Sophia Stewart: Original Prophetic Author of "The Matrix"?

This is a mind-boggler of outrageously surreal proportions (via Jose): It appears that the Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and studio executives who created "The Matrix" movie trilogy knowingly lifted core story components — premises, characters, metaphysical concepts, aesthetic themes — from a 1981 illustrated manuscript entitled "The Third Eye" by Sophia Stewart [left].

From what I understand, here's how it went down: In 1986, the Wachowski brothers placed an ad in a national magazine, soliciting manuscripts for a sci-fi comic book. In response, Ms. Stewart submitted her dense avant-garde spiritual epic "The Third Eye", which she'd copyrighted in 1983 [below right]. After receiving her manuscript, the Wachowski brothers never got back in touch with Ms. Stewart.

Subsequently, Ms. Stewart's work served as a central basis for both "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" movies, which mesmerized hundreds of millions of film fans around the world and generated several billion dollars in ticket and merchandise sales. Just as significantly, "The Matrix" revolutionized the aesthetic and literary standards of action epics, inspiring a cult-like following and generating tomes of impassioned intellectual debate about its metaphysical and theological symbolism. The Wachowski brothers were universally heralded as geniuses.

Ms. Stewart never saw "The Terminator" and was unaware that her work was being used until she saw "The Matrix" in 1999, after which she filed a lawsuit against the Wachowskis, Joel Silver, and Warner Brothers. The lawsuit triggered an FBI investigation which allegedly found that "The Third Eye" was openly accessed and referenced in creative sessions during the making of "The Matrix" and "The Terminator" movies.  Apparently, witnesses came forward from within Warner Brothers, confirming that writers and lawyers at the studio were fully aware that they were working from material which they'd received no permission to use. Indeed, it appears that studio lawyers made a slew of last-minute changes to the movie, removing some 30 minutes of footage, for the specific purpose of disguising the film's relationship to "The Third Eye".

As tellingly as anything, the Wachowski brothers have always refused to conduct any public interviews about "The Matrix". In a fascinating interview on Playahata.com, Ms. Stewart explains:

This idea that they don’t do interviews is crazy. When have you ever heard of such a thing? This is one of the hottest movies of all time and they just don’t want to talk about it. They can’t talk about what they don’t understand, these high concepts that I have laid out, which came from years of study ... I can duplicate my Matrix concepts. The Wachowski brothers have no other bodies of work like The Matrix. They have Bound and some other assassin movie they did. I have been writing for a long time. I worked on Janet Jackson's first television feature scripts called My Special Love and Blue Short. I received my degree in journalism from City University of New York in 1979. I moved to California to study cinema at USC Film school, the same school that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg went to. I have studied writing under some of the most famous authors and writers in the world such as Max Segall, Emille Capouya, Paul Cherry, etc. To my knowledge the Wachowski brothers did not even go to film school.

Ms. Stewart continues:

The Terminator and The Matrix are actually one book. That’s my Third Eye manuscript ... Terminator starts from the front of my book. Matrix starts from the back ... The Third Eye is an epic, my book spans three time frames: the past, the present, and the future. Those films do the same thing. The child in the first Terminator who is born to the pregnant Sarah Connor grows up to be the same as the grown man character in The Matrix called Neo. It’s that chosen one, savior concept. Matrix starts in the future, when technology has taken over. The Terminator was sent to kill the child who was prophesized to destroy the machines. That intersects directly with Neo as being The One prophesized to bring the machine reign to an end. One critic who is unaware of my lawsuit called the movies cousins, but they are actually one and the same in the original.

And some further wild stuff from Underground News Network:

The Matrix in the Bible means the womb. When you say The Third Eye, it's the eye of God, the eye of Horus, and when you look into The Terminator, it's the end time revelation. The end, that's right; and The Matrix is the womb hidden in the womb, and you come out of the womb into consciousness, truth ... Nebukadnezar is in the book of Daniel. Revelations is Daniel also, it's the last book of Revelation, but the book of Daniel also speaks of end times. Now when they were looking at my work, they were getting certain references, and the only thing they could figure out, 'Well, let's deal with the book of Daniel', because they can understand that a little bit more than the last book, which is Revelations, they can't understand most of the symbolism which is so much deeper than the book of Daniel ... so they understand a little bit, but they didn't understand enough.

