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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
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.
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Still, he sold the rights so he must have considered it. Even if he thought it unfilmable then that indicates he thought about this.
I saw the writer of
Life Of Pi on TV the other night stating that he thought the novel was unfilmable - and as we now know, it was.
I'm struggling to think of any writers who have refused to sell film/TV rights to their work.
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Originally Posted by Ardent
There were plenty of live action Epics around in Tolkien's time. Gone with the Wind in 1939 and The Ten Commandments was released in 1956, the year after Return of the King was published. So there were studios with the resources to produce films of the scale required for LotR but I doubt he'd have been very impressed with the special effects. The face of Moses on The Mountain in DeMilles' film is hardly up to portraying the light actually coming from the person; when it is lit at all it's obviously from an outside source. That would miss the point that JRR wants to make in the transformation of Gandalf and Galadriel revealing an inner, otherwise veiled nature.
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I'm probably committing a mortal sin now, but to my taste, a De Mille film of Tolkien's work would have been as bad as a classic Disney style one. Tolkien will no doubt have seen some of these famous epic films (I think it's likely that
everyone saw Gone With The Wind), but where they differ from Jackson is that they were exactly that - epics. One thing I can say for Jackson is that he has a lot of levity and his light heartedness saves the films from being pompous epics (*cough* Braveheart *cough*).