Inside the Making of ‘Wicked’
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Oh, listen, you know how I feel about you. I've already told you. Oh, thank you. You provide this beautiful book review that makes me feel smart. I will take the compliment and wipe my brow again. Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast.

Books and movies have always worked hand in hand, and some of the best films of all time have been based on either bestsellers or works of high literature. I've personally always been interested in the process of adaptation, and this is the last in our series of conversations with directors and screenwriters behind this year's Oscar-nominated films that started as books. And today, I'm here with Winnie Holtzman.

Many years ago, after creating the beloved TV series My So-Called Life, Winnie wrote the book, the script, to the musical Wicked, which tells the story of Elphaba and Galinda, the characters who we used to know as the Wicked Witch of the West and Linda, the Good Witch of the North.

And two or so decades after working on Wicked, which is now one of the highest-grossing Broadway musicals of all time, Winnie co-wrote the screenplay with Dana Fox for the film version. No one mourns the Wicked. No one cries, they won't return. Starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande and directed by John M. Chu, Wicked has received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture.

Winnie, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. Oh, it's so good to be here, Gilbert.

So Wicked the Musical is based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire book of the same name, which was based on the L. Frank Baum novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is a book that formed the basis for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Exactly. It's quite a tangled web of connections and adaptations, all telling their own versions of this basic story. I'd love to start with the one that

I think so many of us saw as a kid. Tell me about the first time that you saw Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard of Oz. Well, that's the movie that really shaped our generation. It was something Stephen and I talked about endlessly during the writing of Wicked, because for both of us, we revere that movie as a great American piece of art.

and an emotional tie to our childhoods. Because when it would appear on TV, you know, in the fall or near to the holiday time, it was an event. So we felt very strongly that everything we wrote in the musical had to incorporate the reality of that movie. In other words, we wanted people to be able to watch Wicked

And understand that we weren't saying that what happened in the Wizard of Oz movie didn't happen. We're saying that if you just move to the camera over here, you would see that there was...

So many other situations and circumstances that were playing into what was happening, which is, you know, with the basis of Gregory Maguire's brilliant novel, you're going to see the story from the Wicked Witch's point of view. She was a real woman. She had desires. She had a family. She was more than just a green, evil person with no name. She had a name.

So Gregory Maguire's book first came out in 1995. When did you read it for the first time? Well, I saw it in a bookstore in New York City. I live in Los Angeles, but I was visiting New York. I think it was at Shakespeare and Company. Is that bookstore still there? I don't know if it is, but there used to be one down on Broadway, I think. And was there one on the Upper West Side? Yeah. And I remember being, you know, sometimes when you're

in a bookstore, lost in your own dreamy thoughts, and you're sort of wandering around. And I remember seeing the cover of that book. That edition had a girl with a green face, but it's half covered by a big black hat, and it's called Wicked. And when I turned it over and read the little praise on the back, it blew my mind. I thought it was such a brilliant premise that this is going to be the Oz story from her point of view. And so...

I was wondering if I could maybe make it into a movie, get the rights. And I found out the rights were unavailable. I never read it. And in fact, people will not believe this, but it literally sat on my shelf, but not with the spine pointing out, with the cover pointing out, because I loved that cover. And I used to stare at it when I was sitting in my writing room. It's kind of cool and spooky, actually, because it was a presence in my room.

What did you think about it when you read it for the first time? Were there things in it, scenes, moments in your mind you said, I can see this. I can see this being on stage or I can see it being somewhere else. Well, absolutely. I mean, first of all, Stephen asked me to read it when he was saying to me, basically, I think you might be the right person for me to write this with. Would you read it and let's have a conversation or actually 10 conversations. And this is Stephen Schwartz's

the composer and lyricist who worked on Godspell, worked on Pippin. So he came to you

He came to me because our paths had crossed actually a few times in life. And he knew I had written a musical when I was younger. And we both were so taken with this brilliant idea of Gregory's that the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch had actually been college roommates. I mean, that's just genius. You know, it was the kind of thing that we knew immediately that that would be in the musical. ♪

There's been some confusion over rooming here at Shiz. But of course I'll care for Nassim. But of course he lies above it. The way Gregory spins that out, what ends up happening in his plot is different than Nassim's.

