All Things Alice: Interview with Ken Markman

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have Ken Markman, managing partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies,  join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor  
Ken Markman, welcome to the All Things Alice podcast. I’m really appreciative and excited to have you on the show and to talk about your contribution to the vision that became The Looking Glass Wars franchise and brand. You’re the Manager Partner and CEO of KKM Global Brand Strategies and you've worked on some big movies. You worked on Empire Strikes Back and Scarface. You told me a couple of stories about Barbie when you worked at Mattel. You have all sorts of wonderful stories and you used these stories to help me see a vision for The Looking Glass Wars. But I cannot remember how we met or who introduced us.

Ken Markman
I think I may be able to put a breadcrumb on the water for you. You were thinking that you needed to begin to put a corral around this omnibus piece that was sprawling outward and you wanted to be in the licensing business, as a lot of producers and IP owners did at the time. Around that period of time, I had been in very serious conversations with what was then the senior management of WMA. As a result of Edward Scissorhands and several filmmakers at the time who were turning pop culture storytelling into merchandise, the water cooler conversation became “Who's got your toy line? When is your t-shirt coming out?” It was no longer, “What Ferrari do you have?” Nobody cared about that. They wanted to know who had your toy line. 

Figurine of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands from Tim Burton's 1990 film of the same name.

As a result of that, you reached out to a colleague of mine at what was then called LIMA, the Licensing Industries Merchandiser’s Association. You had spoken to a gentleman, I believe his name was Marty Brochstein and you were describing how you needed an entertainment guy, a merchandising guy, a marketing guy, all of that. Marty was very, very kind to have volunteered my name. I was thrilled that he did and I was even more thrilled that you picked up the phone and called. I remember sitting in your tobacco leather chairs in your office.

FB
I love those chairs.

KM
I love those chairs too and I have been wanting to get a set. My brother-in-law has a beautiful pair but he won't release them to me. But we sat there and I was completely mesmerized by the visual stimulus. That's a word that came out of Mattel. The visual stimulus is very often what we as the acquiring company would have to look at and how potentially toy-etic it could be, something you can play with. When I was over at Universal looking at Casper the Ghost, I turned to Mark Taylor, who was the Head of Development at Boy’s Toys at Mattel, and I said, “We got to pick this up. This is great. It's omnipresent. It's in culture. Every kid has a ghost story.” He goes, “Ken, how do you play ‘Ghost’?” I couldn't answer the question. 

That was a telling tale of learning for me while at Mattel. Then when you and I talked, we saw all your card soldiers and Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter and the magic mushrooms. It was a cornucopia of visual stimuli. You had spent an inordinate amount of time with the extraordinary artist Doug Chiang. I immediately fell into this immersive embrace of Alice in Wonderland, and in so doing, I think what percolated immediately into our conversation was not, “How do we play Alice?” but, “How could you claim this as your own?” Or was this just going to be another derivative story in a long merchandising tale? It became incumbent upon me to want to reinvent your story so that you, Frank Beddor, the author, could take control of what had been a classic story owned by somebody else and perhaps even other filmmakers. 

That story then became the backstory or the real story, that was so compelling. I know when you told it at meetings at William Morris and CAA and others, invariably, somebody would lean over to me and say, “Ken, is that true?” I always responded, “If Frank said so, it has to be true.” So you became the legend, the mouthpiece, and the face of a new brand of a classic tale that had been mythologized and storied through folklore, which are the underpinnings of Joseph Campbell and the arc of the hero, and everything else from which you've learned and have excelled at.

FB
I tried to answer all of the questions you had posed. It's funny for me to think back to 2002 when I met you because my book wasn't published until 2004 in the U.K. and 2006 in the U.S. 

KM
Thanks to Barbara Marshall. 

Photograph of author Frank Beddor, editor Cally Poplak, and literary agent Barbara Marshall.

FB
Who you introduced me to.

KM
I knew her because I had been working on The Future is Wild with a documentarian from the U.K.

