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"So many of these things in the films we friends of Tolkien's writing have a great dislike on - like Aragorn falling the cliff, or Denethor's one-dimensionality, or "freshing up" the dwarves - are due to the fact that they have to sell the films to people who don't know the story already."
Yes, but....
It's not as if substituting bad story-telling for good helps to "sell" the tale to non-geeks, is it? Aragorn-off-the-cliff and Brego the Wonder Horse are just cheesy, regardless of 'canonicity'; and film-Denethor is simply a bad, cardboard character, and there was certainly no need (I don't think) to replace Tolkien's finely-drawn and subtle portrait with a cartoon villain on the grounds that non-geeks somehow couldn't deal with the original... unless one is taking the position that non-geeks were raised on a steady diet of lead paint chips.
I seem to recall that the original story did OK with a mass audience.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it.
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