Thanks, onthetrail! It appears the Marquette copy (which has 176 pages per Croft) is the same as the "12/14/70" one (which has 176 pages too).

zionius wrote:

Thanks, onthetrail! It appears the Marquette copy (which has 176 pages per Croft) is the same as the "12/14/70" one (which has 176 pages too).

Thanks for that zionius. I will ask Bill at Marquette if he can check to confirm they are one and the same so I can then find out exactly what the versions are from the Boorman archive. There are some markings which will help with that but its a task for another day (or month).

Exciting ! Thank you for sharing, Urulókë

This is very cool.

He was so….intent making LotR that you could see elements of that; IF you watch Excalibur with that in mind.

Example: one of the filming locations was SUPPOSED to be Rivendell, and the sword itself was intended to be Anduril, I believe.

What I mean is, the movie Excalibur offers a very good aesthetic as to how his potential LotR movie COULD HAVE… well, ‘looked.’ Some of the props, filming locations, lighting….that sort of thing.

I found some neat info about Excalibur (some of which ties-in to him wanting to make LotR) here if anyone’s interested, to close my comment: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082348/trivia/

On the subject of Father Maguire, I've been in touch with the archivist at the Reading University Chaplaincy for a few weeks now, and they will hopefully have time to dig through their boxes of material from the 1970 timeframe in the coming months. They aren't well structured 😅.

For the movie scripts - the copy that I have is the same as the Marquette copy. I do not yet know if it is one of the four on file at IU, but will be able to confirm further details in a few weeks. It is quite possible that all four copies at IU are identical, or are the same script but with different annotations... it just takes time for the archive team to be able to process materials and answer questions. More soon!

John Boorman is a great mind of fantasy and Excalibur remains an enduring and seminal piece of fantasy. There’s something ethereal and unhinged about his work. It’s a great shame this project didn’t come to fruition. I’m sure his work would have been far more interesting than what we got with the Peter Jackson films. Howard Shore’s excellent score aside.

Urulókë wrote:

On the subject of Father Maguire, I've been in touch with the archivist at the Reading University Chaplaincy for a few weeks now, and they will hopefully have time to dig through their boxes of material from the 1970 timeframe in the coming months. They aren't well structured 😅.

Thanks for your work on this Urulókë! Please do let us know if you hear back with any update from the Reading Chaplaincy.

For those who may be interested in more about Fr. Maguire and his connection to John Boorman and Tolkien, I have written a blog post (link below) summarizing what I was able to find. The post also includes some photos of Maguire’s books. Feel free to PM me if you want photos of copyright pages or anything else as those are not pictured.

https://thoughtsontolkien.wordpress.co ... le-fr-john-maguire-s-d-b/

TL;DR version is that Boorman was once Maguire’s student and they became friends that way. I wasn’t able to find info on how Maguire knew Tolkien, but I speculate in the post that it probably happened during the years Maguire was stationed in Oxford.