So Bakshi went straight across the hall to MGM to try to persuade Melnick. So I’ll give you the rights, and if you can get our money back, you can make the picture any way you want.’ True story.” What we want is our $3 million back for the screenplay that we paid Boorman. Three pictures.’ He said, ‘We don’t want the picture. What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to animate it. I went to see Mike in his office and he says, ‘Look, I’ve got this script and I don’t understand it. In the main building on one side of the building was MGM - which Dan Melnick ran in those days - and on the other side was Mike Medavoy at UA. “So I call up Mike Medavoy and I go to United Artists, which in those days were on the same lot as MGM. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t I go make the film?’ recalls Bakshi. As Bakshi’s animation studio was finishing the film, he learned that Mike Medavoy, who was running United Artists at the time, had put Boorman’s adaptation into turnaround. The $1.3 million-budgeted, politically pointed Wizards incorporates a number of Tolkienesque characters in its postapocalyptic setting, from fairies, elves and dwarves to the titular characters themselves (battling brothers Blackwolf and Avatar).
That kick eventually had me make the picture Wizards.” “There was a very big fantasy kick going on in the underground and in popular culture.
Howard’s Conan the Barbarian pulp novels in the ’50s. “As far as realistic adult fantasy, Tolkien certainly was the best I’d ever read,” says Bakshi, who regularly consumed sci-fi and fantasy like Robert E. Graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives” was not an uncommon sight on college campus walls, and by the early ’70s, Hollywood had started to clue in to its box-office potential. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books grew exponentially in popularity and were initially perceived as “an underground smash hit, especially with artists and cartoonists,” Bakshi says. … You can’t squeeze those three books into one picture unless you’re making a Roger Corman film.”ĭuring the ’60s, J.R.R. For a Tolkien fan, I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d heard in my fuckin’ life. “But they were going to condense three books into one picture and add extra characters to make it work. “I’m sitting in my office and I read that United Artists was going to make Lord of the Rings as a live-action picture written and directed by John Boorman,” says the now-80-year-old animation director, whose success with adult-oriented cult favorites Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic paved the way for him to make Wizards at the time (the film was released in 1977). 15, 1978, these are some of the things on director Ralph Bakshi’s mind during a candid conversation about what happened, and what could have been. Forty years after his animated classic The Lord of the Rings hit theaters Nov. Battles on the field and behind the scenes before a three-film saga went bust.