The 20 years that separate the premiere of stage musical Wicked and the release of its two-part big-screen adaptation are coincidentally mirrored by the two decades that divide its screenwriters. When Screen International meets up with 70-year-old Winnie Holzman and 48-year-old Dana Fox over Zoom in early January, however, they are entirely akin in their bubbly glee and enthusiasm.
Holzman and Fox have plenty of reasons to be elated. Not only has Jon M Chu’s film become the highest-grossing stage musical adaptation of all time, with global box office standing at $709m at press time, but it has also been nominated for seven Bafta Film Awards, 11 Critics Choice Awards and five Screen Actors Guild Awards. The writer pair themselves have been nominated for adapted screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards.
Trophies are nothing new to Holzman, who co-wrote the original 2003 musical with composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz and saw it win three Tony Awards in 2004. But she admits it would be “lovely” to see honours bestowed on a film she describes as being “its own thing yet infused with the spirit of the musical”.
Based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West, itself a reworking of characters and incidents from L Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz published in 1900, the Wicked stage show came about after Universal Pictures and producer Marc Platt ditched plans to make a film adaptation of Maguire’s novel in favour of a theatrical representation.
The success of the show prompted fresh discussions about a film version, though it would not be until 2012 that plans would coalesce for a Wicked film to be made with Stephen Daldry directing. “Universal were eager for a film but they weren’t leaning on us,” says Holzman. “They may have given a release date at one point, but that was their wishful thinking.”
Daldry left the project in 2020. “It took a while, but at some point, we all looked at each other and said, ‘This just doesn’t feel right,’’’ reveals Holzman. “We parted as friends.” Daldry has since written to Holzman with words of congratulation.
The film’s future looked uncertain after Daldry’s departure, but when Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights) signed on in 2021, it was “full steam ahead” again — with one big difference. “We had made the decision, an artistic as well as a business decision, to make it two movies,” Holzman says. “We were starting from scratch with a whole new concept.”
It was at this juncture that Chu and Platt brought Fox in to collaborate on what Holzman describes as a “tabula rasa” that needed “reinventing, rethinking and reconceiving” at every level. “We got together on Zoom and did more than 150 hours of conversations about splitting the movies up, before we did any writing at all,” recalls Fox, a writer/producer whose credits include What Happens In Vegas, Couples Retreat and Cruella.
“We were lucky to have unfettered access to Jon for a long period of time, which is usually not the custom,” says Fox. Once writing started, the priority was Wicked: Part 1 “because that was the one that everyone needed to start processing. The second we had that one done, we immediately turned to Part 2 — so we needed a lot of stamina.”
According to Holzman, Chu was keen to go “back to the beginning” and drill into the original creative intention. “He was not only telling us what he was picturing, but was asking Stephen and I to go back to an original song or moment and [say] what was in our minds,” she recalls.
Fox meanwhile, having long become accustomed to “being alone with my computer on every movie I had ever written”, found it refreshing to have a co-writer she could “throw the baton” to. “It was too much work for any one person to do in that time frame, frankly,” she says. “So it was helpful to be able to pass the movies back and forth, knowing that if I couldn’t get there, Winnie could.”
Story modifications
“We made so many changes, but the biggest change is that it’s a movie,” says Holzman. “The story is the story but there are certain moments that are adjusted or deepened or expanded.” A case in point is an early sequence showing the young Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, as a bullied child slighted by her father — not featured in the stage show, and a departure from the book’s account of the girl’s childhood.
“We were able to do some different stuff, like see Elphaba as a toddler,” says Fox, who believes the scene lends extra resonance to the grown-up Elphaba meeting the Wizard in the Emerald City later in the film. “When she gets to the Wizard, she still desperately craves that fatherly sense of, ‘I’m proud of you,’” she explains. “She’s still looking for a dad to tell her that he loves her.”
After depicting its green-hued protagonist as an infant, Wicked: Part 1 goes on to show her as a young woman arriving at Oz’s prestigious Shiz University. A small but significant change was to make her a visitor to the school — not an enrolled student as she is in the stage play — only there to help her sister Nessarose, a wheelchair user, get settled.
“I loved that she wasn’t a regular student like her sister,” says Holzman. “It’s a much better set-up for her and the movie.” The decision to make Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible a mysterious teacher of sorcery rather than an officious headmistress marks another departure from the show. A 161-minute running time for Part 1, meanwhile, allowed more attention to be devoted to the central relationship — between Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Galinda, a self-absorbed student later known as Glinda the Good.
“We are more inside the girls and their thoughts,” muses Holzman. “I don’t think it’s a different relationship, but it’s a deeper relationship with more of a sense of their connection.” Audiences will see it develop further when Wicked: Part 2, now named Wicked: For Good, opens in November. “Jon is in the process of editing it,” says Fox. “They have a cut, and now he’s listening to what the movie is telling him. Not that anyone’s Michelangelo here, but it’s that idea that you have a block of marble and you take away everything that isn’t David. We’re in the ‘everything that isn’t David’ part.”
Future projects for Fox include working with Chu again on an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. “I told Jon I serve at the pleasure of the king,” she laughs. “He’s my king, so I’ll do whatever he wants me to do and go where he tells me to go.” Also in the pipeline is a “crazy heist comedy” for Netflix with Ryan Reynolds.
Holzman, meanwhile, is writing a series that reunites her with Claire Danes, with whom she worked on 1990s teen drama My So-Called Life. “Who knows when it will be on the air, but I know HBO and Claire want to do it,” she reveals. This news pleases her co-writer just as much as the Wicked Witch’s demise delights the inhabitants of Munchkinland. “I cannot handle a Winnie Holzman-Claire Danes reunion,” says Fox excitedly. “I’m like, ‘Kill me now!’”
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