FB
She wasn't a traditional agent. She was a book packager so she she knew all of the publishers. We went in and met all the different publishers and we took the approach that you do in the movie business. You go to the highest possible person and then trickle down. Turns out that in publishing, editors don't like that. Editors want to find the writers and then bring the writers to the publisher, so there was a bias against my book. It wasn't until I went to Egmont, where the publisher had just been given that job and she was previously the lead editor. She said, “You're going to be the last book I edit before I become the publisher.” The combination made it okay for her. Everybody else passed until I worked with Cally Poplak at Egmont and the book became successful. 

But I want to go back to the point of our meeting in my office in Hollywood. One of the things I learned from working as a producer was the power of visuals, the visualization of the world. But I couldn't figure out in my mind how the card soldiers could unfold and march and be compact. I just didn't see it. So I asked Doug Chang, who had worked on Star Wars, to do that sketch. (Doug’s Card Soldiers Sketch) That was the first sketch I put on the wall. I loved it so much that I asked him about who he worked with on his movies that did environments. Then I hired Brian Flora, who did the Valley of Mushrooms and the Chessboard Desert. It became a little bit of an obsession for me to visualize the world while I was writing it, as a kind of collaborative effort between artist and author. Then you came into the office, one of the first people who came in who had a business perspective. It was sort of audacious to think, “I need some kind of branding or I want to build a franchise.” I knew I wanted to do that but I didn't have anything ready yet. Your reaction to the world and to what was already created was really inspiring. I thought, “Okay, I might have something here.” 

Then you wrote your proposal, which started off with the perspective of branding mythology and pop culture. Then you wrote, “Cultural myth, storytelling, and reoccurring themes bond culture.” I was like, “Okay, what is he talking about?” 

Image of sketches by artist Doug Chiang depicting the front and back of a Card Soldier from Frank Beddor's bestselling novel "The Looking Glass Wars".

KM
My wife is still asking me that same question.

FB
Then you said, “The multi-generational social condition is called the Cultural Evolution Theory.” I would like you to explain to our listeners what your job is when it comes to branding stories in culture and trying to catch the zeitgeist and make it your own because basically, that's what you were telling me to do. Give me some examples. 

KM
You’re quoting some phraseology, which are the cornerstones of a book I have long tried to write, which I've shared in bits and pieces with you over these many, many, many years. It's called BrandCulture, and it comes from the multiple disciplines of my career, which are marketing, media, communication, corporate identity, design, and licensing. I just happen to be on the cusp of this epoch of culture right now, which we are living in thanks to the movie industry and other media that preceded it, where we're kind of losing words. Once they were the poetic juice of a culture and right now we're living in an experiential culture which is experienced visually. It's no wonder that social media has captured the next generation. 

I was often asked by my students at UCLA, “How'd you get into the business?” And I said, “I love design. I love the expression of storytelling. If I could be in a business painting on the largest canvas in the world, putting words and pictures together, and make a living doing it, I would be very grateful, and that's what I did.” So as an English major on one side and a graphic design wannabe on the other, it was natural that logos, iconography, type, faces, messaging, hidden or overt, would become part of what I wanted to express in a brand. 

Then along comes a gentleman from Sarah Lawrence College named Joseph Campbell. Many people who may be listening to this have read his books, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If they haven't, they ought to pick it up or Google it and drill through some of his things. There's a wonderful book, The Power of Myth, authored by Bill Moyers of PBS, where he interviews Joseph Campbell and he gets right into the arc of the storytelling and arc of the hero. 

These stories that are hardwired into our culture are expressed and handed down, interestingly enough, as memes. Not the memes we think of in the 21st century today, but memes that are passed on from one person to the next, as they were religiously. The Catholic Church was the biggest organization of theater 1,500-2,000 years ago. The equivalent of that theater today is no longer the Orpheum in Manhattan, nor is it Radio City, where it once was maybe in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Now it's the fandom that happens at a football stadium, where the collective catharsis of that experience is handed down. “Do you remember last year? It was fourth and three…” They remember it religiously and it gets passed down and it goes from father to son to grandson, all the way through. 

Photograph of a variety of Hot Wheels cars.

