Around and About WICKED
There are a lot of ways for me to deal with this film.
If you’ve a bit of time, there are a lot of moments for you to absorb in this writing: it’s about the Sacred Feminine, and artistic yearning, and the history of dance in film, and my own history of dance and film, and it’s about the great film-makers, from Fellini and Bergman, to Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, and all of it ends in Oz, with Jon Chu, and that duet between Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erevo — yes, that duet, the life-changer…
If you have to do laundry, or take the dog out, or study for an exam, do it now then grab a coffee or some strong water, and settle in, because Wicked brought this all together for me, and I hope it will entertain you as much, and make you see things even more Wickedly…
Voila:
We’re off to see the Wizard…
Wicked resonates personally to me because all of my life I’ve written about the necessary and vital reinstatement of the Sacred Feminine in our world.
All my novels and much of my dramatic work have dealt with the variations of this Sacred Feminine upon the Masculine: the many ways in which the promptings of the Feminine have enhanced, shamed, irritated, overwhelmed, inspired, altered the goals of mankind, and which have led to as many works of art and of love as well as to witch-burnings, rape, pillage and other forms of woman hatred.
I’ve shown men’s and boy’s reactions to woman as a guide to enlightenment, or to a new definition of compromise or, often enough, as a trip to personal and social mayhem. It’s a confrontation that is at the heart of human and spiritual history.
I wanted to go beyond poet James Merrill’s wonderful lines from The Broken Home:
“Always the same old story –
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.”
My first published novel, She Let Him Continue, was an ironic neo-noir novel of a charmingly psychotic young man who convinces a bored teenage girl that he is a CIA agent, and needs her to help him sabotage a chemical plant. By the end of the novel, the same bored teenage girl has manipulated the young psycho to kill her mother. Which she herself, does, because he doesn’t have the nerve to carry it out.
The second novel, Pit Bull, deals with the masculine world of fighting dogs and ancestral purity. Woman exists as an afterthought. Needless to say, the world of the novel is nastily misogynistic, patriarchal, and a throwback to Empire-building, and to the darkest ages of history.
The third book, Joop’s Dance, is about the making of a ballet by a young and talented dancer in the Netherlands. He is married, has a mistress is the company, but is inspired by a strange woman he has seen in an airport. It is about the rapture of inspiration, and how such rapture can create art and fuck-up moments of a life. It is the moment-by-moment evolution of a dance and, for me, the vital actions of an artist.
The books were published by E.P. Dutton, in the 60’s.
For the next sixty years, my novels and original screenplays concerned themselves with variations on that theme, albeit set in completely different dramatic and historical circumstances. Most of them were unpublished, because much of the time my agents and publishers wanted to me to “cut that goddess shit,” even though the situations and histories of each book did not resemble one another..
Talk about cultural pushback!
My unpublished novel, Mother’s Little Helpers, I eventually shot as a film, which was distributed by Italy’s RAI TV. It concerns eight girls in an adolescent probation facility who are playing with a Ouija board once evening. They contact what appears to be a Goddess, who asks them to bring Her down.
Which they do, and in the course, bring about violent social and environmental change, after taking on the authorities who put them in the facility in the first place.
My cousin Michael put up the money for the film, and I shot it with many of my students from BU as the girls in the cottage, and my wife Kae as Shrink, the psychologist caught between the anti-social seeming Sacred, and the accepted psychological norm, which to my mind is incomplete, because it does not take into consideration the Sacred Feminine in the spiritual/historical lives of young women.
The physical environment was based upon my own experience as a counselor, teaching creative writing and theater at the Las Palmas School for Girls, in Los Angeles – a part of LA County’s penal institution program.
The most recent novel I wrote, which I will eventually publish on Substack.com, is called Kashimi, and is about a film-maker, his muse, and a female teacher and exponent of Ssireum, the Korean form of physical gymnastics in which two people face each other, their hands held to the belts of their opponent, and try to defy gravity by forcing the other to be gravity’s victim in a fall.
In Asia, women participate as much in the sport as men.
Ssireum is probably the most ancient form of wrestling, but it is not wrestling as we know it in the West. It is not about brawn, muscle, or show biz.
The goal of Ssireum is this: Who can learn to defy gravity, and what does that mean in one’s life?
Imagine my surprise, a year and a half after completing Kashimi, then seeing Wicked, and finding myself convulsed and sobbing, at the finale of the film, as Cynthia Erevo and Adriana Grande perform Defying Gravity.
I was happily surprised, and felt spiritually and creatively exonerated, to see the themes of my novel expressed in the final and definitive song of triumph, sung by Elphaba, the green witch, in Wicked.
