Where's Our Beatles 'Lord Of The Rings' Documentary, Peter Jackson?
Look, Sir Peter Jackson, we get it. You're clearly tired of doing any more The Lord of The Rings stuff -- and made The Hobbit movies in a way so that no one would ever ask you to. But c'mon, you'll always be known as the premier expert on Tolkien film adaptations. So when you hear Peter Jackson and The Beatles in the same sentence, this teaser is not what springs to mind:
Like a retired dad who's really gotten into working on vintage cars, Peter Jackson seems to have entered his cinematic phase where he's just restoring old documentary footage for funsies. And in further dad fashion, after making a World War I documentary with it, he moved on to rambling about The Beatles. The Beatles: Get Back (intended to be released at the bicentennial anniversary of the Fab Four's final rooftop concert -- but then COVID happened) had Jackson peruse 54 hours of unused footage and 140 hours of thick Liverpudlian audio from The Beatles' original documentary, Let It Be. But while that 1970 movie painted the bandmates as friendless foes, Jackson aims to set the record straight by showing how the footage can as easily highlight their enduring loyalty and friendship.
But you know which other project of The Beatles about loyalty and friendship Peter Jackson would've been perfect to document? The time they all tried to make a The Lord of The Rings musical epic together. As we've talked about before, the bandmates were all huge fans of J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lennon had hoped to buy the rights to the trilogy so Paul could cast himself as Frodo, Ringo as Samwise, George as Gandalf, and John as Gollum.
Sadly, their plans never got off the ground when Tolkien refused to grant them the rights, probably because he blamed The Beatles for ruining his peace and quiet. Writing to one of his friends, Tolkien fumed: "In a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable."
Who better to direct that story than Peter Jackson himself? Or even better, since he now has access to both properties, Jackson could've just remade LoTR with The Beatles! With all that footage and today's tech, surely it wouldn't have been too hard to de-age Ringo and McCartney and pull a Tupac Shakur on Lennon and Harrison.
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