Beatles Lord of the Rings Movie

It may be well known to the rest of you, but I had never heard that the Beatles wanted to make Lord of the Rings into a movie in 1968. There doesn't seem to be much information on it, but Peter Jackson did speak with Paul about it years later. I learned this from Holly Ordway's Tolkien's Modern Reading, which I am not currently recommending.  It has information that I want to have, so I press on, but the book spends so much time being ultraprecise about what is and is not known about his reading that it is not that interesting to read.  If you like more stories about how Humphrey Carpenter screwed up everything with his Tolkien biography and Inklings book, however, this volume has got plenty.  Carpenter didn't like Oxford, didn't like Christians, and didn't like fantasy literature, so one could see how this might be an obstacle to fully getting things interpreted correctly. Ordway does explode the myth - encouraged as much by Tolkien and his friends as by Carpenter - that he only read or cared about Medieval literature and Norse legends. 

But the movie. There are several brief accounts based on the slight data, but the important bits are that the Beatles wanted to do the soundtrack as well as act in the movie, with Paul and Ringo as Frodo and Sam, George as Gandalf, and John as Gollum; they wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct it, but he turned it down as "unfilmable," which in the context of what special effects could be managed in the late 60's, I think was an accurate assessment. An Apple producer sent them copies while they were in India, leading to the rumor that the Maharishi was a Hobbit fan and had given them each a copy. Why people did not see that as immediately unlikely I don't know, but we were willing to believe a lot of mystical things in those days.

It was Tolkien himself who squashed it for good. There is speculation why he did not want to sign off on it, much of it plausible, but I can't find any record of what he actually said about it. He was capable of just saying no to things without further explanation, especially public explanation. The many news stories I read about the project were brief, and padded, including the one from the BBC, who one thinks might have done better. There was a fair bit of writing that the idea was "intriguing" and "fascinating."  I suppose if you are writing for pop culture fans you can't just say "This is monstrous," but it does grate to read such things. I might grant that Ringo could have been a recognisable Sam, and they might have hit it right on a very few of the songs, such as Bombadil's, but the sustained seriousness would have been well beyond them.  They were good at being funny, even off the cuff, but Mordor requires more.