THE EMPIRE MASTERPIECE
Excalibur
JOHN BOORMAN’S MAGICAL KING ARTHUR CLASSIC
WORDS KIM NEWMAN
JOHN BOORMAN HAD been thinking about the ‘Matter Of Britain’ for a long time. In 1966, he wrote and directed an episode of the BBC’s Sunday Night (“the weekly feature series on artists and the arts”) called ‘The Quarry’, subtitled ‘Portrait Of A Man As A Paralysed Artist’. Its hero is a sculptor called Arthur King and the setting is Glastonbury. Boorman also worked on a script based on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (with elements of T.H. White’s The Once And Future King tipped in) in the late 1960s, but was distracted by a related project — a never-filmed version of The Lord Of The Rings.
Boorman’s Arthurian movie, called ‘Merlin’ while in development, was back-burnered until Star Wars suggested a mass appetite for wizards, swords, quests, and heroes who discover they’re destined to be kings. The film industry took a punt that heroic fantasy would be the defining pop genre of the Dungeons-&-Dragons-playing 1980s. Conan The Barbarian, another long-in-the-works property, was finally greenlit; majors backed Clash Of The Titans, Dragonslayer and Krull; and quickies like Hawk The Slayer, The Sword And The Sorcerer and The Beastmaster rushed to screens.