than how we ended up writing our musical. Because, you know, a novel is not a musical and vice versa. And, you know, reading the novel, it's very dense. It's very episodic. And it's got a tone that's quite dark. There is darkness in our musical for sure, but I wanted a little bit more of what you get in the movie.

probably because of the movie meant so much to me and to Stephen Schwartz, that feeling of buoyancy, the level of wish fulfillment, like if only I could live in Oz. I wanted people to feel like they sort of fell into a place, do you know? And so I was trying to evoke that as much as possible. And there was this way that I was kind of stealing elements of

from the novel, but not allowing the plot of his novel to be the plot of our show, I think we just intuitively, we needed to come up with our own plot. It just felt very clear. Unadulterated loathing For your face Your voice Your clothing Let's just say I love it all Now,

A couple decades have passed, but I get the feeling that the idea of Wicked as a movie, certainly following its success on Broadway, was always sort of lurking in the background. You are so right. In some way. You have the right feeling. When our show on Broadway was pretty successful, it was one of the first things that we knew was coming. And for us...

And I think for our producers in New York, for David Stone, for Mark Platt, the real thing was what's the rush? Because we had a show that was running on Broadway and was touring and also opening up in cities around the world.

As artists, and I don't mean to sound too pompous, but please forgive me. Go right ahead. We try to be artistic around here. The whole idea was if we were going to have a movie, to have something that we could be really proud of. And in order for that to happen, we had to really kind of clear our minds and kind of reconceive the whole story. We're telling the exact same story. And in many ways, there's a lot of the same beats.

But the way we tell it and some choices that are made are quite different. Do you consider this to be a re-adaptation? You're essentially adapting your own adaptation? I mean, it's a little bit of a, you're sort of falling into the rabbit hole. But how did you start to think about taking... That's another story. Yeah, no, you're right. About taking your own work and conceiving it for an entirely different medium.

I really felt intimidated sometimes, but also honored because let's face it, a lot of writers don't get to write the movie. You know, somebody else gets brought in. And my job became to really act as if I was brought in. You know, nothing was precious. Nothing couldn't be examined and reexamined and rethought and redone.

I really sincerely meant that. And I did that with every, I mean, when I say I, we ended up doing it so collaboratively. And who's the we here? Was it you working with Stephen Schwartz, who you wrote the musical with? Stephen was a big part of the creation of the movie scripts. He was always involved. And so was Mark Platt to some extent. John Chu.

had very strong feelings about, about Wicked, the musical. He saw it as a young man when he was about 20 years old, a USC film student. His mother took him to see it. He, he was going back to visit her. They'd come from the Bay Area and she said, oh, there's this musical out of town tryout of this musical in San Francisco. And she brought him to it. And, you know,

Stephen and I were probably standing, I mean, inevitably we were in the back of the theater taking notes and worrying that night when John Chu saw it for the first time. And he fell in love with it.

And he brought in Dana Fox, who he'd worked with recently. And she and I, I would say, tag team more than worked together because this was during the pandemic. And we actually, all of us only worked on Zoom together. And we never met in person until after the movies were written. Oh, wow. Let's take a short break. We'll be right back with Winnie Holtzman.

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I love to talk about specifics, and I think we can do so here because so many people have seen the musical over the past several decades. And honestly, so many people have seen this movie. It's done quite well. If you can talk in specifics about, you know, moments that you wanted to expand from the musical to the movie or moments that did not exist in the musical because of

various constraints that you were able finally to bring to life? Well, I mean, a big one, I mean, let's just start at the beginning. Glinda! Exactly how dead is she? Stephen and I always had this idea, this is going back decades, that the movie should start at the scene of the crime. That's what we called it, the scene of the crime, which is the murder of the Wicked Witch. According to the Time Dragon clock, the melting occurred at the 13th hour.

So, you know, we always thought of panning into that castle and seeing the overturned bucket of water, the puddle. And then John took that so much further and starts with an actual, you know, you're seeing something, you don't know what it is. It turns out to be a drop of water, which is the murder weapon. Yes, the Wicked Witch of the West is dead. No!

When the monkeys explode out of that castle, you know, you pan down and you see the witch hunters, we call them the witch hunters, fleeing, you know, their crime scene. Yeah, Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. Correct. And obviously that's something we would never have been able to do on stage. Then speaking of what you want to see on screen... Oh, Nazaros, don't you worry. I'm here.

