John Boorman’s the Lord of the Rings: A Case Study of an Unmade Film

In 1970, United Artists (UA) announced that John Boorman was to develop a film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Boorman collaborated on the screenplay adaptation throughout the first half of 1970 with Rospo Pallenberg, as well as hiring a small team of designers and production managers to assist in the development of a provisional budget. However, archival documentation makes it clear that UA never committed to a production of the project, only an exploratory adaptation. This article uses the John Boorman papers, housed in Indiana University’s Lilly Library, to demonstrate how Boorman’s work on adapting The Lord of the Rings is an instrumental case study on the wider film industrial process of unproduction, in which projects are more typically financed for development rather than production. It concludes that greater archival research is required in order to reframe scholarly understanding of the industrial processes of Hollywood and other film industries in order to raise questions about why so few film projects ever enter active production.