These are the lyrics of Defying Gravity, composed and written by Stephen Schwartz:
[Verse 1]
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by
The rules of someone else's game
Too late for second guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
[Chorus]
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity
And you won't bring me down
[Verse 2]
I'm through accepting limits
'Cause someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But ‘til I try, I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love, I guess I've lost
Well if that's love, it comes at
At much too high a cost
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you won't bring me down
[Bridge]
Unlimited
My future is unlimited
And I've just had a vision almost like a prophecy
I know it's sounds truly crazy
And true, the vision's hazy
But I swear someday I'll be
Flying so high (I'm defying gravity)
Kiss me goodbye (I'm defying gravity)
So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to fly
I'm defying gravity
And you won't bring me down!
The only difference between me and the lyrics of Defying Gravity was that I never accepted and never will accept limits to the flights of spirit and imagination.
For the eighty-four years of my life, I’ve been an imperfect though steady votive candle for the Muse.
When I was four, my Aunt Fanny took my cousins Marsha and Michael and me to see The Wizard of Oz. We watched it in a drive-in. What I remember most was the screen suddenly going to shockingly vivid color; hiding whenever the monkeys appeared, or the wicked Witch; loving the Scarecrow, feeling sorry for the Lion, and hating Kansas.
When I became a father, I purchased the full set of Wizard of Oz for my daughters, Hillary and Polly; and did the same with Florrie, my youngest daughter.
By the time Wicked appeared as a novel, then as a musical, I was Ozzified and elsewhere.
I didn’t read the book, or see the musical. I had no interest in the work.
Theater was most important to me, and the form of opera and the musical.
I was very aware of “world-changers,” those moments of personal identity in art that opened my eyes, my heart, my yearning and, later, my physical and spiritual soul.
Examples:
Making my parents take me to see Fantasia every weekend;
Falling in love with the dance and music in Finian’s Rainbow.
Being overwhelmed by the pliancy of Frank Loesser’s lyrics of Guys and Dolls,
Demanding to see every performance of Robert Breen’s production of Porgy and Bess.
And this was before we moved to Europe, when I was twelve, in 1952!
When we did move to Paris, as a result of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, I was overwhelmed and inspired by Paris itself, every street, every person, every texture and taste and smell, every day and night.
Then I was entranced by Florence, where I went to the Uffizi to see Botticelli’s Primavera every day, and before which my mom would find me, within the hour of the museum’s opening, standing before the painting, and in tears. Returning to Florence, twenty-eight years later, I saw the restored version of the painting, with the Uffizi officially closed, but unofficially opened so I could write about the restoration. (A ruse. I simply needed time to spend alone with my muse…)
Discovering art in all its aspects was everything to me.
Further adventures in film and theater – and stay with me, because this may be around Wicked now, but it still is about Wicked, as you will see.
Back in the United States, taking ballet and Afro-Cuban dance, throughout junior high and school, so that I could choreograph. I was already directing and writing plays and lyrics, and wanting to do everything in theater;
As an adolescent, with the emotions of Fellini’s La Strada, I discovered a film that made me laugh and cry at the same time.
As an undergraduate, I was overwhelmed by Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and the the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) based on the play Orfeu da Conceiço by Vincius da Moraes with Carlos Jobim’s score.
Seeing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and falling in love with the enormity of film — its sensuality, its immediacy, its visionary drama in the moment, its thematic devices: the helicopter carrying Christ over the aqueduct; flying above the outskirts of Rome, and the shadow of Christ shooting upwards on a wall; Marcello and the photographer following the statue in another helicopter, and trying to chat up girls on the roof of a building; Christ over the Vatican, descending, then the camera suddenly lifting to follow three Asian dancers in a nightclub…
And that was only the beginning of the film.
Nino Rota’s music aided us in every inch of our flight above and then within Rome itself.
Most importantly, Fellini, in the early sixties, presented 8 ½. I became delinquent from the Yale Drama School to travel to New York to see the film when it opened at 11 am, sitting through the afternoon and early evening shows, before going back to New Haven, then traveling with my wife over the weekend to see the film —again, at eleven in the morning, and then at two.
Where to begin to describe the universe of the creative process, and of the Feminine, in that film? And the moments of insane self-mockery? How did Fellini and his magnificent screenwriter, Ennio Flaiano, do this at one and the same time?
How did he create the images of the moment with the timelessness of his themes?
To write about 8 ½ would be to write another essay of exploration, which I guess I should, and probably will, piu tarde…
And seeing Ingmar Bergman’s work, throughout those years of my late teens, twenties, then throughout his career.
