The Next Alice In Wonderland Adaptation Should Consider These Actresses
Frank Beddor’s “The Looking Glass Wars” is THE book trilogy that needs to be a show. As I’m sure some of you know, his books are a dark retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” His books are not only a modernized adaptation of a franchise that has sold over 150 million books and has been translated into twice as many languages as Harry Potter, but it’s also got something for every one of us who’s looking for a good story: action, adventure, gut-wrenching drama, archetypes of romance and tragedy that renders nostalgia at once fresh and familiar. The ride that every one of us want to be on? These books embody.
As with any book I read, when I envision the show, I first imagine the potential cast. That’s the fun part, right? Finding the right actors for the characters is paramount…and to quote Martin Scorsese, “90% of directing is casting.” I’m no director IRL, but after working at a casting agency, producing a few short films, and casting in my head as a writer, I’m no stranger to this process. I put on my “director’s hat” (my beret and do that hand frame thing) – I become “Marty.” I peer through my looking glass and look for who I’d want to be my ALICE/ALYSS.
But wait, before I go there, let me give you some context for what I’m looking for. The character of “Alice/Alyss” is complex; there are two sides to her and timelines to follow in which both converge and undergo a massive metamorphosis. (Do I have your attention yet?)
When Alyss was seven, she was exiled from her home and shot out of a puddle in Victorian London. Once adopted by the Liddell family, her name was forcibly changed to “Alice Liddell” and she was made to believe that Wonderland was only a figment of her girlish imagination. While the truth was never lost to her, Alyss survived by pretending to repress those awesome and awful memories to become what was expected of her: a perfect Victorian lady.
Next, we time-jump to Alice Liddell as this groomed “Victorian lady” entering into high society during the “Season” where eligible young women are matched and married off. Internally, we know (and she knows) she doesn’t belong. But she makes it work – wicked smart, sassy, she plays along — persevering through tough situations, wearing her repressed memories like the fashionable breath-squeezing corsets of the time, wound up like a ticking clock, ready to spring awake if, and when, triggered.
I love this set up for Alice/Alyss. To me, this juicy backstory and atmosphere is an inexhaustible wellspring for an actress. One from which she would be able to draw vulnerability and hope. There are clear goals and high stakes as her past PURSUES her, ignorance and comforts swept aside as Alyss is forced to confront the hardest truths in order to discover WHO she really is. These stories give Alyss the role of the “chosen one” – one with a destiny to rectify a great wrong – for humanity and Wonderland. How she does this and at what cost will be the reason we lean in.
(Uff! Gives me the shivers.)
So now we understand the SCOPE of Alyss/Alice, I, in the role of “Marty,” turn my gaze towards actors who would be able to take on this dynamic duality: repressed Victorian lady destined to be warrior queen of Wonderland. A character arc that demands a robust core throughout while managing nuanced layers of conceit.
We need a real powerhouse… The actors chosen for this list not only have the raw talent to portray such a complex role but can bring it to the next level. Without further ado, here are what we consider the best choices for casting Alice:
I think I can safely say with no pushback that Anya Taylor-Joy is having a well-deserved moment after The Queen’s Gambit. See her in The Menu, Last Night in Soho, and Split, and you’d agree that she has the power to draw eyes to the screen and deliver a killer performance. She is adept in period-pieces as seen in The Witch and Peaky Blinders. But really, what gets me are her eyes – their incredible ability to convey depth of emotion, defiance and vulnerability – an absolute must for an Alice Liddell who would be navigating Victorian society while guarding the secret of who she really is deep down. Anya is not only right for the role, but she’d hit it out of the park. I can picture her as a rebellious young woman out of time, couldn’t you?
Another great contender for Alyss/Alice is Daisy Edgar-Jones. The fact that she and the real Alice Liddell look like doppelgängers is a little uncanny. If you’ve seen Daisy’s performance in Normal People (one of my favorites)or Under the Banner of Heaven as Brenda Lafferty, you’d understand her aptitude for range, depth and complex emotions. Daisy made Brenda instantly likeable as a maverick in the ultra-conservative-Mormon Lafferty family she married into, which only amplified the tragedy of her death. She brings a tenacious fire to her acting, one that quietly provokes and or evokes, challenging the audience to meet her where she is. I imagine Alyss/Alice to be such a character, and it would be fantastic to see Daisy bring her to life.
After a such a distinct and memorable performance in CODA, Emilia Jones exploded onto the scene. The wholesome and yearning character she portrays felt grounded and wise beyond her years; and yet, she could flip back to girlish innocence and first love at the drop of a hat. For many, she left a powerful impression – made us feel the truth she was carrying for all of us. I can see her bringing this to the White Imagination wielding Princess Alyss: her face pure and reflective. In interviews, Emilia’s bright personality and infectious laugh makes her a magnet. With so much life and verve, (and as one of the youngest actors on this list), if given a chance to play Alyss/Alice, Emilia would surely embody her spirit and win our hearts.
Little Women, Lady Bird, The Lovely Bones, Hannah, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch. With a filmography like this, there is no doubt that Saoirse’s got range. She’s made us laugh, cry, forget ourselves and then remember again, touch those lost limbs, feel phantom pangs. Saoirse’s body of work speaks for itself, and would check every box in anyone’s imaginary list of attributes needed to portray Princess Alyss. Period piece skills? Little Women. Coming of age? Lady Bird. Fantasy/Adventure? City of Ember.
Her ferocity and gymnastic ability to completely transform herself into her characters to enter the landscape of the show is special and rare. World creation for big fantasy is only as good as the people occupying its space – and if that were our only criteria, Saoirse would own it. It would be a dream for her to play Alyss/Alice, in all her manifestations. Whether in our world or Wonderland, if Saoirse jumped into the Pool of Tears, it would be straight into the deep end.
Next, I’d like to introduce a dark horse contender for the role of Alyss/Alice. Hear me out. I’d like for us to consider Jenna Ortega. It appears that after Wednesday debuted, no one could stop talking about her – and for good reason. I remember first seeing her acting in the horror movie X, and while she wasn’t yet the star then, her quiet and innocent performance was the standout.
The character Jenna plays in Wednesday, (Wednesday Addams) couldn’t be more different than the Alice I imagined on the surface, but it doesn’t mean she isn’t right for the role. After seeing the way Jenna portrayed Wednesday, as a calm almost monotone character with layers of intrigue and feeling bubbling underneath the surface, so cool and detached, I found her uber interesting. It certainly showcased her talents as an actor and made me think of her taking on the role of Alyss/Alice in a surprising way.
I don’t know about you, but I like it when actors challenge our assumptions about a piece, and find it exciting to see how someone, a little unexpected, could bring the role to a wholly different dimension.
When I was researching actresses for this list, a friend convinced me that I had to include Florence Pugh. Starring in such films as Midsommar, Little Women,Lady MacBeth, and the recent, Don’t Worry Darling,it seems Florence is only capable of delivering compelling, emotionally raw, and powerful performances. You get the feeling that she holds nothing back.
Florence is her own brand of woman – unapologetic even as she bends and cuts herself open to the audience. Her distinct raspy voice along with a trademark frown rivet us, so much going on behind those eyes. Her energy fills and battles with forces internal and external, holding tension in the most visceral way. Watching her, I find myself holding my breath… and imagining her doing battle with Queen Redd? Well, I’d like to be ringside for that one.
Phoebe Dynevor crashed onto the scene with her starring breakout role as Daphne Bridgerton in Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton. Her performance in this fictional period piece fits right into the story line for Alice Liddell in The Looking Glass Wars wonderverse. As Daphne, Phoebe portrayed a woman who was groomed to perfectly fit the mold of her society but who questioned and fought against the very ideals and assumptions of that society even as she ascended in position. Much like Alice Liddell, Daphne was swept up in all the decisions that were made for her, but underneath, she had her own headstrong ideas and desires.
Daphne’s coming of age is an awakening of self – especially in an era of dating and matrimony where class, position and stature out-weighs personal feelings and romance. This internal conflict against external circumstance parallels Alice Liddell’s travails. For this role, Phoebe brought grace, fortitude and exquisite vulnerability to her character. She had the audience rooting for her every step of the way. Now, to see her wield the power of Light Imagination, who knows what she’ll bring to the table?
Coming in hot, last but not least on our list, is Rachel Zegler. While she has the least acting credits on this list, she is also the only one here who starred in a Steven Spielberg film. The part of Maria in West Side Story won her a Golden Globe — an exceptional and hard-earned performance filled with wit, charm, and musicality. Rachel as Alyss/Alice would translate across any language in every platform. Her innocence and passion play seamlessly side-by-side – giving her undeniable appeal.
Each one of these talented actresses would bring something unforgettable to the dualistic role of Alyss Heart/Alice Liddell. What do you think of this list? Who would you pick as your favorite? Is there anyone I didn’t mention here that you think would make a good Alice? Put on your “Marty” hat… I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Meet The Author
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and ego’s he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
All Things Alice: Interview with Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas (Part Two)
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
It is my great pleasure to have Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas join me as my guests! Read on to explore part 2 of a sampling of our conversation, and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
FB:
Since my podcast is All Things Alice and it’s about the intersection of Alice and pop culture, and you guys are game experts and creators, let’s talk about games in pop culture. Right now, there’s a lot of negative buzz about American McGee’s Alice series. You’ve probably read about EA passing on doing Alice: Asylum, the third in the trilogy.
I’ve known American McGee since the first game came out and I knew the producer from Dimension who wanted to make it into a movie and I’ve always admired American McGee’s independence. He’s got a studio in Shanghai and I follow him on social media and I saw how much work and love he’s put into this property and the sequel. Yet the parent company that owns it shut it down. There was a very visceral, very emotional response that he had to it, that he wanted to step away from games, and he wouldn’t produce games.
Can you give us a sense of what that means? I don’t understand how he put so much energy into that game to wait for EA to ultimately pass. Is that a development process? What is that?
LT:
I think it’s passion. Think about how many unrealized projects there are. David Cronenberg was going to do a Bond movie at some point. Jodorowsky was going to do Dune. The individual contribution and the fuel that has taken this idea to this absolutely epic place that we as creatives could look at and be like, “Holy shit, that’s wonderful. I want to experience that.” It’s very different from a casual gamer or a casual cinema goer, going to the cinema on a Saturday night and, they’re not going to look at a poster for Jodorowsky’s Dune and think “Oh, that’s nice. I’ll take the wife to see that. That’ll be an interesting two hours.” They’re like, “No, that’s gonna be a spectacular mind-futz. I don’t know what the hell that is.” I think you have the same issue with games as well. This is driven a lot by fervent fans. Fans really cling onto authorship in games the same way they do for film.
I’m a huge fan of Tarantino films. I’m a huge fan of Peckinpah’s films. I’m a huge fan of the Sam Raimi films. To the point where I’ve watched the stuff that everyone else says is bad. There’s something in there I’m going to find that’s absolutely brilliant. I think that that type of fan exists in video games as well. I think the difference is, the sense of authorship of video games is very, very different. Oftentimes, when you’re building a video game, a lot of my lessons have always been about keeping thinking about the player. It’s less about your vision, and it’s more about their experience. It’s a weird thing to flip-flop back and forward between.
American McGee’s Alice: Asylum is huge and it looks beautiful. I can imagine it’s going to be incredibly costly to do justice to that artwork. When we have games like God of War, Horizon, and Grand Theft Auto, where you can feel everything, touch everything, open everything, look inside and around, there’s an expectation that you’re going to want to do that to anything as beautiful as some of the concept work for that third game. But it’s going to come at a cost. Even if you manage to find ways of cutting costs, work with smaller companies around the world, and find individual investors who really want to see that vision, you’re still looking at around 50-60 million dollars to get to something that approaches what that pitch material suggests. If it can get there, it’s going to be fantastic. If it doesn’t get there, it’s going to be a huge failure. With big companies like EA, or any company at the moment with a shareholder, they’re looking for quick hits and revenue. They’re looking for instant gratification or the knowledge that in two or three years, there’s at least some kind of money coming back on that investment.
I think maybe it’s just too big a project at this time to come out of nowhere. The bigger games we think about, The Last of Us, God of War, and Grand Theft Auto, quickly behind those are usually a very tight relationship with one of the big console manufacturers. Would God of War have worked without Sony? It’s impossible to say. Probably yes, at least the modern iterations that have been done in the last few years.
But it’s their console selling games. What I saw of the third game (Alice: Asylum) is that it’s a console selling game, but it didn’t have that relationship with the console manufacturers. I think that type of relationship could push the game over the edge. But I can understand why he wanted to retreat. We’ve all known and met, especially you Frank, will have met filmmakers who were banging the drum on a particular script or a particular project year after year after year, to the point where everybody in the industry is like, “Oh, yeah, I know that project.” But the public doesn’t and it just never happens for whatever reason.
There are as many games as there are films as there are books as there are albums. I think it’s just part of the process. All of us here on the call can project forward, we can look at that concept material, and we can think about what that game is. We can enjoy it. We can know it. The work that’s required to get it to be a reality is a lot and I think that maybe the appetite just wasn’t there for that.
FB:
What do you think, Nick? Have you played that game? It’s a horror game. She’s in an insane asylum with the Cheshire Cat with a crazy knife. It’s got remarkable artwork to your point, Lee.
NM: I played the first game. I was in college when it came out. The artwork was striking and the take on this book that we all know and love was so different, and that really sucked me in and a lot of fans around the world. But to Lee’s point, this is the interesting line that I walk in my role where it’s both a business decision and a creative decision. So American McGee’s creative passion and his desire to create something and put a cap on his trilogy, that’s the thing that drove him to create this Bible and pitch it and stay on it for so long. That alone drives a creative person, you, me, and everyone in this room. There are things that we want to do and whether or not we’re being paid, we’re going to drive forward to do them, because we want to see it through. Now the flip side of that is the suit at the company who commands the Profit and Loss Statement and wants to see at least that return on investment. It’s also a strategy. EA, like many publishers these days, is looking for less risk and guaranteed hits. Whether it’s an annualized sequel or a game that’s almost complete that they can just take over publishing at the end, they’re looking for these things that minimize their risk, but maximize the profits. This is just like “Businessman in a Suit 101”, so seeing that Alice: Asylum might be five years out, it’s going to cost X number of dollars, that doesn’t always necessarily work with the current strategy, or the current plans or the current calendar. It might not fit in commercially with what they have lined up for the next three to five years. It’s really tough, because with all the passion in the world, and with all the creative juices that we can pour into something, sometimes there’s just gonna be someone on the other end that’s gonna say, no, because if we can’t fund that ourselves, we have to go to that other person who holds the purse strings, but also makes the call. I feel for American and I feel for the fans because we have a number of pitches just sitting on our server here that haven’t gone anywhere, because of those types of people or those types of situations. It doesn’t stop us from doing it again and again and again. Maybe we’re just insane. But that’s the reality of how this stuff works sometimes and frankly, it sucks.
FB:
You’re right. How many pitches have we all had that have been rejected? It’s the passion that gets it over the finish line. You’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it because you need to do it.
But I wonder what your thoughts are on how Alice in video games continues to be reinvented. There’s that new game, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. There’s something about Alice where every decade it’s re-imagined to reflect some idea that’s going on in culture. I’m wondering if Alice has ever been a muse for either of you, figuratively or literally, and what your thoughts are on it surviving and thriving for 150 years?
NM:
I think Lee touched on it earlier. When you’re designing a game, it’s all about the players’ experience. How do you make sure that they’re going through a world or meeting characters or coming up against challenges? How do you frame all that and make it interesting? I think there’s a direct correlation found in Alice’s journey through Wonderland and the characters that she meets and the challenges that she faces. With Tiny Tina or American McGee’s Alice or Kingdom Hearts or any of the other games that touch on this story, there’s a lot of commonality there. There’s a really great comparison to Alice’s journey but also to the player’s journey.
I think a lot of creatives connect with Alice’s journey, which is why you see it being reinvented or you see games license Alice stuff or people put Wonderland or the Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat into their games. It’s because everyone knows the fairy tale. They know the book, they know the story, they know the characters, and it’s very easy to map those steps in a video game or design process. It’s almost a surefire hit or a way to guide the player through a journey or weird and wild world that has a lot of really interesting things.
FB:
What do you think, Lee?
LT:
I think it’s the episodic nature of the structure of Alice. If you look at the Disney movie, or if you look at one of the live-action movies or any other sort of like the animated attempts, it’s usually, Alice enters a room and new things are there. She looks above, she looks below, she looks around. She tests things and then something appears and gives her a clue. She’s like, “Oh, okay, now I have some context.” I may as well have just been describing the first time you play Mario. It’s very, very similar. You jump into a room, there’s something there and it hits you, and you gotta jump on it, you get a cough. Oh, okay, this is how it works. It’s a series of rules. Also, Alice isn’t a story that any of us have encountered in its original iteration. Hundreds of years have passed before it came to my ears. It’s always been compounded.
There are rules that I now think of as Alice in Wonderland that were never really there in the original book, but over time, they’ve been included, or they’ve been done elsewhere, or someone’s done a parody. I don’t remember if that was a parody, or if it was in the original. Then you’ve got the Wizard of Oz, and it’s the counter to Alice in Wonderland. You’ve got these two girls, both in this coming-of-age period. One of them wants to get rid of all the adults and wants things her way, that’s Dorothy. Then you’ve got Alice, who’s like, “Forget the world. I want to go into my head and I want to play with my ideas. I want to play with creativity.”
