4 Times ‘East of Eden’ Was Adapted for Screen & 3 Adaptations That Never Arrived

Netflix is giving high-school English students another chance to not read a classic of American literature on Thursday, October 1, as the streaming service presents a seven-part adaptation of East of Eden.

And this latest version, executive produced by Zoe Kazan and starring Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, and Hoon Lee, has a connection to the very first: Zoe’s grandfather Elia Kazan directed 1955’s big-screen East of Eden.

Netflix’s new miniseries also follows a 1981 TV production based on Steinbeck’s novel, a 2012 spoof of same, and at least three adaptation attempts that didn’t pan out. Read about them all below.

East of Eden (1955)

Elia Kazan, who directed the Steinbeck-penned 1952 film Viva Zapata!, optioned East of Eden after reading an advance copy, and screenwriter Paul Osborn crafted a script. The resulting film stars Julie Harris as Abra, James Dean as Cal Trask, Richard Davalos as Aron Trask, and Raymond Massey as Adam Trask, while Jo Van Fleet won a supporting-actress Oscar for her role as Kate.

The film also has Steinbeck’s stamp of approval. “I more than like it,” the novelist once said, as literature professor Joseph R. Millichap recounted in Steinbeck and Film. “I am more than glad that my book has contributed, among all the other contributions, to what is probably the best motion pictures I have ever seen.”

Contemporaneous critics, however, shared mixed opinions. The Hollywood Reporter’s Jack Moffitt pointed out that only a quarter of Steinbeck’s story had made it to screen and bemoaned the short shrift given to important characters.

The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther praised Dean’s “live wire” performance and Kazan’s stylistic direction but said “the style and studied images veneer an essentially barren story and empty characters,” one in which “pictorial flesh is impressive but the dramatic skeleton is weak.”

East of Eden (1981)

In 1981, ABC presented a three-part East of Eden miniseries, adapted by Dynasty co-creator Richard Alan Shapiro and directed by Shoot filmmaker Harvey Hart. The TV production rewound the clock farther in time than the 1955 film did, starting with Cyrus Trask (Warren Oates) in his post-Civil War life before shifting focus to Cathy Ames — played by Jane Seymour in a Golden Globe-winning performance — and her meddling with Cyrus’ sons, Adam (Timothy Bottoms) and Charles (Bruce Boxleitner).

The miniseries was a hit for ABC — its second part was the second-most watched program that week — but again had viewers divided. “The production is riddled with weak spots and irritating flaws,” The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor said, “but that ambitious, sometimes overinflated narrative holds together remarkably well, often powerfully.”

For Millichap, the miniseries hewed too closely to Steinbeck’s work, exposing the incoherencies of the novel by recreating almost all the Trask family narrative and much of the Hamilton family saga, too. “Moreover, television’s interest in the work seems almost prurient, occasioned by the contemporary penchant for a steamy family saga printed in soap-opera style,” Millichap wrote.

Ron Howard’s East of Eden

In 2004, Ron Howard circled an East of Eden film project as the director’s Imagine Entertainment teamed up with Universal Pictures to strike a deal with Steinbeck’s estate for a new adaptation, according to Variety. The novel had gotten a resurgence of popularity at the time, since Oprah Winfrey had named it the first selection of her revived book club, and Paul Attanasio (Homicide: Life on the Street) was attached to write the screenplay. By 2009, Howard’s East of Eden hadn’t come to fruition, and the filmmaker had stepped away from the project, as Variety reported at the time.

Tom Hooper’s East of Eden

Universal and Imagine held on to the rights to East of Eden, and in Howard’s stead stepped Tom Hooper — then fresh off John Adams and two years away from winning the Academy Award for directing The King’s Speech — with Christopher Hampton (Atonement) penning the script.

“There is an opportunity to show the sex, violence, and darkness of Steinbeck’s work, along with the optimism and celebration of love,” Hooper told Variety at the time.

Like Howard’s project, though, Hooper’s never made it to film.

East of Eden (2012)

Toward the end of his Gossip Girl run, Penn Badgley played Cal in a short film spoofing East of Eden in foul-mouthed fashion. (“Aron tell you I’m a bean farmer?” Cal asks Abra in the short. “Yeah, that’s what I do. You know, I like to plant beans. I plant my seed all over the state of California.”)

The comedic take came from Periods, the production company behind other literary send-ups, including ones riffing on Little Women and Ethan Frome. Victor Quinaz played Aron but also directed the film and co-wrote the script with A.M. Lukas, who took on the role of Abra.

“It’s a pretty solid parody of some of the more ridiculous, melodramatic aspects of it,” one appreciative viewer observed on Reddit. “Also covers more of the plot than the Elia Kazan movie does, if you think about it.”

Gary Ross’ East of Eden

Imagine and Universal had to go back to the drawing board in 2013, reacquiring the rights to East of Eden after their previous rights to the work lapsed, per The Hollywood Reporter. And in 2014, they set Gary Ross as screenwriter and director and Jennifer Lawrence as star of a new adaptation, in what would have been a Hunger Games reunion for the filmmaker and the movie star.

Ross later said on the interview series The Hollywood Masters that he intended to go deeper into the source material, even if it meant splitting the story into two installments.

“Well, the Kazan film, which is brilliant, only deals with about the last third of the novel. It deals with Cal and Aron Trask when they’re already almost adults. The novel begins much earlier, just after the Civil War. Deals with a generation earlier. It’s really remarkable,” he said, per THR. “It may be two films. We may break it in half, into one generation and the next. And that’s what we’re talking about now.”

Like the other Universal–Imagine attempts, Ross’ East of Eden project never escaped development hell.

East of Eden (2026)

Zoe Kazan read and fell in love with East of Eden as a teenager and only then watched her grandfather’s adaptation of the novel, as she told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “I remember feeling really surprised by how loose an interpretation it is,” Zoe said. “Some of my favorite characters are not really in it or are really marginalized. It struck me immediately as being a completely different beast than the book.”

Specifically, Zoe wanted to delve more into what made Cathy the monster Steinbeck says she is. “There’s a real clarity to the quality of her selfishness, which I found completely fascinating,” she said. “It was really important to me not to warm her up or make excuses for her — to find softness and tenderness and humanity without changing the primary DNA of this person.”

And in her adaptation, Zoe is spotlighting a character her grandfather omitted from his entirely: Lee, the Chinese-American valet who becomes a father figure to Cal and Aron. “He’s such an engine in the plot and he’s such a fascinating character,” Zoe explained. “I wanted to pare away what was distractingly racist and honor the humanitarian impulse that Steinbeck was having — but be able to go further with it than he went.”

East of Eden, Miniseries Premiere, Netflix, Thursday, October 1