Most overwhelmingly, for me, Persona, as intimate and sensual as Bibi Andersson could be, in a two character film that kept me in the theater for nearly every screening. With Liv Ullman as the perfect coldly intellectual counterpoint to Bibi’s sweet and nasty sincerity!
In my late twenties, I moved to Rome to adapt Valachi Papers for Dino de Laurentiis – where I would live for the next seventeen years, and from which I would work in American, Italian, French and British film, and continue to write novels and plays, supported by the monies earned in film.
And where Fellini would become my friend, and where I would meet Bibi Andersson, and she would agree to be in two films I had written and would direct, but which, for stupid film-flam reasons, would never be made.
But still…
Amazing moments.
Moments of personal Rome comedies
Discussing a film with a young Angela Molina, the superb Spanish actress, and we are walking near the via Frattina and suddenly Pope John XXIII appears in his Pope-mobile, and Angela starts to scream, and is delightful to watch, this comically self-mocking erotic young thing melting before il Papa, tears streaming down her face, all the while laughing at the magical weirdness of the moment…
“Angela,” I said, “don’t worry, he does this all the time…”
“You can see him every day?” she smiled, crying at the same time.
“Everyone walking does…”
“Then you are Catholic too?”
“I’m Jewish. Like the guy he worships day and night.”
Angela broke into laughter, which was adorable to see. She took my arm and squeezed it. “Italia,” she said, shaking her head.
“No,” I replied.”America. Via Pologna and Canada…”
So all this went on, all the magic of the Rome streets, the goofiness and absurdity of the film world, the fear of the publishers of America during that period of “Don’t write that goddess shit,” and in spite of it, I continued to write every day and dreamed every day and night and the imagery grew greater and the thoughts went deeper, and higher, and I found myself teaching, which in a way I’d always done, but now at Dartmouth, as an artist-in-residence, teaching screenwriting at first but then shifting to the sacred, with the reading of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover,
Edward Whitmont’s Return of the Goddess, Tom Robbin’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues…And from there I was asked to set up Screenwriting Programs at Arizona State University, then Boston University, and, finally, at Savannah College of Art and Design, where I taught Playwriting, Screenwriting, English, and Creative Writing, and in all those places found myself fighting the same kind of bureaucratic and sometimes autocratic bullshit that had everything to do with what was going on in Mother’s Little Helpers or Kashimi or the lyrics of Defying Gravity.
I would last in those academic settings maybe five to ten years.
My classroom was my set.
It belonged to me.
I was the one to cry “Action,” then “Cut.”
That was the point of hiring me.
At least it was, and still is, to me.
When Human Resources entered the world of academia, and expanded its power by deciding to define what each classroom should be, and how it should be taught, I went elsewhere.
But my behavior was no different in teaching than it was in film.
Just as my loyalty to the classroom was to the subject I was teaching, and to the students, when I accepted a contract to write an adaptation for film, my only loyalty was to the work I had chosen to adapt.
It was not to the producers or studios.
I would first write an outline, discuss it with the studio heads, producers or directors, have them sign my outline, then I would write the first draft.
If I decided I need to change anything in that first draft, I would send a telegram, letter, eventually email, to the studio and have them sign it. Making them sign the outline was to ensure that when I turned in the script they could not say, “This wasn’t what we discussed!”
That was the initial mantra of every studio or producer with whom I had ever worked.
And this is why:
The terror for producers and studios of film consisted of reading a completed script. It was no longer “a sale” or “a deal.” It was no longer something you could shmooze about. Now it was tangible.
Their panic was palpable. They came up against the terror that perhaps they knew nothing about screenwriting or film!
They became victims of “impostor syndrome,” the fear that they inhabited a position they didn’t really deserve, because they had just been lucky!
I could write the most darkly comic stories about the terror studio people and producers had felt when actually faced with something to produce.
They knew they had to commit to yes or no..
If they were wrong, it was their ass.
But they didn’t know wrong from right. If they did know, they probably wouldn’t be studio heads or producers. But not knowing a good script from a mediocre or bad, they wouldn’t have the guts to go ahead to put somebody else’s money on the line — unless they felt they had some kind of proof that the work was going to make millions!
It’s hell to be a producer or studio head, most of whom are, I must say, gamblers at one a.m. in a Vegas of the mind. To quote Frank Loesser, “They call you Lady Luck, but there is room for doubt, at times you have a very un-lady-like way of running out…”
Publishers are no different.
Later, on substack.com, I will publish an essay I wrote on about Gore Vidal, and the fun we had when his novel Duluth was given to his publishers. They had been expecting to see Lincoln instead. Faced with Duluth, they were terrified. They had great faith in former best-sellers, but not in Gore Vidal himself, as a writer!
