Two paths diverged on a yellow brick road, and Hollywood could not travel both. So, crucial choices were made a long time ago about how to adapt Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked. The result is the blockbuster film currently playing in movie theaters around the world, originating from a Broadway show that has had fans singing along for decades. But if other choices had been made once upon a time, neither the musical nor the new movie would exist.
Imagine a film adaptation of Maguire’s book with no songs whatsoever. Had this project moved forward as planned in the late 1990s, it may have starred a green-skinned Demi Moore as Elphaba, directed by Back to the Future filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. Given the Stephen Schwartz–composed musical version’s obvious appeal, first on stage and now as a feature film, few would argue that things didn’t work out for the best. Still, what might have been remains an intriguing untold story. Wicked producer Marc Platt—who has guided the project from page to the stage and now to the screen—knows that better than anyone.
Maguire’s book is about the very notion that every story has multiple perspectives and that the right course of action is seldom obvious. Platt’s job as a producer was to figure out the best way to bring that counterintuitive premise to life. “It portrays the Wicked Witch as maybe someone who wasn’t all that wicked,” Platt tells Vanity Fair. “I thought it was just such a clever idea to look through a different lens and see things a different way. All of a sudden, things you thought you knew—you didn’t.”
He felt the same way about the adaptation, which was the result of many years of trial and error in which it seemed like the movie might never get made at all.
We’re speaking in Platt’s company’s bungalow on the backlot of Universal Pictures, where he first began working on Wicked as the studio’s president of production. Now a solo producer, Platt still works on the lot, just around the bend from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin headquarters, and down the hill from the Psycho house. Platt’s relatively nondescript office complex has become a destination for Universal’s famous studio tour, with guides pointing it out as the birthplace of the Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande musical juggernaut.
The reception area of Platt’s bungalow is covered floor to ceiling with posters from his past productions, including La La Land, Legally Blonde, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Drive. His private office is dominated by a massive framed portrait of the original cast of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, as well as a single one-sheet from 1993’s Philadelphia, which he helped shepherd as an executive at TriStar Pictures.
It was that film’s director, the late Jonathan Demme, who would warn his friend Platt against making a musical out of the novel that retold The Wizard of Oz through the villain’s eyes. “He wasn’t a big theater guy at the time, and he said, ‘That sounds like a really crazy idea,’” Platt recalls.
Demme, who died in 2017, ultimately realized he was mistaken, but he wasn’t alone. That thinking was prevalent in the industry when Platt was in the early days of figuring out what to do with Wicked. Movie musicals were out of fashion in the late 1990s, and wouldn’t be en vogue again until Chicago defied Hollywood’s conventional wisdom in 2002.
In any case, a sweeping musical wasn’t the first choice for Wicked. Platt and others tried for years to adapt the novel into a straightforward fantasy adventure. But there were a number of obstacles to overcome and problems to solve in refashioning the narrative itself. Loneliness was a key part of Elphaba’s origin, and the novel’s omniscient narration had the ability to delve into what was happening in her head and heart. But how could the movie do that without overly relying on voiceover? “It’s harder in a traditional film,” Platt says. “Usually you need another character to talk to, and you tell your best friend what you’re thinking or feeling.”
Rendering the Land of Oz on a modern tentpole scale was an additional challenge; the budget projections for the fantasy always seemed to exceed what the studio believed it could earn back. And then there was casting. The film also wouldn’t work without A-list talent—though there, at least, Wicked had won the heart of one such star.
“I am going to try and get the timeline right if I can remember, but I believe when I became the president of production at Universal, the project was already here,” says Platt. “It had been optioned initially by Demi Moore’s company.”
Maguire had always feared his book wouldn’t sell at all. He was as surprised as anybody else by Wicked’s runaway success with readers, and even more so when the book became the focus of a bidding war among a group of actors who hoped to produce it as a feature film.
