Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” hits the big screen today!
Listen to the podcast on Inkandescent Radio
Are you "Wicked?"
"It certainly has been a wild ride on a broom I didn't realize I was hauling when I set out almost 50 years ago," says international bestselling author Gregory Maguire, author of "Wicked." Don't miss our Q&A, podcast, and video interview!
November 22, 2024: A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, founder and president, Inkandescent PR + Publishing Co. — Odds are good that you have read Gregory Macguire’s bestseller, “Wicked,” seen the Broadway show (millions around the world have), and/or are anticipating the release of the film version this month.
So it is a great pleasure to share with you the interview I had the privilege of doing with him for The Costco Connection. Gregory allowed me to record our conversation (see that video above on our Authors Between the Covers Show on Inkandescent.tv).
Scroll down to read our Q&A — and be sure to check out the book, show, and new film coming soon to a theater near you!
Q&A about Being Wicked with bestselling author Gregory Maguire
Hope: Hello, and welcome to this month’s episode of the Authors Between the Cover Show on the Incandescent Radio Network and Inkandescent. Tv. I’m Hope Katz-Gibbs, creator of the Incandescent PR & Publishing Company and the proud host of this show. I cannot tell you how excited I am to introduce you to our guest, the great American novelist Gregory Maguire.
You all may know him as the author of Wicked: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Hiddensee: The Nutcracker’s Backstory (which I had the privilege of interviewing for Costco’s magazine in 2017) — and he’s written dozens of other best-selling novels for adults and children, most of which, or all of which, are inspired by classic children’s stories. Gregory first published his first novel, The Lightning Time, back in 1978. Wicked was published in 1995 and was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2003. And coming this November 2024, it will be a major motion picture. So we can’t wait to hear all about it. Welcome, Gregory, and thank you for being here.
Gregory Macguire: Well, thank you. It’s great to see you, Hope. And it certainly has been a wild ride on a broom I didn’t realize I was hauling when I set out almost 50 years ago.
Hope: Wow. That is just so incredible, and your life and writing career are so fascinating. After discussing your inspiration for Wicked, we’ll get into some personal stuff. What drew you to The Wizard of Oz as a source of inspiration?
Gregory: I had played little theatrical games based on the Wizard of Oz in the backyard when I was in second or third grade. I remember this precisely because we were not a very prosperous family, and the kids had to play in the backyard so they didn’t get run over on the busy street. And I was the boss kid. Did you ever realize that in a large family, there’s always one kid who makes all the plans and decides what everybody else will do? That’s the boss kid. And I was the boss in our family. I had six brothers and sisters. Many families in the neighborhood were just as big or bigger. And so I would gather my little squadron and decide what we were doing that day. Whenever there was an Us had been aired the night before, it was fresh in the mind of every child. So, I had a purpose-built cast ready to go. And I would assign parts, and we would improvise our way through the story that we had just refreshed in our minds the night before. In a way, I think at the age of seven or eight, I was beginning to play with Found Materials, which is the story that it seemed like everybody knew, just like everybody knew Santa Claus, and everybody knew the tooth fairy, and most people I knew the Gospels, too.
It was just one of those stories that made it seem like you came born knowing it. That’s how it felt. And so everybody played along with me, but I would shake it up a bit, and I would say, Okay, people, we’re going to do this again. We’re going to run through it again. We’re going to mix it up a little bit. We will do some cross-gender casting, and we can try out different parts. And also this time, why don’t you over there in the corner, you didn’t do much the first time through, why don’t you be Captain Hook? And so some kids would say, But, Gregory, Captain Hook isn’t in this story. And I’d say, Excuse me, it’s my story; if I say Captain Hook is in this version, he is. And he’s going to come in, and he’s going to get married to the Wicked Witcher of the West, and they’re going to have twins. And they’ll be called Little Hookums and Little Snookums. And so once you introduce a foreign agent into the yeast, it can’t rise similarly. It has to do something different. And I think I understood that that’s how stories were made.