Insomma, as we say in Italian…
I have written around Wicked, and what brought me to Wicked, so now let me deal with Wicked itself:
My youngest daughter, Florrie, a professional ballerina at Sacramento Ballet, had seen the film, had called us, and said, “You’ve got to go see Wicked. Go now, then call me back.”
I am a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and can watch all the films, pre- and post-nomination, whether they are animations, documentaries, features, foreign films, and so on, via streaming media.
But Florrie said not to see it streaming on our TV.
“Wicked is too big a film. You need to see it on the big screen,” she urged. “I don’t want to say anything more about it, except I’ve seen it three times. That should tell you something.”
So my wife Kae and I went to the local theater — the one with reclining seats, food service, hydroponic multidimensional eco-blasting sonorities, as well as a dozen other wraparound cinematic gazzillies.
After an interminable half hour of interminable coming attractions – loud, violent, pestering, and yet another reason to sit at home with a novel or book of history, cat on lap and dog at side – the film began:
With the overhead shot of a figure on horseback, then Dorothy and pals dancing along the yellow brick road, I found myself tearing.
I didn’t know why.
Then, flying over that brilliant landscape of tulips and glorious colors, we come upon Oz, and the arrival of Glinda.
Listen to me:
When I saw Wicked, I didn’t know Ariana Grande, or her work. I’d never seen her before. I didn’t know who she was or what she did.
(I’d never watched The Sopranos or Seinfeld, either, and I dropped out of Top of the Pops when we moved to Europe. There’s only so much I can do in a day or night. I have my priorities. Reading is always first. I always have four to six books to read, and they prompt me harder than anything else!)
Anyway, there’s the bubble appearing above Oz, and inside of it there’s Ariana, and I don’t know the fuck why, but I’m already in tears, and when she breaks the bubble and says, “It’s good to see me, isn’t it?” I am enslaved, and laughing so hard, and thinking, “This is a film that has more up its sleeve than simply taking the piss out of itself!”
Ariana has a look that is so complex: delightful, delighted, sweet, full of shit, but all of it meaning, “I may be a goddess but I’m not as stupid as I know I am, so let’s see what happens, give me a minute and maybe I can surprise all of us!..”
That’s not Billie Burke from the Wizard of Oz. This is a Glinda that has something to prove, not just to the people of Oz, but to herself!
Whenever have I fallen in love with an actress/character in the first shot?
And not even a minute of film had gone by.
“No One Mourns the Wicked,” the first musical number, to me was somewhat disappointing. The choreography did what it had to do. I found myself pulling back from the film. The moment seemed rather banal. Until the second viewing of the film.
Now I could see see how Jon Chu, the film’s director, and conceiver of the vision of Wicked, was shooting it.
He’s doing what no other choreographer had done: he had made the environment itself a principal dancer. His editing in the dance number was more than rhythmic cutting. It’s set cutting, which acted as a dramatic sort of extension to the rhythm to the music.
He was making the physical setting itself a dancer. The dance number itself was something that happens with it, and not solely upon it.
It was the setting itself giving the impetus to the number, Chu’s angles and cutting of different aspects of the physical setting became a part of the choreography itself.
The best example of this multi-use of choreography, in which even the furniture becomes a principal dancer, is when Ariana sings Popular to her pink furniture, boxes, room and corridor – and all alone!
Or when Chu makes the physical library not merely a setting of the dance, but propels the moment, generates it, in Dancing Through Life.
The closest I’ve ever seen that use of environment as choreographed character is in the ballet sequence of American in Paris by Gene Kelly and Vincent Minelli, in which the setting and position of the dancers allows us to enter and take part in the choreography. You can’t imagine that ballet without the sets, not as background. The sets are part of the dance.
But what Chu does is more.
He dances the settings themselves!
Bear with me. A word about choreography in the film musical:
Dance in film began within six months of the arrival of sound in film.
The camera was mainly static. It seemed to be sitting in the fourth row of the theater.
The camera had been far less cumbersome in silent film. It was small, pliable, everywhere. But with sound, everything became large and cumbersome.
The answer was to create larger “sound” studios, that could give the camera movement on a track or on a lift, or dolly, and keep the sound equipment hidden. Busby Berkeley seems to have had the most fun with camera movement, in his Warner Brothers films of the Thirties, in which he created overhead fractals of dance, and cut between the song, expression of the actors, and goofy enormity of the sets.
The film musical, under Berkeley’s vision, ceased being about dance, and became more about film work as dancer.