“People who had expressed an interest in the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes,” Maguire says. “Salma Hayek had had some interest, and Laurie Metcalf.” And Moore, of course. Any one of these women is intriguing to imagine in the lead role, though Maguire isn’t sure whether they all intended to play the part of Elphaba.
Moore’s company, Moving Pictures, came on especially strong. The actor was a dominant cultural icon at the time, thanks to her daring, bare-all Annie Leibovitz portraits from this very magazine. She was also one of the industry’s most powerful stars after A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, and Striptease, which had established her as Hollywood’s highest-paid actress. Maguire pictured her as a perfect Elphaba. “I used to say, I can imagine Demi Moore naked and green on the cover of Vanity Fair,” the author says.
Moore herself remained in the background, while the negotiations were spearheaded by her Moving Pictures producing partner. Suzanne Todd had come up as an assistant to action-movie producer Joel Silver, getting her first production credit on 1990’s Die Hard 2 starring Moore’s then husband Bruce Willis. “We had been friends for a long time,” Todd says. Moving Pictures formed in 1993; their first projects were the 1995 coming-of-age story Now and Then and the 1997 action drama G.I. Jane, both starring Moore. But the company also made films that didn’t feature the actor, like the Mike Myers comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
“I used to say, I can imagine Demi Moore** naked and green **on the cover of Vanity Fair.” — Wicked author Gregory Maguire
Todd confirms that Moving Pictures was pursuing the rights to Wicked so that Moore could play one of the leads. The raven-haired star had always specialized in tough, headstrong women—though she had also gone blonde and whimsical in 1991’s The Butcher’s Wife, and maybe could have stretched to play Glinda the Good Witch. “I think on different days she could do either, but in the moment it was definitely for Elphaba,” Todd says today.
They never got to the point of casting Glinda, but Todd can at least share her wish list. “At the time, there were a few people top of mind: Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson, Nicole Kidman.”
Moore declined to be interviewed for this story, but Todd recalls stiff competition as she fought for the novel’s rights. “Whoopi Goldberg’s manager wanted to buy it for her,” she says. “But I really wanted it.” (Goldberg’s publicist, Brad Cafarelli, confirms: “This is true. Whoopi loved the book and tried hard to get the rights.”)
Maguire eventually went with Team Moore. “My agents in New York and in Hollywood recommended the Demi Moore proposal because her company had a preexisting relationship with Universal, and they said that will grease the skids on getting a potential project into production,” the author says. “It doesn’t promise it, but it means that you’ve already jumped over the problem of how to get somebody to pick up the phone at the studio. Demi Moore could make that happen. She had Universal on speed dial.”
The bidding war had driven up Wicked’s price tag, which would eventually impact its destiny in profound ways—though that was fine with Maguire. “The reality of life for me was that I had adopted three infants from overseas, and my first concern as a person who’s making his living as a working artist was to pay off the goddamn mortgage any way I could,” Maguire says.
But Moving Pictures needed the studio to help cover the cost. “Universal was willing to step up. Hal Lieberman was the head of the studio then, and they bought the book for us,” Todd says. “Then I embarked on the journey of finding a writer.” This, however, meant Universal would retain the overall rights to the adaptation as well.
At that point, Lieberman was at the end of his tenure as the studio’s movie chief, and when he stepped down in late 1996, Platt moved into the role. Over the next two years, various screenwriters took shots at adapting the book—but no one seemed to crack it in a way that could get Wicked a green light. “I saw a couple of screenplays, and I confess with all high regard to people who write screenplays—and that’s not me—I didn’t care for them much,” Maguire says.
The person who came closest was Linda Woolverton, who had gotten her start in the 1980s writing kids’ TV cartoons like Popples, My Little Pony, and Dennis the Menace. She’d become screenwriting royalty in the mid-1990s after transitioning to features and helping pen the screenplays to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Mulan. “She wrote a beautiful script,” Todd says. (Woolverton did not respond to an interview request.)
