Paradise Lost

[Prometheus]

Is this even filmable? Oh boy...

[dwest]

I read this years ago and thought - great script. Can never be made. Certainly not at the budget listed (around 30 mill - I think). We'll see what happens. Shocked to see that one on the sales list.

[ComicBent]

Thirty years ago, in one of my previous careers as a graduate student and teacher, I read Paradise Lost. And I mean I read every word of it for understanding. I skipped a lot of reading assignments in my years of working on a Ph.D., but I was determined I was going to read that particular work.

You cannot film it and keep it "straight." You would have to be abstract or ironic or distance yourself from it (maybe in something like Brechtian epic theater, with the Verfremdungseffekt). But you cannot transfer that work to the screen in a faithful way. Even one of my professors (granted, he was a modernist and - gasp! - a liberal) was laughing at it one day at lunch, because of the episode where the satanic group of angels attacks the good angels with cannons.

[Jake Schuster]

My screenwriting partner covered that for a prodco which shall go unnamed here. We had long discussions as to whether this was even filmable. I'd read it in graduate school (along with "Paradise Regained") and actually loved great stretches of it. The character of Lucifer in the poem is astonishingly vivid.

[The Road Warrior]

Originally Posted by Prometheus

Is this even filmable? Oh boy...

Would you Adam and Eve it ?

That's cockney rhyming slang for believe it


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_rhyming_slang