Textured black card wrappers with die-cut title window, bound internally with two clasps176pp [1] 1pp printer information on Croxley Script watermarked paper. Some pencil annotation. John Boorman's one-film script of The Lord of the Rings has become the stuff of legend and ignominy for Tolkien cognoscenti. The script condenses Tolkien's trilogy into less than three hours of screentime and was to be filmed in Ireland and Spain. Boorman called upon aspiring scriptwriter Rospo Pallenberg, to spend six months at his house in Ireland writing and developing the script. As Boorman himself stated to United Artists executives: ‘it has been necessary to make many omissions, and to eliminate several characters. Often we have telescoped many incidents into a single scene. We have tried to capture the spirit rather than the letter of the book’. Page 34 describes Sauron as ‘a character who is a combination of Mick Jagger and Punch’ and at the Council of Elrond, Boorman creates a play scene in which Sauron is represented ‘dressed in white, in a strange robe of pleats, and whenever the pleats splay open, dark garish colours burst forth. A harsh musical beat accompanies this character. He struts menacingly around the table, the others retreat in front of him’ – he even has his own song, performed in chorus. However, with the poor performance of Boorman’s 1970 film Leo the Last as well as other British produce films financed by them, United Artists decided in November 1970 not to proceed with film. Original copies that are known: one copy at Marquette University’s Tolkien collection; four copies among John Boorman’s papers at Indiana University’s Lilly Library.