It’s that precipice of becoming an adult. In Wizard of Oz, the lesson is, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might not be ready for it.” And in Alice in Wonderland, it’s more along the lines of, “Yeah. Be curious. Do ask questions. Do try these things.” When you watch the Disney version of it, it’s “Drink that, eat that mushroom, smoke that thing, take that, that’s really great.” The irony is when you encounter Alice as a child, you’re anywhere from three to seven years old, and then you get to school and school is like, “Don’t drink these chemicals. Don’t touch these bottles. Stay away from mushrooms.” So for me, Alice exhibits the lesson of don’t trust authority. Be curious, but be safe. I never stopped doing that. I don’t generally go into the woods and eat large mushrooms. That’s not a safe thing.
NM:
I feel like that’s a bumper sticker if you want to go into business: “Be curious, but be safe.” I think we could do some big business.
FB:
Currently, mushrooms are a big business that’s coming our way.
So, guys, I’ve heard this rumor going around that you’re going to be adapting this book series, The Looking Glass Wars. I know the author, and I know he’s a pain in the ass. I’m wondering how you’re going to navigate that guy to create a good game? To your point Lee, The Looking Glass Wars is not episodic. I think he wrote the book because Alice is so episodic. So he’s got the Hero’s Journey. Are you going to turn that book back into an episodic series of games? What are your guys’ plans with that book series?
LT:
This is my experience of working with creative, especially on original IP, that’s not originally a game and adapting it into the game. The adaptation process is fantastic. It’s really fun. You look at the books, the original IP, and you think about the themes and the tones and the characters and the types of things that the author is trying to tell their audience. Then, as a creative or designer, rather than strictly adhere to that and think, “Oh, I’m going to take this and I’m going to take this.” No, think about the abstract. Think about what, in a game, can cause similar things. How can I cause a player to feel the themes in this book or the tone of the book? That starts to suggest a genre or at least a principal way that you interact with the game. Once you’ve got that, then you can think about the various different systems. We’re fortunate enough that video games are rapidly proliferating. There are hundreds of different reinterpretations of genres and systems every year. So, you play a variety of different games. You see how those games make you feel, and slowly you start to have this collage of interesting abstract systems onto which the creative of the IP can be laid.
You have to do that very, very softly because the first time they come together, the creative and the system, it usually doesn’t work. But that’s okay. Because, as game designers, that’s all we do. We solve problems. We know where we want to go but we see an issue in that direction and in achieving that vision. Is it an art problem? Is it a field problem? Is it a sound problem? Is it a feedback problem? Is it a problem with the original narrative? You just have to look at these problems through lots of different lenses. Then you start to divine this loop, this sensation of like, “Oh, I do this, this happens. I feel that and now I want to do something else and something else.” That’s the traditional loop.
All games have loops and feedback to the player. Do this, that’s good. Do that, that’s bad. You learn how to divine your way through the scenario. Once you’ve got those systems, that’s the really fun part, because now it’s the back-breaking work of borrowing bits of the narrative. Can we change that? How do we push this around? What do these characters do? At that time, we talk to someone like you and your understanding of that universe is huge, way better than ours. Even if we read every single word that you’d ever written, our perspective on the world would be completely different from your perspective on it. But In that negotiation, and talking about the world and the characters and the systems, you work out how to land it and it’s very clear. It’s like an airport with beeps and lights. The runway appears, and you’re like, “That’s where we want to go.”
That’s the life of the game, at least while you’re in production. It’s not something that takes three months and you nail it. You have to go on that journey again and again, even all the way up to delivery. Then when you’re in delivery, when you’re in those final stages, it’s about putting it together. That’s the point where the creatives have to take a step back and realize that there’s lots of endless work that has to be done to get this game finished. It’s very similar in film and TV. How many times do we hear, “The director is not allowed in the edit suite,” or, “The writer has been banned from the test screening”? You have to close it down and get that game delivered. All the fun stuff is right at the start. Everyone’s friends and then there’s the tense interaction of how this IP is actually going to kind of be expressed inside of a game because it’s a very different environment to the books or the comics. In my experience, none of those experiences have been the same. They’ve always been very different. It always starts with all the best-laid plans and there’s always something that happens that changes that. I think that’s why you go back and do it again. What did I learn last time? Great. Let’s put those into play. I think it’s very easy to be precious about games. I think you have to be, but it’s one of those…there’s a famous line from a film, The Croupier. It’s “Hold on, tightly. Let go lightly.” I think that’s exactly it. When you’re in control and when you have a pen and have that authorial position? Yeah, protect it. Stand up for your ideas. But realize that when it’s time to let it go, it’s usually for a good reason. Let it go lightly.
FB:
Nick, we are all bonded by the same gentleman, Rich Liebowitz, who has been interested in my property for a long time. He’s been a friend and, back when he was an agent, he was representing The Looking Glass Wars. Rich is the person, as Lee had said, who’s the connective tissue to this conversation, and why we’re in this room. In terms of our collaboration turning The Looking Glass Wars into a video game, it’s been really interesting for me to share the magic systems and to be able to articulate the logic and rules behind the world that I’ve created and have that land as a starting point for some of the gameplay.
But when it came to the narrative, it really changed because we all agreed to start with something that’s not in the book. We wanted to give fresh story elements and bring us up to where the books start. I found that to be a very exhilarating proposition. Can you talk about why you think that impact is important in terms of the game that we’re working on, and can you also talk about how we’re piggybacking on the game design and play of Justice League?
NM:
I think you nailed it. It’s exhilarating to tell a story that isn’t a direct adaptation of what’s already there. There’s this great book series, there’s this great movie, whatever it happens to be that you’re adapting into a game. People know the beats. They know what happens. There’s almost an expectation as to how this is supposed to go. The Last of Us TV show is a great example of how they subverted some of those expectations, but also expanded upon the universe to make it new and fresh, even though they retold the first game in an eight-episode arc.
You being so gracious and allowing us to play in a sandbox that exists before the first book is that really exhilarating moment where we have an idea of where things are going but we are allowed to take however many steps we need to take to get to that point. There are a lot of different stories and really cool moments that happen in those steps. We could either take our time and do it over a number of games, or we could do it over one game. But that’s really exciting. That freedom is what makes our job a little bit easier because we’re not beholden to, here are the steps, you have to hit these bullet points, because this is what everyone knows.
During that adaptation phase, I put together this document that was full of narrative, thematic film, all these different references that were visceral and exciting, that had themes of war and brotherhood, because of some of the characters that we wanted to touch on in our game. But then I also included relatable situations, because that’s something that’s really important for any piece of media is that there’s some kind of thread, like we’re doing with Silverlake, there’s something relatable that players can understand whether it’s their first time in the world or their 100th time in the world.
So, I put together this big list full of Band of Brothers and Suicide Squad, examples of groups of individuals who come together to reach this common goal. The steps to get there might not be easy, they might not all get along, they have different personalities. There’s a lot of inner character play, and things that happen that lead them towards where they’re going, but it allows for a lot of interesting weaving that we can do on the way to that endpoint. So that adaptation process and those meetings I had with Lee early on were what led us to ask you if we were able to play in the sandbox that exists before the first game because we think we can do something really interesting here.
Those types of moments and that type of creative relationship with an IP owner, or a writer, or an artist, are the things that really help drive a great product. Because if we’re just given roles and marching orders, that really puts us in a box. It doesn’t allow us to flex and do things we think are interesting and could maybe help. So having that freedom is ultimately better for the product itself, but also better for the fans because they get something new, they get this really interesting take on this cool thing that they love that expands the universe and gives them something completely new and unexpected. That’s not only exciting for us as creatives but for a fan playing the game for the first time.
FB:
It’s a good point, that it’s not just the creative freedom that I’m trying to give to other creators. I want their voice. It’s what’s inside of you. It’s part of you. It’s who you are. It’s how you communicate. It’s how you create. If you’re a writer, it’s your voice. If you’re an artist, it’s the look and the feel. If you’re the game designer, it’s the playability. So to be able to offer that you have to let go of your own preconceived ideas and let that creativity transfer to the medium and the audience of that medium. That’s why I’m excited about collaborating with both of you. That’s why this conversation is really satisfying, because you have deep understanding and perspective, and creativity, that’s your own. That’s what you’re bringing to it. You’re hoping that you make a good decision as an IP owner, but like Justice League, like Warner Bros. and DC, handing it over and trusting that it will come back, and that communication will ultimately end up in the final product is a leap of faith. But that’s where the best creativity comes from.
NM:
It’s a big leap of faith for an IP owner and as a creative on the other side of it, we don’t take that for granted. We’re appreciative of that. Because, again, it allows us to do things that we are passionate about. We don’t want to just be this work-for-hire, paint by numbers studio. We want to do things that are really cool. We have certain things that we think would be amazing so allowing us to do that is very much understood on our side to make sure that we treat it right and we do what’s right by the property and by the owner. But to also do something cool that’s going to take people by surprise.
FB:
Let’s talk about Justice League, because Justice League has exactly that, and has some very cool, new kind of playability moments, and you’ve described to me, you’re going to take that engine and create the 2.0 for The Looking Glass Wars games.
Can you describe what those features are that players have been excited about? That you guys were nervous about or thought would work and have come to fruition? Give us a little inside picture of what you were thinking and how it turned out.
NM:
Justice League is, genre-wise, an open world action RPG. It’s a game that gives the player freedom to explore and tackle the narrative at their own pace. It also gives them agency, which is the RPG element of it all, to design and outfit their character, not only cosmetically, but mechanically, so they can play in a way that feels really good for them. One of the things that was really important in Justice League was to give players a different experience and give them the tools to make them realize that their Superman can be very different from your Superman, or my Batman can play very different from your Batman.
That was really important to us and we weren’t actually really sure if DC was going to let us do that but luckily, we were given the freedom. Agency is really important in video games. A player wants to play a game, or they want to watch a movie, because they want to implant themselves in a different world. They want to put themselves in a situation that isn’t their normal, everyday life. They want to be fully sucked into this experience. Sometimes if the player is just handed a character that’s fully formed and has all the skills and knows exactly what to do, it’s not always exciting.
For Justice League, everyone has their knowledge of Superman and Wonder Woman but we’ve given them a blank slate in terms of what that character can do and how powerful they can get and how they will play. Those decisions are really important. They actually tie very deeply into what we’re going to do with our Looking Glass Wars game. We have this war in Wonderland and we have these card soldiers and this really great system and these mechanics that you’ve given to us through the caterpillar thread and all kinds of other really cool stuff. We, in a similar sense, want to give the players this blank slate where they are stepping into the role of being a soldier in this much, much larger war that’s way bigger than them. That could be overwhelming but we know that we’re going to give them the tools to grow in power over time. Not only are they going to get stronger, but they’re going to understand the world better. They’re going to know what’s going on and that kind of agency, giving the player a choice and giving them the tools to make those choices, I think it’s going to give players a real sense of immersion. That’s something that we always strive to do in our games. As we build version 2.0 for Looking Glass Wars, that’s going to be a key feature that we’re going to really hone in on to make sure that players can step into the soldier role and be the soldier they want to be, the suit they want to be, the color they want to be. Whatever it happens to be, we will make sure they have the tools to make the choices that will give them the coolest experience that they can create.
FB:
You brought up agency and agency for characters is universal and in storytelling, it doesn’t matter the medium, the characters have to have agency that you can understand. That’s an important point and something that I really worked hard on in the novels and that I was proud of. I’m excited about this collaboration with both of you and I’m excited about finding a way forward for The Looking Glass Wars to live in the gaming space.
I have really enjoyed this conversation. Creativity, imagination, and curiosity is something that we trade in every day. So it’s nice to talk with like-minded friends and colleagues. But before we go, I’m going to ask a question that I always ask and that is, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?
Lee, you can go first. I know you’ll have an answer.
LT:
Do you know what? It’s kind of odd and I wouldn’t normally do this. If you asked me which of the Reservoir Dogs, I’d pick some weird sort of background cat. But it’s Alice. She has agency. She has control. She can get herself out of trouble. She can get herself into trouble. It’s the curiouser and curiouser mentality of never stop asking why. Even if you look at who the original audience was – a young girl in the 1890s – never stop asking, never stop playing runs counter to the ideals of the time. I think that sense of curiosity is a big reason why Alice continues to be a tale that kids are told. I have friends with kids and they’re telling them about Alice in Wonderland and showing them the cartoons and the early films, and I think that message is still true. Be curious. Don’t accept anything just because someone tells you to calm down. Don’t accept that. That’s the worst thing you can do.
So, yes, my answer is Alice. I want Alice’s experience. I want to know what that tastes like. I want to know what being 20 feet tall feels like. I want to know what being three inches small feels like. I’m not frightened of any of those things. I think that’s the creative spirit. It’s the repetition. It’s the loops. You do it and then tell someone else and they’ll pass it on. Never stop being curious.
FB:
How about you, Nick?
NM:
Lee took the star of the show. He’s number one on the call sheet. I’m going to be lower down on the list I think. Maybe this is just my personality or how I would want to interact with the world or the power that I wish I had, but I would choose the Cheshire Cat. He’s this chaotic force within the world, this comical conniving, meddling, all-knowing character who makes life hard for everyone else.
LT:
You mean a business owner, Nick? It’s funny, that.
NM:
Yeah, it’s how these things work out like that somehow.
FB:
Earlier in this conversation, because we’re on a Zoom call, I was watching you, Nick, smile and as you were smiling I thought to myself, “I bet he’s gonna say the Cheshire Cat.”
NM:
My mischievous grin gave me away.
FB:
That’s it. That’s exactly it. So, on that, I’m going to end and thank you both. Wishing you a lot of luck on the continuing success of Justice League and wishing all of us a long collaboration on The Looking Glass Wars. Thank you, gentlemen, for hanging out with me and chatting about all things Alice and pop culture and games and your love of creativity. It’s been a real pleasure.
If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part 1 of my interview with Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas!
All Things Alice: Interview with Nick Madonna & Lee Thomas (Part One)
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
It is my great pleasure to have Nick Madonna and Lee Thomas join me as my guests! Read on to explore part 1 of our conversation, and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
FB:
You have that beautiful mic.
LT:
Yeah, this was a gift from Riot when I was working on Convergence, and it was right during COVID. So, we had to do our initial temp V.O. all from home. It was the first time they did that, and, as it happened, it worked magically. My wife was also working in the office next door, so I was sat in my front room with my laptop, this mic, and a duvet and pillows around me and I was doing the temp V.O. for one of the characters. So, she’s in one room, closing a deal with the producer and she has to explain to all of her colleagues that her husband is an insane Creative Director on video games that does voices.
FB:
I did not know you did voices. That’s awesome.
LT:
Yeah, I’m a theater kid. From school, I always wanted to act. I auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I was into musical theater. No one wants to direct theater at school because no one really understands what a theater director does. They all want to be an actor. But, I was like, “Oh, I’ll paint the sets. I’ll do the directing. I’ll do whatever.” The love of my own voice comes from that, I think.
FB:
I started the same way, by the way. Well, I started off as a skier and I was hired to do the stunts in these two movies, Hot Dog: The Movie and Better Off Dead. I got to know the director and he said, “Oh, I think you can be a day player.” I had one line in a movie called Amazon: Women on the Moon. It was a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie. I had never done any acting before and the director said, “Oh, I really like what you did. I’m gonna give you a little bit bigger part opposite Carrie Fisher.” Suddenly, I had a two-day part where I was her husband, and she gives me a venereal disease and I go blind and I have to walk into a wall. I have to do this pratfall. So, I did this thing and I got two or three jobs in a row and then I said out loud to somebody, “This is really easy. I think I’m going to do this.” From that day on I never got another job.
LT:
That’s always how it works.
NM:
Making your debut, and Kentucky Fried Movie, that’s one way to go–
FB:
One way to go to the bottom. But, nevertheless, this is my first podcast talking about video games and talking with creators and designers and producers of video games, and folks that I’m collaborating with, as well. To start off, I’m really curious about your first introduction to video games? What got you excited to be in this business and to design games?
LT:
I was kind of lucky when I was a kid. My dad worked adjacent to programming so when I was very, very small, we had Apricots and black and green old school monitors in the house. So, I always remember playing whatever games my dad liked. Golf was the first one. I couldn’t hit a ball in real life, but I could get a hole-in-one with a computer game. That was a that was a fun kind of like, “Oh, okay, I can be pretty good.” That was really fun. Then, we got one of the, they were called Video Packs, I think in the US, but in the UK, they had another name. The licensing between the US and Europe, it was still at that point where a console was released in America and a console was released in the UK and the names were completely different. We had a sort of a Pac-Man clone and a Space Invaders clone and a Submarine clone game. So that was my first introduction to video games and I love them to bits. But I think the first time I played something where I was like, “Oh, this is interesting. I want to do something with this.” It was probably Wolfenstein and Doom, those first 3D, first-person point of view games. You would play those levels again, and again, and again. Because, of course, you already have the shareware version, because my dad bought the PC he wasn’t going to buy me the games. So, I had the free shareware version and I’d just play that again and again and again.
Then a friend of mine had the same thing and I called him up modem-to-modem, and then we were playing multiplayer. From that point on, I loved games a lot. So yeah, they’ve always been there.
FB:
It’s interesting that you bring up your dad because I was really close with my dad. Anything my dad was interested in, I ended up gravitating towards. I imagine there’s an emotional connection to that time with your dad and playing those games. I had a similar situation with golfing. I was a big Tiger Woods fan so I started playing his game and then I optioned the artwork for the 18 Infamous Golf Holes and I thought I would try my hand. It never got across the finish line but I really relate to the Father-Son aspect of finding things that you have a love for and that you can share.
