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Kingdom of Heaven and . . . Warriors of God

Given that he’s a historian, it’s no surprise that James Reston Jr. is a stickler for dates. At the moment, the date he’s concerned with is not October 2, 1187, the day Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders, an event highlighted in his 2001 book Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. Rather, it’s November 27, 2001, the day he and producer Mike Medavoy signed a contract to make a film version of his book.

The film was never made. Instead, director Ridley Scott and Twentieth Century Fox studios made Kingdom of Heaven. After reading a draft of the script, he decided to sue.

But can history be copyrighted? Talking over the phone from his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Reston explains his case. "The point of this is, they wouldn’t have a film but for my book. You have to start with what they call a high concept. And for years and years, people in Hollywood have been trying to focus on the Crusades and figure out how to make a movie, but they could never get the concept."

Reston insists he had nailed that concept seven years ago. "Warriors of God was begun in 1998. It has become my signature in these historical projects that I take a novelistic approach to history, where characters, scene, and setting are very important. But it also has an important element of relevance to the current day, and I began in 1998 with the Third Crusade, which would be quite relevant to the Arab-Israeli situation. I started with the story of these fabulous characters of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart and proceeded to the Library of Congress for a couple of years and wrote this book, and it came out in May of 2001 and had a decent response from the reviewers and was selling nicely and all of that.

"And then came September 11, 2001, and you may remember on September 16, Dubya declared that we were going on a Crusade, something he’s been trying to live down ever since. And so the American people were desperate, in the wake of September 11, to read about Arab history, about Islam, and about the clash of civilizations between Europe and the Middle East, between Islam and Christianity, the Western Crusades versus the Western jihads. And there was this book, right in the middle of it, so it was kind of bizarre serendipity from my standpoint, and the book just went through the roof.

"Then in November of 2001, Mike Medavoy purchased the film rights to Warriors of God. Two weeks later, Medavoy, having heard through the Hollywood grapevine that Ridley Scott was interested in some sort of Crusade film, wrote him a letter in which he says, ‘I’ve got the rights to this book, let me send it to you, let’s go into business together.’ That’s in effect what the letter says. Several months later, Scott wrote back and said, no, we want to do our own project.

"What we now know is that in this period, when Mike Medavoy concentrates Scott’s mind on Warriors of God, his people come up with this high concept of doing this film on the Third Crusade, and it’s based on the first 100 pages of Warriors of God. It has as its main character Balian of Ibelin, and of those first 100 pages of Warriors of God, 10 focus on Balian. The three or four most important scenes of Kingdom of Heaven are taken directly from scenes in Warriors of God, and then, as a sort of in-your-face flaunting of the whole thing, they called their movie Kingdom of Heaven, which is the title of the second chapter of my book."

Very unchivalric. And the studio’s response to these charges? "Twentieth Century Fox believes the claims to be totally without merit."

We’ll see. Meanwhile, Reston fears the film will botch an opportunity to tell a terrific and instructive story. "One of the disappointments is that this is a magnificent story of history and it’s magnificently relevant to the current situation, and they’ve taken it and screwed it all up. They’ve done the Hollywood, typical things, try to make a love story out of this, a blacksmith and a princess, which is what they always do."

Reston suspects the film version will fudge or ignore all the elements of the book that illuminate our current historical situation. "There are a lot of lessons that come out of the Third Crusade that have been ignored by Bush, for example. One of the ironies of this is that the New York Times reported on January 9, 2002, that Karl Rove was suggesting that Bush read this book so he could understand what he was starting to get himself into. I don’t know whether he read it or not, I don’t know what Bush reads, but he certainly didn’t glean any wisdom from it."

Unlike, or so Reston claims, the makers of Kingdom of Heaven.

— PK