I can pretend that Eriador is like the California of Middle-earth, and itâ€™s a nice active marginâ€”I will just ignore that my housemate, who unlike me has completed the Silmarillion slog, has disabused me of that notion. Iâ€™m good with the mountain ranges on the west coast of the map. Tolkien, where geology is concerned, is an excellent scholar of linguistics. The possibilities are fascinating and frightening.Īlex Acks is a geologist who thinks J.R. Uma would have definitely made a hotter Arwen or Galadriel. We might have had Brad Pitt for Aragorn and Steve Buscemi as Gollum. And the casting would have been so different! Samuel Jackson would make a great Uruk-hai chief, but Quentin would probably have made him Saruman. Of course, Quentin’s wiggerish devotion to African-American thuggery would probably have made his version of LOTR a lot more friendly to the Orc point of view. And I got Quentin ready to direct itâ€™,â€ Ken Kamins, a producer who worked for Weinstein on the project, told Ian Nathan, author of Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-Earth. Â€œHarvey was like, â€˜youâ€™re either doing this or youâ€™re not. This, Weinstein said, according to a new book on the film, was a â€œwasteâ€. Tarantino, known for his gratuitous, cartoonish violence and provocative scripts in films such as Django Unchained and Pulp Fiction, was the back-up Weinstein had in store after Lord of the Rings director delivered a two-film script to Weinstein costing $12 million in development. But the fantasy epic very nearly didn’t happen: if Harvey Weinstein had his way, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth would have been condensed into a snappy two-hour film, directed by none other than Quentin Tarantino. The gentle, meandering drama of the Lord of the Rings trilogy won Peter Jackson and his team 17 Oscars and a place in the cinematic pantheon. The Telegraph causes jaws to drop by telling us what might have been:

The lord of the rings ring melted