As a writer, you take what you know and put something foreign and alien into it, and then see what happens, see what you get. I think I became a writer because I loved to play with the material I found in a story.
Hope: I find it endlessly fascinating how a writer’s mind works. Tell us about the history of Wicked.
Gregory: Well, that came about 30 years after our games. I was living in London in the early 1990s, and there was a terrible murder in London of a small boy who had wandered away from his mother’s apron strings and, by the end of the day, was found killed on a railroad bed. There was a boy hunt because security cameras had spotted schoolboys walking along a public pedestrian mall with this little lost kid in between them. Once the boys were identified, there began to be a loud conversation all throughout England about who these boys were and how they could wake up in the morning, get dressed for school, and become murderers by the end of the day. This was a question that it’s hard to answer, even now, after 30 years. It’s a question: I think it’s important to ask because we have to know ourselves whether we could suddenly crack and do something that we would consider criminal or immoral or sinful, even.
Everybody started talking about where these boys came from and how they could be like this. And I began thinking about it, too. And I really started asking myself the question, what are the roots of evil? Where does it come from? Were these boys always terrible? Or did they get corrupted by life? They were not in a good situation, but you don’t have to be poor to do bad things, as we all know. Money doesn’t have that much to do with it. So, when asking that question, I thought I couldn’t ask it about these boys. I’m not a journalist. I’m not going to go interview them. I have to ask it imaginatively, which is what I’ve always done. I decided to write a story about somebody who was recognized as evil. And I thought, well, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? The Wicked Witch of the West. Children’s books are what I know best. And the minute What had I thought of her, I thought, I’ve had a vision. Through my whole Catholic boyhood, I thought the Virgin Mary would come out of the clouds one day.
But instead, it’s not the Virgin Mary. Look, the clouds are apart. It’s Margaret Hamilton, and she’s coming down on a cloud, and she’s saying, I’ll get you in your little dog. And I thought, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’ve had a vision. I’ve had a vision. Everybody knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is. Nobody knows how she got that way. Nobody cares what happens to her. And everybody’s glad when she dies. That’s ripe material. So I really took the Wizard of Oz because it was hanging around in the pantry. I didn’t set out, just because I love the story, I set out to write about evil. And in so doing, Hope, I discovered, I don’t really know very much about it, and I have to let this character be herself to instruct me both what she’s like and what it is that we who find ourselves adjacent to dubious people, what is that we do with that information, and do we make it worse? By stereotyping and scapegoating, are we partly responsible? Those were the questions I had in my head.
Hope: How did you decide to answer this? Tell us more about the writer’s process and how it evolved.
Gregory: I was very without going too much into the psychodrama of it, because my mother had died in childbirth when I was born, I had a suspicion, superstition, I think is actually the word I mean, that I would never get to be 39 years old. I would never be able to be older than she was because how can you ever get older than your mother? I mean, your mother is supposed to be older than you are, right? Until the very end of my 38th year, I was writing children’s books. But on the day I turned 39, I said to myself, If you are one year older than your mother ever got to be because she died at 38, then that’s proof you’re a grown-up. That’s proof you can take on grown-up material because you’re older than your mother. So I began to write Wicked that day, the first day of my 39th year. I was actually near Beatrix Potter’s farm in the Lake District in England, and I started remembering The Wizard of Oz, both the book and the movie.
I remembered this scene — I don’t even know if it’s actually in the movie — when Margaret Hamilton was whirling around and pointing to Billy Burke and saying, “I might have known you’d be behind this, Glinda.” I don’t know if that line is actually in the movie, but that’s what I heard in my head. And I thought, oh, my gosh, these ladies know each other. When the Wicked Witch shows up in Munchkinland, nobody says, “Oh, Wicked Witch, allow me to present Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.” Clearly, they know each other. They recognize each other. They have a history. I wondered if maybe they went to school together. And at that, I fell off my ankles laughing on the grass because I thought, of course, they went to school together, and if so, they had to be roommates. And that’s where all this began.