We rode that wave through Hot Wheels, interestingly enough. I was at Mattel during the twenty-fifth anniversary and it was just at that time when dads were beginning to have sons. Just like my son-in-law had two sons and my two young grandsons, who are five and three, have now inherited my set of fifty Hot Wheels that I collected. What I'm saying is that memes are stories. Some of them are wildly exaggerated, and some of them are very explicit. Folklore becomes a mythology that gets passed on for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then if it's connected to iconography, whether it's a signature or a voice, a dance, a sound, or a musicianship that then gets placed against twenty-four frames a second, and turns into a motion picture or a theatrical play, this is what we're dealing with today

The experience economy is the expression of story. One of the things we learned through the study of human psychology is that people don't remember facts. If I gibberish to your audience today and say, “Well, you know, seventy-three percent of albinos never reach the age of fifty, it’s going to go right over their head.” If I said to them, “Have you ever seen an albino cat land on their feet after falling off a thirty-foot-high roof?” They'll remember the story. They're not going to remember the fact. So the very beginning of mythology and meme storytelling, which becomes legend and then expressed and changed over time and modernized through technology and media, is the art of storytelling. That's where you began with one of the great stories of all time, Alice in Wonderland.

One of the things I want to amplify about branding is that you begin with the story, and we wanted you to own your story. We wanted to carve it out as unique and separate. This happens whether it's BMW or Nike or Coca-Cola. If you and I were in Atlanta sipping a Coca-Cola in their corporate headquarters, and I said, “Wow, that was a great meeting with the management at Coca-Cola, wasn't it Frank? They got it right away.” If we went back and did a post-mortem and we asked Coca-Cola, they'd say, “Well, was it the meeting that was so good? Was it Frank's presentation? Or was it the Coke that we shared because we enjoy Coke and Coke is life?” That's how ingrained it has become over the last 120 years. 

Advertising helps that to a great degree with BMW. “BMW, the ultimate driving machine.” It doesn't get any better than that. There's another axiom that falls into branding, and we talked about this early on, in order to own a brand, you want to be able to own a slice of the consumer's mind. You want to own a word. You want to own a phrase. You want to own a color in their mind. Red, indelibly, boom, Coca-Cola. Nike with the swish. It's simple. It's straightforward. It gets right to you. So when you think about BMW, “the ultimate driving machine,” it couldn't be any better than that. The axiom here is, you want to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. That's what BMW did. It's an automobile. Starbucks, it's coffee, man. But the reality is, they've taken the ordinary and turned it into the extraordinary, and that's what branding is all about. You can take that experience and own it. 

A Coca-Cola advertisement featuring a variety of bottles and cans and the slogan "Coca-Cola x You".

FB
You tasked me with that when you simply said I should come up with a different spelling for the name Alyss, so I can own Alice. That was the moment I started thinking about broadening out from the names that Lewis Carroll had created and Disney had made familiar. So I changed the spelling of Alyss and the Mad Hatter became Hatter Madigan. Another thing you did that was also very, very helpful is you were posing this question of, “How do we suspend disbelief in this world, in this reality of a fantasy world?” Because The Looking Glass Wars is set both in Wonderland and Victorian England, that gave me a little bit of balance. I also was mindful of creating a Wonderland where people could suspend their disbelief. That was something you kept saying, “We need to be able to suspend disbelief so we can land and live.” As if Jurassic Park is actually in Hawaii, or Wonderland is just up the Five. If you drive long enough, you'll find yourself in Wonderland,

KM
Exactly. How could you refute the simplicity of the idea that in a grain of amber, there was a mosquito that contained the DNA of a dinosaur? Only Michael Crichton, with his scientific background, could create it. He created the myth and he turned it into a story that became irrefutable. It's so believable that how could you not want to believe it? That's where metaphors and storytelling become this immersive fabric in the consumer's mind. That's how we started our story. There’s enough believability in the past to shape-shift, to use one of your words, shape-shift some of this so that you can take ownership of it and it becomes irrefutable. 

FB
You wrote, “A new reality for a new generation, borrowing from the past and making them their own, a form of branded history with its own images indelibly marked in the minds of a new global audience.” So I tried to convey that in a less Professor-ish way

KM
I can't get away from myself. 

FB
That whole idea of creating a new reality, telling a story in a different way but taking ownership of it, I found when I started to go out into the marketplace with The Looking Glass Wars, that was happening. People felt grounded in the world and the story because, the premise of Lewis Carroll getting it wrong was easy enough to go, “Let me just turn my perspective on history and what I think I know.” The other thing that was really important was, that you said, “You have to change their perception of what they think Wonderland is right off the bat. You have to have the meta-story, the story behind the story.” So suddenly I had more work to do.

