Guardian reporter Sean Michaels has discovered a sort of epistolary parallel universe in which A Clockwork Orange is a late-'60s time capsule from hell: A recently unearthed letter from the period propositioned director John Schlesinger — presumably between his Oscar-winning films Darling and Midnight Cowboy — to helm the film with Mick Jagger in the lead. It gets better: The Beatles were reportedly interested in contributing songs. Alas, Schlesinger evidently had a problem with novelist Anthony Burgess's infamous ultraviolence; "the film's extreme delinquency wasn't 'the sort of subject I particularly want to tackle,' " the director told executive producer Si Litvinoff, thus opening the door for Stanley Kubrick's dystopic 1971 masterwork starring Malcolm McDowell. Michaels spends a few minutes fancying the alternate Jagger/Beatles version, but really, we'd rather not imagine this at all unless... no. Just no. Sorry we even brought it up. No. [The Guardian]