Whoopi Goldberg fought hard for the Wicked rights in the '90s

A new piece from Vanity Fair tracks the journey of Wicked from page to screen, and there were some surprising twists and turns on that yellow brick road. If you’ve read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, you know it’s a lot denser and darker than what ended up on Broadway. Nevertheless, it became a bestseller, and had Hollywood nipping at the author’s heels. “People who had expressed an interest in the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes,” Maguire tells VF. “Salma Hayek had had some interest, and Laurie Metcalf.”

But it was Demi Moore’s production company that originally optioned the rights, though Whoopi Goldberg’s manager tried to buy it from them. (Goldberg’s publicist confirms to the outlet, “This is true. Whoopi loved the book and tried hard to get the rights.”) Maguire liked Moore for it because her company already had an existing relationship with Universal, meaning it might be easier to get the movie made, and because he thought she’d make a good Elphaba. “I used to say, I can imagine Demi Moore naked and green on the cover of Vanity Fair,” Maguire says. As for Glinda, Moore’s producing partner Suzanne Todd says her wishlist included Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson, and Nicole Kidman.

Of course, this straight literary adaptation never came to be, though Todd at one point courted Robert Zemeckis to direct and Beauty And The Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton did a pass at the script. Todd says Woolverton even pitched adding songs to it. But the musical as we know it wasn’t born until a friend told composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz about the book.  “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.”

The rest, as they say, is history—though it still took Schwartz some time and convincing to get Universal producer Marc Platt to see that the musical version deserved a chance to fly. You can read all about it here.