KM
I remember that. It's really true. There are a couple of axioms that have always found their way into my thought process when working on a movie or any branding objective. You do want to suspend disbelief, which is what entertainment and storytelling do. You want to find the universal truth in a message that is not so far out of reach that you can not believe it, it's just beyond my grasp of reality as I know it. By penetrating your world, you're going to show me how I can conclude that reach. 

To get back to Coca-Cola for a moment, If you ask Coca-Cola, they want to be, the refreshing drink at the end of your reach. They want their product, their brand, to be at the end of your reach, no matter whether you're at home, the movie theater, or a baseball stadium. A great storyteller and filmmaker does just that. You suspend disbelief. You can almost break through the fourth wall, but by sliding into that world, you will take me magically to a place heretofore I've never been permitted to go. So you become my guide, my sherpa, and through your storytelling, you're telling me how to survive, how to succeed. 

Screenshot of the animated children's TV show "The Blanket Show," featuring a band of sheep playing against a wall and surrounded by pillows.

That leads me to the universality of it. I was making a presentation to a number of licensees in Los Angeles and California. I was working on a show when I was at MTM called The Blanket Show. There was this Rastafarian sheep who would sit down and unfold a blanket that looked like a book and he would invite all the animals in the woods to sit around while he told a story. It was basically a practice and a runway for parents to help their little ones get off to sleep. At that time in the industry, you had to have 22 or 28 half-hours to be able to syndicate something so that the repetitive nature of viewership would incline a purchase decision for merchandise. I decided I couldn't do that because Bill Melendez, who famously did the Peanuts animated specials, was our animator. We couldn't afford to do 22 or 28 half-hours with Bill, so we decided to do one, but the one was going to be the reprise and the kickoff every night for The Blanket Show at home. So we started off with the Rastafarian sheep. We're jamming and the kids would be dancing the putting their jammies on. “What are we doing now, boys?” “We're going to go brush our teeth and comb our hair. Then we're going to put the music on and then Mom's going to come in and read the book and then Dad's going to shut off the light.” So my pitch to the licensees was, “Here's the universal truth, would you like to be in a business that happens in every household in the world, every night? That's a big business. Or you could take a risk and hope that Batman 47 is going to be as successful as the first two or three?” No, I'd like to be in the bedtime business. 

So the book was born and the night-lights and music were created. We had everyone from Rosemary Clooney up and down the ladder singing nighttime songs and the universal truth was irrefutable. You don't want to be in a business that happens in every household around the world at least once a day? We had 35 licensees signed by the end of our first six months based on one half-hour. It was unheard of in the business, an absolute breakthrough. 

The first question I invariably asked you was, “Why do you want to tell this story?” Whether you're talking to Alan J. Pakula or Steven Spielberg, both of whom I had the highest regard for when I worked with them, “What's the story you want to tell?” Then I get into that conversation with them, and I say, “What's the promise and what's the takeaway?” It becomes really simple. The promise may be a little abstract. If you ask Christopher Nolan what his promise was on his many movies, it would probably be a very esoteric and dense response, but nonetheless very curated. I then say, “What's the takeaway?” 

I put it down to this, your audience just saw your movie in a theater. As they're leaving the theater, the lights and the smell of popcorn are going to hit them in the head. What is the thing they're going to say to their significant other or the person they just shared that experience with? What is that football fan going to tell his son? What's that boy going to tell his dad he just saw in the Viking game? What's the fandom response? That's the takeaway. That's your job as a filmmaker. What do I want them to say, and how does that correlate with the promise I'm going to give to them, so they can enter the sphere of my chapel, my theater of communication, and over the next hour and a half I can take them on the ride of their life? Whether it's at a theme park, in a church, in a synagogue, in a baseball stadium. Your job becomes, what's the takeaway? 

A photograph of the field during the national anthem at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 of the 2024 World Series.

FB
I remember you posing that question and it was very challenging to reduce it to something personal. That was another aspect of our working together, I started thinking about the power of imagination and the power of getting back to your inner child, where you have wonder and curiosity and anything is possible. I thought, “I'm writing this book because of that. Then you asked, “How do you play imagination?” Then it became about good and evil and Joseph Campbell stuff and you're pivoting to, “What kind of mythology am I creating? What myth do I want people to walk away with that's different than good and evil?” 