How about you, Nick? What was your first intro into the game space?
NM:
Similar to Lee, but also some differences. We had a Texas Instruments computer very early on in the mid 1980s. It didn’t do a lot, but it rendered some images on screen of animals that I could press a button and they reacted to that. That was really my first, true introduction to games. But my main difference with Lee’s story was that my real first game system, and what really got me into games, was a Gameboy. My dad, through his work, made some trades over the holidays, and was able to get his hands on the original Gameboy, the big gray brick version, which was hard to get when it came out. He was able to get me a Gameboy and a copy of Tetris. That was my first gaming system. That was my first real sense of, “This is mine. It’s more than a toy. There’s something there.” I could just sit by myself and play it in the corner, and no one would bother me. That’s what got me started down the path of being really interested in that kind of stuff.
That Father-Son bond, I had that too, but it wasn’t around games. It was a long time before I actually had my first console but what I bonded with my dad over was comic books, pulp novels, and things like Conan and Sherlock Holmes. We went to the comic store every week and we were collecting and reading. There were certain things that eventually dovetailed into the games, especially the fantasy and the mystery elements. For example, the latest game we worked on was a Justice League game, so there’s a lot of love there. It has gone from games and media around games and that’s influenced a lot of what I’m interested in now and what I like to work on.
FB:
What I really love about doing this podcast is, everybody who’s creative is pretty much touching pop culture and we’ve already been talking about comic books and games. Lee, we’re talking about acting earlier, you’re talking about your first love being movies, and synthesizing those things to come up with your own creative vision.
Lee, could you give me a little background and connect the dots from that experience with your dad and creating those games, to what you’re doing now with Rich Liebowitz at your studio?
LT:
To follow on the theme, it all goes back to my dad. This is always the case. My dad played lots of sports and when I was born, he reserved a season ticket for me at Aston Villa, which was our local team. Safe to say, I’m not a big football fan. My younger brother ended up being the sporty kid and I was much more the art and theater kid.
The other thing I had with my dad, because it wasn’t going to be sports, was movies. Every Saturday, my dad would take me to the video store. The key one was Superman, which I think I must have watched thousands and thousands of times. My nan literally said, “I’m not going to come and babysit for Lee if he makes me watch Superman again.” I used to know all the words. But then when we would go back to the video shop, I would search for other Christopher Reeve movies. One time I picked a very old film he did that was really unsuitable for kids. We started watching it and my dad was like, “Oh, no, no, not this one.”
Weirdly, that period of searching through the video store was one of the first times I was ever introduced to Alice as well. It was the 1972, the Peter Sellers version with Fiona Fullerton as a young Alice. I got to that because I really loved James Bond and A View to a Kill came out in 1985. Fiona Fullerton is a Bond girl in it. She plays the Russian spy in a Japanese bathtub with Bond, and she goes, “Oh, Tchaikovsky.” My favorite. As a kid I’m just looking at the musical references and I don’t understand the double entendre that’s going on underneath it so she’s always the Tchaikovsky Bond girl. So, scanning through the video store, I see Fiona Fullerton and my dad’s like, “I know her. Where do I know her from?” I’m like, “You know her because she’s a Bond girl, Dad. Obviously, you pay attention to Bond girls.” We picked that video up and I was not prepared for the surreal, very bizarre, 1970s version of Alice in Wonderland. I had obviously come across the book in some way, but this was the first time seeing it. I think I saw it before I saw the Disney film as well.
It’s very, very odd. I went back and looked at it a few days ago just to sort of refresh my memories and I was suddenly like, “Oh, now I know why I like Monty Python. Now I know why I like Mighty Boosh. Now I know why I like surreal comedy because the movie is like a sketch that goes into another sketch, which goes into another sketch, which goes into another sketch. It really doesn’t conform to traditional narrative. It’s more like a video game narrative. In games, you’re always trying to get the player to divine where to go next themselves. That’s the ultimate. If you can play a game without the game stopping you and saying, “Oh, hey, go and see this quest,” or “Hey, go over there,” Getting that player to feel that sense of agency is the goal. The 1972 Alice in Wonderland film reminded me of that. She has options and she has to just keep going.
FB:
The novel is so episodic, and I thought they tried to make that work for them in that movie. By the way, I forgot that Michael Crawford was the White Rabbit and he went on to play Phantom for all those years. Dudley Moore was in it too.
LT:
There’s quite a few people that pop in it as well. Especially for me, everyone in that cast was in British Kids TV, which is really weird in a fantastic way for those who haven’t experienced it.
FB:
That’s a really great story because with Alice, not only were you intrigued, but it’s the way the story was told and the humor triggered an interest in that kind of storytelling.
Same thing with you, Nick. You have your PHL Collective company. You’re the CEO. Or how do you label yourself, or is it just as the guru of games?
NM:
Yeah, I don’t even know. I founded the company. CEO. Head. I just do whatever needs to be done to make it work.
FB:
When you’re an owner of some sort you wear a lot of hats. But connect the dots for me from your 80s computer to your high-tech operation you have going now.
NM:
It actually started more low-tech. That love of comic books and my weekly habit of going to the store with my dad was what got me started in art. I was okay in school. I played a lot of sports. But art was the thing that I really excelled at. That’s what I could really focus on and it’s what I wanted to do. For a long time, I was drawing comic books, and I was taking drawing classes and kind of figuring things out. Eventually, at the end of high school, after completing independent art study I applied to an art school here in Philadelphia called the Tyler School of Art, which is an extension of Temple University.
At that time I was like, “I want to do art. This is what I want to pursue. I would love to be an artist for Marvel or DC. This is my thing.” I talked to a recruiter and talked to some teachers, and I showed them just this massive stack of sketchbooks I had of character studies and characters and panels and pages. I was, no joke, literally laughed out of the room. They didn’t consider comic books to be a true form of art. According to them, that was not a pathway to being an artist. Oh, my God, I still remember it and I hold that grudge to this day. And I should, rightfully so.
But taking that information, taking that low point I was looking at, in the early 2000s, I thought to myself “Okay, if comic books are no path forward, what can I do with my art? How can I utilize those skills to pursue something that I’m really interested in?” Games were always important to me and I continued to play throughout my youth and through high school. Just about that time, there started to be some programs around Game Design and 3D Art and understanding how to manipulate the computer to output things that could be rendered on a television or printed on a PlayStation disc. That started me down that pathway of trying to figure out how I pivot, utilize these art skills, but do something which maybe has a little bit more of a path forward. So, I pursued 3D Art and I have my degree in 3D Art and Animation. From there, I utilized those skills to work my way up through games through being an artist, a 2D and a 3D artist, a Quality Assurance tester, being in production, being in business development, and finally running a studio. I made a third pivot from 2D art and comic books to 3D Art and Animation to the boring business guy that sits on his computer all day. But I do more than that. I’ve rolled with what has worked really well for me and what has been fulfilling and that’s where I am now with my studio and what we’re doing.
FB:
I really love that story. Because, when you’re dealing in art, and that’s your passion and that’s your path forward, it’s pretty scary. You don’t get that much support from school. You’re lucky if you get any support from your parents because that doesn’t spell success, or being able to take care of yourself.
I also love the pointed obstacle, and that there’s a visceral reaction still in your body. I really have that as well, from the many rejections of my novel. Some of the very pointed rejections, which were not really about the book, but about my background My dad used to always say, “Rejection is a great thing, son,” and I go, “What are you talking about?” “Because the door might get slammed on you, but it’s going to open another door up a bit, and it’ll probably be the door that you should have opened in the beginning.”
NM:
I did get that support at home. Luckily, my parents saw what I could do, and they encouraged me. There was, to this day, still a lot of fear of going into a field that they don’t understand. Just a lot of parents kind of have that, especially with new media and a lot of what we do. But seeing that success and seeing the growth within that field, and seeing that their support has made their child successful is important.
Because, those moments of rejection are defining. They’re lessons and they’re also growth moments for you as a person to figure out, “Well, am I just going to give up on the thing that I really love? Or am I going to find a way to make this work? Am I going to find a way to move forward?” I think those are really important lessons. As we’ve done talks at schools, because a lot of kids today are fans of games, and they want to go into game design. I always think back to that moment, I made sure not to crush a dream early. But be realistic and say, “Look, these are the things you need to study. If you are really interested in this, I would suggest doing X, Y, and Z.” I don’t tell them it’s impossible. I don’t tell them, they’re terrible or anything like that. I make it positive and give them the right kind of pointers so they can go on a similar path, or maybe even an easier path than what I took to where I am now.
LT:
I also never realized that you were from an art background, Nick. Me and Nick met, not that long ago. But as soon as we met, there was something where I just got on with this guy. I had the same thing, I wanted to draw, but it was never quite good enough. I went to art college, and it was like, “What’s this stuff like that? That’s not important.” I ended up going to art school because I wanted to go to film school and I rang up the National Film School and said, “I’m 15. How do I get there?”
If anyone’s listening, and they’re thinking about what to do next and they don’t quite know – go and do a foundation course, or go and do a year where you try lots of different mediums. The first year of art school, you try painting, you try sculpture, you try technical design, or costume design. It’s about bringing different perspectives to view. I think the more, this is how I ended up where I am, the more you can be like Alice, the more you can be curious, the better. I’m just way too curious about everything. Why is that? When’s that happening? Why is that happening? Eventually, your parents stopped being able to answer you and point you in the direction of books or teachers and that carries on growing and growing and growing.
I think that’s one of the best things about the game industry versus the film industry. In the game industry, by and large, most people are very, very curious about everything. I think in the film industry, people have much more of a sense of, “Hey, I’m keeping to my lane. This is what I specialize in.” The notion of heads of department is a very rigid hierarchy. That hierarchy exists in video games as well, but it’s more often connected to salary banding, rather than actual responsibility on a project. The reality of video games is you’ve got the player in the middle of it, and the player is completely unknown. They’re this random entity. You’ll have to think about which way the player is going to turn the game, not necessarily where you want to turn the game. That conflict of who the author is, is the main difference between film and games. I’m really enjoying the game side of it at the moment. That’s not to say, there’s not a lot to do on the film side, because that’s fun as well. But in gaming, that unknown entity is really fun.
FB:
The film business is difficult on the business side of it because it’s more rigid. They take big swings. I know they do the same thing in the game space but there really is a collaborative effort, it seems to me, to make games fully realized compared to how it works in movies, where if you give the power to the director, and the director knows what they’re doing, they drive the ship. But in games, there are so many parts that you need to collaborate with.
So could you talk about how you guys met and how you collaborate? Then I want to get into the game Justice League that you just released, Nick, because it’s pretty exciting.
LT:
The game business runs much the same way the film business runs in terms of relationships. Nick and I met because of Rich Liebowitz, who runs Epitome, who I’m working for now. Rich, he’s one of those, what Malcolm Gladwell would call a serial networker. He knows so many people. He has a very good profile and an understanding of what drives those people and what they want. When you meet so many people, you can be like, “If I put these two together and get them to have a conversation, I wonder what’s gonna happen there?” That’s what Rich did with me and Nick. He put together a couple of meetings. I got to see Nick work. Nick got to see me work. There was a mutual attraction. A mutual admiration of each other.
You have to have humor in whatever you do. You have to. If I’m working with someone who has no humor, it’s just over. As soon as you can find that with someone, you can understand that person and that they are pushing towards the same sort of quality you are, it might not be exactly what you like, it might not be to your tastes, but if you can see them working, you can see that productivity and it’s very, very easy to find good collaborators in the game industry, for sure.
There’s a ton of neurodiversity in games as well. Again, it is very, very different from film. When I worked in film, I learned about communicating ideas. I learned about leadership. I worked for some great directors, and I got to see those directors be in control, in a sense. But if you really analyze what that control is, they’re really just marshaling other great leaders. A great art director, a great director of photography, a great writer, and then a director above. And that director works differently with each of those, those three people. The art director, you go off and you talk about this, and maybe you’ll go to a museum and you’ll look at photographs, and then a costume designer, maybe you’ll go to a show. There’s different ways of drawing lines or creating tighter relationships so you can enable that person to push and go further. That’s inherent in video games as well, but even more so.
FB:
Nick, Lee sounds like he really knows what he’s talking about. Can you tell me about the actual mechanics of the two of you working and a little bit of the history?
NM:
Our origin story is definitely connected through Rich. As Lee mentioned, he works for Rich’s company, Epitome, and Rich has been in the game industry for a long time. We’ve been working together for the past couple of years and Rich is helping me with strategy and business and augmenting the efforts that I’ve been doing over the past 10 years to grow the business. There’s a lot of things that we want to do and a lot of games that we want to make and having someone like Rich has been invaluable to how we plan for the future.
I met Lee through Rich. He connected us and as Lee said, there’s just a lot of similarities between us in terms of comedy movies and games. There are a lot of touchstones and that’s going to be key to any good friendship or any collaboration. We got on pretty quickly and we’re collaborating on one project, which is an original IP from my studio called Silverlake, which is a horror title that we’re really interested in making. A lot of the early ideas for the game and the comic were bounced off of Lee and he’s given a lot of valuable feedback. It helps strengthen our friendship, but also, I trust his feedback. He’s worked on a lot of really great things and I value his input. That’s the origin story.
FB:
I saw the demo for that horror game, and it has a really interesting and dark tone that’s so different from your latest game, Justice League. I don’t think people, if they saw both, would connect that this is the same creative force. To Lee’s point, sometimes people get outside of the box or they’re in a box and they want to get outside of the box, or sometimes people just have creative ideas.
Tell us a little bit about that game and the premise. What other horror games would you compare it to?
NM:
One of the things that I think is really important for any creative is to be able to work on something that they have a connection to or feel a connection to. While we love the games that we make based on big IPs, internally at the studio, we’re also really big fans of horror and survival, and a lot of movies and novels in that vein that really influence our thought process behind Silverlake. For us, again, we want to make something that we would want to play. That’s always gonna be a driving force for a designer. When we’re playing really great survival games that are out there, we’re like, “This is really fun. But what if we did it this way? Or what if we added this extra layer on top of it? How do we make this different? How do we inject something new into this genre?” That’s where Silverlake came from.
The story takes place in the 1930s in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s based on indigenous mythology and culture. We have a character who’s come back from World War I and has seen and been through severe traumatic experiences. He comes home and is confronted with the expansion of industry in the Northwest, and how that has changed his family and his tribe’s land. There are a lot of supernatural and horrific elements that are injected into that narrative, which we’re playing on to really bring that horror element to it. Then, people might not be familiar with everything that happened in the 30s, what people went through, and what industry was like at that time, but thematically, there are a lot of common threads to things that are happening today. So we’re pulling on those threads to make the story that we’re telling, from all these years ago, relatable to players today. There are a lot of important themes and things that we’re touching on, but essentially at the core of it, we’re telling a horror story. We’re telling a story about this man’s journey, who he is as a person, and who he becomes after he goes through all these traumatic experiences. There’s a psychological and mental aspect to it. It’s a really interesting property for us that we’re working really hard on and very excited about.
FB:
I was in the film business, and still am to a certain degree. One of the reasons I started The Looking Glass Wars, is very similar to what you’re talking about. Which is to have my own personal story that I could work on and develop and invite people into and have control over it. I always describe it as my sandbox, and I’m inviting these people to play in my sandbox and go crazy in the sandbox, but I know that it’s my sandbox. But, we all have to make a living, and that’s where the IP comes in. That’s where I’ll sell something or I’ll get hired as a producer on something which isn’t mine. It’s just a work-for-hire.
Tell me the difference about how it is to work on Justice League, which is obviously a big IP from Warner Bros. I imagine there were a number of issues in terms of restrictions or things you can and can’t do. Can you share a little bit about that game now that it’s public and being played around the world?
NM:
With any IP that you don’t own, there’s always going to be rules, there are things you can do and things you can’t do. There are certain things that you need to be wary of, because there are other aspects of the brand, whether it’s toys, or cartoons, or movies, that you can’t step on. You don’t want to overtake another product that the same company’s doing. There are always those rules and we’ve dealt with those rules for a number of properties that we’ve worked on in the past.
What made Justice League different was the complete freedom that we had, which was awesome and unexpected. When I first originally pitched this game, I took a lot of my years of comic book love and poured it into this pitch and created a story that reintroduced players to the Justice League in a way that was different from how they were depicted in modern media. For the past 10 years, it’s been the really cool Zack Snyder movies that are really dark. Everyone’s super serious. That’s great. Those did really well. That’s how everyone knows these characters for the most part.
In our game, I really rolled it back to the origins of the Justice League, and the Saturday morning cartoons, and the things that make these characters so iconic and joyful. Why are they celebrated? Why have they lasted this long? When I pitched that to DC, they gave us the smallest amount of notes ever. That was really awesome because I was expecting massive rewrites to this whole thing that we did. They saw and identified that we knew what we were doing. We love these characters and we were showing that we love these characters through the game, through the gameplay, and through the choices that we’ve made. That alone, that confidence in us allowed us to really create our own little sandbox within the universe. We worked really closely with Warner Bros. and DC for two years to make sure that everything we were doing was spot on, we weren’t stepping on other people’s toes and that we were representing the characters in an authentic and accurate way that was joyful and fun and creative and new. Every step of the way, they were patting us on the back, encouraging us to move forward. It was really awesome.
I’ll tell you one of the really great things that helped us identify that we had something good. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the work is good, right? Internally, everyone likes it. You have collaborators or friends saying “Oh, this is really good. I really liked it.” But you don’t know how honest that feedback is all the time.
