Cravenline
Behind the Curtain: Joe Roth
You know Joe Roth, even if you don't know his name. The founder of Revolution Studios, and former chairman of 20th Century Fox and Disney, has produced a broad swath of movies in his nearly forty year career, including Young Guns, Major League, Nightbreed and The Jerky Boys. Lately, he's been producing a series of fantasy films that put a new spin on classic fairy tales. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Snow White and the Huntsman, and now Oz the Great and Powerful, a new film from Sam Raimi that stars James Franco as a stage magician and shyster who travels to Oz and becomes "the man behind the curtain."
We sat down with Joe Roth to discuss the development of the film, why he's making so many fantasy movies lately, why he won't remake Young Guns, and his upcoming low budget drama, Heaven is for Real.
Read CraveOnline's review of Oz the Great and Powerful.
Read CraveOnline's interview with Oz the Great and Powerful star Rachel Weisz.
CraveOnline: You’ve done a couple of different films that take fantasy tales and repurpose them, recontextualize them…
Joe Roth: Four of them.
Four of them, with Maleficent coming out. Do you feel like you could have done a straightforward Wizard of Oz movie, or is this the best way to go right now?
No. No, you can’t… I mean, this is my own personal opinion. You can’t remake a classic. You can remake a movie that had a very good idea, but somehow wasn’t executed as best it [could be]. The Wizard of Oz? You’re not going to remake The Wizard of Oz. So once I heard the idea, “Who is that guy behind the curtain, and how did he get there?” That seemed like a great way in to do a prequel to the story.
Where did you first hear the idea? Was it a script that came to your table…?
No, it was a screenwriter. It’s one of those funny stories. A screenwriter came in, pitched a couple of ideas that were not that interesting. I’m in the room, I go, “What else you got?” He says, “Well, I’m reading the [L.] Frank Baum books to my kids.” And I said, with great intellect, “Oh, I didn’t know there was more than one.” [Coughs] He says, “Yeah, there were,” and I asked him to go down through some storylines, and when he got to that storyline it intrigued me for a lot of reasons. First of all because I always wondered who that guy was behind the curtain, and what he did in his life to actually sacrifice his life, because he couldn’t go out anymore. He had to be the guy behind the curtain. And, as somebody who ran Disney Studios for some time, it was very difficult for us to find male protagonists, [this] was an organic way of having a male protagonist in a fairy tale.
Disney had done another repurposing of Wizard of Oz before, Return to Oz…
Yes.
I was wondering, because it’s MGM that has the original Wizard of Oz…?
Yes. It’s MGM/Warner Bros. Actually it’s part of the Warner Bros. library.
What aspects of Wizards of Oz…
What are the rules?
What are the rules?
The rules are it has to come from the books.
So what was in the original movie that was verboten?
Well, like the ruby slippers.
Those weren’t in the book?
No.
Because I was expecting a scene at the end of the credits, where the witches were all sad and go, “Oh, let’s go shoe shopping.”
[Laughs]
Did you read the books eventually?
Yes.
Was there anything you discovered in there that you were very excited about?
Well, there are so many characters in the books, so we had to limit the amount of characters simply because we could only make a two hour movie. So to me that was frustrating.
You have a plot point about someone turning into so-and-so. Were you worried about the audience coming in, having seen Wicked, and sort of knowing the trail of events?
The audience doesn’t seem to know, based on the online response we’re getting. They don’t seem to be able to figure out whether it’s Rachel [Weisz] or Mila [Kunis] who turns out to be the Wicked Witch.
Did you expect that?
No.
You thought it was going to be a foregone conclusion?
Yeah, I just thought we’d have to hide it in the campaign, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Sam Raimi was a very good choice to direct this. What sort of conversations did you have with him. He’s never worked in 3D before.
No. However he did the three Spider-Man movies, and I’ve known him, and he’s a showman, and his office was close to mine. At first he didn’t want to read the script because he loved The Wizard of Oz. He kept thinking we were making a remake. “Nope. It’s not a remake. It’s kind of an origin story for the wizard.” And he read it and said, “Okay, I have to do this. I absolutely have to do this.” I said, “Well, we’re going to do it in 3D.” He said, “Great. That’s the way to do it.”