Now in this culture, as I think about what I'm working on, I think about what's real. Is this real or is it not real? That's powerful with Alyss, because people tell her that her backstory is not real, and she loses her belief in her history. The world is so divisive right now. Facts are no longer facts. With respect to Alyss, I thought it was a really powerful idea that people want to understand that this is real and they can hold on to this. It's not going to be pulled away.

KM
That reinforces the etymology of “looking through the looking glass.” At what end of that am I seeing reality? Is it closer to me or further away? Is it giving me the right optics? There's subliminal messaging in that statement that you could run and almost code the brain to be able to say, “I'm looking through this lens. Which media am I experiencing today? What's truth, what's not truth?” If I'm sitting in a football stadium, I'm sitting with 100,000 people who believe in the same thing I do - the “Fandom of the Exalted Play.” We're going to be warriors and win this year's season. This cathartic experience economy is not new. It has lived for over 3,000 years. It's tribal. It's part of our DNA. We're hardwired to it. It's just that it has evolved as technology has evolved and as we have evolved ourselves as we need stories to survive.

FB
When you were asking me, “How do you play imagination?” you went to Barbie and the playability of Barbie and how Barbie evolved. You were talking about the different ways you could manipulate the clothing and then the kinds of Barbies. I remember that it was about the playability and how successful Barbie had been and then it tapered off and they had to reimagine it. Now, with the movie having come out, it must have come full circle.

A screenshot from Greta Gerwig's 2023 film "Barbie," featuring Margot Robbie as the title character sitting at a desk with her face framed by a mirror frame.

KM
Barbie is a portal. She's like a magic wand. They can cut her hair. They can dress her, and once they take off her clothes, they’re impossible to get back on so you have the use-up rate, as we used to call it, in the cosmetics business. Barbie has a usability rate and it wasn’t about how long a girl plays with Barbie. It used to be from the ages of two to eleven, but that has diminished greatly. Eleven-year-old girls are gamers now. They don't play with dolls anymore. The compression of age and the acceleration of adulthood for young kids has grown exponentially. But what has also grown is the number of Barbies. There’s a Barbie astronaut, Barbie policeman, Barbie fireman, Barbie whatever. She's the portal for play. She has costumes, just like the characters in any one of your stories. That all enhances it. Then you have Barbie's house, Barbie's car, and Barbie's friends.

I wanted to give an homage to Hot Wheels for a bit, knowing that you have little babes in your family now. Have you ever noticed a Hot Wheels car just about perfectly fits the width of a little boy's hand?

FB
I did not.

KM
Do you know that General Motors and all the car manufacturers give Mattel a royalty-free agreement? If you want to do Jeep, if you want to do Corvette, royalty-free. Why? Because that's the next generation. “I'm playing with the Ferrari, Dad! Look at me! Look at me!” When your big sister or big brother is telling you what you can play with and what you can't play with, and your mom and dad are telling you what to do. I have no control over anything but I do have control over these big machines that make loud noises. I can control this. It’s the sense of empowerment and wonderment of imagination. That's how toys work. 

FB
I wanted to go back to the Jurassic Park story because Michael Crichton came up with that amazing universal premise and then with Steven Spielberg, they took ownership of dinosaurs to the point that nobody is ever going to take dinosaurs back. Do you agree with that? 

A screenshot from Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Jurassic Park," featuring a Tyrannosaurus Rex roaring in the rain.

KM
One hundred percent they own dinosaurs. When I was at Mattel, we were looking at this secret property from Steven. We wanted to encourage Steven to do some color configuration so the dinosaurs could be branded. What that means is, that when Mattel did Mermaid Barbie other companies would go out and do a slightly smaller version of a mermaid and dump it into the Targets of the world and whatever. Meanwhile, we would be selling Barbie for $12 or whatever and they were selling theirs in a bin near the checkout line for four bucks. We were being cannibalized. 

