Rospo Pallenberg

Rospo Pallenberg (b. 1939, Croydon, Surrey) is a British screenwriter. His father, Corrado Pallenberg (1912—1989), was a prominent physician and journalist who served as the Papacy medical adviser and later published Inside the Vatican bestseller. Rospo extensively collaborated with film director John Boorman, co-directing in 1977 and essentially re-writing the script (but only getting the 2nd Unit Director/Creative Associate credits), and co-writing a critically acclaimed Excalibur in 1981, for which they got Hugo Awards nomination. Pallenberg and Boorman had a massive fallout after The Emerald Forest adventure drama in 1985 since John insisted on casting his son, Charley Boorman, against Rospo's strong objections; they cut ties and never worked together again. His sole work as a director, a black comedy slasher Cutting Class in 1989, mostly gained negative reviews. Pallenberg worked on several notable scrapped film projects. In 1970, with John Boorman, he wrote a script that encapsulated Tolkien's Lord of The Rings trilogy in one feature-length movie. His screenwriting notably impressed film producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the original Planet of the Apes franchise creator and founder of APJAC Productions. In October 1972, soon after Jacobs secured the movie rights for Frank Herbert's Dune and announced the upcoming film adaptation, he sent the copy of Pallenberg's "Lord of the Rings" script to 20th Century Fox, suggesting him as the screenwriter and commending it as "an excellent job, on the whole, considering the enormous amount and complexity of the material they had to work with." In December 1972, Pallenberg delivered the Dune storyboard, followed by a 52-page story treatment in late January. Unimpressed, Jacobs fired Pallenberg. (APJAC subsequently invited Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Dalton Trumbo to write the script, but the project got scrapped after Arthur P. Jacobs died in June 1973 from a heart attack.) In the 1980s, Rospo Pallenberg prepared several drafts of Stephen King's The Stand screen adaptation for George A. Romero; the project never came to fruition, and King himself wrote the script for the subsequent TV mini-series directed by Mick Garris in 1994.