Platt also remembers her take on Wicked as one of the strongest, noting that it included a few characters later cut from the musical version—like Mother Yackle, a mysterious ancient woman who helps guide Elphaba’s fate. “It was, as I recall, a fairly faithful adaptation of a very big, dense, thick novel,” he says. “The focus was Elphaba as the warrior and The Wizard as this authoritarian leader, which is very much the DNA of Gregory’s book.”
Formal negotiations for a director never got underway, but Todd says she had conversations with representatives of one well-known filmmaker who had a lot of experience with big-budget fantasy. “There was kind of a rumble for a minute that Bob Zemeckis wanted to do it,” Todd says.
At this point, the man behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit was widely acclaimed for his ability to blend state-of-the-art visual effects with live action. He had dominated the 1995 Oscars with Forrest Gump and had the clout to choose virtually anything as his next project. Todd hoped he would select Wicked.
She had a connection with him through Silver as one of the producers on the HBO horror anthology series Tales From the Crypt, so she arranged a call. “I never spoke to Bob directly about it. I think it was an agent conversation saying he’d be interested in talking about it,” Todd says.
But talks never went any further than that.
If anything, Woolverton’s screenplay may have been too faithful, including everything a feature could reasonably carry from Maguire’s sprawling literary yarn.
“It’s a very hard thing to do,” Maguire says of the adaptation process. “My novel is turgid and slow and demanding, and requires investment by the reader as you follow 38 years of Elphaba’s life. That was for a limited audience. I wasn’t writing a potboiler, and I knew it. I was writing for a limited, fairly nerdy kind of reading audience; I thought, I’ll be lucky if this sells 25,000 copies.”
But the book’s surprise success did not mean the studio wanted to risk an equally dense movie. A big-screen Wicked had to be lighter on its feet—and leaner. “Universal was hesitant to make the move because the budget with visual effects had come in at like $35- or $37 million—which at this moment in the ’90s seemed implausible,” Todd says.
Today, that’s a very modest budget for a studio film, especially considering that the two-part Wicked musical movie has a reported cost of $320 million. But back then, the project didn’t have two decades of blockbuster stage success to justify taking such a chance.
Todd says at one point Woolverton suggested they consider following the path of the 1939 Wizard of Oz by adding songs to the mix. “Linda is the one who really wanted to do a musical,” she says. “The idea came from her work at Disney, where she had also worked on the musicals of those animated films.”
Stephen Schwartz came to that same idea on his own. The Broadway hitmaker was then best known as the lyricist and composer for the musicals Pippin and Godspell, and for writing the songs for Disney’s animated Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He first heard about Wicked while on a snorkeling trip in Hawaii with his friend, singer Holly Near, who was in the midst of reading Maguire’s novel and would describe it to him between dives. “I immediately had this epiphany that that was a great idea for a musical,” Schwartz says. “So before I had even read the book, I was trying to get the rights—more or less, immediately. While I was trying to track them down, I learned about Demi’s production company and tried to get a meeting to talk them into not doing this movie, and doing a musical instead.”
I went into that meeting pretty hopeless. I thought, ‘There’s just no way that the head of a movie studio … is going to change course.” — Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz.
But Moore has never been a singer—and Schwartz knew from previous experience that if Moving Pictures was on board, he would not be writing a musical for her naturally smoky voice. “Oddly enough, Demi had been the speaking voice of Esmeralda in the Disney film Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he says. “She said, ‘I don’t want to do my own singing,’ and we found a soundalike who sang the character’s songs. The point being—I wasn’t going in saying, ‘Oh, let me do a musical for Demi.’ I just wanted to see if I could home in on the project.”
Todd remembers getting an unexpected inquiry from Schwartz. “He called to say, ‘Oh, this book would be so great’” as a musical, she says. “And then we had a magical lunch with him at the Four Oaks on Beverly Glen.”