We made big swings to get top-tier voiceover talent for the game. We had Nolan North, Diedrich Bader, Fred Tatasciore, we have these prolific voiceover actors doing voices in our game. When they started reading the script during the first V.O. session, they were laughing, genuinely, and that’s when we knew. That’s when we felt good. That was the one thing for us that made us think that the earlier feedback that we’ve been given is accurate. We can validate it now. Because, a lot of times V.O. actors get in the booth to do the job. It’s a work for hire, “I gotta read these five lines. S.A.G. says, “I need to be here for an hour, then I have to be out the door.” But to be in the sessions with these actors, and have their respect and have them laughing and have them saying, “Oh, wait, what if I make a joke right here? This line is great but let me do this little thing right here.” It was fantastic.
Every step of the way from conception to release, we’ve had all these really encouraging moments and, critically, we’re seeing it in reviews. We’re seeing players love it. We’re seeing people understand that this is our love letter to the Justice League and to these DC characters. Getting that feedback now that people are playing it is really good and it’s made the entire team really happy. Sometimes when you spend a long time on something, whether it’s a movie or a game, you get lost and you’re not sure and you feel some self-doubt before it comes out. You’re like, “Oh if I see a bad review score, I feel like I’ve wasted two years of my life.” We’ve all been there at a certain point but when we started seeing the reviews come out for this game, we were over the moon. We’re so happy that everyone understood it. We’re really happy with the reception.
FB:
Congrats on that reception because it is a terrific game.
The Mad Hatter’s Day came and went in October, but don’t be fooled – it’s never too early to prepare for the next year’s celebration! And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, it’s that the allure of Victorian elegance can be found even in the most ordinary of objects – like a humble tea set.
Subtlety is not the name of the game in Wonderland. Oh no, my dear reader. This is a world where everything is larger than life and eccentricity reigns supreme. These sets are not your typical run-of-the-mill dishes. They boast whimsical designs and extraordinary style that will transport you straight to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. And trust us, once you set these beauties on your table, the ambiance they create will have you feeling like a true Mad Hatter in no time.
So come along with us as we tumble down another rabbit hole and explore the very best Mad Hatter tea sets for every occasion. Just a word of caution, dear reader – the further you delve, the stranger and more whimsical these tea sets become!
This Alice in Wonderland Teacup boasts a simpler design, yet there is still a degree of madness about it – particularly with the reverse handle.
The light aqua-colored coating serves as the base for paintings depicting scenes from Wonderland, and it comes in a set of four – each with its own mesmerizing story told through the paintings. But the magic doesn’t stop there. The plates in this collection feature paintings of the unique fauna native to Wonderland.
Crafted by the renowned Mary Blair, this collection is not just for avid collectors, but also for those who want to relish in the delight of afternoon tea in the comfort of their own homes. Though it may not create an ambiance in the same manner as some of the more eccentric tea sets we shall soon explore, this teacup is a fitting collectible for those who appreciate the artistry of Wonderland.
2.) TRI-SPOUT TEA SET
And now, we invite you to discover a true masterpiece in the world of teapot design – the Tri-Spout Teapot. Yes, you read that right – a teapot with not one, not two, but three spouts! This may sound like something straight out of Wonderland, but we assure you it is quite real.
The unique design is sure to be a conversation starter and will undoubtedly make a statement in any home. The white background serves as the perfect backdrop for the impeccably crafted silhouettes of Alice, the Red Queen, the Cheshire Cat, and the Red Queen’s soldiers. The true star of this set is the teapot – with its three pouring holes, featuring the Red Queen and her warriors. A cute red heart adorns the lid, adding to the whimsy of the design. While it may not be practical, it is indeed lovely.
For fans of the topsy turvy and often dark machinations of Tim Burton, this tea set sports a modest and modernist silhouette with striking artwork of his Alice In Wonderland characters. Each cup is adorned with vibrant colors coinciding with the characters featured. Naturally, Johnny Depp’s iconic Mad Hatter takes the place of honor on the tea pot itself.
For a bit of pedigree on your tea table, and if you have a keen eye for auctions and scant availability—consider seeking out a James Sadler Alice in Wonderland Children’s Book Teapot. Hard to come by, but well worth the hunt.
Anyone with any awareness of fine porcelain and novelty collections alike will know the works of James Sadler. Stand out among the multitude of the company’s wide variety of teapots and tea sets would be the “Classic Stories Book Collection”. From Treasure Island to Wind in the Willows and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterwork Sherlock Holmes every teapot in the collection is brilliantly crafted to look like a bundle of books.
Best of all is of course the Alice in Wonderland Classic Stories Teapot. So popular is the timeless tale that the teapot was released once in the 1970s and again with updated art in 1990. No finer image could be selected for the “cover” of this book than the iconic tea party scene. Those with an eye for detail will also smile to see the red rose emblematic of the Red Queen atop the little teapot serving as the piece’s lid.
With a nod to Victorian elegance, this tea set sports black and white illustrations created by the iconic John Tenniel for the original books by Lewis Carroll infused into the porcelain. Alice, The Mad Hatter, The Cheshire Cat make their appearances on the teapot and cups. Collectors will also adore that the maker Angioletti Designs offers the set in powder blue, gentle green, and soft pink. Likewise, each color set offer a different combination of illustrations.
Of course, the set is made whole by a creamer cup and a sugar bowl. Rest assured despite the “eat me” labelling no shrinking or growing should occur upon consumption. The border of each piece is a scrolled raised gold which would make even Queen Victoria pleased with the royal dignity of tea time with this porcelain masterpiece.
For the big spender collectors, here is a crown jewel. Disney’s iconic depiction of Wonderland was so bursting with color and beautiful whimsey—and this tea set from Elisabete Gomes perfectly captures everything about the movie.
This is another tri-spout teapot, but it sports even finer hand sculpted creatures and flowers from the gardens of Wonderland from the previous entries on this list. Alice and the Cheshire cat are perfectly depicted, but the Singing Flower at the centerpiece of this tea pot makes it true centerpiece item for the most discerning collectors of Alice in Wonderland memorabilia.
All Things Alice: Interview with Androo Mitchell
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
It is my great pleasure to have Androo Mitchell join me as my guest. Read on to explore a sampling of our conversation, and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
FB
Let’s go back. You came to my office that was on the fifth floor on Wilshire when we were doing Wicked. That was 2000, I think. Crazy, my friend, that’s 23 years ago!
AM
I know. The craziest part is that I remember, so clearly, getting the phone call from Stumpy and he was giving me the background and story about this film. “You need to take a look at it and do something different, work your magic.” So, when I got the film, I was like, “What exactly do you want me to do?” And he’s like, “I don’t know, just put anything you want. ABBA, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, put it in there. It’s not necessarily going to be licensed, but just, do your flair. But also, do keep in mind that some of the songs you might have to license in case he likes it.” That was such a great introduction to working with you and then hearing your response and talking to you. You were just over the moon with Funki Porcini and Amon Tobin and all that stuff took the film to a whole new level.
FB
I want to set that up for our listeners because who you’re talking about is Greg Stump, who has directed and produced these fantastic ski movies. I knew Stumpy back from my ski days.You had a lot of experience in that indie space. When we were working on Wicked, which is a psycho thriller about a teenage dream girl who seems to be taking her mother’s place after losing her in a brutal unresolved murder. Julia Stiles is the lead, it was her breakout starring role, and it was a smash hit when it premiered at Sundance. She got discovered there and went on to star in 10 Things I Hate About You. The director, Michael Steinberg, and I, had a difference of opinion on the music and that’s when I brought you in. What you said earlier was true. It was like, “Okay, do what you want to do with this. Let’s see how changing the music and adding some new songs will affect the testing.” Then you introduced me to all these great bands, like Morcheeba, for example.
AM
It allowed me to recreate something that had already been filmed. As a music supervisor, normally you submit music, the editors will edit to the music and work around it. Then you end up getting told at the 11th hour that the editor and director have decided to chop that song into three different parts and use it here and there. Whereas Wicked, it was already picture locked. So, I started working backwards, like, “Okay, so I love this song. There’s this action and drama that happens,”then I’d go back and say, “Okay, I’ve got 43 seconds to build into that moment of the song.” So, then I go back to 43 seconds in that song, and I go, “Oh, my God, I could actually fade it in right here.” I was working backwards so that the music that I was choosing, where the crescendos and the changes of tempo were happening in time with the dramatic scenes of the picture lock. I had a clean palette, and I could use anything I wanted. It was a music supervisor’s dream to do something like that and to have ultimate creative control.
FB
You had so much fun with the music and the choices. There was Jack Off Jill and The Cranes and Juliana Hatfield and the Switchblade Symphony. There were a bunch of songs that were added that were not in the Sundance cut. Anyway, this is All Things Alice and Wicked was the segue for you and me to work on TheLooking Glass Wars soundtrack.
I was doing so much research on Alice in Wonderland in pop culture and was completely floored by how many artists across all these different mediums used Alice as their muse, and, particularly, in music itself. I started feeling a little bit jealous that, if Lewis Carroll has all these artists that are inspired, I wonder if artists would be inspired by The Looking Glass Wars. That’s when I reached out to you and that’s when things got really interesting. It was hugely enjoyable to work with you and to work with all these bands and musicians. I really want to talk about that experience. But I also want to talk about some of the songs that motivated the two of us to even take on this soundtrack. As I think I mentioned to you, Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” has always been a big favorite of mine. This kind of blatant psychedelic LSD trip with great lyrics. “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother give you, don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice.” Alice in Wonderland in songs are everywhere. So that was the impetus to get us going. I think I called you and said, “Okay, we gotta do something about this.”
AM
I remember us talking for sure about the idea and the concept. Of course, this was long before streaming platforms. So, it was like, “Oh, hey, let’s put a playlist together.” This was back in the days of CD compilations.
FB
You sent me so many amazing playlists. Not just for references for The Looking Glass Wars soundtrack and music but just for hanging out. What was really great and unique was that you introduced me to so many bands I’d never heard of, and it was fantastic. We were originally talking about some of our favorite bands that used Alice as their muse. But these were different. These were bands that would take an idea, a theme from the book for example, then write and create their own music. That was super unique. You were introducing me to all those bands.
AM
The most fun part of my job at that time was to go find new and undiscovered indie music. The motto that I’d always had and how I initially made the first steps into the music business was promoting bands through college radio. An environmental folk rock singer Holly Johnson in Vancouver and got a grant and I got hired for a year to promote this environmental folk rock singer. It was all about getting new music, getting bands, out there putting chyrons up, getting free music videos for sports because this is still back in the days of MTV. The upside as well is that when things started moving along, and I was starting to work with films with bigger budgets, it was great to be able to have them sign off on both publishing the masters and get them for an affordable rate. I was always being able to create that balance between making the bands happy and making the media producers happy.
FB
That was crucial. Because, as you know, it was an experiment, and I was doing on a budget. I wanted to experiment and wanted the artists to be able to have all this freedom creatively, and the idea of doing music inspired by a book was unusual. Those bands that you had cultivated relationships with and the technique of finding and promoting bands that played perfectly into what I wanted to try and the budget.
I think one of the first artists you introduced me to was Kuba. Ultimately, he wrote, “To Another World,” which is one of my favorite songs and pretty much an anthem to my 20 years of writing inside Wonderland because it was welcome to Wonderland. Welcome to my world. I used to use that song when I would introduce myself at school events, and then I’d introduce myself, “Welcome to Wonderland. Welcome to my world.” I love that song. How did you find Kuba and what was the story behind him?
AM
I don’t remember exactly how I first met Kuba, but he is a local, he’s from Victoria, Vancouver. The music scene in Vancouver was very small in the 90s, compared to what it is now, but everybody kind of knew everybody. Kuba, I couldn’t believe he wasn’t signed, and he wasn’t this huge Canadian artist. There were various reasons, that I understood later, why he wasn’t signed. But even to this day, he is just knocking it out of the park. He sent me, recently, a few unfinished tracks from this EP that he’s working on, and he’s just got a grant and he just released a single on Spotify.
I was fortunate to work on the Craig Kelly documentary called Let It Ride and ended up getting some really huge bands. But I wanted Kuba to write an original song for the tail credits because Craig, unfortunately, perished in an avalanche, so there needed to be something very special to close the film. I asked Kuba to write something original for it and he went into the studio. A little while later, he sent me this mp3 and he’s like, “This is kind of the song structure and the flow. I’d be more than happy to go into the studio and produce it. I just need this amount of money to do it.” I was like, “Oh my God. What you sent me, is perfect as is.” It’s raw. It’s organic. It’s natural. It’s heartfelt. He just nailed the lyrics. In my opinion, it’s the best song on the soundtrack. I got all these big bands and Kuba just nails the tail credits song. So, it’s not surprising to me that Kuba would write a track that symbolizes your journey for 20 years, just knowing the talent he has. To this day, he’s still pumping them out. He’s a natural.
FB
There’s a beauty and a haunting quality to “To Another World.” It starts with a mass being sung as thunder echoes and it’s really ominous. Church bells are rising, and it takes us into another world and it’s a very, very different Wonderland. The story I told him I was interested in was, during Queen Redd’s coup everything was destroyed, and Alice was exiled, and her childhood friend has grown up and he’s a 20-year-old resistance fighter and his world’s lost. He’s singing about that loss and that emotion, the chorus of the Alyssians, who are the resistance fighters keeping faith that Alice will return to the throne and take down Queen Redd’s reign. He was able to sonically capture that emotion in a really, really beautiful way. When I heard that song, I knew that this was going to be a remarkable journey with these various artists doing an awesome job of hitting the themes of my book, with all kinds of different music.
I’d never done that before. I’d never produced music. I was a neophyte and you pulled me along. There were a lot of really great songs. That song “Shattered” that Silence did. What was great about that song was we used the samplings from the audio book. He was manipulating Gerard Doyle’s voice. Gerard Doyle had a teenage kid, and he thought, “Oh, man, I’m so cool in our household now.”
AM
The other cool part is that Silence was very much tied with the Battle Axe Records crew and Swollen Members and Mocha Only. He was really tied into that whole scene. The other fun part is we took samples from the audio book and that to Freeland for “Burn the Clock” because he didn’t release his version that he did on his own but, at the time, “Burn the Clock” and “Mind Killer” and were huge tracks being played at the time in London, at Fabric and the big nightclubs there.
Adham is an incredibly talented musician, and producer, and composer. He’s been nominated for a Juno and an Emmy for composing work. “Through the Looking Glass” was an incredible piece. Not to toot our own horns, but doing this soundtrack was, for me, one of the greatest experiences because I had done some producing and some co-producing compilations and some artists. But I didn’t have as much creative control as I did with The Looking Glass Wars soundtrack. It was very organic. It was like, “Okay, you guys, make your selection, make your thing.” Then they would send it to you, and you had your notes and then I’d have my notes and we’d go from there, do rounds two and three. The friendships I had with the artists really allowed for this collaborative experience. It wasn’t all about the money and exposure. It was just about everybody loving Alice in Wonderland and here’s this opportunity and here’s this book.
FB
One of the things I would try to offer was that creative freedom, even if the money was small, that’s the upside. Let’s have a really dynamic, creative endeavor. That’s where that song “Puddles”. “A puddle where no puddle should be,” was a line in my book. That’s how Alice finds her way to our world. That’s what made it more unique in terms of a portal from Wonderland to our world. That was a fun song because they took that idea and riffed off of it. Then Queen Redd was another thematic, iconic character that we wanted to play with, and I think that’s when Phontaine did “Sea of Redd”.
FB
I’m curious, do you recall your first introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland? Or was it the Disney Alice in Wonderland? Or was it music?
AM
I was quite curious myself because I do have this memory of being in a sort of fantasy world and having this impression of, “Well, gosh, Alice in Wonderland came out long before I was born, so did I see in the theater?” I googled it and found that Disney re-released it in 1974. I would have been five, six years old. I’m not 100% certain, but I’m pretty sure that I went to a theater and saw it.
FB
Wow. So, you saw the animated cartoon first? That’s pretty cool. When you say that you have this feeling of this imaginary fantasy world, do you think it’s coming from Alice in Wonderland? The first instance of falling down the rabbit hole?
AM
I was very fortunate as a kid to have been surrounded by a lot of nature. The better part of the first 13 years of my life was surrounded by water and ocean and mountains and snow and trees and farms. I spent a lot of time in that, kind of fantasy world. I also had an older brother of five years and an older sister of seven years, and some alternative thinking parents.
My sister led a very alternative life, and I was introduced to some different ways of living at an early age. My brother was very creative, very adventurous, very extreme, in a lot of ways. I could do a whole podcast just on my brother. My mom got involved in philosophy. Then my dad had a civil engineering degree, so he had a bit more of a grasp on the mechanical aspects of life, but he also had very liberal minded ideals. Having been brought up with that, and seeing films like Alice in Wonderland, or Lord of the Rings, or these kinds of types of fantasy films, I was able to relate to them a little bit more.
FB
There’s a lot of magic and inspiration and wonder and curiosity, especially curiosity, in how you were parented and the environment that you were in along with the things that your brother and sister were doing. All of it sounds like it could have been inspired by some of Lewis Carroll’s own words and ideas that came out of Alice in Wonderland, which I think is one of the reasons it’s endured. It’s ability to transform the everyday life and the culture that’s going on in the decade that it’s being consumed. Especially with music, because we were talking about Jefferson Airplane earlier, and that whole experimental time of the 1960s. I think that album came out in 1967.