Hope: I love how writers can make themselves laugh.
Gregory: I laugh a lot!
Hope: Tell us how Wicked became a Broadway musical.
Gregory: After the book was published, it got very good notice, and it sold very well. Hollywood optioned it. The calls from Hollywood started coming in the morning after a Sunday front page book review, over the fold, praising item in the LA Times. Next Monday morning, my agents started getting calls. I had to hire a Hollywood agent immediately. I filled it off first for about a year, and eventually, Universal Studio shows and Dembe More gave me an option, or I took the option that they proposed. It was in development hell, I think they call that. That’s in quotes. If you’re worried about my swearing, that’s in quotes. That’s the term of art in the industry. It was in development hell for about three years. I saw some of the scripts. I didn’t really admire them. It made the story more relatable for middle schoolers and even younger people. There was a lot of scatological humor, a lot of pratfalls. It was taking the seriousness out of my story. But I had three adopted kids that I needed to feed. So I was going to take the money, bow my head, and try to get out the back door before anybody was looking.
And then Stephen Schwartz, the composer, eventually of Wicked, the play, heard about the book from the folk singer Holly Neer. And Holly said I’m reading this great book. And Stephen said, Oh, it sounds like my return to Broadway. And he went to Hollywood and found out who owned the rights. And he presented himself at Universal Studios to the door of Mark Platt. And he went in, and he said, I’ve been keeping my ear to the keyholes, and everybody says, You can’t get a good script for this story, and I know why. Mark said, Why? Steven said, Ever since 1938, everybody knows that everyone can sing, and they should sing this story before they make it into a movie. I will make it into a play, and it will build its own audience. When you get around to making it into a movie, it will already be a phenomenon. Well, that’s exactly what happened. But I’ll tell you what, Hope, it happened by a factor of about 20 times more than anybody anticipated. It’s now in its, I think, 22nd year on Broadway, the play. It’s the fourth longest-running play in Broadway history, and millions and millions have seen it of people around the world.
The movie, which will be released in two parts, one part this fall and part two next fall, is one of the most lavish productions I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard that the budget for the two movies was about $400 million. And you know what? It looks like it. It is so beautiful. I haven’t seen the whole thing. I’ve only seen what everybody else has seen on YouTube clips, but it’s dazzling. And I went and visited the set and saw it being filmed, too. So that’s how it became a musical, and the musical surprised everyone by… I mean, people thought it would do okay, but it did more than okay. It actually broke box office records in almost every theater it played in for the first 10 years.
Hope: As a writer, a story is so often all in your head, but now your stories are real for millions and millions of people in multiple versions. Tell us how that feels.
Gregory: One would think that that would be a condition for the requirement of a whole lot of therapy. A writer lives in a very probate space. I mean, if you’re looking at my image and not listening to me on the radio or on your device, you’ll see I have a study, and it’s a nice room, it’s a nice building, it’s nicely appointed, and I’m very happy here. But I spend 99% of my working life here in this room alone. When something escapes out the door or out the window, and it goes into the world, when it’s a book, I expect to get anywhere from no, from none to maybe 200 letters of appreciation. Very often, it’s none. Like, oh, well, that one didn’t go anywhere. Or if people liked it, they didn’t feel like writing to me about it. But when something enters into the entertainment industry, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. And if you are, as I am, a fairly shy person and a person who’s happy to live in my own mind rather than on the red carpets of Hollywood, then that much attention could be crushing. It is very lucky. Therefore, I hope that just about the time that Wicked was starting to really hit the stratosphere, my three adopted children were going into grade school.
And the needs of children in my universe are always more important than anything else. So, I didn’t adopt children so they could help me with my own mental health. But in fact, their needs took over. And anything else that happened, oh, I was invited to go to Australia for the opening of Wicked. I was invited to go to some other places. When It opened in Japan and Korea, I turned them all down. No, I’m on lunch duty that week, I said. I’m supposed to supervise the kids bringing in money for milk. I’m not going to Tokyo to swan around like some jerk. I’ve got a job to do here. That’s how I wanted it. So, my kids helped me keep my feet on the ground. I hope that answers your question. How did it feel? It felt weird, but I felt protected. I felt protected by real life.
