Doing the Broadway shuffle

Hal Luftig had such a good time at “Legally Blonde,” he sat through it again with friends a few days later. But this time he knew what was coming. “I watched it differently, and I noticed there were some musical moments,” says Luftig, a producer of the Tony-winning musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” “So I went back a third time.”

He was still musing about song-and-dance possibilities for Reese Witherspoon’s pink-clad Elle Woods character when he got a cold call from Darcie Denkert, president of MGM’s then-new theatrical division, inviting him to a breakfast meeting. “I thought, ‘Meet with them,’ ” he recalls. “MGM has a lot of great titles. What do I have to lose? And they have a great breakfast at the Rihga Royal hotel.”

Three years later, Luftig and MGM have a composer, lyricist, book writer and director readying the studio’s 2001 hit film “Legally Blonde” for Broadway’s 2006-07 season. The musical adaptation of MGM’s 1988 “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is playing there now, and the show based on 1968’s “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” opens on Broadway this week after three years on London’s West End. Due next month at London’s National Theatre is a “musicalized” “Theatre of Blood,” the 1973 horror classic starring Vincent Price as a vengeful Shakespearean actor.

The MGM offerings join a growing roster of movies-turned-musicals on Broadway and West End. In London, “Mary Poppins” is a major hit. “Billy Elliot the Musical,” staged by Stephen Daldry with music by Elton John, opens in May. Three of the last four winners of the Tony Award for best musical began as films: “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “The Producers” and “Hairspray.” This month, New Line Cinema hosted a table reading in New York of a musicalized “The Wedding Singer,” scheduled to open on Broadway next year. Days earlier, a dance musical opened in Beijing based on Warner Bros.’ classic film “Casablanca.”

“You hear it about almost every film that comes out now,” observes Jack O’Brien, the Tony-winning director who has spun theatrical gold from such films as “The Full Monty,” “Hairspray” and, most recently, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” “This seems to be the new mother lode.”

Since Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” proved as commercially winning onstage as on-screen in the mid-’90s, movies have been receiving more attention as musical fodder. A Disney Theatrical Productions spokesman says “The Lion King” alone has grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide, and under development are stage productions of “Tarzan,” with music by Phil Collins, and “The Little Mermaid.”

That success has hardly gone unnoticed. DreamWorks is a co-producer of “Shrek -- The Musical,” which will be staged by “Avenue Q” director Jason Moore, and in development is a musical adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can.”

MGM on a mission

Yet while most studios primarily respond to inquiries rather than solicit them, MGM has been particularly aggressive since forming MGM On Stage in January 2002. MGM On Stage has about 40 titles in various stages of negotiation, development or production, Denkert says. Among them: “Heartbreakers,” “Those Lips, Those Eyes,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Garbo Talks,” “The Fortune Cookie,” “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” “Weekend at Bernie’s,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” “Desperately Seeking Susan,” “Get Shorty,” “Marty” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Who better than MGM, which by 2000 had amassed upward of 4,000 film titles after buying Cannon, Orion, PolyGram to add to their film libraries? When the studio assembled a library task force to explore new ways to raise money from those films, two major ideas emerged: The first was to increase already existing home video and DVD sales and television licensing revenue, and the second was to explore new ways of using the library.

Denkert and Dean Stolber, executive managing director of MGM On Stage, proposed trying to develop and license titles by adapting them, primarily for the musical stage. The two spent several months watching and rewatching MGM movies. “You’re watching to analyze each character’s motivations,” Denkert says. “You ask if the emotions are so strong that words would not suffice and the characters would sing about his or her emotion.”

Eventually, Denkert and Stolber came up with about 150 titles they thought would make good stage adaptations plus do well touring and in schools and community theaters. MGM On Stage was formed, and they started meeting with producers, writers, directors, agents, composers and other theatrical people.