AM
Before I jump into the music aspect, I think one of the things I also want to touch on is the archetypes that were represented, not just in Alice in Wonderland, but also with Lord of the Rings, and even Star Trek. Tolkien and Roddenberry based a lot of those characters on universal archetypes and ideals. What’s interesting, particularly those three, is that I believe a big part of their success is that no matter where you are from, or what your background is, there’s always a character that you can identify with. There’s something that you can like. If you’re the intellectual you can relate to Spock or Captain Kirk as the alpha male, decision maker.
Perhaps there’s the esoteric connection to those archetypes as well. That’s a whole other conversation but the wonderment and the curiosity of trying to find who we are, especially if I’m watching an animated fantasy at the age of five, six years old, and having that impression on me of living in a fantasy world. Those types of messages and the morals of those stories can be really influential.
FB
I agree that a lot of the biggest movies and the most successful novels, a lot of them deal with archetypes that are easily recognizable. You can identify with the characters, and you can put yourself in the hero’s shoes, or the hero’s journey. Themes like, “Who am I?” which is a big theme in Alice in Wonderland. I think it’s really true as to why they work so well. In The Matrix, which I absolutely loved, he was the “Chosen One”. That’s an archetype that’s been used over and over. Same with Luke Skywalker, he’s the “Chosen One”. They have a lot of obstacles to overcome, and they go on this hero’s journey.
AM
But let’s not forget about the mentor figures and the symbolism and the transformation of The Matrix that also goes with Alice in Wonderland as well.
FB
That movie is just filled with Alice. It’s everywhere. It’s basically a version of Alice in Wonderland. I just was watching Stranger Things with my kids, and you have the Upside Down and the hero’s journey into another dimension. Those are all archetypes, and Stranger Things capitalizes on a tone that’s really unique. It’s an 80s tone that we’re familiar with, as well as all the references that the show brings up. It’s nostalgic on one hand, but it’s a fantasy.
Tell me about your favorite Alice-themed songs in pop culture. When you have Stevie Nicks or Gwen Stefani and then Tom Petty or Tom Waits, Lady Gaga, The Beatles. There’s so many different artists and styles and yet all of them have Alice-influenced songs. Let’s talk about that.
AM
The most obvious one to me is Jefferson Airplane for sure. In 1975, I was six years old. The classic rock that still is memorable to this day, these albums were coming out, or they were very, very fresh again. When I was six years old or five years old, my brother was 10 and he was a bit ahead of his time when it came to music. I was blessed with, with having, not just my siblings and parents having unique, really good music tastes, but we also had a lot of family friends. One in particular moved in with us and brought crates and crates of albums and records. There was a phase of the San Francisco psychedelic scene that came into the house – the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, definitely some of the folk rockers like Carole King. There was just some incredible music that I was being blessed with and I just remember listening to Jefferson Airplane and being completely blown away. Not just by the music, but the album artwork too. And hearing “White Rabbit” was like, “Oh my God, there’s a song about Alice in Wonderland. How cool is this?” That was really the first impression of Alice that I got.
I can’t really say about pop culture, how it was affected, I’m just talking about my real first experience. Also, you had the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, and they were blasting out these incredible albums. Fleetwood Mac was very much one of my favorite bands back in the day, and I was fortunate to see them live at Wembley Stadium, and I’ve always loved Stevie Nicks. The thing I remember most was she created such an environment with her voice. The metaphorical aspects of her lyrics really brought in a sense of wonder and beauty of the song with the haunting vocals.
FB
I didn’t realize how Alice influenced The Beatles. On their Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, the album sleeve features an image of Lewis Carroll, and a bunch of imagery from Alice. The imagery comes through in some of their songs like “Cry, Baby, Cry” or “Glass Onion.” Certainly, “I Am the Walrus” is from Through the Looking Glass. I was a big fan of The Beatles, and I didn’t put that together until just a few years ago, as I did research and looked up bands that were influenced by Alice. Gwen Stefani’s Alice-inspired video, “What Are You Waiting For?” is really about a case of writer’s block. I identified, sadly, with that, but in that story, she’s getting assaulted by a rabbit and being chased around a maze in this sort of skirtless gown. Tom Petty also did an Alice-inspired song, “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” That was a really cool video.
So, what do you think keeps people coming back to Alice as a springboard for their own imagination and their own art?
AM
I think it’s a natural progression for an artist and, although I’ve only written a couple of songs in my life, but at least when I go into a creative mode, we want to tap into that world that we remember. I also get back to the symbolism aspects of Alice in Wonderland and how the different experiences can mirror what’s going on in our own life. We can add the lyrics, or we can do it metaphorically. But imagine how many songs are out there that you don’t even know about that were inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
Let’s not forget about the psychedelic aspect too, because part of an artist’s development is perhaps taking some alternative medicines.
FB
Some pink mushrooms to find inspiration in the Valley of Mushrooms.
AM
You’re gonna call them mushrooms but I’m going to refer to them as medicine. The trips can also be inspiring as part of it is delving into the alternative sides of the mind and the imagination and the brain. So, you’re going to be able to fantasize or imagine and visualize these things that are happening to you and in alternative world from your memory.
FB
You’re talking about exploring an alternative of state of mind; however, you get there, and to see what creativity comes out of that and if it’s cohesive or not. I think a lot of us creatives have played around with that idea. Sometimes it’s in a dream state.
AM
When we wake up, we’ve had a dream that’s going to inspire us, perhaps, to do something completely different with our day. Everybody has their own creative outlets and whether they’re a painter or a songwriter, it’s going to come out. Alice in Wonderland, the influence, and the memories are embedded in a lot of people.
FB
That’s very, very true. Alice represents a particular kind of journey and a state of mind that people feel themselves in and she comes out the other side, and she ends up having a lot of agency and having a stronger sense of who she is.
If you liked my interview with Androo and All Things Alice, please consider donating to this GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice, the documentary featured last episode, so it can be shared with the world.
Should you decide to support the documentary on GoFundMe, please send your receipt as proof of donation to automaticstudio@gmail.com to claim one of the following rewards:
Over $25 earns a social media shout out from Frank
Over $50 earns a Looking Glass Wars Art Print set
Over $100 earns a Hatter M. Graphic Novel Bundle signed by me or a limited edition, hand-printed 11 x 15 inch illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by renowned artist Harry Furniss, printed on Arches Velin rag paper by printmakers George Walker and Andy Malcolm (Cheshire Cat Press)
Over $150 earns an entry into a raffle for a rare signed There’s Something About Mary poster (only 2 in existence)
Over $250 earns a 1 on 1 call with Frank Beddor, Wendy Rowland, and Andy Malcolm to chat about filmmaking, publishing, and all things Alice in Wonderland
For a $500 donation you will receive a signed copy of the new, in-progress 300-page coffee table book, There’s Something About Alice, to be published in early 2024 by Firefly Books
Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz have long occupied similar space in pop culture. Dorothy and Alice walk hand in hand among our favorite childhood heroes. Their stories are so reminiscent of one another that their names are often uttered in the same breath, alluding to exploration of other whimsical realms, of imaginative adventure, and of budding identity. But each story still holds its own individual charm, while touching on many of the same themes.
Here, we will explore exactly what makes these stories so unique, and still so infinitely universal to audiences everywhere. (Disclaimer: For the purposes of this article, I’ll be referencing the most popular film versions of each story, though they both began as classic storybooks. I’ll be referring to Judy Garland’s 1939 portrayal of Dorothy, and the 1951 animated Alice.)
Though this is not true for the films, Alice in Wonderland actually came first. Lewis Carroll first wrote of Alice in the mid 1860’s, while L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published over 30 years later. One could assume that Carroll’s wildly successful tale influenced and informed Baum’s writings.
Each tale begins in a different, and somewhat opposite way. Dorothy is thrust into her adventure against her will, by way of a freak accident, while Alice enters her tale willingly, as an active participant. Dorothy is swept away to Oz by a tornado (and a bump on the head), while Alice runs off to chase the white rabbit, either in her sleep or awake (it really wasn’t very clear).
Interestingly, they exit their stories in opposite ways. Whereas Dorothy was stolen away to Oz, she finds her own way back. Alice, on the other hand, volunteers to go on her journey and then makes it home by continual boldness.
Either way, both girls eventually find their way home. This is another theme that runs through the currant of each story: a young girl’s desire to return to familiar comfort. Dorothy’s last words in Oz were famously, “there’s no place like home”, while Alice’s sentiment was basically the same.
Examining gender roles through Alice & Dorothy
Though I am possibly projecting my own millennial biases onto these works of fiction, it seems to me that both (male) authors were trying to tell little girls that their place was at home, close to all things domestic, and that going on those pesky adventures will only end in tears. It is little wonder to me that both stories were popularized in 1950’s America.
On this feminist note, it is interesting to me that both protagonists were female. How would each story be affected if little Alice were Alex instead, or if Dorothy were Daniel? I don’t think that either plot would be greatly changed if either character were switched to her male counterpart. I think the difference here lies in the “how” of the story, rather than the “what”.
Alice and Dorothy were allowed such vulnerability and tenderness only because of their gender, since these emotional traits are associated with girls. The stereotypical male adventurer is brash, strong and unafraid (at least outwardly). The characters would have been expected to act out their stories differently if they were boys. Here, we see a prime example of typified gender roles in literature, and the unnecessary limits placed on characters as a result of their gender.
Age is another factor that sets these characters apart, and in some ways, defines them. Alice is around age 7, and Dorothy is about 12. This could account for the difference in tone and plot complexity in each story. Alice’s plot is often seen as disjointed and haphazard, while Dorothy’s story is more traditional.
As a 7-year-old, one could expect that Alice’s story wouldn’t make much logical sense, but would consist of a fanciful world filled with fun, zany characters. We could also expect this from Dorothy, but with a bit more maturity, and the logic and emotional depth of an older child.
As a fun experiment, I made my own family rewatch the films, and asked which story they liked better. Coincidentally, it was the younger ones (myself included) who prefer Alice in Wonderland, and the older generation who most enjoyed The Wizard of Oz, for the reasons I mentioned previously. Only those who remain children at heart can truly appreciate the magic of Alice in Wonderland. For those who need a more traditional story, The Wizard of Oz is a great choice.
Another reason for the difference in tone could be each story’s country of origin. The Wizard of Oz is a distinctly American tale, whereas Alice hails from Victorian England. Dorothy is a classic midwestern farm girl, who soon realizes that she’s not in Kansas anymore. Alice, on the other hand, has to fight the omnipotent monarchy to return home, a very English concept.
The Use of Color Theory in Storytelling
Despite their differences, both films share one artistic attribute in common. They both feature a vibrant color scheme that has tantalized audiences, both old and young, for decades.
A recent obsession with Breaking Bad has turned my mind to color theory, and its use in visual storytelling. Both Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz make excellent use of colors, which tell even more of each story symbolically, between the lines. Alice begins with a theme of white. She lays in a field of white flowers, and is disturbed by a jittery white rabbit, perpetually late. Historically, white is understood to signify innocence, and this seems to be true for Alice. The white rabbit’s preoccupation with time could suggest that the clock is always ticking on Alice’s childhood, and it’s time for her to grow up, whether or not she’s ready.
In Wonderland, she encounters a wide array of new colors throughout her journey, the most formidable of which is red, which she meets last. The Queen of Hearts, Alice’s adversary and the story’s villain, takes on red as her theme color, symbolizing the opposite of girlhood and innocence, or the loss of it.
In fact, Alice first draws the ire of the Queen by failing to paint one of her white roses red (not pink, not green, not aquamarine). This, to me, is a symbol of vulnerability peeking out through a veneer of false maturity, or a child not quite ready to grow up.
The Wizard of Oz also uses its own rich color theory, but toward a different end. Many scholars have compared Dorothy’s story to a cautionary tale on capitalism. Think about it. A very lavish, very green city was the story’s destination. Add in a yellow (or gold-ish) brick road. And fun fact: in Baum’s original book, Dorothy’s slippers were silver, not ruby red. So, a path of silver and gold leads to wealth and prosperity?
The symbolism here is almost too on-the-nose. But it is not one-dimensional. We also see the ugly side of capitalism, as another important character is represented by green. The Wicked Witch of the West, the story’s villain, symbolizes the greed and selfishness associated with wealth, as her only concern is stealing Dorothy’s (silver/ruby) slippers. And, well, she is the color of money.
Songs of Synesthesia in Oz and Wonderland
Even the film’s theme song, Judy Garland’s famous “Over the Rainbow”, is color based. Alice, too, sings a color themed song of her own.
“In the Golden Afternoon”, the song she sings with a choir of brightly-colored flowers, again references youth and its fleeting nature. Gold represents change. The golden hour, sunrise or sunset, bids farewell to one day and welcomes in another. (Think Ponyboy, here). It is a time of change, growth and evolution, of maturing and growing up. Which, like the song, can sometimes be melancholy.
Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are two stories that can never be imitated or replaced. Alice and Dorothy have stood the test of time as two of the most endearing and loveable fictional characters of all time. And when we watch either of these films again for the 100th time, we can’t help but remember what it’s like to be a child on an adventure.
Meet The Author
Marissa Armstrong is a Los Angeles native and currently a student at Arizona State University, where she majors in Film and English. Her brand of dark comedy stems from an appreciation of both the light and the dark in humanity. It is her purpose to use her storytelling wiles to celebrate all things tragically hilarious. Or hilariously tragic.
All Things Alice: Interview with David Rutsala
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
It is my great pleasure to have David Rutsala join me as my guest. Read on to explore a sampling of our conversation, and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
Frank Beddor
I’m excited to chat with David today because we have been collaborating for many, many years, on all sorts of different aspects of The Looking Glass Wars and other projects. But one of the more rewarding parts of our collaboration has been the novel of the Hatter M graphic novels.
I was thinking about that. It’s so hard for me to pinpoint because my mother was always quoting stuff. She was always quoting Alice in Wonderland and other Lewis Carroll writings, so it was always around. I do have a memory of the first time it was just read to me rather than being read to, my siblings and me, but just being read to me. That opening section is so powerful with her falling down the hole and drinking the potion and I just remember being blown away by that.
FB
Was that something that your parents did on a regular basis? Reading stories to you as a family or individually.
DR
That was something my mother really did. Occasionally my father would, but my mother was very theatrical so that was something she really liked to do. She would even read to my father, in the evening, from the newspaper and he liked that.
FB
What was her favorite? Did she have a favorite to act out and be theatrical? Or do you recall a childhood favorite?
DR
One of my strong memories is of her reading Treasure Island to me. I could tell it was a special thing. There used to be a thing of, “When is the kid ready for Treasure Island?” Especially young boys because it’s such a classic boy’s adventure story. It’s just so magical, the way it opens and it’s scary. It feels like you’re being given a new experience because it’s kind of an adult thing, with the black spot and there’s other scary stuff in there.
FB
It’s like Grimms’ Fairy Tales and so many other books that were written back then. I was a big fan of Treasure Island because it was scary, but also because of the adventure aspects. I remember I was doing an interview with Michael Morpurgo, the British Children’s Laureate and he was giving me a hard time about reimagining Alice in Wonderland, but he finally came around. But he gave me a word of warning: Don’t touch Treasure Island. I said, “I’m putting it in space.”
DR
They did do that. Treasure Planet.
FB
Luckily, I didn’t work on it. But do you have one, a classic that you ever thought about reimagining?
DR
I do, but one of them is something I’m working on so we can’t talk about it. It’s something, one of the many things, I worked on during the pandemic because it was one of the things that when that started, I was like, “I am not coming out of this with nothing accomplished.” And as I wrote a massive book for you.
FB
Let’s set it up and tell the listeners what exactly this book is and how it came about.
DR
Originally, Frank came to me, and he wanted to do something about the Hatter M graphic novels because he’d noticed that there were some people who just didn’t want to read graphic novels, and they loved his novels. He thought we could do novelizations of graphic novels. I think you were thinking about other people, and I lobbied for myself really hard. You were not totally convinced but I put together an outline. At that stage, I think I had it as three books and I felt like the Alyss energy needed to be in there in some respect. So, I created a new character, a teenage Victorian journalist with her own backstory, who was hunting Hatter. That was basically my addition to the structure. Then I found a way to tell all the stories within the graphic novels and add new ones. I recall, you read that, and you really liked it. But your big note, you had many notes, but your big note was it needs Alyss. It wasn’t something we’d ever thought about because it wasn’t right, the initial conception. I remember when I first talked to you about the Penelope character, the reporter, I was saying, “There’s gonna be a lot of Alyss energy here and there and she’ll be sort of an echo over the whole piece.”
But still, you felt like it needed Alyss and the minute you said it, I knew you were right. One of the really exciting things for me was that meant we could expand one of the chapters in your first book about Alyss on the streets of London. Because that was my favorite chapter was many people’s favorite chapters.
FB
Also, I skipped over a number of her teenage years, so I thought, “Oh, it’d be really interesting to explore what was going on with her.” But structurally, the idea that these two people are separated on planet Earth, and they’re slowly inching their way together, just made sense.
DR
My simple one liner on it always was, Hatter’s searching for Alyss, Penelope is searching for Hatter, and Alyss is searching for herself. That was always the guiding thing that I think is one of the reasons I could write such a long piece because I always knew what it was about. I always knew the motivation of the characters because when you go into one of these like picaresque-style stories, one of the problems is often you lose the thread. But the strength of this material that you’d set up was that the thread was so strong that you would never lose it. Hatter’s looking for Alyss. Penelope is a journalist and she’s looking for Hatter. She doesn’t even know he’s Hatter originally, he’s just this mysterious monster character that she hears of and reads of in European papers.