So mermaids, dinosaurs, puppies, all generic. But you can own it. And Steven looked like he was by the popularity and the size and the sound of his dinosaurs and the maturation of his technology, which he fused into his filmmaking brilliantly. We wanted a color distinction. I remember being in the meeting, going around with all the engineers, must have been in a boardroom of 25 people, and they convinced me we would not be able to go beyond a generic dinosaur and therefore we were afraid we would be cannibalized and our investment in the toy line would never pay off. Hasbro, smartly so, picked it up and made gazillions of dollars. That all down to the power of Steven Spielberg, the storytelling, the sound, the sensation. The rapture of that story was incredible. 

But to your point, you want to own a character. You want to own everything about that and close it off so nobody can cannibalize you up and down the toy line by size, material, or channel of distribution.

FB
As this podcast is called All Things Alice, what do you think the reasons are that Alice in Wonderland has lasted for so long in culture but hasn't been centralized in the way that Jurassic Park centralized dinosaurs?

KM
You can't deny the story is ever present in culture. It's a little like Madeline. She kind of weaves in and out of culture. I think you have made it more accessible across media, which is what's necessary, as opposed to being a classic novel from an English writer steeped in a bygone era. But Alice has captured the imagination of adults and young children. If we can remember going back and saying, “What's real? Is it under my bed? Is it in my closet?” So I think Alice has the potential of wonder, fulfillment, of tripping the light fantastic. Of what is real and what is not? What is make-believe or not? Where does our imagination begin or end? It’s very tribal, watching the flicker of a fire in a cave and acting out the hunt of the day. These are truth serums that flow through our bloodstream. I think that is what has made Alice in Wonderland last for so long. It is a classic tale. 

An illustration by Sir John Tenniel of Alice meeting the Flamingo from Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

FB
What was your first introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Did you read the book? Did you see the movie?

KM
It was reading the book, not watching the movie. I had, and have always had, a literary bent, whether it was Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe. I was drawn to that period of dark things and things. I was always drawn to that sort of Nether World. With Alice, I identified with this unknown of possibilities.

FB
What's under the bed?

KM
What's under the bed? There were several toy lines I reviewed that were everything from dust bunnies to “What's under the bed?” You know, this mythology of “Who's in the shadows?” It plays to our deepest fears and grandest imaginations. We're hardwired to it.

FB
This is a part of entertainment and culture that people don't really understand and you've done a really beautiful job of articulating it and the two aspects of your interest in life, literature and art. I can only encourage you, for all of us listening and out in the world, to finish that damn book of yours. Where are you on this book?

KM
I have been talking about it relentlessly and just when I don't think I have anything to say about something that supercharges my jets, a conversation with somebody such as you ignites that fuse. I know there's something. I know storytelling and myth are part of our culture and have made what we have come to know as modern life for the last 3,000 to 5,000 years. I'd like to comment on it, to develop a rationale as to why people react a certain way. I've seen it and I know it to be the truth. That's why Alice is a perennial. She's not going away. It's beautiful and you will own imagination however you wish, to define it by color, by shape, by sound, by musical note, soon to be. Through your literary prowess, you will be able to turn these cards over, like your tarot cards, for the public to be able to penetrate the World of Imagination, as you want people to see it, because they may not recognize it by themselves. You are our Sherpa. You are our wise man at the fire telling us the story of Alyss, and that's the takeaway.

FB
Well, we need your book. We need your book so all the storytellers can have their roadmap and we can leave the breadcrumbs behind for our audience. What was really enlightening about the conversation was the way you contextualized your experiences and contextualize how other artists have taken their ideas and brought them into pop culture, going all the way back to your story about being in a cave and telling the story of the day’s hunt. All of that is really a powerful road map for creators to own in their own stories. It doesn't have to be a franchise. It just needs to be you expressing your truth and that comes through the writing and the process. That's what you helped me to clarify. You asked strong questions, which helped me make strong choices.

KM
Tell me, Frank, if you can give us a pre-teaser. Fragrance is one of the most powerful branding tools in the quiver, because of where the brain senses smell. It's in the center of the brain. It’s very, very powerful. So is music, and you seem to be on the cusp of something rather extraordinary because you could own a sound, just like Mission Impossible. It doesn't have to be an entire orchestra. It could be three notes, whatever. 