As camera and sound improved, there was more pliability of movement, and editing became musical - although what we were seeing was still static, and “on the beat.” The best of it, to my mind, was still Gene Kelly – who had fun with the musical numbers in Singin’ in the Rain, and took us through a cinematic history of the musical itself. The camera showed the dance, moved with the dancer, but still was stuck to the inevitability of the story.
As I had mentioned earlier, in An American in Paris, Kelly and Minelli moved the camera within the setting, and cut within the setting.
Michael Powell, in The Red Shoes, however, used the emotion of his characters to edit the shots and rhythm of the ballets. That informed the drama of each dance number. The emotion within the dance itself, and seen on the character’s faces, or in the surreal visions of the settings, was the personal drama – its subjectivity, its specificity.
Thus, the dance numbers had a tension and intensity of characterization that gave Powell his visual choices. Powell worked within the psyche of each character to create the images and imagery of the ballet. It was far more subjective, interior, and personal than the dances in the Hollywood musical.
Interestingly, it was as abstract as Busby Berkeley’s earlier work.
With the original film version of Westside Story, Jerome Robbins created the great leap forward in the shooting of the musical film: he made the city and the street a character on and in which the dancing occurred.
The opening of Westside Story marries image, movement, and musical score, beginning with an overhead and moving wide-angle shot of the city, and ending, while beginning, with a zoom to a playground, where the Jets gang are seated, waiting for action. The snap of fingers directs us to the rest of the action, which uses setting not only as location, but as a visual cue and image for the cutting.
It is a lesson in how to use film itself as choreography - setting, color, music, dancing, editing all a part of the same rhythm, beat, measure.
The Big Daddy of Robbins’ film version of Westside Story, and one that every choreographer-director must memorize for its surety of purpose is Cool.
This is the most difficult number to dance in the musical, with the most insane counts for the dancers, but Robbins breaks up the counts by making the editing part of the beat-counting itself. So not only are the dancers dancing the number, but the shots themselves are also dancing.
Robbins takes apart the number into each dancer’s beat, or each group of dancer’s collective beat, and uses the edit either to focus and emphasize that beat, or makes the camera compete or begin the moment itself. It is highly complex, and visually, to my mind, the most exciting dance number ever filmed as complete film/dance.
The producers fired Robbins after those two numbers for going over budget.
The remaining choreography was reproduced by several of the dancers from the original show who were also in the movie, specifically Tony Mordente, who played Action. At least the producers had the remaining intelligence to let Mordente and the other dancers “demonstrate” the dance!
In spite of the stop-start-more-than-one-director pace of the original film version, Robbins’ work took the filmed dance to another level.
To note the difference, watch the way Steven Spielberg shot what I consider the two best numbers of his adaptation of Westside Story: Justin Peck’s Dance at the Gym, and America. Peck’s choreography honors Robbins’ groundbreaking work. It does not attempt to one-up the original choreography. It is itself fluid, sharp, and devoted to Bernstein’s rhythms. Spielberg shoots the numbers deftly as an homage to the Great Old Days of the big number of the MGM musical. In a way, the shooting (but not Peck’s choreography) takes us deliciously backwards!
Compare Peck-Spielberg’s Cool with the original Robbins work, and you will see what I mean. Peck’s version is a musical situation, shot as a dramatic scene. Jerome Robbins’ choreography is based on an emotion, so immediate, so shocking in its intensity. Robbins propels us, with his camerawork and cutting, into the immediate devastation and impotent raging of his characters – cool versus heat - while Peck-Spielberg’s take on the song is situational – a knife hopping from one character to another.
Pushing the filmed musical number further than it had ever gone, and therefore becoming the champion, to my mind, is Bob Fosse, whose work in both “Cabaret,” and, monumentally, in All That Jazz, has set the bar for all choreographer-directors to be.
Fosse did it all.
In All That Jazz, Bob Fosse conceived of every number as a dancer, and shot each dancer as if he or she were the camera.
The numbers emerged from the point-of-view of Joe Gideon, a dancer-turned-director, like Fosse. Everything we see– the point of view, the steps, the images, the editing are each a reflection of Joe Gideon’s emotional yearning, and his self-mockery.
Film itself, everything that went into the shot: the emotional and physical movements’ the cutting; the musical accentuations; the physical changes of the settings; the character’s emotion; often, all exist within one shot, or extended shot.
All of it exist not only for the advancement of the story, but also for the immediate texture and emotion of each moment of the character Fosse was considering..
Fosse’s lesson seemed simple:
Don’t bother directing a musical film unless you are a choreographer.
But there was more, in All That Jazz, and Cabaret.
Everything in the shot has its own life, its own emotion, its own drama. The world within each frame is vital and active.