FB
Because you have the background of pitching and selling and creating TV and film properties, you have a really strong sense of how to position something and how to sell something. I remember we were talking about a pitch I was going to do for The Looking Glass Wars. You were helping simplify it and one of the things you came up with was what people are looking for today, in terms of creating a new myth, but not a myth that has to do with good and evil, but a myth about truth versus fiction. You’re also able to crystallize thematically what these ideas are about, and how they’re going to find their way into pop culture.
Since working on The Looking Glass Wars, and taking this deep dive into Alice in Wonderland, have you noticed how much Alice in pop culture there is to draw upon? Or how often it’s referenced?
DR
That was rather stunning to me. I would have probably imagined it was strong and present, but it just was just everywhere, literally. I encounter a reference to it pretty much every day. There’s so many. “Down the rabbit hole,” you hear that almost every day nowadays because it’s become, people go down a YouTube “rabbit hole”. That’s one that’s so ingrained in us, I don’t think people are even thinking, Alice in Wonderland.
FB
It often morphs. In The Matrix, they turned the liquid into pills. Then I read an article about taking the red pill, which was a whole article about the internet, and about how deep that rabbit hole goes. But they were using a Matrix invention to talk about Alice in Wonderland. It keeps feeding on itself. It’s quite remarkable.
DR
“Through the looking glass,” right? That’s another one of those expressions that you hear a lot, but actual direct quotes and references are just as prevalent. An article I’m putting together for your site is the Star Trek connection. As I did a little research on that, I discovered that Alice in Wonderland, its use in the original series, and in Star Trek Discovery actually makes the Star Trek animated series canon. That’s an amazing thing. I was going through one of my early old Star Trek reference books from right around the time the animated series came out and it even has an entry for Lewis Carroll.
FB
Would you say that because you’re a fan of Star Trek that Star Trek using Alice in Wonderland is one of your favorite connections?
DR
It’s one of my favorites. Of course, it’s used in such specifically different ways that evoke different things. That’s the thing about Alice in Wonderland. It can be so many different things. It’s an example of a fantasy world. But then you can look at Alice in Wonderland as the opposite thing, which is, it’s us looking at our world. It’s a tool to examine our world. I always love in Oliver Stone’s JFK, when Costner as Jim Garrison says, “We’re through the looking glass people. Black is white and white is black.” The great thing about that is everybody understands. Even if they’re not going, “Looking Glass, Alice in Wonderland,” in their brain.
FB
They know that it’s a shorthand. It’s a vocabulary that we’ve developed around it, and that’s why you don’t really recognize and or you can recognize it so quickly.
DR
I honestly feel like, after going through this process of working on this material with you, that I think Alice in Wonderland is right up there with Shakespeare and the Bible as the most influential works of literature that have been wedded so deeply into our culture, that we don’t even notice it.
FB
What do you think it is about Alice in Wonderland, that has endured in culture, but not quite endured in film and television in the same way as, for example Sherlock Holmes and even The Wizard of Oz? Alice, until the Tim Burton movie came out, I would say that 90% of the people would recognize the Disney animated movie, but that was from 1951.
DR
You’re absolutely right. I think some of it is just the daunting nature of going up against Disney. The Jungle Book had adaptations before, other than the Disney film. Largely the material Disney has done is in the public domain, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, not a lot of other people have taken it on. Recently you had Guillermo del Toro taking on Pinocchio, but only a couple of people have tried that. I think the Disney effect is part of it. The other thing is, with Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan and similar properties, people saw as more natural story generators and they saw Alice more as one story.
FB
That’s a good point. Story generators versus, Alice’s story being episodic and having a definitive end.
DR
Wizard of Oz is there’s another one. There are 13 books. I read them all as a kid and we only really have a couple of adaptations. The Judy Garland movie. The Return to Oz movie from the 80s. I think there’s an animated patchwork girl. But there’s very little for the amount of material there. I think sometimes it’s the daunting nature of going up against an iconic cinematic version. Some of it is the inherent nature of that story. To some degree, Alice in Wonderland is a daunting, dense story. It’s a story where if you actually take the book itself, and go, there’s a lot in there that you can stage. The sequence where she grows, you’re getting all this stuff about drugs, all this stuff we have in our heads because it’s such a powerful thing over the years. Then you’re going well, how can we get some of that into this adaptation? Tim Burton tried to do that to some degree.
FB
The success of Tim Burton’s movie pushed a lot of people away from trying a new version of Alice or The Looking Glass Wars, especially with directors. Tim Burton’s movie made a billion dollars and having done the sequel and now it’s many, many years later, and seeing other reinventions come out. There’s the opinion that there’s nowhere to go. As you said, there’s no story engine to keep driving the Wonderland mythos.
DR
That was the most powerful thing, almost instantly, with your material that I felt. The first thing I felt was, “Why didn’t I come up with this?” That was one of the first things I said to you.
FB
I remember that.
DR
It seems so obvious. You can even present it with that cheesy title – Alice in Wonderland:The True Story.
FB
Except to suspend disbelief in that storytelling, you really have to work with the reality of Lewis Carroll and the books and the real Alice Liddell, and then play with the fiction of it.
DR
That was an exciting thing that you did. That’s something that’s part of the Alice in Wonderland myth in and of itself. If you go a little deeper, you encounter that. That’s why I was jealous, because you were taking on two levels of the myth at once, and then finding a way to tell that story. But then when I looked at it more deeply, I realized you’ve created this story engine that you can keep going back to and that, to me, was the most impressive thing. I think I demonstrated in the book we’re doing that it really has a massive story engine. It can just keep going and going.
FB
I don’t think I realized until my first book. The first book was published in the UK, and I went to a school event. There was a very eager boy raising his hand, who asked, “How come you didn’t finish the book?” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you just did a recap of Hatter’s 13 years. He’s my favorite character. You should go home and finish those 13 years and include them in the book.” I’m like, “How old are you, kid?” Then I realized on the plane ride home, that was a really strong story engine, because it’s such a long period of time that they’re separated. I just started to imagine all the people he would have met in our world at the time. The friendships he would’ve made, the influence he would’ve had, and how he would have left awake of mythology behind him. That’s when I realized that this story could be infinite. When he met President Lincoln or Jules Verne and Jules Verne was inspired to write one of his books because of Hatter. You can do this endlessly.
DR
Those 13 years on Earth are one of the most important periods because so much changes. You have the Industrial Revolution taking over the world and then you have astronomy taking off. There’s just so much stuff that didn’t exist at the beginning. Revolver pistols didn’t exist. Just on and on. One of the things was when I was doing research, I would always have to double check, “Does this exist at this time?” I was always trying to make sure that everything in the book fit all the other material that’s already out there. So, I was always doing little things to make that work. For example, I discovered that Budapest did not exist at the time. It was Buda and Pest.
FB
It was my mistake. I did not do as much research as you did.
DR
But I covered your ass. I put in a line about how, like, people are already starting to call it Budapest.
FB
You called me and you busted my ass so bad. You’re like, “Oh, do you want to know one of the many mistakes you’ve made? I’m gonna fix it for you.”
DR
But it’s indicative of that period that a lot of stuff is changing. That’s another thing that makes the Hatter story so exciting because he’s a catalyst living in a time of catalysts. A time of imagination. One of my feelings always about your story is it’s about recapturing the imagination for our culture. The 20th century was the century of imagination and the 21st century really hasn’t been, in fact it’s been a century, so far, of reversion.
FB
Of killing imagination. You really feel it in culture and the need break out of this. I had this quote from the novels, “Fantasy just declared war on reality.” I really never thought it would apply to day-to-day life.
DR
One of the exciting things about the story is seeing what the destruction of imagination can do to a world. What just one girl, who has this great power of the White Imagination, what she can do on a positive side, for the world, and for the people that surround her. One of the great things in the Hatter stories is this thing you invented, “follow the glow”. The glow is something that Hatter can see that indicates some kind of special imagination is going on. That idea to me was very exciting and that’s another little thing that I’ve always wanted to return to or even have a point where Hatter wants to return to that.
FB
What do you think Lewis Carroll would say? If he was here, given everything we’ve been doing with his story.
DR
I think he’d probably be more interested in where mathematics has gone. I think he would be like, “But quantum quant…Wait, wait, wait. The laws? Imaginary?” He’d be interested in some of this amazing stuff that’s happened in mathematics because he was a mathematician.
FB
I think you’re right. I think he would say that his Wonderland survived for 157 years. Let me go off and do something more interesting in mathematics. That’s a great answer.
DR
He was a person who was very amused by the world that he lived in. I think that if he saw what we were doing, he would get a kick out of it. He wouldn’t necessarily say that’s what he would do but he would say, “Well, it’s for your world not mine.” We have to remember that he made massive changes between Alice Underground and Alice in Wonderland. He was not averse to rethinking. The Tea Party doesn’t exist in that original manuscript. That’s an amazing leap of imagination. I know that part of it was just, there’s mundane levels where children’s stories usually have like dinner scenes, some kind of food scene. It didn’t have one of those so he put it in but it’s become one of the most iconic elements of the story so you would think would have been there on the first pass.
FB
David, this has really been a joy to talk about your work and our collaboration and Alice in pop culture.
DR
I think that listeners can see how we’ve collaborated for so long. Because we just got through an hour and a few minutes without stopping. No issue and we probably didn’t even cover half the things.
FB
We absolutely haven’t. But hopefully they’re interesting to the listeners and because of what you were saying about your imagination, your childhood love of writing and continuing that into adult life, I’ll end with something that that Harry Miller said, “Imagination is the voice of daring.” I think that’s been very true in your work. It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with you and to chat with you today. Thanks so much, my friend.
If you liked my interview with David and All Things Alice, please consider donating to this GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice, the documentary featured last episode, so it can be shared with the world.
Should you decide to support the documentary on GoFundMe, please send your receipt as proof of donation to automaticstudio@gmail.com to claim one of the following rewards:
Over $25 earns a social media shout out from Frank
Over $50 earns a Looking Glass Wars Art Print set
Over $100 earns a Hatter M. Graphic Novel Bundle signed by me or a limited edition, hand-printed 11 x 15 inch illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by renowned artist Harry Furniss, printed on Arches Velin rag paper by printmakers George Walker and Andy Malcolm (Cheshire Cat Press)
Over $150 earns an entry into a raffle for a rare signed There’s Something About Mary poster (only 2 in existence)
Over $250 earns a 1 on 1 call with Frank Beddor, Wendy Rowland, and Andy Malcolm to chat about filmmaking, publishing, and all things Alice in Wonderland
For a $500 donation you will receive a signed copy of the new, in-progress 300-page coffee table book, There’s Something About Alice, to be published in early 2024 by Firefly Books
Changing Realities: Tubi’s Rabbit Hole and the Evolution of an Iconic Phrase
During halftime of Super Bowl LVII (57 for those not well-versed in Roman numerals), viewers were treated to a commercial in which giant anthropomorphic rabbits kidnapped people and threw them down a rabbit hole lined with TVs. No, this wasn’t an ad warning the public about rabbit-perpetrated abductions. It was part of a brand-new marketing campaign by Tubi, an ad-supported video-on-demand service owned by the Fox Corporation, which was urging viewers to “find rabbit holes you didn’t even know you were looking for.” Tubi’s allusion to Alice’s entrance to Wonderland was just the latest example of how the term “down the rabbit hole” continues to permeate more than 150 years after Lewis Carroll originally put pen to paper. In fact, Tubi’s rabbit holes show a recent shift in how the concept is viewed in pop culture.
The Infamous White Rabbit
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland kicks off, of course, with Alice following the rushing White Rabbit down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. This portal to a world of whimsy and strangeness eventually took on a metaphorical meaning. The current operational definition, per the Oxford English Dictionary, is that a rabbit hole is a “bizarre, confusing, nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.” The negative, foreboding connotations in this definition can be seen in how “rabbit hole” was used in such diverse media as The Matrix, former Playboy Bunny Holly Madison’s memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny, and, most recently, in the Paramount+ spy thriller series, Rabbit/Hole. As used in these examples, going down a rabbit hole has come to mean entering into a labyrinthian world with danger lurking behind every unknowable corner.
Of course, everyone knows what someone means when they say they went “down a YouTube rabbit hole” last night. Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, writing for The New Yorker in 2015, explored how the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland had come to signify extreme distraction, specifically in respect to internet usage. Schulz, in wondering why rabbit hole has become so pervasive in public consciousness compared to elements in other fictional worlds, makes an important observation. “As a metaphor for our online behavior…the rabbit hole has an advantage,” she writes, “it conveys a sense of time spent in transit.” There is a further connection to Lewis Carroll’s world in that the digital rabbit hole also seems to transcend time and space. Often, we watch YouTube videos or read Wikipedia articles for what seems to be a short time, only to look up at the clock and find that what seemed like a walk around the block was actually a transcontinental flight. An internet rabbit hole may have even caused one to be late for a very important date from time to time.
How Does Alice Get To Wonderland?
But what about this idea of transit? In Alice in Wonderland, Alice travels through the rabbit hole on her way to Wonderland. She doesn’t spend time exploring every nook and cranny of the subterranean burrow. “The modern rabbit hole,” writes Schulz, “unlike the original, isn’t a means to an end. It’s an end in itself.” Remember those TVs lining the dirt in the Tubi ad? They weren’t just for entertainment while traveling to a wondrous, surreal destination. The rabbit hole is the destination. The journey, the experience of endless exploration, entertainment, and enlightenment is the goal. The wonder and magic of Wonderland can now be found in the trip through the rabbit hole, the permanence of a fixed point replaced by the emotional, intellectual, and sensory fulfillment of the itinerant digital traveler.
The current usage of going down a rabbit hole also promises individualization, that the experience is fully tailored to the individual. Indeed, Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s Chief Marketing Officer, stressed this point when speaking in reference to their Super Bowl ad campaign, saying the streamer has a “deep and diverse content library that allows people to dive into their own personal content journey…that might just lead them down the perfect rabbit hole for them.” Now, you’re not going down a rabbit hole, but your rabbit hole. One that conversely promises both discovery and familiarity. Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times, recently alluded to Alice in Wonderland in a piece titled “How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole.” In it, he discusses how Rupert Murdoch and Fox News created a personalized rabbit hole for their viewers, one that reflected the world they wanted to see. Of course, this has had dangerous political consequences but Rutenberg’s usage of rabbit hole shows the continued power that the term has with the public consciousness. Additionally, it is yet another example of rabbit hole being used to refer to a set of experiences and events rather than as a means of transportation.
The Rabbit Hole Has Changed
It’s clear that the usage of rabbit hole has transformed from a conduit to a destination, but Tubi’s commercials also herald a shift in the way in which a rabbit hole is viewed. As stated earlier in this article, the term rabbit hole has commonly been used to imply something negative. Going down a digital rabbit hole often implies a loss of something – a loss of focus, a loss of sleep, a loss of time which could have otherwise been used in the pursuit of something productive. Yet the Tubi spot promises viewers that going down their rabbit hole will result in a sublime experience in which all their entertainment desires will be satiated. While one can be skeptical of Tubi’s assertions, there is a kernel of truth in their promise. Rabbit holes can be enlightening and entertaining, an expression of someone exploring their individuality. Going down a YouTube or Wikipedia rabbit hole often takes place within the context of someone achieving fulfillment through researching their interests. Going down a streaming rabbit hole can introduce viewers to content that will entertain, thrill, and comfort. Though certain particulars have changed over time, the modern usage of rabbit hole, promising enlightenment and happiness, is far closer to Lewis Carroll’s original meaning, invoking the sense that like Alice, we can all discover our own Wonderland.
Meet the Author
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview With Wendy Rowland and Andy Malcolm (Part Two)
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this week’s conversation it is my pleasure to have Andy Malcolm and Wendy Rowland join me. Read on to explore a sampling of our conversation and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
If you like my interview with Andy and Wendy, please consider donating to their GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice so they can share it with the world.
FB
I did notice that, in your documentary There’s Something About Alice, you often asked the question, “If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be?” I think the film starts with that question, am I getting that right?
WR
Yes, there’s this wonderful guy, Anthony, who starts the film. He wasn’t a planned interview, it was that first trip to England when we were on the river, and they’d stopped for a picnic. Andy saw this group under a tree and so we approached them to see if they’d answer a few questions. This guy, Anthony, was just this lovely, eccentric, older British man and it turned out to be one of our favorite interviews we did for the whole film.
AM
He was the very first interview we did on the very first day of making the film, so we were very fortunate that way.
Wendy
Again, he begins and ends the film, he’s at the end of the credits, too. Just this lovely guy who loved all things Lewis Carroll. Your typical British eccentric.
FB
He was pitch perfect for the start of the film. I think that must have been a good omen for you that you met him under a tree, that he was your first interview, that it was spontaneous, and he answered the question. It’s a fantastic answer that people enjoy and brings you right into the film. So, I’m going to attempt the same thing and turn the tables. Wendy, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be? And why?
WR
I’m sort of embarrassed to say, because it seems a bit obvious, but I think I would pick Alice. I just have a strong memory of, when I was probably seven years old, my mom gave me an Alice dress that I wore all the time. I wore it when I went to Disney World for the first time. My mom had an Alice themed birthday party for me, probably because I had the dress. I just have these memories of being dressed like Alice at Disney World and thinking it was the most amazing thing and I think she is just one of these girls that you grow up with. I don’t know if I relate to her in terms of the actual story. But in terms of her imagination, it’s the most famous child’s imagination and all the places that imagination took her – I love everything about it.