Listen to Sophia Stewart being interviewed by Da Ghetto Tymz [.wav].

UPDATE / CORRECTION (23-May-2005 20:12EDT): Turns out I got the timeline a bit twisted up in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of my post. As best I can tell, here's how it went...

1979: Stewart begins work on "The Third Eye" while studying at USC film school. She fashions the work as a science fiction rendering of the Book of Revelations.

1981: Stewart submits a treatment for "The Third Eye" to Warner Brothers.

1983: Stewart completes "The Third Eye" (including graphic illustrations, character analysis, special effects, synopsis, and detailed screen treatment) and files a federal copyright to protect the finished work. She submits her manuscript to Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox.

1984: "The Terminator" is released by Orion Pictures, which was formed in 1978 as a joint venture between Warner Brothers and three former top-level executives of United Artists.

1986: Stewart submits her manuscript to the Wachowskis in response to a magazine ad.

1999: "The Matrix" is released by Warner Brothers.

UPDATE 2 (2006-09-25 01:38EST): From Snopes.com:

Stewart's case was dismissed in June 2005 when she failed to show up for a preliminary hearing of her case. In a 53-page ruling, Judge Margaret Morrow of the Central District Court of California dismissed the suit, saying Stewart and her attorneys had not entered any evidence to bolster its key claims or demonstrated any striking similarity between her work and the accused directors' films. As of this writing, Stewart's case is no longer before the courts. She has announced that she does not plan to let the matter drop, so possibly this case will someday be re-filed and heard, but for now it is over.

Sophia Stewart's Wikipedia page (which didn't exist at the time I originally posted this piece) adds:

Stewart is not the first person to make a claim that the Terminator films lifted their material from other sources: shortly after the release of the first Terminator film, the author Harlan Ellison sued Terminator director and producer James Cameron due to the alleged similarity between the plot of the film and two scripts that Ellison had written for the TV show The Outer Limits. Ellison and Cameron settled out of court, and the video release of the first film now contains a credit to Ellison in the closing credits. Perhaps relevantly, both of the Outer Limits scripts in question ("Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand") were written between 1963 and 1965.

Equally there are numerous other claims surrounding what inspired the Matrix, including Grant Morrison's claims that it was all lifted from his comic book series The Invisibles. In an interview [7] he has stated "The truth of that one is that design staff on The Matrix were given Invisibles collections and told to make the movie look like my books... It's not some baffling 'coincidence' that so much of The Matrix is plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image, lifted from Invisibles so there shouldn't be much controversy. The Wachowskis nicked The Invisibles and everyone in the know is well aware of this fact but of course they're unlikely to come out and say it."

All of which demonstrates how difficult it is pinning down one specific work of fiction as an inspiration for another.

For me, the most convincing evidence that the Wachoskis lifted Ms. Stewart's work lies in the intellectual content of her spoken words in contrast with the Wachowski brothers' apparent silence on the matter. Stewart demonstrates a clear, fluent grasp of the high metaphysical concepts that made The Matrix such a compelling piece of avant-garde film-making. My impression is the Wachowski brothers are brilliant action directors and visual stylists, but not authors of original prophetic symbolism.

Comments

[Hanna]

Woman deserves a whole lota money. I hope she gets what's hers and so do those rip-off artists.

I'd hate to go without saying how typical this is.

Love,

Hanna

[Kai]

Hanna,

Can you believe this bullshit?! You're right, this kind of thing is typical -- forget Elvis, see my essay on A Lion's Trail -- but still, the brazenness of this particular story, the ability in this day and age of some white dudes in corporate office suites to casually steal copyrighted literary material and make a zillion dollars from it, floored me.

Peace & Light,
Kai

[nezua limón xolografik-jonez]

oh man. that's infuriating. i'm going to credit her from now on. seems fair. at least until these highNmighty fellas see fit to "talk about" their "creation" and dispel my doubt.