“I can’t believe she remembers where we had lunch,” Schwartz says now with a laugh.
But time was running out for Moving Pictures in the Land of Oz. “I think it was in their hands for two or three years,” Maguire says. In all that time, Wicked came no closer to being made—and soon, the company itself was at a crossroads as Moore began to back away from producing.
Todd would go on to produce the 2007 Beatles-infused musical drama Across the Universe and the 2010 Tim Burton–directed storybook fantasy Alice in Wonderland (which was scripted by Woolverton), but Wicked would always be the one that got away. “I would’ve loved to have been able to finish what I started,” Todd says.
The non-musical film adaptation of Maguire’s book was dead. Zemeckis made Contact, What Lies Beneath, and Cast Away instead; Moore not only stopped producing, but took a break from acting until making a comeback as the villain in 2003’s Charlie’s Angels. But since Universal had paid for the pricey rights to the book, the studio kept them as Moving Pictures dissolved.
Schwartz was still adamant about making a musical out of Maguire’s book, and reached out to Platt to see what was possible. “My pitch to him was stage musical, and then, if it works, adapt the stage musical as a film,” Schwartz says.
“He didn’t, in that first meeting, say, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re absolutely right. I’ll do that.’ It took a while,” the composer adds. “I think he was waiting on the second draft of the screenplay, and he wanted obviously to consider what we talked about. But I went into that meeting pretty hopeless. I thought, ‘There’s just no way that the head of a movie studio, where the studio has already been spending money on screenplays and is thinking of doing this [as a drama], is going to change course. But I want this so badly, I’m going to give it a shot.’ And I just was extremely lucky that it happened to be Marc Platt.”
As it happened, Platt was about to make a major career change as well. He and Universal parted ways in April 1998, and he left his role as an executive to become a full-time producer. The studio kept him in the fold, however, giving him space on the lot to run his company—and freedom to continue working on any of the unmade titles he had guided during his time as an executive.
“The folks up there said, ‘Is there any project you want to take with you?’ I said, ‘I just want to take one.’ That was Wicked.”
Platt inherited all the storytelling problems that had vexed Wicked for so long—but some of them were solved when Schwartz began devising songs.
His musical numbers would allow Elphaba to express the feelings that are otherwise buried deep within her. “The people of Oz think of her as wicked. How do you get inside of her to understand that she’s actually not that?” Platt says. “One of the ways is by hearing the inner monologue, the thoughts of her or any character. In a musical, a character can turn to the audience—or the camera—and sing what he or she or they is feeling. That opened up a door of storytelling.”
Schwartz would partner with writer Winnie Holzman, then best known as the creator of the Gen X coming-of-age classic My So-Called Life. Platt says Schwartz and Holzman adjusted the story so it would not focus exclusively on Elphaba, turning Wicked into the fantasy-epic version of a buddy comedy by enhancing the role of the Good Witch. “We were very interested in the Elphaba-Glinda relationship, which is a small piece of Gregory’s novel,” Platt says. “For us, it became the main focus.”
“The folks up there said, ‘Is there any project you want to take with you?’ I said, ‘I just want to take one.’ That was Wicked.” — Producer Marc Platt
That’s when Demme offered his words of warning about Wicked—misguided, maybe, but well-intentioned. His sentiment was shared by nearly everyone in the industry: Movie musicals simply were not a thing in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
“That led up to me deciding, ‘I’m going to take a left turn and not develop it initially as a film,’” Platt says. “I always thought it was a film, both because it’s in The Wizard of Oz tradition and also because it’s a world to build and immerse yourself in, which lends itself to cinematic treatment.” But he also knew that a successful musical version of Wicked could make an eventual movie more likely, just as Schwartz proposed. “That’s what happened,” Platt says.
It only took a few more decades.