Fellini understood that, in his later films, and you can see the difference from La Strada, and Nights of Cabiria, to La Dolce Vita and 8 ½.
When Fellini used color, beginning with The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, to Giulietta of the Spirits, and And The Ship Sails On, the tactility and sensuality of each image and movement became even greater. Color and its depths and textures provided even greater emotional definition of the moment.
Bob Fosse was no fool in All That Jazz.
He used Fellini’s director of photography, Giuseppe Rotunno, to help guide his eye!
I was still living in Rome when All that Jazz was released in America. Being a devotee of Fosse’s Cabaret, I spoke to several screenwriting friends in LA, and all of them said that All That Jazz was masturbatory, self-involved, an ego-trip, and not worth the bother.
When it opened in Rome, I didn’t go to see it. Not my normal style, but I trusted my friends’ opinion enough to stay away from the film..
Several months later, on a Saturday, I woke up, bored, and went to the only English-speaking theater to see Fosse’s movie.
I was stunned.
After the second showing, I called my wife and said, “Get over here. I’ve seen the best musical film ever made…It’s ground-breaking, and light years ahead of everything else!”
When she came to the theater, we saw it two more times.
And I never stopped seeing it, at every release.
I wasn’t at all surprised when Alec Baldwin, in an interview, said that Roy Scheider’s performance as Joe Gideon should have won every acting award that existed.
“It’s an actor’s actor performance,” he said, as I told all my friends, “Bob Fosse’s work put the film musical itself into the realm of pure art.”
I taught the film, in my Sacred Art, and Screenwriting/Playwriting classes.
Fosse and Robert Alan Arthur and Paddy Chayevsky created the definitive movie musical, planting a standard for all future directors and choreographers of film. Every line of dialogue, every shot, every camera movement, every choreographic gesture has a reason for being. Each moment possessed an immediately sensual lift. Everything worked together.
That’s art.
And that brings us back to Wicked, and the automatic question in my mind, as I saw the film: “Will this have the physical and psychic impact of Fosse’s work for me? All That Jazz being the Big One?”
Wicked is a BIG MOVIE.
What? You’ve come this far, you’ve read Heaven knows how many pages of this essay just for that earth-shattering insight?
Wait.
Before the movie was even made, everyone involved in its creation thought BIG.
Because David Maguire’s novel had gone into many continuous versions and had a BIG audience, and because the musical had been such a BIG hit, there was no way anybody could scrimp on the production – unless they wanted something for nothing, which was often the case. But Wicked was simply TOO BIG to cheat. Cheaters couldn’t prosper on this one.
So that sounds simple:
Think BIG.
So BIG it would be.
But, stop—!
To MGM, in the good old days, Gone With the Wind was BIG.
Wizard of Oz was considered just a movie for kids, and it wasn’t even supposed to star Judy Garland. Shirley Temple was to be Dorothy. Garland, at that time was not yet the knockout she would become.
So let’s put that BIG thinking aside, and look at the opening shot of Wicked.
Because It’s more than BIG.
It’s overwhelming.
The opening shot of the movie contains the enormity of Jon Chu’s vision of the event:
Starting with a figure on horseback, followed by flying monkies, and passing a tiny Dorothy and her friends on the yellow-brick road, the characters almost seem to be afterthoughts, played against an environment which is revealed as magical, enormous, endlessly filled with dazzling tulips, and all sorts of possibilities and dramatic questions.
Chu’s vision promises wonder.
Surprises.
And endless cinematic intelligence.
The opening shot reveals the wonder of film itself.
A film industry cynic would say, “Yeah, and all it takes is money.”
But that’s not true.
Idiots have lots of money.
Look at the idiots at the supposed helm of our government.
In less than a hundred days, a demented narcissistic psychopath and a wanna-be Martian are working their asses off to dismantle two hundred and fifty years of democracy, with half the nation applauding, and those people don’t even know why!
No, it’s not about the money.
It never is.
It’s about vision: theme, character, the tactility and sensuality of event.
Money? It’s easy to throw away, to show the world how you can spend.
I mean, Trump’s turned the White House into a Vegas weekend!
This is different.
To use money to express theme and vision, and to remain focused until its completion, takes fortitude, intelligence, and will.
Jon Chu’s vision of Oz, prompted by Gregory Maguire’s novels, Winnie Holzman’s play and her screen adaptation, with Dana Fox, with whose rhythms animated by the composer-lyricist, Stephen Schwartz, had to have specific physical and visual solidity to exist, a product of the director’s inspiration.
Chu had to define for his crew and producers how he saw and heard and felt the world the authors’ words had created. He had to assemble a team that could manifest his way of seeing, feeling, dramatizing and showing Oz.
