When Life Becomes a Fairy Tale

“Happily ever after was great,” says a character in the 10-hour NBC miniseries “The 10th Kingdom,” “but it didn’t last that long.”

Writer Simon Moore says he wanted to find out what life might be like 200 years after we closed the book on Cinderella, Snow White and friends.

“Those stories really only take girls to the edge of womanhood,” says Moore, 41, who also co-produced the project. “One of the first ideas I had was that there would be a great golden period, which I would allude to when Cinderella, Snow White and Red Riding Hood became the rulers of these kingdoms. I’m imagining what that world would have evolved into without an industrial revolution, and with magic as routine, and a whole society that believed in destiny.”

In episodes that begin airing Sunday, “The 10th Kingdom” takes two lost New Yorkers (John Larroquette and Kimberly Williams) on a romp in the European countryside, where they encounter magic mirrors, a dog-prince, Dianne Wiest as the Evil Queen and an over-the-top trio of slapstick trolls. There are guest appearances by Snow White (Camryn Manheim) and Cinderella (Ann-Margret).

The $45-million series was shot both at Pinewood Studios and in rural Austria, France, Germany and England over a six-month period that involved two directors and two crews working simultaneously.

“I wanted to see it as a sort of road movie across a great land mass like Europe,” Moore says. NBC hasn’t produced a multi-part miniseries of this scope for 25 years. “I’m not sure if that’s a real selling point or a disaster!” Moore jokes. “But I wanted to do something that would have the kind of gravitas of a novel.”

NBC Entertainment President Garth Ancier concedes it wasn’t the easiest project to find a spot for: “ ‘10th Kingdom’ is a strong and compelling program that can certainly sustain viewer interest for the long haul, but it is a challenge to program a 10-hour miniseries without disrupting the stability that we have been striving to create.” The network’s solution is to air the miniseries in five two-hour installments.

If home is a man’s castle, it is often a writer’s fortress. If Moore were an actor, we’d probably be meeting in a hotel bar. But he has invited this reporter to lunch at his sprawling, renovated 1970s house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, which serves as home and work central for him and his partner Jane Prowse.

Moore began writing for the theater, and has since written, directed and produced scripts for movies and television, including the feature film “The Quick and the Dead,” starring Sharon Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio, and an Emmy Award-winning adaptation of “Gulliver’s Travels” for NBC. He has managed all this from his tranquil London base, ignoring the pressure to move to Hollywood.

“Everyone said live there and I didn’t want to, and I’m glad I didn’t,” Moore says. “I would be a less interesting writer if I lived there.” Then he adds: “It’s OK to read weekly Variety, but when you go to Los Angeles, you start to read Daily Variety. And then you think, ‘That’s not enough! Maybe there’s an hourly Variety!’ And that’s when I know it’s time to go home.”

Tall, fair and soft-spoken, Moore chats in a giant office equipped with a small gas fireplace, pool table, a desk looking out into the garden, what seem hundreds of books, and baskets marked with the names of various works in progress stacked neatly on shelves.

Moore says he became fascinated with “fairy stories” about 15 years ago. But he struggled for a way to reconceptualize them for a modern audience. “I discovered this huge collection of self-help books in the 1980s which were called things like ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ and ‘The Cinderella Complex,’ and I realized that this was the way in,” he says. “I realized I needed to be bold about the psychology of it, that these stories contain the very DNA of all our adult preoccupations and fears and desires.”

The story centers on Virginia, a New York waitress who has to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment. The male romantic lead is half-wolf.

“I wanted to try and polarize this ‘What do women want?’ argument with a character who met this woman, and couldn’t decide whether he wanted to eat her or make love to her,” Moore says.

He hopes that the series is as heavy on character development as it is on special effects. “On one level it’s just a silly romp, and I want it to be that,” Moore says. “But hopefully at the center of it is this complex psychology. It’s not my intention to say the fairy stories haven’t gone far enough. They deal with our fears. They’re almost always about going out in the world; they’re almost always about being cursed with something that you could interpret in a psychological sense to be your baggage. This is fantastic material, and all I’m really doing is putting a spin on it.”

During the last 10 years, the project has evolved from a two-hour movie draft to a 600-plus-page script. To keep from getting overwhelmed, Moore worked on index cards for much of the time, using color codes to separate the story line from the characters.

“It helps to see the structure of the piece before I get into the details,” he says. “If you say can you sit down and write 600 pages where there are wonderfully formed characters that all have their arcs, a story that finishes on a climax on the hour break, where there is a real sense of history and ideas, you just say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ ”

Moore says that one of the challenges for him as a writer is diving into foreign territory. “The 10th Kingdom” might revolve around magic and destiny, but does the writer believe in destiny himself?

“I don’t believe in it at all,” he says, laughing. “I’m very interested to write about the things I don’t believe in. As an atheist, I love writing religious characters. If you already believe in what you’re writing, then I really don’t understand what it is you’re uncovering.

“Always, the conceit for me was that they should believe in their world,” Moore continues. “When they put their kids to bed, that they would tell them silly stories about the place where there’s no magic and no destiny--you know, our world.”

* “The 10th Kingdom” can be seen beginning Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC. Subsequent episodes air Monday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).