Did the script change at all when Sam came aboard? Did he bring in his own proclivities?
You know, really, Mitchell [Kapner] wrote the script. Mitchell is the Baum expert, Baum historian. And Sam liked working with David Lindsay-Abaire, who is much more of a wordsmith, a New York playwright.
Tell me about the difference between the drafts. Lindsay-Abaire got credit, which means he did a substantial amount of work…
I think most of the work he did was in the dialogue. It wasn’t substantial plot changes. It was more dialogue than anything else.
There’s talk of Snow White and the Huntsman 2. Is that still going?
We’re developing it.
Are you looking at a potential franchise for Oz the Great and Powerful 2? Is that something you’re interested in pursuing?
I would pursue it only because there’s such great source material. You’ve got twelve other books, you’ve got a wonderful cast, so we’ll see. We’ll see how well it does.
At this point, now that you’ve established this framework, could you go back and do Wizard of Oz, because the Gales have a bit of a cameo in way…
Again, I wouldn’t approach it head on.
Could you do it from a different perspective, like you’re doing Maleficent?
Yeah, perhaps. With Maleficent we’ve really turned it around. We’ve turned the Sleeping Beauty story completely on its head.
Do you look for that? Is it a coincidence that you’ve done a bunch of reimaginings?
I think it’s a coincidence.
You’re not just looking around, “Hmm… Fairy tales… Cruella De Vil is attacked by dalmations! Let’s do it!”
No, no, not at all. I’m actually much more reactive than active. I got to work with Linda Woolverton, who I think is a fabulous screenwriter, and she had a take on Alice [in Wonderland]. Which I was suspicious [of], going into Alice, because Alice had been done so many times, it’s been at Disney, but she made a connection for me about to make it not an episodic movie, which was that those crazy creatures down below weren’t really crazy, they were kind of a political underground. Somehow or other that connected it to me.
I haven’t seen Maleficent, but with Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and the Huntsman, you seem to be taking traditional fairy tale “women in peril” stories and adding a female empowerment kick.
Yes, I think there’s no question about it that Alice and Snow White, and in Maleficent the female is already empowered, so I’m not so sure we’ve done that… But yeah, I’m interested in either large escapist fare that has elements that have stood the test of time around the world, whatever language, culturally, [and] I’m also interested in the actually earthbound human experience.
You’ve done so many films that have become part of the pop culture consciousness. Have you ever thought about revisiting something like Young Guns?
It has occurred to me, but I don’t know how to make it differently.
What about Americathon? I feel like that would be very appropriate in the modern context?
Oh my god, unfortunately it’s all too real. [Laughs]
I wish that film was more available. It’s a fun flick.
It was a fun film. Meatloaf and Elvis Costello before anybody knew who they were.
And John Ritter was wonderful.
That’s right. I remember picking up Elvis Costello at LAX. He was coming up from Australia. No one even knew who he was. I was just told by CBS Records that this guy was good. I remember taking him, picking him up at the airport, taking him on the set. I was thinking, “Oh, this guy’s great!” [Laughs]
What is coming up next, after Maleficent?
I am working on, in a complete reversal, I’m doing a $13 million movie based on the bestselling book Heaven is for Real. You know that book?
I’m actually not familiar with that book.
It was actually the bestselling book in the world last year, in English and Spanish.
Okay, well, I’m a screw up then.
No, no, no. Nobody knows about it. If you didn’t live here [in Los Angeles] or in New York, you would probably have a better chance, but it’s a story of a pastor whose four-year-old boy almost dies on the operating table, and comes back with tales from heaven. So again, it asks one of those salient questions, which is “What happens after you die?”
It is tricky when you give a child a messianic power. I remember Pay It Forward seemed oversold.
Yeah.
Are you looking into that balance?
No, it’s the pastor’s story, in the way that Dustin [Hoffman] can’t really change in Rain Man, a four-year-old can’t really change. The change has to come in the pastor. It’s the story about a guy who is a man of faith who loses his faith, who has an opportunity to regain his faith by the experience of his son.
