Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Christopher Hampton Adapting Charles King Book ‘Every Valley’ On Origins Of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ For Walden Media

EXCLUSIVE: Walden Media has hired Oscar, BAFTA and Tony Award-winning screenwriter and playwright Christopher Hampton to adapt Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, the critically acclaimed book by award-winning historian and bestselling author Charles King, for a film that the indie studio will produce and finance.

Published in 2024, Every Valley uncovers the story behind one of the world’s most beloved musical works, George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. More than a simple origin story, Every Valley reveals the turbulent, gripping world in which Handel’s Messiah was born, an era rife with war, political strife, and personal suffering. With cinematic scope, the book traces the lives of a diverse cast of real historical figures, each of whom contributed to the creation of a transcendent musical masterpiece that continues to inspire hope centuries later.

Considered the greatest piece of participatory art ever created, Handel’s Messiah continues to be performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras worldwide.

“Handel’s journey through immense struggle and personal transformation to create one of the most beloved and enduring pieces of music is an epic befitting the movie screen, and we could think of no better writer than Christopher Hampton to adapt Charles King’s book with the depth, beauty, and scale it deserves,” Walden Media’s President of Film and Television Benjamin Tappan told us.

Frank Smith, Tappan and Cher Hawrysh will produce Every Valley for Walden Media, along with Dan Lupovitz and Peter Touche.

A British writer and director known for his work on films like Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement, Hampton won his first Oscar for the former and nabbed a second statue in 2021 for his script to Florian Zeller’s The Father, before reteaming with the filmmaker on his 2022 drama The Son. Hampton has also won two Tony Awards for the book and musical score of Sunset Boulevard. He is repped by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates and CAA.

Every Valley author King is also behind the New York Times-bestselling Gods of the Upper Air, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award. His other notable works include Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award, and Midnight at the Pera Palace, a chronicle of modern Istanbul.

Walden Media is currently in the awards conversation with Nuremberg, a historical thriller from director James Vanderbilt that stars Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Leo Woodall, and Michael Shannon. The film currently has a 96% fresh audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics on November 7. Currently, the company is in post on the Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Spy, starring Crowe and Harry Lawtey, which adapts the book by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Hoffman.