Hope: That is so beautiful. So you are married to American painter Andy Newman. It was one of the first same-sex marriages performed in the state of Massachusetts. We are talking to you from your studio home in Massachusetts. And so tell us about that experience and also about your three kids.
Gregory: Well, like some families in this country and around the world, we had our kids before we got married because we weren’t allowed to get married. It wasn’t yet legal. As the decades have gone on, and we’ve been married now for 20 years, 20 years ago last month, as the decades have gone on, we ended up being among the first cohort of same-sex marriages in the history of this nation. We were in the first four and a half weeks. We didn’t want to do it the first day or the first week because I didn’t want public attention on it. Again, to protect the kids. I didn’t want cameras there recording it and making it a news item. We decided to wait for the first blush, the first month to go by. Then, when everybody had read enough stories about it and wanted to move on to something else, we thought, now we can sneak in under the radar and have a ceremony that’s suitable for our family and for us. The kids were about six four and three, and they walked us, they gave us away at the ceremony in our backyard where there were about 120 people in attendance.
And then they took us back as soon as the service was over. And the kids are from overseas. Both boys are from Cambodia, and their sister, our daughter, is from Guatemala. So, they were raised in a peculiar household. They had two dads instead of a dad and a mom, or one mom, or one dad, or two moms. I concur. I admit that that was unusual. But I think what was even more unusual in their childhood was that they had two parents who were artists. Neither of us had a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Neither of us was getting in the car and rushing off to be someplace else. That meant we walked them down the driveway to the school bus every morning and every afternoon. When the school bus came to deliver them, we waited there to take them in to supervise them, unpack their knapsacks, clean their lunch boxes, and start on their homework. So it wasn’t just one of us. It didn’t fall on only one set of shoulders. I think adopted children can be insecure, but I think we were able to give them a brace of dads, if you will, to help them feel secure because of the way we weren’t because we were both self-employed.
Hope: What are they all doing now?
Gregory: Well, they’re in various occupations. Those who went to college are through college and employed. One is in LA, and the other is in Augusta, Georgia, in the Army, just finishing up a course in cybersecurity. The third one is living at home and working in a bakery. We get together often, and we are still very intact as a family. I know some families that break up. I mean, you don’t have to be an adopted child to want to get away from your family. It happens to a lot of us. We’re very happy so far, as the kids are solidly in the middle of their 20s, that they actually feel more committed to us and more attached to each other than they ever did in their teens. I know there are bumps ahead. Nobody’s flight path is particularly smooth in this life, but they have each other, and they have us. That makes me very happy.
Hope: That is so beautiful! I’m very happy for you all. Good job, Dad! Now, back to the books and what people can buy at Costco. The Wicked Series includes several books. Tell us about the world you created.
Gregory: Now, you would think that in a book called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witcher of the West, a book in which, as you might know, the witch gets splashed by a bucket of water on the second to last page. And if she survives, nobody knows about it. Nothing else is said about what happened to her when she disappeared. Well, how can you write a sequel to a book in which the main character is gone? And I struggled with that for a little bit. I didn’t really want to write a sequel. But I’ll tell you, faith… Hope, excuse me. See, you’ve got a very religious name. I could also call you charity, I suppose, before the end of the Zoomcast. About nine years after the book had come out and the play had opened and was doing well at the Box Office, we had the first Gulf War. No, it was actually the lead-up to the second Gulf War, I guess. Those photographs came out of Abu Ghraib. I don’t know if you remember where political prisoners and terrorists were being tortured.
