makes Aragorn seem older, wiser and immediately kingly. Jackson would seek a deliberate resonance between the serial and his own films in the casting of Ian Holm as his Bilbo; Holm having made an impassioned Frodo back in 1981.

Having made his mark in Bakshi’s adaptation, Peter Woodthorpe would again provide the disturbingly funny duality of his Gollum. Disembodied, that needling, pathetic, hissing voice carries a note of pure heartbreak.

The seminal serial was responsible for bringing another generation to the book. But Hollywood had lost interest or grown weary of its numerous challenges. And for fifteen years the Ring lay forgotten, until it was finally picked up by the most unlikely director imaginable.