FB
As a filmmaker, imagination is crucial to making anything. You must be able to imagine it before you start so I definitely understand that answer. I’ve asked that question quite a bit, and Alice would seem obvious, but most people don’t pick Alice. It’s interesting. I love that story. I love that answer because you’re not talking about having read the book, you’re talking about how Alice was already in pop culture. How about you Andy?
AM
I think I relate to the White Rabbit because I get nervous a lot and I like to be on time. I’m very conscious of time. I guess that sums it up.
FB
I feel the same way about time. It’s very hard for me to be late. I’m often early to avoid being late. If I’m driving somewhere I am the White Rabbit.
What was the criteria for choosing what went into the film out of the 50 hours of footage that you that you captured? What was the process like? Did you guys argue about what should be in? Because you were saying earlier, Wendy, that Andy wanted everything in. Andy, how did you guys negotiate that whole process?
AM
I’m very respectful of Wendy and we’re doing a coffee table book together based on the film and I love Wendy’s views and ideas because I’m so tied into it that sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees and Wendy will say, “Oh, we got to use that or we can’t use that.” We never argued about anything. Whatever Wendy wanted; Wendy got.
WR
Andy was so relaxed. He’s the dream producer because he loves everything about Alice and the story and the characters so much, that he’s always just so excited about it. Everything we would cut or anytime I’d show him something, his reaction would be, “Oh, my God, it’s fantastic.” He’s very easygoing about it all too, which certainly helps. Really, we just had fun. We would try and find things that made us both laugh or find things that we were like, “Oh, my God, this is amazing and it’s going to work perfectly here.” The hardest part always is cutting it down. You end up with a two-and-a-half-hour film that you love but anybody else would find deadly boring, because it just has to be more concise. I find it’s always easy to get from 50 hours to two and a half hours, because it’s easy to figure out what you don’t want. I’m sure that happens when you’re writing also, it’s easy to get rid of all that extra stuff. But when you’ve got what you really love it’s, how do you bring it into that final part that you think is really tight? We started having some screenings with other people too, which certainly helps, because sometimes just sitting in the room, you can tell when they’re bored, or you can tell when something’s working.
AM
Then somebody might suggest, “Why don’t you move this section here and try this there?” We were open to people’s opinions. I think we worked it out pretty well.
WR
Robin, who’s our cinematographer, and who’s actually married to Andy, she also would come in and watch several versions. She wasn’t in the editing room all the time so she could come in and really be like, “Yeah, that’s not working. Andy, you have to wrap this up. Wendy, don’t let Andy bring anything else into the film.” So, she was good, because she was coming from bit of a distance at that point and was able to see it really clearly. She had lots of great comments and suggestions.
FB
Being in a screening room and having other people there and the pressure of people watching it, you really do get a sense of how a film is playing. I’ve gone to a lot of film festivals, and we did a lot of test screenings with Something About Mary and my film Wicked. The audience tells you what they think just with their body language. The room changes. People start futzing around. They lean in. They don’t lean in. I’m sure your experiences with the screenings were really helpful as well. It sounds like you had a really dynamic working relationship, and it comes through. The film’s terrific.
I know that you’ve done a GoFundMe campaign for the purposes of financing some of the licensing challenges of clips. I’m really hoping this podcast will reach people who will contribute. Let’s try and finish this thing so we can get it out to the public. Tell me a little bit about what your thinking was. I’m assuming this has all been self-financed and now there’s those expenses that sneak up on you, because everybody doesn’t want to give you everything for free. What’s been happening on that front?
WR
We started this GoFundMe and it’s gone well. We have a little bit more than half of our fundraising goal. Every little bit helps, right? If somebody can give $10, $15, whatever people can afford. We always sort of joke that it’s in Canadian dollars, so it’s way less. $500 Canadian is like $350 US or something like that. Our goal is to both, clear some licensing, because we did use some Disney clips. We’ve certainly credited everybody in the film, but there’s lots of stuff that we would have to pay to get the rights to if we wanted to get it on air somewhere or have it screened at film festivals. Then we also have all these hundreds of hours of interviews with really brilliant people. We have some of the most well-known Lewis Carroll scholars.
AM
Martin Cohen, Edward Wakeling, and Mark Richards.
FB
But you also have two hours of Ralph Steadman and American McGee. I want you to know that I’m going to kick in and I’m going to help you get over the finish line. But I also wanted to talk to you guys about your other work. Andy, you are one of the top foley artists in Hollywood, and you have worked on some really big films. I don’t think people know exactly what foley artists do. It’s amazing. I watched your documentary, and I found the whole thing fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about your studio and what a foley artists does?
AM
A foley artist watches a movie and performs the sounds in sync with the with the picture. Essentially, it’s the easiest thing in the world. I’ve been doing it for 48 years.
FB
It’s not easy. I tried to explain to my daughter in the car. I made a little scratch on the hood, and I said, “Okay, so this guy that I’m talking to tomorrow, Andy, he would have to figure out how to do that without the car at his disposal.”
AM
That’s a good start. A foley artist is a person who recreates sounds that can be recreated in a studio for television, for feature films, for commercials, for video games. Essentially, we watch the film, we do all the footsteps for all different characters. We do whatever they’re doing, punching meat, or rattling chains, or breaking glass. It’s a very physical job. It’s very performance oriented because when you’re doing all the footsteps for all the characters, you have to get into their headspace. You have to get into their mood. You have to figure out the size of the room they’re in. It’s really a job that has a few components in that the recording engineer has to be working with two, three, four mics, sometimes, making it sound real and fit in into the picture. Then there’s a Pro Tools operator/editor who is putting everything into sync and labeling. There have been some films where we were up over 100 tracks, and everything has to be accounted for and the mixers have to know what goes where. There are a lot of complicated elements that go into making a foley track.
FB
Which is why your documentary about foley, Footsteps, is so informative and so interesting, because it captures that, but we get to see it visually and how you go about it and all the different everyday items that you collect and that you use to create the sounds. Is that documentary available somewhere?
AM
I will be seeing the director in a couple of days; I can let you know.
FB
I’d love to know. I’d love to share it with the with the listeners. It’s terrific.
AM
It’s been in a lot of film festivals and it’s now playing on all Air Canada flights. I would imagine it would be available, but I will definitely let you know and if I can get permission for you to use it on your website. My favorite foley film was one that we did in 1979 and it’s called Track Stars: The Unseen Heroes of Movie Sound. It’s eight minutes long and it’s done split screen. You see the action happening on one side and then the two foley artists performing the actions on the other side. It’s very entertaining and back in 1979, I had a lot of energy back then.
FB
Let me ask you about that energy because your studio is called Footsteps Studio. The documentary is called Footsteps and footsteps are what people recognize as the most obvious foley sound. When there’s footsteps, you have to recreate those. Did you ever find yourself in high heels trying to recreate those sounds?
AM
To this day, I have more high heels and I walk better in them than my wife does. I have 500 pairs of shoes, at least.
WR
Andy did Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and there’s a scene where Alice is running across the table and that’s Andy wearing some sort of little shoes. Any person’s footsteps, he can do them. It’s amazing to watch.
AM
That was sort of make it up as you go. To this day, it’s make it up as you go. Just, what’s going to work for this. We do IMAX underwater films, and nobody knows what it sounds like underwater, so we just make it up. Then there’s animation, which is my favorite part of foley, because you get to go off the deep end. It’s always more creative that way because you’re inventing sounds for everything. Then there’s drama on the other end, where you’re trying to make it fit, you’re trying to make it transparent. Then in the middle somewhere is comedy where you get to try and make it real, but then exaggerate and make it funny.
FB
It just seems like the coolest job of all the jobs in in Hollywood so that’s why I was so taken with the with the documentary.
AM
No, I have to agree it is a very cool job. It’s very creative. The other thing I like about it is you’re on your feet all day, and you’re throwing heavy bags around and smashing glass and, just one million and one things. Like we did Vikings, and we’re doing swords and shields and we’re ripping lungs out of human bodies. It’s just never ending.
WR
Andy’s whole house is mic’d so that if he needs to throw a body bag down the stairs, he just has to plug a mic in on a stairway. Then they can throw, not usually a real body, but some giant thing. He can drive cars into his studio. I mean, it really is the most incredible space.
FB
It’s fascinating. That’s why they call it a foley artist because you’re making it up as you go with all the items. But what is it that you do differently? Why do so many filmmakers come to you? You’ve won Emmys and you’ve done big movies like Dune and Blade Runner. You did that movie, I just saw, Women Talking, which was terrific, and of course, you did Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.There’s nobody else that would have done Alice in Wonderland. But why do you think they keep coming back to you?
AM
It’s because of the team that I was talking about earlier, because we can make it transparent. A lot of places, they just record everything close up, and then leave it up to the mixers to make it work. We have a team, there’s three foley artists, and everybody is experienced and really good at it.
WR
Your imagination comes through I think, too, right? I think that Andy is just, like, didn’t you do mime at one point? So, you’re coming at it from a theatrical artistic background, too. But people assume that there are just computers that have libraries full of sounds and why would you even do foley anymore? I don’t think that people realize how specific every sound is, whether you’re putting a glass down on a table or banging a table with your fist or using a fork against a plate, all of that stuff is done by a foley artist.
FB
That’s what my daughter said, she said, “Well, why don’t you just Google it?” But Andy, you pointed out that the size of a room impacts the sound of the footsteps and anything else. There are so many levels of complication to really capturing the sound and, if it’s a fantasy world, then you have to invent the whole thing.
AM
It’s a lot about layering sound. For example, I had to do the sound of a whale being born underwater. What does that sound like? You think of the sound and “Okay, well, let’s put that in. So that works so let’s add something else.” An obvious one would be a horse and buggy. I actually have real horse feet. We do the feet on one track, we do the bridle on another track, a leather creaking, we’ve got old boxes and old creaky ladders for the wagons, and we do crunching sounds for the wheels. You’re layering, you’re building a sound and that’s the fun.
FB
What about Alice in Wonderland? Had you worked with Tim Burton before? What was interesting about working on that film?
AM
Normally we get between 10 and 15 days to do a feature film. On Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, we had 55 days, because it was so detailed and because the animation changed every day. It was just a fun experience because, again, we had to make everything up. We ended up using ceramic and onyx and shaking it around for the soldiers marching. Alice’s feet, and the little doors and the keys, all the stuff, even as simple as the cane of the dodo. It was just a great experience.
FB
Did your love of Alice, your knowledge of Alice help you on the film? How did that affect the conversations you were able to have with the producers, the director, actors? Did that inform any choices you made?
AM
It’s funny because we, as foley artists, know more what the directors and the mixers and everybody wants than they do, so we don’t really need to get instructions from anybody. Because we have a clean slate, we can kind of get more creative. If we get notes, and it’s really specific, it gets boring. We don’t normally talk to the directors. I didn’t actually talk to Tim Burton, unfortunately.
FB
Well, I don’t know. I mean, not talking to anybody on the crew, or the studio or the director. That might be another reason this is the best job in Hollywood.
AM
It is a blessing, Frank. We have three studios on a 25-acre lot of land. We’re way out in the country so it’s very quiet out there and we don’t get bothered by anybody and nobody comes to see us. People think, “Oh, you’re in the movie business. You must have people coming by all the time.”
FB
Helicopters landing and the head of Disney stepping out, “What are you doing to my Wonderland?”
AM
Exactly. I used to work a lot in Los Angeles and you would see people on the lot all the time. Steven Spielberg over there or Will Smith over there. That was a little different. Sometimes they come into the studio. I would meet Danny DeVito and Steven Spielberg and all kinds of people when you’re on the lot. But nobody knows where we are up in Uxbridge.
FB
You seem to have your own film studio because your wife works in the business and Wendy, you’re a documentary filmmaker and a producer and a director. You know what it’s like to sell projects to networks and then have to deliver on all the requirements that they have.
What’s your experience been? Are you primarily making documentaries? Or do you also do scripted content?
WR
No, documentary has been my focus all along. After I graduated, I started working for the National Film Board of Canada, which is one of the birthplaces of documentary. I was very lucky to be there for a few years and then I’ve been freelancing. I’ve done films for mostly Canadian broadcasters, CBC and CTV and the National Film Board. So yeah, I just love documentaries. I feel like every film you do, it’s like doing a PhD on something different. You really get to know everything about a topic. I’ve done science for a program called Nature of Things. I recently did a film called 14 and Muslim following three young kids in Canada who went from a private Islamic school to the public school system, against the backdrop of Islamophobia and Donald Trump in the US at the time. Alice in Wonderland, most recently. I explore different topics and I just love it. It’s always something different. As everybody knows, it seems there is a newfound interest in documentaries over the last few years and they’ve become a really popular.
FB
They’re very, very, very popular. An old friend shared a story with me that I thought might make a good documentary so I might hit you up for it and get your opinion.
WR
For sure.
FB
But before we wrap this up, I had a last question regarding the Cheshire Cat Press. Which is your own publishing company, correct, Andy?
AM
Correct. I do that with George Walker. We do limited edition books based on Lewis Carroll and Alice. George has been teaching Book Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 38 years so he’s the perfect partner to have. We do very high-quality work. We print most of the books ourselves, and we sew them. The only thing we send out for is binding and slipcases. Our latest book that we’re just about finished is called Alice’s Adventures in Advertising, which has advertisements from 1897 to 1996. You name it, everybody has used Alice as a theme for advertising, from Ex-Lax, to cryogenics, to cookies, to Campbell Soup.
FB
I’ve seen a lot of those ads. I would love to see a couple of images or put some images on the website when I do this interview. That’s fascinating. I’d love to see that.
AM
The previous book we did was Alice’s Adventures in Guinness. As a collector, I had about 80 different Guinness advertisements from 1929 to 1965 where a beer used Alice as a mascot. It just seemed odd at the beginning that a beer would be using Alice in Wonderland to sell their product.
FB
That’s the reason I’m doing this podcast, All Things Alice, because it’s runs so deep into pop culture, and we don’t even realize how often we are exposed to Alice in advertising and pop culture and music. There’s a reason it’s the second most quoted literary work in the world. You’re really drilling down on some very specific, interesting, idiosyncratic aspects with the Guinness beer. I find that all fascinating. You’re also doing a coffee table book for your documentary, correct?
AM
Correct.
WR
We had a small screening in Uxbridge where Andy’s studio is and somebody at the screening, a publisher, approached us about making a coffee table book. He loved the film, and he thought it would transpose nicely into being a coffee table book. It will be very similar to the film except for it’s a book not a movie, but they’re looking at illustrations from fashion, advertising, music, film, artists, and illustrations from Russia to Japan to Finland. We’re really looking again at Alice in popular culture. The drawings and the images are so bright, and they’re so imaginative and psychedelic at times that I think it’s going to be a really beautiful coffee table book. That’s what we’re focusing on. Our lives have become all things Alice again.
AM
It could even be called All Things Alice. We’ll steal that.
FB
Steal from the great. I had such a great time chatting with you and I’m really looking forward to getting the word out on your documentary and your GoFundMe campaign and sharing this podcast and cutting together an interview for my blog and sharing all of your creativity, the work that you’ve done on the coffee table book, the previous coffee table books, this documentary. For folks who are listening, step up, and let’s fund this GoFundMe, and we can all work on putting together those interviews and cutting something together for bonus material that we could put on YouTube or on my website. What do you guys think about doing that?
AM
Great idea.
WR
That would be awesome. Our goal is really just to get things seen. We don’t want stuff sitting on the cutting room floor that people would find interesting. Whether you’re a researcher, a scholar, a student, or just somebody who loves Alice, I think there’s so much interesting content that didn’t get into the film. We would love to be able to get some of it out there.
FB
The other thing is people often talk about, creating, “I want to make this. I want to write this book. I want to do this documentary.” You guys have done it. It’s a real thing and it’s just a few bucks in between it being this real thing and being shared with the public. I’m going to make that happen, I hope, with my listeners and my readers and I’m looking forward to following up and doing more things. So, thank you guys for really a delightful hour of talking about all things Alice, it was really a pleasure.
If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part 1 of my interview with Andy Malcolm and Wendy Rowland.
If you liked my interview with Andy and Wendy, please consider donating to their GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice so they can share it with the world.
Should you decide to support the documentary on GoFundMe, please send your receipt as proof of donation to automaticstudio@gmail.com to claim one of the following rewards:
Over $25 earns a social media shout out from Frank
Over $50 earns a Looking Glass Wars Art Print set
Over $100 earns a Hatter M. Graphic Novel Bundle signed by me or a limited edition, hand-printed 11 x 15 inch illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by renowned artist Harry Furniss, printed on Arches Velin rag paper by printmakers George Walker and Andy Malcolm (Cheshire Cat Press)
Over $150 earns an entry into a raffle for a rare signed There’s Something About Mary poster (only 2 in existence)
Over $250 earns a 1 on 1 call with Frank Beddor, Wendy Rowland, and Andy Malcolm to chat about filmmaking, publishing, and all things Alice in Wonderland
For a $500 donation you will receive a signed copy of the new, in-progress 300-page coffee table book, There’s Something About Alice, to be published in early 2024 by Firefly Books
All Things Alice: Interview with Wendy Rowland and Andy Malcolm (Part One)
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a Podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author that draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration. The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this week’s conversation it is my pleasure to have Andy Malcolm and Wendy Rowland join me. Read on to explore a sampling of our conversation and check out the series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview. For the full transcript with exclusive content, join our private Circle community.
