Words matter. These are the best Craig Zadan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s expensive to produce musicals on television.
People think, ‘Oh, you’re doing ‘The Wiz’ because ‘Empire’ is such a big hit.’ The truth is, staging this musical has been a dream of ours since the ’90s, but the rights were tied up. It’s just coincidental that, this year, when we were choosing a new musical, the rights were cleared.
The truth of the matter is – when we look at things – every movie we do – no matter what the subject matter is – we go to the universal theme of family. We always go to that because if the movie is about family, then any audience can relate to it.
A lot of people feel that ‘Music Man’ is a good movie musical.
We have a great musical sequence in episode five of ‘Smash’ called ‘Let’s Be Bad,’ and it probably is the closest to ‘Chicago’ that I think any of us have ever experienced.
When we went to Judy Davis and said, ‘We want you to play Judy Garland in the mini-series ‘Life With Judy Garland,’ she was shocked, but we just had an instinct about her.
The reality of producing the Oscars is that it’s a blood sport. With social media, everyone has a chance to voice their opinions. You have to know that entering into this special world requires a very thick skin.
When you work on a passion project, there’s always the chance that you’ll get your heart broken.
Neil and I are most thrilled that we were able to bring musical theatre to the enormous audience that ‘The Sound of Music’ reached.
I was captivated by Stephanie Mills.
It rests in the hands of ‘Dreamgirls’ and ‘Hairspray.’ If they’re successful, we’ll be back on track – people will continue to greenlight musicals. If they don’t work, then you’re going to see everyone go back to the way it was before ‘Chicago.’
I would say that, first of all, if you have the honor of being chosen to produce the Oscars, you usually get only one crack at it. We were the first people in sixteen years to do it three times in a row, and it was one of the most profound experiences you could ever imagine.
Neil and I had the greatest experience of our lives doing ‘Chicago’ with Latifah. Then we had the second best experience of our lives doing ‘Hairspray.’
If anything’s going to go wrong, it’d go wrong during ‘Peter Pan,’ not ‘The Sound of Music.’
Live TV is the future. It’s the only way you can beat the DVRing of America. Everything is DVRed, and no one watches stuff when it’s on. Awards shows and sports are watched when they’re broadcast.
There were no TV musicals until we did Bette Midler ‘Gypsy,’ and the success of that opened the door for us to do the rest.
We wanted to take on social and political and LGBTQ stories which no one at the upper level of the entertainment industry ever really wants to do. So you have to fight, and you have to persuade, and you have to manipulate the studios and the networks. And you have to go back – over and over again – until they say yes.
What usually happens on the Oscar telecast is that as soon as best picture is announced, everyone is up out of their seats and running off to their parties.
The future for us is not to go bigger but to go different.
Some filmmakers set out to re-create the theater experience they got on Broadway. They kept everything the same. They shot the original casts. We reinvent the whole thing, look at it solely as a movie. We pretend that nobody saw ‘Chicago’ or ‘Hairspray.’
It is very, very important that people understand that you can tell different kinds of stories, and they do, related to gay and lesbian issues – especially when you know the people behind them.
We have a particular philosophy in the casting room that we don’t really tell the actors – the actors tell us.
In the past, once a movie musical was made, it was believed that you were left with that version, good or bad, for posterity.
We’d go to studios with ideas to do movie musicals and they’d literally kick us out. They said, ‘Audiences aren’t interested in movie musicals. You’re wasting our time.’
We’re finding that the casting of ‘A Few Good Men’ is different from the musicals because the kind of actors that you need to do it are movie actors, basically.
I don’t think we’re going to break the law in terms of what you can or can’t do on TV. We’re looking to do something edgy, different, and special.
We’d never do ‘The Sound of Music’ because the movie was perfect.
To battle the odds – loss of interest, no funding, discouragement – requires someone who doesn’t give up.
I think we sublimated our Broadway desires by doing theater in Hollywood – not on stage but by doing the movies of ‘Chicago’ and ‘Hairspray’ and also musicals on TV. We did Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Annie.’ Even ‘Smash’ was like doing theater.
Carrie Underwood clearly drove ‘The Sound of Music.’ For ‘Peter Pan,’ we had terrific actors but not stars, and we did not do nearly as well.
