John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely revered as one of the greatest masterpieces of English poetry, Milton’s Satan one of the greatest characters in all of literature and mythology. Yet no one in the century-plus history of cinema has been able to bring Milton’s sublime vision to the silver screen. While there have been many visual and verbal allusions to Paradise Lost and its critical reception in a myriad of movies,1 Milton’s epic poem itself has never made it to theaters. Over the past decade or so, however, filmmakers have come as close as ever to translating Paradise Lost to the big screen, but the endeavor ultimately failed, and the rise and fall of the production made for a devil of a decade.
I first heard about the Paradise Lost film back in a March 4, 2007 New York Times article by one Michael Joseph Gross, “It’s God vs. Satan. But What About the Nudity?” I was an undergraduate student, taking a “Bible and Later Literature” class, which was the first time Milton’s Paradise Lost was assigned reading in my college career. My Miltonist Professor—who was both impressed by my knowledge of the Bible and the Miltonic-Romantic tradition and horrified by my fervent insistence on the tyrannical nature of the Judeo-Christian-Miltonic God and my promotion of the Romantic reading of Milton’s Satan as hero—had rather low expectations about the prospect of a Paradise Lost film, but I was overall optimistic. After all, what could be a more glaring example of the fallen archangel’s current cultural ascension than Milton’s sympathetic Satan as the star of a blockbuster film?
Gross’s article revealed that a spec script for Paradise Lost had been pitched to big-time Hollywood executives back in 2004 by two novices by the names of Philip de Blasi and Byron Willinger, the writers explaining that the reception they received was less than enthusiastic, to say the least. Yet their own enthusiasm for the ambitious aim was less than stellar, Willinger remarking matter-of-factly, “We figured someone’s going to make a movie of it someday, and it might as well be us…” It’s certainly not what you’d expect someone taking on the monumental responsibility of at long last bringing Milton’s magnum opus to the screen to say.
Nevertheless, in 2006 the de Blasi/ Willinger script for Paradise Lost was purchased by independent film producer Vincent Newman, who, according to the article, had been fascinated with the story of the War in Heaven since he stumbled upon the biblical Book of Revelation amidst the boredom of Sunday school. Newman was captivated by Revelation’s story of the celestial battle between Michael and “the great dragon…, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9), and Milton had given this war to start all wars its most magnificent poetic treatment. With a Paradise Lost film project now in his hands, Newman successfully enlisted the co-financing help of Legendary Pictures, whose chairman and chief executive, Thomas Tull, wryly remarked that his initial response to the project was, “that’s going to make a lot of older folks relive bad college experiences.” Tull came to realize, however, that “if you get past the Milton of it all, and think about the greatest war that’s ever been fought, the story itself is pretty compelling…”
Getting past the Milton of it all is a very suspect sentiment, but Newman was on the same page as Tull, requesting alterations to the original screenplay, which was apparently a bit too faithful to Milton’s text for his taste. Newman believed a Paradise Lost film should have “less Adam and Eve and more about what’s happening with the archangels,” not only because the revolt of the angels and their fall from Heaven, along with their vengeful rise from damnation in Hell, is more exciting material (and would make for a promising SFX-heavy $100-million action epic), but because “In Eden there’s the nudity problem,…which would be a big problem for a big studio movie.” Despite the many challenges and potential pitfalls, Newman was enthusiastic: “This could be like The Lord of the Rings, or bigger…” Gross was right to point out in his article that it would seem Newman’s “passion is more for the idea of the poem than for the poem itself,” even if “he speaks of the project with unflagging enthusiasm…”
Newman plainly explained that Paradise Lost would be “a war movie at the end of the day,” while also emphasizing that his aim was for the angelic war film to be “made with total adherence and respect to any of the three religions’ involvement in the story of God, the Devil and the archangels…” Reshaping Paradise Lost so as to make it more of a universal story for a broader audience would inevitably involve alterations to Milton’s unequivocally and unapologetically Christian story. Yet while Newman maintained that the film was not “a Christian endeavor or Christian movie,” Stuart Hazeldine, who in 2006 penned the second draft of the Paradise Lost screenplay (which would undergo additional revisions by Lawrence Kasdan and Ryan Condal), was hopeful that his treatment would prove to be pleasing to Christian crowds: “I’m adapting Milton, and then Milton’s kind of adapting Genesis, and I wanted to make sure that for the faith audience, I guess, that they will see it more as The Passion of the Christ than The Last Temptation of Christ…” This is to say, essentially, that the Paradise Lost film should not simply be an epic fantasy action movie, but also a religious film insofar as it invests the faithful in the theological sentiments beneath the spectacle—which could prove disastrous for the film’s presentation of Milton’s Satan.
Gross acutely observed in his “It’s God vs. Satan” article that Paradise Lost may have more than a nudity problem; the film may have a Satanic problem: “The depiction of Satan may be a polarizing one among scholars. Some, in line with Romantic poets like William Blake, will want the dark prince to be the hero; others won’t be happy unless Satan is a self-deceiving hypocrite, and the story an education in virtue and obedience.” That I would prefer the former depiction (which would be my Passion of the Christ) hardly needs to be noted, but I would be open to a film version of Paradise Lost which, like the poem itself, was fundamentally ambiguous in its presentation, allowing for radically different interpretations. Yet with the anxiety over appeasing rather than potentially offending “the faith audience,” there was room for doubt that this would be the Paradise Lost the filmmakers would bring to the big screen. What’s more, Scott Derrickson, the man highlighted as the likely director for the film, was a fervent Christian. Hazeldine explained that the endeavor of a Paradise Lost film would ultimately prove “a challenge for people like Scott and I, who have a faith, but we just love movies…We often find that we are wondering, are we too worldly for the church and too churchy for the world?”
To be fair to Derrickson, his 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose did present the kind of ambiguity a Paradise Lost film could benefit from. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is at its core a courtroom drama, centering on the death of the titular young lady, which occurred during a prolonged exorcism conducted by the priest on trial in the film. The audience is repeatedly shown two versions of the same flashback events—one from a religious or supernatural perspective and another from a scientific perspective—leaving much open to interpretation. This sort of openness did appear to be at the heart of Derrickson’s vision of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, as he voiced in an MTVNews interview back in July 2008:
What’s interesting to me is that you cannot help but feel that his initial feelings of being disgruntled are merited, and I feel a lot of empathy for the Lucifer character in the beginning of the story…I would want the audience to be sympathetic with him at the beginning, and what happens — what he’s up against and what he’s wrestling and struggling with — you certainly feel that.
Derrickson added that Paradise Lost “would not be an easy movie to make, but it would be groundbreaking…It’s really worthy of the attempt.” Indeed, but the attempt would not ultimately rest with Derrickson.
Notes
1. See Eric C. Brown, Milton on Film (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015).↩