THE Rolling Stones came close to starring in the movie adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, but their manager failed in his bid to secure the film rights from novelist ANTHONY BURGESS. Stanley Kubrick went on to make the cult film, starring Malcolm MCDowell, but music mogul Andrew Loog Oldham had hoped to turn the movie into a project for Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and Keith Richards. Oldham admits he was inspired to turn the Stones into movie stars after the Beatles' first films A Hard Day's Night and Help! were hits. The Stones' former svengali reveals, "In 1965, after the Beatles had succeeded with their films, I tried to buy A Clockwork Orange and various other things to get the Stones film made. "I couldn't get the rights to make A Clockwork Orange because Anthony Burgess thought that he had cancer and just wrote furiously and took money in from others." So, instead, enterprising Oldham decided to make a concert film, which has never been seen. He explains, "The only film that ever got made in that time was a documentary that I made, called Charlie Is My Darling "That was a practice. I just filmed four or five days of them on tour in Ireland, but the Rolling Stones film never really got made because everybody we met (in the movie business), if they were five years older, they were over the hill, and we just didn't trust ourselves with them." Oldham has now come full circle and has just completed a screenplay for a new biopic, based on his own memoirs, Stoned and 2Stoned.