Peter Jackson's documentary miniseries The Beatles: Get Back is now streaming on Disney+, and it's worth acknowledging how much his career as a filmmaker owes to what the Fab Four didn't get to do: make their version of The Lord of the Rings. Decades before Jackson's Oscar-winning journeys into Middle-earth, The Beatles almost starred in a Lord of the Rings adaptation of their own.
It's fascinating to ponder what such a project could have looked and sounded like. Here is what we know about this ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful cinematic undertaking.
The association between The Beatles and The Lord of the Rings came about as the result of overlapping studio contracts and a driven producer. United Artists had a three-film deal with The Beatles, starting with A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and with the animated Yellow Submarine not counting toward the deal, Apple Films head Denis O'Dell sought a new project for the Fab Four. At the same time, United Artists was in the process of acquiring the film rights to The Lord of the Rings. O'Dell figured The Beatles would be perfect for a Middle-earth musical.
As Jackson told the BBC, "When they [The Beatles] went to Rishikesh and stayed in India, it was about three months with the Maharishi at the beginning of 1968, he sent the books to The Beatles. I expect because there are three, he sent one book to each of The Beatles. I don't think Ringo got one, but John, Paul and George each got one Lord of the Rings book to read in India. And they got excited about it." In an interview with Uncut, O'Dell noted that Donovan's enthusiasm for J.R.R. Tolkien's novels was instrumental in getting The Beatles, who usually "never read anything," excited about the prospect.
One might assume the four Beatles would be a natural fit to play for the four Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, but the casting decisions were not so straightforward. Paul McCartney, the closest thing the band had to a proper leader, was set on playing Frodo Baggins, with Ringo Starr filling the affable best friend role as Samwise Gamgee. John Lennon allegedly changed his mind a lot on which character he he would play, wanting the roles of Gandalf, Frodo and Gollum at different points in development. Ultimately, it seems as if Lennon settled on Gollum, with George Harrison playing Gandalf.
Looking to additional musical artists to fill out the cast, Donovan was set to play Merry, and Galadriel was being offered to Twiggy. It's unknown who would have played the rest of the Fellowship, although imagining which other 1960s rock stars could fit the roles of Pippin, Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas and Gimli makes for a fun fan-casting exercise.
Knowing a live-action Tolkien adaptation would require an extremely skilled filmmaker, O'Dell sought out three of the best directors of the 1960s: David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Michaelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, Blowup). Lean turned down the offer, and while Kubrick is the director most associated with the project in the public consciousness, he also said no. Kubrick loved the novels, but considered them "unfilmable," a challenge beyond his special effects work on 2001. Of O'Dell's top three choices, Antonioni was most interested.
Yellow Submarine art director Heinz Edelmann also pitched an animated version of The Lord of the Rings, to star either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones as voice actors. Animation seemed like a more natural way to adapt the fantasy trilogy, given the limitations of special effects at the time (sure enough, the first proper adaptation was Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film), but United Artists wanted a live-action film. After the Apple Films project fell apart in 1969, John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg also wrote a treatment for a Lord of the Rings film for which the The Beatles were briefly considered. However, the band was already breaking up by that point, so such casting soon became an impossibility.
J.R.R. Tolkien had long been skeptical about a film adaptation of his novels, and given that he wasn't fond of how his books became a part of 1960s hippie counterculture, it makes sense that he'd scoff at the idea of The Beatles being the face of his story.
"Ultimately, they couldn't get the rights from Tolkien, because he didn't like the idea of a pop group doing his story," Jackson recalled. "So it got nixed by him. They tried to do it. There's no doubt about it. For a moment in time they were seriously contemplating doing that at the beginning of 1968."
Despite allegedly disapproving of a Beatles Lord of the Rings movie, Tolkien did still approve United Artists' acquisition of the rights, and the claims that the Boorman/Pallenberg treatment almost involved The Beatles anyway might suggest Tolkien didn't have as much veto power over the idea as Jackson claims. This was all so long ago that the exact details might not be fully remembered by all involved; McCartney acknowledged as such while talking with Jackson about it. However, even if Tolkien didn't directly cancel The Beatles' Lord of the Rings, the band breaking up certainly killed any chances of it happening.
Cinematically, it's probably for the best that Jackson's version, rather than The Beatles', ended up becoming the definitive live-action Tolkien adaptation. If even Kubrick thought The Lord of the Rings was impossible to properly adapt in the '60s, any attempt would likely have ended up something of a train wreck. Still, it's a shame we'll never get to hear what would certainly be one of the greatest movie soundtracks of all time.
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