Are you hoping that your musical will be able to bring a new audience to your franchise and the storytelling of Imagination? I wish I could have front-row seats. I can't wait. I want to be humming the song. Sammy Cahn has one of my favorite quotes. He was once asked, “What is one of the happiest things as a songwriter?” He said, “When I'm walking down Fifth Avenue and somebody is whistling one of my tunes.” I share that with you because you're not too far away, my friend.

A collage of cosplays inspired by author Frank Beddor's "The Looking Glass Wars" universe.

FB
That’s a great quote. My fantasy was that somebody would dress up as one of my characters for Halloween. When I was first writing my book, I didn't realize what a broad and beautiful world cosplay is and when I went to Comic-Con and people showed up in costumes based on my book, not a movie or a TV show, that was a highlight. But to answer your question, it’s timely because today I received a video from my composer, lyricist, and book writer, and they sang a little song to me, saying, “We're starting!” So, the process of The Looking Glass Wars musical has officially begun today.

KM
Bravo. Congratulations.

FB
Fingers crossed. I've been thinking about this for a long time because I was friends with Gregory Maguire and I went to see Wicked in San Francisco in 2003 and thought, “I wonder if I could do that with my book.” So I've been thinking about it for 25 years and here we are.

KM
I was working on Curious George with Universal for a couple of years and the next up on their hit list they wanted me to undertake was Wicked. Then there was a management change and NBC spun off so the rest is history, as is often the case in Hollywood. But I would have loved to have gotten my hands around that.

FB
My understanding is that Wicked was not even on their books. It was a miscellaneous item because originally it was developed as a movie. They couldn't make it as a movie and then they made it as this musical. Now, many, many years later, it’s one of the most successful musicals of all time and apparently, the movie is quite good from reports that I have heard. I'm excited to see it and maybe it'll rub off on folks thinking that The Looking Glass Wars and Alice in Wonderland could be the next.

KM
We don't have to own the genre. We just want to participate.

FB
Thank you so much for hanging out with us on the show today and sharing your wonderful stories and, most importantly, thank you for your contribution to my work that you initiated and so kindly imparted in 2002 and continued on through all these years. It has really helped me to create what I've created to date. So thank you, Ken. 

KM
That warms my heart. That has the most meaning. H.L. Mencken, the journalist, was once asked, “Why do you write?” And he said, “I write first, to make a living, and secondly, and more importantly, to win the respect of those I respect.” So your comments are very dear and important to me. Thank you so much. 

FB
Thank you so much, Ken. We'll talk soon. 

KM
Thank you so much. Cheers.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Mary Pat Matheson of the Atlanta Botanical Garden

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have the President and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden Mary Pat Matheson join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor
I’d like to welcome Mary Pat Matheson to the All Things Alice podcast. She is the President and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Mary Pat, so nice to meet you.

Mary Pat Matheson 
Nice to meet you too, Frank

FB
I understand we both spent some time in Utah. 

MPM
Yeah, I lived there for 30 years. What took you to Utah?

FB
I was on the U.S. Ski Team and I lived there for about five years. I had a condo in Salt Lake City and I drove up to Park City and Snowbird.

MPM
You can't live in Utah and not ski. It’s a long winter. We were in Park City for about 11 years before we moved to Atlanta.

FB
Wow. I bet that was a big adjustment.

MPM
It was changing climate, culture, geography, flora, fauna, you name it. It was a big change, but I was I was ready. I'd been at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum in Salt Lake for 20 years and my husband and I talked about it and decided it would be a good thing for my career. Atlanta has turned out to be such a great city. We really love the city and the diversity. My husband is retired now and we have a farm in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is, so he gets to stay there all the time and I go back and forth. We need that outdoors. We don't get the mountains and the snow in Atlanta.

FB
That's a nice combination. I sort of stopped skiing when I moved to Los Angeles but then I had kids and I had to teach the kids to ski so I fell back in love with it. I drive up to Mammoth a lot. I really miss the mountain life. Sun Valley was one of my favorite places. Park City has exploded. 

A photograph of Main Street in Park City, Utah during winter with a forested mountain in the background.

