[William Cloud Hicklin]

I wonder if Tolkien ever considered what a live action film might be like.

Tolkien's concern was not just limited to whethyer or not special effects and celluloid wizrdry could create the illusion of Middle-earth reality.

Here's what he wrote in "On Fairy-Stories:" However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas, yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.

Moreover, as we all know it is simply not possible to get the wealth and richness of the LR into even ten or twelve hours of screen-time. And even if that were piossible, one still couldn't tell the stroy in the gradually-unfolding manner Tolkien did; the early chapters *before* Bree are masterful, and one needs to get past the character of Bombadil himself to take another look, in those three chapters, at how deftly Tolkien step by step expand's Frodo's (and the reader's) perception of the world in both space and time.

Besides, as a practical matter all that f/x costs money, which means no film would ever be made except as a lowest-common-denominator mass blockbuster like Jackson's vulgar action flicks.