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Rick wrote:

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THE SCARAB--Forry mentioned this in "Things to Come" in 3 or 4 early issues. Supposedly it was to star Boris Karloff (as the Frankenstein Monster?) and Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. I seem to recall other names as well, maybe Peter Lorre. Probably it was all somebody's pipe dream but it seemed pretty exciting to me when I was a kid.

As I remember, the movie would also have featured Jack the Ripper and a couple of other monsters. I think (but this may only have been my inference) that it was about the Ripper vs. Sherlock Holmes. The last report was that the monster gimmick had been canceled and it would be produced as a straight horror movie, which was the last I ever heard of it. I wonder if it might have metamorphosed into A Study in Terror. Herman Cohen was the producer of that, and both he and Rathbone had done movies for American-International; maybe they hooked up through them. (Btw, in looking up some AI movies from that period, I see AI was just the distributor, not the producing company; I don't know now [although I may have once] whether they initiated the projects and put up the money for them or what.)

I'm sure the old FMs and Spacemens (spacemens?) whet our appetites for dozens if not hundreds of movies that were never to be. One I was particularly looking forward to was The Dreamers, scripted by Ray Bradbury from Roger Manvell's novel, about people who dream of the same creepy house. Bradbury wrote several other scripts from his own stories that never got made, including a remake of Fahrenheit 451 and three versions of The Martian Chronicles.

Another famous never-to-be movie, this one from the early 70s, was John Boorman's LOTR, which would have had Frodo shtupping the Lady Galadriel, among other curiosities; Filmfax did an article on this and other aborted productions of the trilogy, including one with the Beatles as the four hobbits. And speaking of Tolkien, the movies I'd have most liked to see made were War in Heaven and Many Dimensions, from novels by an acquaintance (though not exactly a friend) of Tolkien's, Charles Williams, about Satanists vs. the Holy Grail and atheists vs. the Stone of Solomon respectively. These two, and several Hammer-styled occult stories, were slated for filming in the 90s by a new production company in the UK--which, following the announcement of its production program, was never to be heard from again. In 2007 the producer of several sf movies announced his intention to film War in Heaven and two other Williams novels, plus Lewis's The Screwtape Letters; he's still talking about Screwtape, but "in God's timing and when it's right" (probably = can't get the money together).