Again, when the technical and aesthetic crew understands and defines the writer/director’s vision, then a work emerges that is uniquely its own world.
In retrospect, you cannot separate the author (in most cases, the writer/director) from the sum of his or her parts. For example, it is difficult to imagine Fellini without the structure or words of his collaborators, the writers Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli; the music of Nino Rota; the photography of Giuseppe Rotunno of Amarcord, Roma; Gianni di Venenzo of 8/12, La Dolce Vita; and the costumes of Piero Gherardi for Dolce Vita, Giulietta of the Spirits, and 8 ½.
How can you separate Ingmar Bergman’s vision from the work of his photographers, the expressionist Gunnar Fischer of Bergman’s early films, and Sven Nykvist, whose impact in the later films demonstrated Bergman’s astonishing play of light on face and setting? And always, the actresses and actors, the faces who inhabited his films: Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Bjorstrom, Anders Ek, Erland Josephson, Liv Ullman, Harriet Andersson…
Jon Chu collected about him an extraordinary group of artists – besides the cast - uncompromising in their devotion to the work:
Alice Brooks, the director of photography; Nathan Crowley, the visionary production designer; Lee Sandales, the rich and always surprising set decorator; Paul Tazewell, Costume Designer, whose work carefully and specifically defined and embellished the characters of the film; and the enormous uses of special effects by Tom Bailey and all the visual and digital effects artists who could bring the voluminous surprises constantly in each shot to the screen.
The world Jon Chu physically created had to contain the genuine splendor and comic trickery of the worlds in which Glinda and Elphaba found themselves.
Leading them to Oz was the arcane magic of Madame Morrible, craftily played by Michelle Yeoh, and ostensibly overseen by the greatest power of Oz, the Wizard, inhabited by a nervous, uncertain, fearful, and clumsily narcissistic Jeff Goldblum.
All of this magical yearning by its principals, and feared by the occupants of the land, is the result of the one motivating idea of the commander in chief, The Wizard of Oz, the operating principal of all wanna be dictators, autocrats and tyrants. As Trump had told the American people about immigrants “eating the cats, eating the dogs, eating the pets of the people that live there,” and about illegal immigrants, “who are Mexican and other gangsters, who commit murder, and rape, and enter our country by the millions!” so the Wizard tells Elphaba and Glinda:
‘The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”
Mussolini and the Abyssinians, Hitler and the Jews, Trump and all the Mexicans, Blacks, Women, Asians, Gays, Lesbians, Trans, etc, the populations comprising DEI, that is the national conflict of the film.
Immediately, and most emotionally, it challenges Glinda’s wished-for sense of self as Purveyor of All Magic, and it leads Elphaba in her decision to “defy gravity,” and to go against the direction that the Wizard/Trump demands everyone travel: Follow the road. It’s gonna lead you right… to me.
The enemy of the Wizard is his unspoken green daughter, Elphaba, who is the product of his dalliance with the wife of the Governor. Elphaba does not yet know this.
Glinda, the pure-blonde good witch, appears to be Elphaba’s opposite: she is lovely, magical, held in awe by the students of Shiz. Glinda allows herself to be pitted against Elphaba, until she becomes her room-mate at the school. At which point, it becomes even more difficult for Glinda, when Elphaba is chosen to study magic above all others – and appears to be chosen for her schooling by the Wizard himself. The relationship becomes central to the film. Until the last scenes, the Wizard will remain an unseen but powerful voice in the background.
The lightness, high coloring, insane sociability of the world of Shiz is smartly but quietly shown to be as anti-intellectual, as racist, as thoughtless as our contemporary world.
The reaction of the students to Glinda – stereotypically in awe of her supposed purity and position – and to Elphaba – despising her green-ness, hating her intelligence, at first feeling sorry, then surprised by Glinda’s growing friendship with the green outsider – defines the light-hearted and energetic world of Wicked as something other than it appears to be.
Wicked is less about a witch than it is the world of Oz itself!
Two of the most startling images and moments occur at the University: the first, in a wildly comic vital and energetic dance number, Dancing Through Life, with Jonathan Bailey as Prince Fiyero demonstrating how good looks and vanity are worth more than learning, and ending at the astonishing library, where students dance all over books, and Fiyero himself squashes one with the heel and hell of his boot… It’s all so much fun, and the squashing and metaphorical book-burning happens so quickly you don’t realize how Chu has set up the fascistic mentality of Oz.
As if that were not enough, the only classroom scene we have is with Dr. Dillamond, the professor of history at Shiz University. He is a goat, one of the few animals remaining in Oz who are allowed to speak but, because of his accent, he is the object of students’ disdain. Worse, he teaches a subject the students cannot tolerate. As Glinda says, “I don’t know why you always talk about history. Why can’t we just escape the past?”