We always knew, Stephen and I, that we wanted to see her as a little green girl. This is all about our wonderful Wizard of Oz. Do you know how he got here? No. From the sky. In a balloon. And we wanted to see her little sister. And we wanted to try to establish that relationship early, which we do in the movie. Stop! Elphaba! Elphaba, drop! What have you done this time?

That's not at all done on stage. You know, imagine having like a little child painted green every night, waiting in the wings for the one moment she's going to come out. I mean, it's just not. You made the right choice. That's not a fun idea. But the movie is the perfect place to do that. When you meet her as a little child early and you meet her little sister and you see that bond, that informs a lot of the movie, a lot of the story that unfolds.

You could actually express emotion in a way in film that you cannot in theater because someone sitting in, you know, in the mezzanine cannot see a person's face, the emotion on their face close up in the way that you can in a film when you're looking at Cynthia Erivo getting emotional. Absolutely. Is that something they have to bake into the screenplay? Oh.

Oh, absolutely. There's moments that are in the screenplay that are like that, that we're going to land on her face and we're going to see the reaction. You know, it's interesting because, of course, the musical itself on stage is emotional. People find it emotional. They laugh, they cry, they get involved. You know, we've had fans for over 20 years, but we knew that it could be

it could be widened out because there's so many people that don't go to theater that could be potentially touched by the movie. I felt inspired by the idea that people could be discovering this, people who would think, I don't like musicals. What's a musical? Why would I ever go? I mean, just the other day I was being driven to one of the Critics' Choice Awards and I

The man who was driving me said to me, you know, my girlfriend dragged me to your movie. I didn't want to go. I didn't think I would want to see a musical. And I loved it. And, you know, that's one of the best compliments you could ever get.

I'm curious, given how long Wicked has run on Broadway and in all of the cities in which it is toured, and you've developed this sort of rabid fan base. People have gone back and seen it multiple times, multiple times, and are so attached to it. How did you sort of grapple with the fact that as you adapted this from stage to screen, all of those people are going to have various opinions on anything that you did?

Well, you know, first you cry. I mean, I was scared. I was scared, Kildare. Wouldn't you have been scared? Yes, I'm scared right now, listening to you tell me the story. It's intimidating. But, you know, in order to do any kind of writing of any kind, and you know this, in order to do anything that you present to people, finally you have to go to a private place and say to yourself, I'm going to do what feels right to me. I mean, what else can I do?

I'm going to be my own audience, which is how I write everything, which is how Stephen Schwartz writes everything. I mean, I'm not on social media. Thank us. So I mean, people mention things that are happening and, you know, I'm like, please don't even tell me. But yeah.

If you chose to, you could be frightened every minute because what are people going to say? What are people going to think? What is my family going to think? What are people that are strangers going to think? How badly am I going to embarrass myself this time? If you've been successful, now the success will be taken away. If you've never been successful, this is your big moment to really fail. I mean, there's always something to be scared of.

And I just have lived with that my whole entire life, trying to make, create things. So I really did want people to have a great experience, an experience that had some merit. And I can't do that if I'm constantly taking a poll. You know, it has to be Stephen and I kind of joining hands and with John Chu and with Dana Fox and all of us going,

What do we think? Is this moment working for us? Is this going to work on screen? And that was the constant question. I'd love to talk about the end of the movie. And again, you know, I don't think we're spoiling something. A lot of people have seen it. And it has to do with arguably one of the most famous songs in the modern Broadway canon, which is Defying Gravity. I'd sooner defy

It's the big number at the end of Act 1 in the musical. And in the movie, it's sort of elongated, expanded. It plays out over the last 15 or so minutes of the film. It's basically its own chapter of the story. It has interstitial scenes, multiple locations. Quickly.

Get on. What? Talk to me as a screenwriter about how you take that song, this thing that has been staged and presented in this one way for so long, and you just blow it out to make it this giant showstopper in a different way at the end of the film, which it turns out actually isn't the end of the story. Well, first of all,

When we decided to make two movies instead of one, we knew that that was going to be the end of the first movie. And there's a second movie. So we wanted to remind everyone that there's all this story that's going to continue. Take it away!