If you like my interview with Andy and Wendy, please consider donating to their GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice so they can share it with the world.
FB
Hey guys, I’m really excited to be chatting on this podcast with you today because this is the first interview with someone I have not previously worked with and you have a project independent of anything that I’ve worked on before, which is very exciting. Of course, the reason we’re here is to talk about your fantastic documentary, There’s Something About Alice. So, my first question is, it seems like you might have been inspired to use the title based on the movie that I made: There’s Something About Mary. Is that accurate? Were you riffing off of my title? Or did you come up with that on your own?
AM
We were riffing off your title. The film was so successful.
FB
That was very smart. I love the title. After the movie, somebody wrote an article that was “There’s Something About Frank,” so it’s appropriate. Let’s talk about your documentary because I’m always interested in meeting and talking to people that have a love for Alice. The premise behind your documentary is Alice and pop culture. Can you give us a sense of the project’s genesis and the why now? I know you’ve been working on it for a long time. But what got you excited about it?
AM
We started in 2012, when we heard about an event that was happening in Oxford, England to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the telling of the tale. I recruited Wendy and Robin, our cinematographer, and said, “Let’s go to Oxford and film the event and see what comes of it.”
FB
What was happening at that event?
AM
It was a three or four-day event. It started off with a boat trip on the Thames and the first lunch was at Godstow, which was where Lewis Carroll told the story to Alice. In the afternoon, we went for a row in the same kind of boat that Lewis Carroll took Alice and her sisters rowing in and then there were panel discussions.
WR
There were also art exhibits and picnics, and they had a small two-person experimental play. Then on the river, they had a couple of kids dressed up like Alice and her sisters, and two young men dressed up as Dodge and a friend. It was four full days. We just arrived with our camera and started filming and at that point, we didn’t really know what we were going to do. We just thought, “let’s document that.” That was when this idea of Alice in popular culture emerged.
Andy has been, for years, a part of the Lewis Carroll Society. I was new to it all. I’d read Alice, but that was about it. We didn’t start out thinking the documentary was going to be about Alice in popular culture. I think that after we started doing some interviews, we started to think about the bigger picture and how the story of Alice and Alice, the character, has been reinvented with every generation. That’s the path we took over the 10 years that it took us to make the film.
AM
We hadn’t even stolen your title by then because we were mostly dealing with Lewis Carroll. Then as we progressed, it became more about Alice.
FB
I love that choice because most films I’ve seen are really about Lewis Carroll, and his inspiration and of course, all these locations that you visited, but that’s territory that’s been mined a few times in documentaries. So, the notion of exploring Alice in pop culture and why it’s lasted so long, and what a cultural phenomenon it is, gives your documentary a unique angle. As you said, Wendy, it gets redefined every era, every decade, depending on what’s going on in that era. In the 1960s, there were all the psychedelic references because of the mushrooms and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”. Then, when The Matrix came out, it was about the internet and falling down into a parallel world. It keeps getting redefined. That’s what you covered so well. On that note, what was the process of picking people to interview? What were you looking for?
AM
We were paying attention to Lewis Carroll meetings. Our next event was American McGee, speaking to the Lewis Carroll group in Los Angeles. We made a special trip down for that and we recorded the talk he gave in front of the society. We also got a private interview with him in the library after that. Then, in 2015, New York was celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book. We went down for that and there was an auction selling an 1865 edition of Alice in Wonderland, for which the opening bid was $2 million. That was a special event.
FB
Were you able, in your film, and over these 10 years to answer the question, what it is about Alice that would motivate somebody to spend $2 million on a book? Because at the end of the day, isn’t that a question you were asking yourself? It’s a question I would ask myself.
WR
There is something but I’m not sure there’s a specific answer. I think that’s the interesting thing about the film, is that everybody in the film has their own answer to that. Some people think it’s because there’s something about that character that can live on in your imagination and can go so many places because she goes down this rabbit hole, which is a term that’s used over and over and over again. There’s such a breadth of so many characters that different people can relate to. Also, Alice is timeless, in the way she looks, and in the way she dresses. She’s not pinpointed in the Victorian age. She could exist in any decade, which I think is interesting. One of the things I love about the film and the people we interviewed, is there are so many different answers to why Alice lives on. Maybe you don’t even need an answer. You just have to dive right into it, and everybody takes what they want out of the story.
FB
I think that’s true. She has become a universal muse for creativity and imagination. Those words come up all the time. That’s what American McGee said in the film. He said something like, “There’s something about her imagination that appeals to everyone.” She became a muse for me and she’s a muse for you. I’m curious Andy, about the Lewis Carroll Society. What is it? What is the purpose? There are numerous Lewis Carroll societies around the world, one in New York, one in Japan, and one in London. Do I have that right?
AM
Yes, and one in Brazil and one in Holland, and one in Canada. It’s people getting together and sharing stories and having talks and exchanging artifacts. Just all people who are really amongst Alice and really enjoy the story and want to share it with others. We have major people speaking at our events. Adam Gopnik has spoken at various meetings and a lot of the mucky mucks, the Martin Cohen’s, and the Edward Wakeling’s and all these kinds of
scholars.
FB
I even heard you landed that author, Frank Beddor. He’s impossible to get. I heard he was really hard to work with.
AM
But he talked about Alice’s avatar and maybe you could explain that a little more to the audience because I found that was a fascinating part of your talk.
FB
I’ll just let everybody know that I’m teasing. It’s an inside joke. When I found There’s Something About Alice, I reached out to both Wendy and Andy about doing an interview. Then we had a preliminary phone call and they said, they had interviewed me for the documentary in 2015 when I was in New York, speaking at a Lewis Carroll Society event. I walked outside and they accosted me. They approached me and said that they were doing this documentary, and they asked me some questions. So, it turns out that we had previously met, which was a delightful little coincidence. But I was talking about Alice as an avatar in the same way I just mentioned that she’s a muse. Of course, I probably said it in a really elegant, very deep, meaningful way, but it still did not make it into the film. I will forever give you a hard time about that. Maybe we can find a place for it somewhere on my website, one day.
WR
We will for sure.
AM
And the 40 other people that didn’t make it. It really didn’t have anything to do with the quality of the talk, or what people were saying, when you start editing the film together. We’ve probably used a quarter of the interviews that we actually recorded.
FB
Let’s talk about that. It’s a nice segue way, because of all the Alice’s out in pop culture, whether it’s music, theme parks, television, or gardening – you find the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which is a medical term. How did you go about choosing the clips that you wanted to include in the film and the folks you wanted to interview?
WR
It is the hardest part. You end up with hundreds of hours of footage and then you have to figure out how to bring it down to an hour. We had endless amounts, from Betty Boop to a Rexel commercial, to Jonathan Miller, to Jan Svankmajer. We wanted to include everything. It was a never-ending treasure trove of footage that we could dig up. Andy’s also a collector and has beautiful images and hundreds of books of illustrations, which is where his initial interest lies. First, we came up with the theme of Alice in popular culture, looking at every generation that gave us a through-line so we could go from early Alice to the current day. Then it was just trying to find things that were unique and interesting. We did look at Disney. There were certain things that you can’t ignore. But it was also trying to draw in things that people wouldn’t see every day. The response to the film does seem to be that most people were unaware of how widespread Alice is. How many musical versions, how many composers have used different parts of the story, like David Del Tredici. We were trying to create this really broad picture, but still have it have a point, because you can’t just have stuff thrown all over the place.
FB
There was a very clear theme and through-line. I think people are going to love this documentary. There are gems in there. For instance, WC Fields as Humpty Dumpty in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland film. You hear his voice, and you go, “Wait a second, I know that. Who is that?” So, if you’re an Alice fan at all, this a film you must watch. But I wanted to go back to why you chose an hour given you have so much footage. Is that a typical length of time in terms of selling this or putting it on a network?
WR
When we started the film, we decided that we wanted to make the film we wanted to make. We didn’t go and pitch it to the CBC, or the BBC, or to any other networks. Because you often lose control. Often, they want you to make a film different from the one you wanted to make. For Andy being the producer, the Lewis Carroll fan, and the Alice collector, this was his labor of love, and it became our labor of love. We just wanted to make the film we wanted to make. We didn’t want to be reined in. I’ve made stuff for television and a TV hour is actually more like 46 minutes because you have to have advertisements. Now that’s kind of gone. There aren’t really many guidelines these days, because of the streamers. It was really just a coincidence that our film ended up being an hour. It just felt like the right length. It felt like it wasn’t repetitive. For instance, American McGee, who’s in the film, we really loved him, and we had so much content, but we had to take about half of his stuff out of the film because you’re looking at the pacing, you’re looking at where people’s interest might kind of fly. You’ve got to keep it moving. So, when we finished, we were like, “This seems like the right length.” And it turned out, it was approximately an hour. We weren’t constrained by any broadcaster’s time.
FB
Let’s talk about some of the people you interviewed because I found that very enjoyable. You brought up American McGee. He is a big Alice fan and has this game that he’s been working on for years and years. I have gone to lunch with American McGee when he was in Los Angeles and a friend of mine was trying to produce his game as a movie when it was sold at Dimension. He must have a really interesting take because he’s worked in the game space, but he also understands the rest of pop culture. What were some of the more memorable moments that you recall from interviewing him?
AM
It was funny because he said, right off the bat, “Well, the first thing I did was I murdered Alice’s family.” It gave him a springboard so he could interpret the story in his way for a video game. But he said he always listened. Whenever he had a question, he would always go back and think about, “Well, what would Alice say about this?”
WR
While his game does seem like the opposite of what you would think for being based on a child’s storybook, he did return to the text a lot and he tried to stay true to it. It’s interesting because it is violent and dark but there’s a piece he held onto that he wanted to remain faithful to the story.
FB
I was going to say that that’s quite an understatement that it doesn’t stick to the storybook version because she’s in an insane asylum with a cat that assassinates most people. But in listening to the interview, that comes across, which was great, because he does contextualize the reason that people are interested in Alice. He also had the theory that Alice is in a lucid dream, which gave him a lot of freedom creatively to do something in pop culture that reflects what’s going on now. I think people that watch your film will make that connection and enjoy it, one if they’re a fan of the video game, but two, because he has a really interesting take that you captured.
WR
He’s really, if you’re familiar with the video game, you sort of have an idea of what this person American McGee with this interesting name is going to be. Then you meet him and he’s this really soft spoken, thoughtful, really articulate renaissance man. It wasn’t at all what we expected. I hadn’t done a ton of research. I’d read a little bit about him and gotten got my 16-year-old son to set the game up for us, who loved that we were encouraging him to play this totally violent game. But American McGee was just this lovely guy who you could have talked to for hours. You could tell he was really intellectual and wasn’t just this mad video game inventor, so I think it was a really pleasant surprise for all of us.
FB
I had a lunch with him, and I would have used all the same adjectives. He didn’t create that game to capitalize on the title. He used Alice to tell his own story and to thematically express something that was meaningful to him. Let’s talk about Ralph Steadman. I was really delighted to see the interview and I was super surprised that you are in his studio. How did that happen? Tell us a little bit about Ralph and what it’s like to interview somebody that is, how I see him, an eccentric genius. What was your experience?
AM
He is indeed an eccentric genius. We were able to organize the interview through his daughter who looks after all his business. We were as surprised as everybody will be when they see the film that he consented to do the interview. But he was just so much fun. We spent the whole day interviewing him. Thank God Wendy is the amazing editor that she is because he didn’t complete a sentence. He would go off on a tangent and be talking about somebody and he goes, “Yeah, Ringo Starr. Is Ringo Starr still alive?” We left more in the interview than what he talks about, specifically about Alice because it was his first big break into illustrating books.
FB
Can you elaborate on that? Because I think that’s interesting. I think readers and listeners will know that he had worked on Hunter S. Thompson’s albums and books, and he’s worked in music and publishing, but Alice in Wonderland was his breakout.
AM
He illustrated the story in 1967 and he said it was his first big break into the illustrating business. His only regret was that he didn’t write the story.
WR
I don’t think he was that familiar with the story when he was approached to do the book. I found it to be quite a moving moment. We’re doing the interview and he pulled out a lot of the original drawings from when he’d made the book. It was great to watch him rediscover it because he said he hadn’t looked at it for years. He’d go, “Oh, I really liked how I did that. Oh, yeah, I was just starting to do lines in that way.” He’d go off on these tangents, but he’d always come back to his drawings. At one point in the interview, he has the book in front of him and he realizes that this is a book he had given to his parents and had done an inscription for them. I think he had forgotten. Then he reads what he’d written to his parents, and he said, “I send you this rare copy.” He laughed because he figured it wasn’t going to do that well, so it was not really going to be rare. He said, “Far and away the best thing I’ve ever done.” You could tell he was quite moved remembering writing that for his mom and dad. I think he would have stayed and just kept talking to us all day long and his daughter finally, sort of said, “Okay.” She generally has to rein him in, when he’s doing interviews. But then they invited us out for lunch, and we spent the day with his wife and him and his daughter eating at this lovely pub. It’s sort of amazing when you never know if you’re going to be given one hour with somebody and it’s just going to be this really straight-ahead interview or if you’re going to have this completely wacky day, where you meet this lovely man who’s an incredible artist.
FB
I really identify with him reading what he wrote to his parents because when you do something at that age, and you’re publishing something for the first time, you always reach out to your parents and it’s emotional when you look back. I love the fact that you were watching him rediscover it. He’s my favorite of all the illustrators that did Alice, so I was really excited. But I’m even more excited after you said that story to hear the rest of the interview. There could be an hour special on Ralph Steadman.
WR
Our hope is to make these interviews available because he said so many great things, but the problem is, you can only include so much. There’s maybe five minutes of him in the film when we have two hours of footage with Ralph.
FB
That’s fantastic. And you had lunch and you got to see his studio and have a full experience with a very talented man.
WR
We all brought our books, and he signed them all with his ink splatter signature.
FB
My brother gave me a copy of the Alice and Wonderland book he illustrated this Christmas. So, I was really excited because I knew I was going to do this interview with you guys, and I wanted to hear more about Ralph Steadman. You also have Will Brooker who wrote a scholarly book on Alice and pop culture.
WR
He was really integral to our thinking about the film, because his book is Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll and Popular Culture. He went the Lewis Carroll route but, certainly, that inspired us when we were starting to think about popular culture. He speaks beautifully about the films and about the art that’s been done since the publication of the book, and he certainly, as you’ve seen, is strongly opinionated about what he likes and what he doesn’t like, in terms of the different illustrators. But he’s not trapped by John Tenniel or the other early illustrators. He likes the scope. It was interesting, because, we have on one hand, someone like Ralph Steadman, but then we have Will Brooker who brings a scholarly side to it, and yet he’s very approachable.
AM
He’s a university professor and he teaches film and culture, so he was perfect for our interview.
FB
He writes a lot about American McGee game, in the book, doesn’t he? Was there a connection?
WR
We didn’t make a connection with between him and American McGee at all. We went back to England a second time and that’s when we interviewed Will Brooker and, at that time, we had started to narrow our focus. That’s when we realized he was somebody we wanted to include and he is one of the great interviews, that ties a lot of the threads together. And he has the last word. But yes, certainly a big fan of American McGee, certainly a big fan of anything that’s bringing Alice into current popular culture. But then he’s also very able to talk about the earlier artists too and the people who’ve been inspired by Tenniel or Furniss. He also spoke about the Jonathan Miller film and the Jan Svankmajer film. Those were high up on his list.
FB
Did you have a list of questions when you talked to each person? Or was it more free flowing and letting them share what came to mind?
AM
I’m gonna let Wendy answer that, but I’m gonna say that Wendy is an awesome interviewer. Because what she does is she starts up a conversation, so people can actually relax and converse rather than feel like they’re on the spot.
WR
Often, we just did quick interviews with people that we’d run into at a conference, and I would have a list of a couple things that we wanted to touch on. But I think with somebody like Will Brooker or Ralph Steadman, or Brian Sibley, who’s also a writer and scholar, I try and do my research. I hadn’t read Will Brooker’s whole book, but I read the first and last chapters and a few things in between. So, I always have questions prepared. But usually what I do is I just have a conversation and then once I feel like we’ve run out of things to talk about, I go back to my list of questions and see if I’ve checked everything off. I always try and go in prepared, maybe have a quote or two from what they’ve written that I can talk about. But we didn’t do any pre-interviews with anyone, it was very much just arrive and see where it takes us.
If you liked my interview with Andy and Wendy, please consider donating to their GoFundMe campaign to finish There’s Something About Alice so they can share it with the world.
Should you decide to support the documentary on GoFundMe, please send your receipt as proof of donation to automaticstudio@gmail.com to claim one of the following rewards:
Over $25 earns a social media shout out from Frank
Over $50 earns a Looking Glass Wars Art Print set
Over $100 earns a Hatter M. Graphic Novel Bundle signed by me or a limited edition, hand-printed 11 x 15 inch illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by renowned artist Harry Furniss, printed on Arches Velin rag paper by printmakers George Walker and Andy Malcolm (Cheshire Cat Press)
Over $150 earns an entry into a raffle for a rare signed There’s Something About Mary poster (only 2 in existence)
Over $250 earns a 1 on 1 call with Frank Beddor, Wendy Rowland, and Andy Malcolm to chat about filmmaking, publishing, and all things Alice in Wonderland
For a $500 donation you will receive a signed copy of the new, in-progress 300-page coffee table book, There’s Something About Alice, to be published in early 2024 by Firefly Books
