Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…
…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…
My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.
What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.
Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.