It's like a, it's movie language, you know, to sort of go through that land of Oz and show all the people of her life that are effect, that's going to be affected by this revelation, this incredibly courageous choice she's making. All the people that have mattered to her, that matter to us, having been with them. And that's, that's how that was born. Citizens of Oz, they're...

is an enemy who must be captured. And Stephen was really, Stephen and John, John Powell, who scored it with Stephen, very carefully figured out ways to elongate that song. Never dare

We didn't want to do anything that might harm the song, if you see what I mean. I do. And I think with every beat of the movie, it was like that. You know, like, we wanted to rethink all the time. We were always rethinking. But we didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You don't want to accidentally lose the kernel of what's making it emotional in the first place. Witches.

You alluded to the second film, Wicked, for good. I can allude, but I cannot speak further. I was just going to say, I doubt there's much you can say about what's coming. Not if I want to live a happy life. Yeah, we want to have you back on. Can you talk about the moment when you or you as a group realized,

okay, this is going to take much longer to tell this story in a cinematic way than we did on stage. I mean, I was very reluctant personally because, you know, it sort of goes back to what you were talking about before. My fear was that it might lose the impact of the story. You know, the story is built to take you all the way to the end. And I was worried. And then what happened is Stephen and I, we realized,

We really didn't want to cut any of the numbers. So if you're not going to cut any numbers, but you're going to expand and deepen the relationships, the moments, you're going to allow for cinematic time. And Stephen wanted to write two new songs because...

There are moments in the second movie that he and I both felt could be musicalized. And so if he wants to add two songs, two new songs, and we want to take all this time to develop, you know, show the childhood. We need a time for all of this. Where's the time going to come if we're not cutting any numbers? But what I realize now, of course, is that

It also had to do with the stories of the movies. I mean, the first movie is really Elphaba's coming into her own, finding her voice and stepping into her true destiny. And that is done through her friendship with Glinda in some ways, but that is really her journey. Then in the second movie, though Elphaba is hugely, vitally, crucially important, she

Glinda herself does a similar thing. She steps into her true destiny. She discovers her true destiny. And so when John Chu and Dana Fox and I and Stephen Schwartz were sitting around having these

long conversations on Zoom. And that became clear. It became much, much easier for me to realize that I could feel an integrity about making it two movies. It started to feel right.

You not only were involved in developing and putting together this giant film production, but I assume over one or two days you actually found yourself in the cyclone, in the tornado of a big budget film. What was it like to be on set?

This was John Chu's idea that Stephen and I would make cameos in the movie. From the beginning, we were hoping that we could get Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel to do cameos. So we came up together with, I think, the perfect cameos for them.

But when it came to our cameos, early on, John said to us, oh, you've got to be in the movie. You've both got to be in the movie. And even I noticed in the script that

the shooting script, the character I play, it says something like a person in the crowd or an actress, and then it says, W-H? In question mark. You can read it! He must be a wizard! No!

It got to be so much fun because we were all shooting the same night. Kristen, Idina, Stephen and I. And we were, you know, we went to London and those amazing costumes that Paul Tazwell put together and my hair that looks like soft serve ice cream. I mean, my wig. Did you get to keep any part of the costume?

I did not. I was way too shy to ask for the costume. There are moments when you use your authority as the writer of this entire thing and say, I would like to keep this green frock. Winnie Holtzman, co-writer of Wicked, the film adaptation, writer of Wicked, the...

Hit, hit, hit Broadway musical. Thank you so much for joining the Book Review Podcast. Thank you. I loved it. It was really fun to meet you. It was a pleasure to have you on. Our series featuring Oscar-nominated writers and directors was produced by Tina Antolini and Alex Barron with help from Kate Lepresti. It was edited by Wendy Doerr and engineered by Sophia Landman and Daniel Ramirez. Our original music was by Elisheba Itup.

Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Maddie Mazziello, Nick Pittman, Felice Leon, Brooke Minters, Dave Mayers, and Elliot DeBruin. Thank you for listening. I'm Gilbert Cruz. See you next time. What is your calling? Maybe it's something you love to do, a goal you want to achieve, a skill you want to learn, or a difference you want to make. You know it's part of who you are and part of the life you want. But do you know how you'll get there?

The military can help you pursue your calling with countless opportunities to help you build a future filled with purpose. You have a calling. We have an answer. Learn more at todaysmilitary.com.