J. R. R. Tolkien the film, stage and merchandise rights of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976, the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" was released in 1978 as an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of "The Lord
U. S. R. Murty U. S. R. Murty Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty (as he prefers to write his name), is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. U. S. R. Murty received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, with a thesis on extremal graph theory; his advisor was C. R. Rao. Murty is well known for his work in matroid theory and graph theory, and mainly for being a co-author with J. A. Bondy of a textbook on graph theory. Murty has served as a managing editor and co-editor-in-chief