They also got on the phone, contacting such major Broadway players as “The Producers” director Susan Stroman and “Annie” composer Charles Strouse. They gave songwriters Stephen Schwartz and Alan Menken a list of films to think about. And Denkert played matchmaker with “Full Monty” composer David Yazbek and TV writer Jeffrey Lane, bringing them together when she learned both were interested in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”; Lane says they are already talking about doing other projects together.

It helps that Denkert and Stolber came from theatrical backgrounds. Stolber began as an actor, performing on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” And Denkert, who just completed “A Fine Romance,” a coffee-table book on the links between Broadway and Hollywood, was a theatrical lawyer before joining United Artists in 1977 and moving to Los Angeles when MGM bought UA in 1981.

“I expected two lawyers out to see what profit they could make,” Lane says. “But these weren’t studio executives who somehow wound up with this on their plates. These were two people who loved musicals. They really knew what they were talking about.”

They’d better. Developing musicals is expensive -- they can cost $10 million to $12 million -- and unpredictable. The 1996 musical “Big” lost more than $10 million, says lead producer James B. Freydberg. The 2002 “Sweet Smell of Success” lost nearly $10 million, says Marty Bell, one of its producers.

Development takes time. Unlike TV films or books that can closely follow news events, musicals usually take several years. “In moviemaking, you hire a writer and he goes off and writes,” observes Denkert. “Musicals are a very collaborative process: You have a book writer, lyricist, composer and director -- all with different schedules. Getting them all in the same room together takes time.”

Some projects were already in place when MGM On Stage started. The musical of Ian Fleming’s “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” was developed by the team that has long produced the James Bond films. The stage production of Oscar winner “Marty” played Boston in 2002 starring John C. Reilly as forlorn butcher Marty and, says Denkert, is aiming for a Broadway slot next season.

The 1989 Oscar winner “Rain Man,” she says, has a script written by the film’s Oscar-winning co-screenwriter Barry Morrow. “Rain Man” would be a play with music, as would “Midnight Cowboy,” which has been licensed to British producers. And Blake Edwards is developing his classic “The Pink Panther.”

“A lot of people asked when I was going to do another ‘Panther’ film, and I personally didn’t want to do another movie,” Edwards says. “I have a substantial ownership in the ‘Panther,’ and seeing how well other films translated to the stage, I thought that was a good idea.”

A trend reemerges

Hollywood and Broadway have been slow dancing for decades. The studios have invested in Broadway shows frequently over the years. At MGM, as at other film studios, films have long been licensed to Broadway musical producers. When Stolber, a former executive vice president of United Artists and MGM, licensed the stage rights to “42nd Street” to producer David Merrick in the late ‘70s, Denkert was the MGM lawyer who worked on it with him.

“We in the producing community went through the catalog of plays that were viable musicals,” Bell says. “Novels have been a source, but these days Hollywood seems to gobble up all the novels before we can. So movies become one source of a good story. And often they’re laid out dramatically for you so there’s less structural thinking than you have to do with a novel.”

Until the mid-’80s, observes Freydberg, musical producers were really entrepreneurs, originating more of their own ideas. More recently, he says, as costs of musicals have exploded into the multimillions, risk-averse producers tend to import shows, mount revivals or adapt films. “Broadway producers became more presenters than producers,” says Freydberg, the lead producer of a new musical based on the 1985 Cher film “Mask.” “Origination became more rare.”

The motivation was to protect investments. “If you have a hit revival of a musical, everybody decides that’s where the money is,” says veteran producer Harold Prince. “But that works for the first one. The first one is a hit; the copycats are not.”

Not only that, he says, but whether revivals or film adaptations, all of this is cyclical. “Thirty years ago, when my career started to take off, the major studios would call and ask if they could send me their catalog, saying, ‘You can pick what you want and we’ll make a musical.’ Somebody does ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ or ‘Spamalot,’ they’re successful and everybody else decides that’s the next thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s a flavor-of-the-month syndrome, and it always seemed to me that being first to be second is not ideal. You want to be the first.”