After five years of work, the Wicked musical starring Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth as Elphaba and Glinda opened at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco in May 2003. In the few weeks it ran, one of the attendees was a young film buff who hoped someday to become a director himself: Jon M. Chu, who would go on to direct Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and parts one and two of the eventual big-screen version of Wicked.
Getting to that debut was its own ordeal, and Schwartz says he could not have navigated it without Platt. “He’s not just a producer who has a vision and then says to the writers, ‘Go off and do it,’” the composer says. “He’s really in the trenches. Whether it comes from an instinct for what the audience wants to see or simply his own artistic abilities, I couldn’t say. I just know, as a writer, collaborating with him was immensely valuable.”
Schwartz credits several details to Platt, including how to handle the talking animals of Oz. Schwartz says Platt proposed limiting their presence by having the Wizard both persecute and silence them. “A land in which animals speak is a wonderful land, and the fact that they were losing that ability, because of the political situation, seemed like a really simple and poetic and emotionally satisfying consequence,” Schwartz says. “That idea was Marc’s.”
The San Francisco stage performances resulted in further revision. “Some songs were trimmed, the opening [changed], a new song was put in. You learn a lot,” Platt says. “In film, we have editing. Once the camera tells the story, everybody goes into the editing room and you can rewrite again. When you put something on stage, the train has left the station and you only can do so much. You can’t change big, big pieces of scenery and sets. It’s too late, too expensive. Time is money. You’re very beholden. So you have to reverse engineer what you can and can’t change.”
In October 2003, the Wicked we know today debuted at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway. Once it became the proverbial Broadway smash, Platt found he was no longer as eager to put the story on film. For one, a movie is generally regarded as a threat to ticket sales for a stage show. Last year, Variety reported that the stage show had been seen by approximately 65 million people, with $5 billion in box office revenue over the course of two decades.
But there was another reason to wait. “I knew I had to withhold,” Platt says. “I had to be disciplined and not leap in too soon, not just because the show was running, but because it had to be for my kids—my legacy to them and to the grandkids. I didn’t have grandkids when I started this. Now I’ve got eight, and nine’s on the way. I mean this with humility: I wanted to be really prepared and know as much as I could know. I wanted to go to school for a long time, and really become the best kind of producer I could be.”
About five years ago, he felt like the time had finally come. The reaction from audiences speaks for itself: part one of Wicked is already the highest-grossing movie ever adapted from a Broadway show, having collected $527 million and counting so far.
“I knew I had to withhold. I had to be disciplined and not leap in too soon.” — Wicked producer Marc Platt
Platt helped change Wicked for the better, to borrow a line from the second half of the musical. And he was changed in return. While Wicked went through many possible iterations before arriving in its present state, the project also changed the course of movie history in other ways.
Though Woolverton’s Wicked screenplay was never produced, she went on to write Disney’s live-action Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the villainous sorceress from Sleeping Beauty—who, like Elphaba, is revealed to be not quite the monster she seemed. This notion came up in Todd’s earliest conversations with Maguire. “He explained that in the course of any given day, I can be the wicked one to you, and you can be the wicked one to someone else,” she says. “It’s literally a perspective thing. Look at what Linda was able to do: taking that lens of Wicked and applying it to Maleficent, which was a huge hit movie with a sequel of its own. It basically jumped off of that same idea: What if things weren’t what you thought they were?”
Making the Wicked musical into a two-handed narrative about Elphaba and Glinda influenced another Platt production that is now regarded as a classic—also featuring an overwhelmingly bubbly heroine. “At the same time I was making the Wicked stage musical, I was doing Legally Blonde. And when the stage musical was in San Francisco, I was doing the sequel to Legally Blonde,” Platt says. “So you can think of Elle Woods and you can think of Glinda, and see some little connection.”
Looking back at Wicked’s especially long journey, another quote from Legally Blonde comes to mind: What … like it’s hard?
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The post Demi Moore as Elphaba—and More Tales From the ‘Wicked’ That Never Was appeared first on Vanity Fair.
