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Into The Woods: Navigating The Development Process

By Jacob Krueger

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Adapting a stage musical to the screen is never easy. On stage, musicals work because of their theatricality—the feeling of pretend, play, magic, and performance. Whereas in the relatively naturalistic world of film, those elements are very hard to pull off. Which makes the surprisingly successful film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s stage musical Into The Woods even more worthy of study.

That’s because successfully adapting Into The Woods as a musical for Disney might just be one of the most challenging projects ever.

For all its hilarity and fun, Into the Woods is one of the saddest, darkest fairytales ever. It’s essentially structured like The Wrestler, where by the halfway point everything is perfect, everyone’s gotten their wish, and then, basically, everybody dies.

It’s horribly sad. It’s a movie about loss, based on a play about loss, written by James Lapine (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics). Loss is what they do. They just make it really funny.

And that’s simply not what Disney does.

For anyone who has ever developed a movie with a producer, some of Disney’s notes, and some of the brilliant elements that had to be lost in the adaptation won’t be much of a surprise.

But how Lapine and director Rob Marshall navigated those notes in a way that served both the producer and the screenplay is something that every aspiring screenwriter, and anyone who has ever felt that their “perfect” screenplay was being run off the rails by the development process can learn from.

You see, somewhere during the development process, Disney said to Lapine, “we’ve got a problem, James, with the body count.”

Most writers would have responded to a note like this with total incredulity… and maybe even a little bit of rage. In fact, if you look at some of the response from hard core Into The Woods fans, you can see that rage expressed on Sondheim and Lapine’s behalf.

We’re talking about one of the most beloved musicals of all time. And that shocking body count (as we’ll be discussing later) is one of the things that makes the story so successful, not only thematically but also structurally!

To reduce the body count is not just to make a couple changes to the plot! It means potentially undermining the structural integrity of the story, the meaning of the songs, and the natural evolution of the characters’ journeys—not to mention cutting some of the most beloved and memorable elements in the play.

But Lapine’s reaction, under the circumstances, was remarkably zen.

Rather than going to war over the script the way it was, he dedicated all that energy to figuring out how else it could be done, playing on the same team as the producer, rather than seeing them as the enemy.

After almost 30 years of wandering in the woods of Hollywood, searching for someone brave enough to produce a film musical of Into The Woods, Sondheim and Lapine had finally found a partner in Disney.

By committing 100 million dollars to Into The Woods (this number was later reduced to 50 million), Disney had taken a huge leap of faith on Sondheim, Lapine, and director Rob Marshall. Unfortunately, the basis of that leap of faith may have been what the lyrics were saying rather than wha...