A brand new piece from Vanity Fair tracks the journey of Wicked from web page to display screen, and there have been some stunning twists and activates that yellow brick highway. If you’ve learn Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, you realize it’s quite a bit denser and darker than what ended up on Broadway. Nevertheless, it turned a bestseller, and had Hollywood nipping on the writer’s heels. “People who had expressed an curiosity within the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes,” Maguire tells VF. “Salma Hayek had had some curiosity, and Laurie Metcalf.”
But it was Demi Moore’s manufacturing firm that initially optioned the rights, although Whoopi Goldberg’s supervisor tried to purchase it from them. (Goldberg’s publicist confirms to the outlet, “This is true. Whoopi cherished the e book and tried exhausting to get the rights.”) Maguire favored Moore for it as a result of her firm already had an current relationship with Universal, which means it could be simpler to get the film made, and since he thought she’d make a superb Elphaba. “I used to say, I can think about Demi Moore bare and inexperienced on the quilt of Vanity Fair,” Maguire says. As for Glinda, Moore’s producing accomplice Suzanne Todd says her wishlist included Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson, and Nicole Kidman.
Of course, this straight literary adaptation by no means got here to be, although Todd at one level courted Robert Zemeckis to direct and Beauty And The Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton did a move on the script. Todd says Woolverton even pitched including songs to it. But the musical as we all know it wasn’t born till a pal instructed composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz in regards to the e book. “I instantly had this epiphany that that was an excellent thought for a musical,” Schwartz says. “So earlier than I had even learn the e book, I used to be making an attempt to get the rights—kind of, instantly. While I used to be making an attempt to trace them down, I discovered about Demi’s manufacturing firm and tried to get a gathering to speak them into not doing this film, and doing a musical as a substitute.”
The relaxation, as they are saying, is historical past—although it nonetheless took Schwartz a while and convincing to get Universal producer Marc Platt to see that the musical model deserved an opportunity to fly. You can learn all about it right here.
