Hard as it is to imagine the phrases “Dark Lord” and “lasciviously dancing” in the same sentence, in another world (or Middle-earth), Sauron might’ve been a Mick Jagger type. In his thrall, the “femme fatale” wizard Saruman would’ve initiated a seduction...of Gandalf, to be precise.
This was director John Boorman’s vision for his three-hour-long The Lord of the Rings movie. Yes, singular. Around 1970, United Artists — which owned the film rights to J R R Tolkien’s trilogy — asked him to helm an adaptation. Over six months, he and Italian architect Rospo Pallenberg, who was looking to break into the movies, drafted a map of Middle Earth and in-depth character analyses, broke down scenes, and devised solutions to special-effects problems in a pre-CGI world. (To miniaturize the Hobbits, they figured, they’d cast 10-year-olds, give them facial hair and get adult men to dub over their voices.)