There was one particular photograph of a man with a hood on his head and electrodes hooked up to his fingers. It was one of the photographs of our times, I’m afraid. Like that small child burning napalm in the Vietnam War. It is just one of these photographs that you can’t forget when you see it. And so that photograph tore my heart out of my chest. That’s just not a way to treat a human being, even a bad human being, even if that person was a terrorist and had killed someone. There are laws against the treatment of political prisoners, and I couldn’t bear it. In order not to go insane, because I still had a job of raising my family and keeping my own mental health intact, I decided to go back to Oz. Because in Oz, I can safely find myself in somewhat treacherous territory and try to pull myself through it and try to pull characters through it. I remembered that in Wicked, not so much in the play, probably not in the movie, the script of which I haven’t seen, the witch and Fiero have an illegitimate child. By the end of Wicked, the novel, he’s 14 years old, and he’s hanging out in the castle with his mother, and then she disappears, thanks to the bucket of water.
What happens to him? Suddenly, he was about the age of my kids, and I started caring more about his situation. And so I wrote the book called Son of a Witch, which was about what happened to him when his mother disappeared. Where did he go? How did he make it through? And he wasn’t really sure that she was his mother because she wouldn’t admit to it. She wouldn’t admit ever to having had a child. She wasn’t sure. I suppose this can happen if you’re a witch. It doesn’t happen to most women, but she wasn’t really sure if she’d ever given birth. And so the book Son of a Witch is about his journey from 14 to about 24 in which he grows up and actually finds proof of his provenance, proof of his bloodlines, if you will, by the end of that book. And then once I’d gotten back, once I’d uncorked that vintage again and poured myself a drink, then it was intoxicating. And I went back for two other books. A Lion Among Men is about the cowardly lion, where he came from, and what happened to him, even after The End of Son of a Witch.
Out of Oz is about Dorothy’s return to Oz, about, well, she’s about six years older. Instead of being 10 years old, the way she was in the original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, she’s now 16. She’s more like Judy Garland when Judy Garland played a 10-year-old. And I have fun with that, too. L. Frank Bohm, the author of the original Wizard of Oz, did bring Dorothy back to Oz. So I was playing on his invention. Dorothy returns to Oz, and there’s been a political rethinking about the witch. She’s been rehabilitated while Dorothy was gone, and over the 30 years intervening Oz years, that is. And Dorothy’s put on trial for her murder. So that’s what Out of Oz is about.
Hope: What a powerful imagination! It’s fantastic. Living inside your brain must be really fun. Tell us, what is next for you?
Gregory: After I wrote those Out of Oz, I named Out of Oz, which is available at Costco, along with the other three books I’ve mentioned. After I wrote Out of Oz, I thought, Now I’m really done. I even named it Out of Oz as if I’m out of gin, I’m out of spaghetti sauce, I’m out of money for this week, we’ll have to wait till next week. I was trying to give myself instructions. You have finished this cycle. You’re done. The title even says it. But then, Hope, the same thing happened with Son of a Witch. My kids kept growing up, and COVID began to happen. Our youngest daughter, who had just gone away to college, had spent about six months at college before college dorms closed, and she had to come home. So suddenly, she is now just a little bit older than the age Dorothy was at the end of Out of Oz, and then the other character, Lear’s daughter, whose name is Rain. And I had ended Out of Oz with Rain having found a twig from her grandmother’s broom and taught herself to fly on it and flown actually beyond the country limits of Oz, out over an ocean that few even knew about.
Oz is not as landlocked as everybody thought. It’s just that beyond the high mountains, there actually was an ocean. It was like European travelers going across Central America and finding the Pacific and the penny dropping. Oh, my gosh, this isn’t even India. This is someplace else. There’s another ocean over there. So Rain found the ocean, and I finished out of Oz with her flying away, flying away from Oz, getting out of Oz herself, literally on her grandmother’s broom, so to speak. But Ten years later, COVID happened. My daughter’s home huddled underneath her Kermit the Frogy Blanky, trying to do freshman college courses from a fetal position in her bed on her Zoom. And I think to myself, I can’t leave that poor child out flying over the ocean. She says I can’t rescue her. The job of an artist, the job of an author, even the job of a parent, I think, and you can tell me if you think I’m wrong, the job is not to rescue your children or your protagonists. The job is to follow them and ensure they know they’re seen. Make sure that they know they’re on your radar.