In the past, according to Professor Dillamond, animals spoke. About everything. And everyone learned together, from and about each other’s differences. The past contained the fullness of ourselves. Up to the Wizard’s dictatorial now.
The Goat is the last animal allowed to teach at Shiz.
All the other animals are in hiding, and are afraid of having their voices taken away. Soon the good Doctor will be arrested, and that will be the end of history, and of learning - like Trump imposing his powerful ignorance upon our universities, libraries, law firms, and all media that criticize him.
This splashy, fun-filled environment is a breeding-ground of stupidity, and of fodder for the mindless world of Oz, presided over by a pathetic charlatan shill.
It is Elphaba who realizes that Dr. Dillamond represented the only hope for Oz and for the University: a voice that is the voice of the past, and of all history it contained. Her soul is never more exposed, and her choice to defy it the potent realization of her anger against stupidity, conformity, and – as she will later come to realize – autocracy turning to tyranny.
Jon Chu’s reason for his choices in Wicked as a film - his pitting Glinda’s self-love and deeper self uncertainty against Elphaba’s loneliness and deeper sense of self-worth, becomes the dramatic focus of the film, played against the vibrant pseudo-magic of the settings.
As Glinda is the falsely radiant center of the population’s awe, Elphaba is the genuine heroine of Oz: she is an outsider, a loner, the most deeply-feeling, deeply-caring character of the piece. And she is vibrantly, lusciously green.
Both Glinda and Elphaba must grow into the best of themselves, and finding themselves to be genuinely sisters as witches, and genuinely witnesses to the falsity of the Oz itself.
It takes two scenes in Oz itself – far less in time than the rest of the movie – for the two sisters to realize the lie of the Wizard. He needs a “face” to support his Empire, and requires Elphaba to be that face, with Glinda as “best friend.”
Needless to say, Elphaba refutes the Emperor and his hench-woman, Madame Morrible.
Swiftly, Glinda and Elphaba are chased by the palace guards up to the tower of Oz, where Elphaba discovers her flying broom, and her own capacity to defy gravity and fulfil the power of her truth-telling.
She asks Glinda to accompany her, but there is a secret between them - which bespeaks Part Two of the Movie? - and Glinda holds back from joining Elphaba, even though she insists Elphaba take the broom and do what she must.
Defying Gravity, the duet between the pair, is one of the most moving moments in the film and one of the most sob-producing events I’d seen in years.
The tear sliding down Elphaba’s cheek, the hand of Glinda wiping it; the look of love between them, then the wink from Elphaba a moment before she climbs onto the broom and starts her flight, both singing and knowing what it means to defy gravity…I cannot remember seeing such an inspired pair in film since Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman in Bergman’s Persona: or Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa in Margarette von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne.
Cynthia Erevo’s acting conviction, the ferocity of her intelligence, the pathos of her soul, her vocal pyrotechnics as fluid, jazzy and as dynamic as her dives and zooms throughout the tower through the broken window and into the sky above Oz; Ariana Grande’s rich dramatic arc, moving from superficial self-love to awkward self-knowledge, to genuine love of her Other, her sister defying gravity, and both of them knowing, now, what that means and what they must do…
It is the richest and most operatic moment in film history.
The sensitivity, dramatic intelligence and artistic choices of Jon Chu and his team have created an experience in film that is a gift to the world, an act of love, and a cautionary tale.
After we called our daughter, Florrie, and told her of our love for the motion picture, she said, “It’s the film for my generation. Everything it’s saying is something we have to learn…”
So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to fly
I'm defying gravity
And you won't bring me down!
Which is the meaning, the experience, and the beauty of all great art, and
the best and the beauty of all great people.
And, like Doctor Drummond, Wicked is meant to be saved, savoured.
And its very theme a call to act.
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules
Of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity
And you won't bring me down
I'm through accepting limits
'Cause someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But 'til I try, I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love, I guess I've lost
Well, if that's love, it comes at
At much too high a cost
I'd sooner buy defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I'm defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you won't bring me down
Unlimited (unlimited)
My future is (my future is) unlimited (unlimited)
And I've just had a vision, almost like a prophecy
I know, it sounds truly crazy
And true, the vision's hazy
But I swear, someday I'll be
Flying so high (I'm defying gravity)
Kiss me goodbye (I'm defying gravity)
So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky
As someone told me lately
"Everyone deserves the chance to fly"
I'm defying gravity
And you won't bring me down!
Bring me down!
Bring me down! Ah!