Posted in: Comics, Movies | Tagged: Edgar Allan Poe, frank miller, graphic novel, sin city, sylvester stallone
Sylvester Stallone Has Written A “Gothic Comic”, Names Frank Miller
Sylvester Stallone has turned his Edgar Allan Poe script, 55 years in the making, into a gothic comic, talking Sin City and Frank Miller
Article Summary
- Sylvester Stallone is rewriting his long-gestating Edgar Allan Poe screenplay as a gothic comic book.
- The Poe project began in 1971, was rewritten for decades, and once drew interest from Robert Downey Jr.
- Stallone says changing audience tastes pushed him toward comics, with hopes of adapting it later into a film.
- He cited Frank Miller and Sin City as the model, seeking a creative partner for the new graphic novel.
Sylvester Stallone has had a script for a movie about Edgar Allan Poe that he wrote in 1971, and it has been in pre-production for 50 years, since he was writing and starring in Rocky. And now, with a film about the making of Rocky coming to cinemas, as well as his own biography of those days, he has revisited that script in the last two weeks. In light of the fact that it might no longer work for modern audiences, if they even know who Edgar Allan Poe was anymore, he has now rewritten it as a comic book. He wants to work with a partner, name-checking Frank Miller and Sin City, and see it published. And then maybe, get a movie out of it again.
In The Steps, Sylvester Stallone’s recently published account of the years leading up to Rocky, he says, “I became obsessed with Poe. I read everything he wrote. I became an unofficial Poe authority. I knew more about him than I knew about anything else on the planet.” Sylvester Stallone began work on a screenplay about the macabre poet and inventor of the modern detective story in the early 1970s, years before he locked himself in a room and banged out the first draft of Rocky in a legendary three-day writing sprint. A surviving draft dated March 1, 1979, shows how serious he was: he originally planned to star as Poe himself.
Costume tests were shot, and in 2017 he shared the sole surviving image from those sessions on Instagram, admitting he eventually realised he wasn’t right for the part. During production of Rocky V in 1990, Sylvester Stallone made a pilgrimage to the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia. He knocked on the locked door of one of the houses where Poe lived from 1838 to 1844, then toured the building and told the park ranger he had written a movie script about the author and was “just in awe” of him. Sylvester Stallone has described pitching the project to producer Avi Lerner with a memorable exchange: “I keep telling my producer Avi Lerner, ‘Make Edgar Allan Poe!’ He says, ‘Does he have a gun?’ ‘No, he doesn’t have a gun.’ ‘Can he throw a knife?’ I say, ‘No, he writes poetry!'”
Over the decades, he rewrote the script repeatedly, by his own count, at least 20 times. He later targetedRobert Downey Jr. for the lead. Robert Downey read the script, called it great, and confirmed he and Sylvester Stallone discussed it. Sylvester Stallone’s condition was that they wait until Robert Downey was “hot again” so the film could be made at a major studio rather than on the cheap. The timing never quite aligned. According to The Steps, the project even drew interest from directors including William Friedkin and Roman Polanski. Still, it never went into production. “What fascinates me about Poe is that he was such an iconoclast. It’s a story for every young man or woman who sees themselves as a bit outside the box, or has been ostracized during their life as an oddball or too eccentric. It didn’t work for him either. His work was too hip for the room, but he developed the modern mystery story. He was also one of the great cryptologists; there were very few codes he couldn’t crack. He was just an extraordinary guy.”
In 2019, Bleeding Cool reported his Instagram video, in which Sylvester Stallone flipped through pages of the old script and vowed to finish it. “It’s a never-ending journey, and I would hate myself if I don’t continue it at least to the best of my ability and try to see it, actually, come to fruition. To be able to go out there and say, ‘I accomplished it. It may have taken 45 years/50 years, but it’s done.’ Anyway. That’s what I’m working on. It’s been one of the great challenges of my life.”
And now he has found a new route. Talking to Marina Hyde on The Rest Is Entertainment, he says I can’t give it up. But, the culture has changed so much that I’m not sure that it would make a feature anymore. I don’t know if the audience… first of all, did they even know Poe and his works? So, I thought, you know, I got to rewrite it for a gothic comic. Take the comic, and if that
works, then you move it to, like, a Sin City. You get a guy, a partner like Frank Miller, and then see.” He confirmed it as a planned graphic novel, with the potential for a future film. “Yeah. See what I mean? Always changing the format. Yeah, you got to shape-shift.” Wouldn’t be the first…
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