You will do what you can. You will shout advice. You can’t necessarily throw out the safety net, but you can make sure they’re not alone. That’s maybe the main thing. Maybe that’s the main definition of parenting: to ensure somebody else is not alone. So I couldn’t leave Reanne alone out over the ocean anymore. I’d left her hovering there for 10 years. So I went back and wrote three more books about her adventures, which are called Another Day. They’re a different series. They’re not the Wicked Years. It’s called Another Day. And I finished it up just about as COVID was finishing, and I thought, phew, okay, I’ve got her back safely. Her feet are on the ground. Now, I’m going to walk away. And so it’s like a third time in a row I’ve said, I’m walking away from this material. Then something else happened. Last one. Next year, next March, just about seven months from now, I have one more book. It will be my eighth book set in my Oz, if you will, and it’s called Elfie. And it is the childhood of Elfaba, the Wicked Bitch of the West, between between the ages of two and 16.
Wicked was 500 pages of manuscript, and my editor said, “We’re going to buy this, we’re going to pay you nicely for it, but you have to lose 80 pages.” And I lost 80 pages, and in those 80 pages, there were about three little tiny episodes of things that happened to her when she was four and when she was twelve that had to hit the cutting room floor. Now, Hope, Wicked has become this enterprise. It’s like intellectual property. It has escaped this room. It has burst through those windows, and I will never see it again. It belongs to the world now. I mean, copyright belongs to me, but it’s in everybody else’s mind. It’s probably going to survive me. I’m going to be dead, but people will remember Fierro and Madame Morable and Dr. Dillamond, as well as other characters I invented and played with. And I realized sooner or later somebody will say, Hey, let’s do a young Elfabun, young Glinda series, like young Bugs Bunny and young Sherlock Holmes. Somebody’s going to do that. And I’m not going to be around to say no.
I thought, if somebody’s going to say what her childhood was like, I think it should be me. People can deviate from it the way they’ve deviated from everything else. But I want to be the first to put my hoofprint in that particular sand. So that will be, I’m saying this to you now, Hope, that will be my eighth and final book derived from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz many, many generations later. But who knows? I’m not promising anything.
Hope: I love that. The world loves that. If you could meet L. Frank Bohm, what would you say to him?
Gregory: I would say to him, Honey, you ain’t got no idea what’s going on in court, and your characters have become part of the foundational myth of our entire nation. I think stories about George Washington, the Cherry Tree, and Abraham Lincoln walking five miles to deliver a nickel to somebody who had been underpaid for making a change. I think Washington Crossing the Delaware and the soldiers on Iwo Jima and Thoreau living on Walden and writing about the natural world. There are some things that are national myths that belong to all of us and make us recognize what it is to be American. I would tell Bohm that Dorothy is part of our national psyche now. She is one of us, and she defines us and her adventures. She goes to this magic land, but she actually performs what is required of her mostly without the agency of magic. She performs well because she arrives with courage and fortitude, Midwestern common sense, and an open heart. We hope that as Americans, we will retain all those attributes and make our nation better in the years to come than it has been.
Hope: I could talk to you for hours. Thank you to best-selling author Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, and so many eight stories that focus on that magical cyclone.
Gregory: That magical cyclone. Keep spinning. I keep trying to get off at the next stop, but then it sweeps me back up again.
Hope: Well, we can’t thank you enough, sir. So this article will appear in the October issue of the Costco Connection, and it will be on the Inkandescent Radio Network and Inkandescent.tv, coming this fall when the film comes out in November. So thank you again for your time, sir. I appreciate you. Thank you all, dear audience, for listening and watching. Take care, and go get that book at Costco!