But hit or miss, it’s a trend that keeps reemerging. Earlier film adaptations included such musicals as “Promises, Promises,” spawned by Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment”; “Sweet Charity,” from Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria”; “Sugar,” from “Some Like It Hot”; and “Applause,” from “All About Eve.” But today the title is part of the attraction and less likely to be changed.

“A part of people’s hearts is already there,” says Strouse, composer of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Annie” and “Applause,” who also composed the score for the new musical “Marty.” “With a fine movie, you have a whole story which has been seasoned and appreciated.”

But even if the title doesn’t change, the story needs tweaking.

“Mel Brooks knew that he had to be willing to throw out the screenplay for ‘The Producers’ and start anew, taking these wonderful, eccentric characters he created and make it believable when someone launches into song and dance,” says Stroman, that musical’s Tony Award-winning director. “I doubt an original screenplay could make it into a musical without a major overhaul.”

Getting the rights to even try is often complicated. “Usually a producer has to chase down the movie company and the screenwriter and sometimes more than one screenwriter and one version of the movie,” Bell says. “MGM is trying to package all the rights so it’s one-stop shopping.

Bandwagon is rolling

Other studios are certainly paying attention to the trend. RKO Pictures, for instance, is reviewing its catalog of 1,100 films and titles, says Chairman Ted Hartley. RKO was a co-producer of last season’s “Never Gonna Dance,” based on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film “Swing Time,” and, says Hartley, is talking with book writers about combining the Astaire-Rogers films “Top Hat” and “Roberta” as a musical. “You have a title or name that audiences recognize and feel comfortable with and which helps to get the writers and stars you need to make it work.”

New Line, a backer of the wildly successful “Hairspray,” hasn’t launched a division, says Mark Kaufman, senior vice president of production and theater. Rather, he says, he and others have gone through the company’s film catalog “specifically looking for movies that sing.” Besides “The Wedding Singer,” he says, New Line is developing the 2003 coming-of-age film “Secondhand Lions” as a musical, with a book by Rupert Holmes, and the 2000 comedy “Saving Grace,” with a book by Harvey Fierstein.

Warner Bros. in 2003 established its Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, which is a co-producer of “Casablanca -- The Dance” in Beijing. While Warners has several film-based projects in development, says Executive Vice President Gregg Maday, they will be announcing them later.

Then again, there’s the Disney-stirred pot of gold enticing them. MGM On Stage begins its nine-minute promotional film with a competitive “Meet the real lion king -- introducing MGM On Stage,” but Disney and MGM each approach the business differently. While Disney develops its own shows and is the producer of Disney shows on Broadway, MGM is less involved financially. Says Denkert: “The cornerstone of MGM’s business plan is to license its shows to experienced Broadway producers or do the initial development in-house and then license to experienced Broadway producers.”

Each deal is different, she says, but all include a license fee for underlying rights and approval over the creative talent attached to the project. MGM On Stage is developing about 25% of its projects in-house, estimates Stolber, afterward finding a producing partner. While he declines to be specific about the size of their usual investment -- “the book, lyrics and music may be five figures” -- Stolber says a workshop, reading or further development could increase their financial commitment.

In return, MGM gets more than just a royalty payment, says Denkert, referring to what she calls “the halo effect. There should be an uptick in DVD sales and in television licensing revenue of the original movie. The show itself may spawn remakes, sequels or a television series.”

For example, when the musical of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” began to get attention, she says, there was interest in a remake and a sequel to the original movie. On “Chitty Chitty,” Denkert says, they’ve been approached about doing an animated Saturday morning TV series for children as well as a possible remake of the movie.

“When you’re head of business affairs and you’re talking to an agent, you’re often talking about what the agent wants and why you can’t give it to him,” she says. “Now when I speak to agents, many conversations revolve around job assignments and creative issues. I’m treated like one of the good guys.”

Barbara Isenberg wrote “Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical.” Contact her at Calendar.letters@latimes.com