MPM
It's nuts. We kept our house for three years after we moved here and then we decided it was too hard to deal with the rental and we sold it. Now we look back and go, “Well, that was a dumb idea.” But I don't know if I would be happy there anymore. Most of our friends who stayed in Park City have left. It's just exploded. Park City Mountain Resort was owned by a family for all those years and then somebody forgot to renew their lease with the U.S. Forest Service and Vail Resorts and signed up for the lease immediately. So the family lost the resort and it's now owned by a huge conglomerate. It’s just not the same as it once was. And I do think after 11 years, eight or nine months of winter gets old.

FB
My friends who lived there all had to move down to Salt Lake City because they couldn't afford to live there anymore. It’s like with a lot of the ski resorts where all the big money from out of town comes in and then all the locals don't have anywhere to live and have to commute 45 minutes or an hour. It's nothing like it was when I was there, which was in the 80s and 90s.

MPM
You were there in the heyday. Even better snow then, too.

FB
It was amazing back then. I also was there at the start of the Sundance Film Festival, before it became such a big market. It was very, very charming. 

MPM
Before it was Sundance it was the U.S. Film Festival and they sold it to Robert Redford five years after it began. But a friend of ours, Lori Smith, ran the independent part, which is what took off, of course. It's not even a shadow of its former self. We loved it when it was like it was when you were there.

FB
I'm always interested in folks who are exploring Alice in Wonderland in all the different mediums. When I first started writing my book, The Looking Glass Wars and I started looking into how deep Alice runs in pop culture, I was amazed. When I came to Alice in Wonderland gardens it surprised me. It seemed like an outlier. Yet, here I am talking with you about this big exhibit you have in Atlanta and the New York Botanical Garden is doing its own Alice exhibit.

Your exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden is called Alice’s Wonderland Returns. When was the first incarnation?

MPM
That is a very good question. This is the second iteration of it with some new work, the Singing Flowers. I believe it was on display in 2019 and into 2020. We've done work with Mosaiculture, out of Canada, going back to 2013 when we did another imaginary world show with giant cobras and then we did one with a big dragon. Alice is the newer one. 

A topiary sculpture depicting the White Rabbit sitting in an umbrella from "Alice in Wonderland" in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

What we found when we did it in 2019 and 2020 is Alice has a cult following. Whether you're a little tiny kid or an 80-year-old woman, you have a story about Alice in Wonderland. You have a special place in your heart for Alice. It touches almost all dimensions of life. I was out in the garden during the first show and I saw this woman. She was about 50 years old and had a little dress on, and she was holding the map. I said, “Can I help you?” And she said, “Well, I think I've seen the entire show, but I'm looking at the map because I flew here from Denver to see the Alice in Wonderland show and I don't want to leave in case I miss anything.” Then she said, “See, I wore my Alice dress, and she twirled around, and her dress had Alice in Wonderland all over.” It was hilarious. She hadn't missed anything. I walked her through the whole show but that's the way this show touches people in a way no other show we've ever done has touched people.

FB
People like dressing up and doing cosplay with Alice. Do you encourage and invite that? 

MPM
Every Thursday night from May to the end of September is “Cocktails in Wonderland”. We encourage people on Thursday night to dress up so that's really worked with the cosplay people. Even people who don't know much about cosplay still dress their kids in Alice in Wonderland stuff. 

FB
Is there a signature drink?

Mary Pat Matheson

It’s the “Queen's Gambit,” a spiced apple Margarita.

FB
That sounds lovely and delicious. Might have to try that.

I saw the photograph of the singing flowers, and I'm a big fan. I've used the singing flowers in a number of story elements in my work. So tell me about coming up with which kind of flowers you're using in this installation.

MPM
We work with a creative partner in Montreal. The art form you’ve seen images of is called Mosaiculture. Horticulture and mosaic together. Some of the older instances include manor houses in 19th century Europe would have a clock on a hill all planted with plants. That’s where this concept of mosaic and plants came together. In the late 1990s, the City of Montreal wanted to do something really special that was very green for the millennium, for two the year, 2000 and they came up with the idea of creating a nonprofit. 

Lise Cormier became the head of this new nonprofit, Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, which worked with the province and the City of Montreal to create a major international competition. Cities around the world picked symbols of their cities or heritage or mythology from their countries and created big, beautiful images out of this topiary work. Most of them were made in Montreal but the concepts were created in different parts of the world. The show started in the summer of 2000 and I think they had 3 million guests. It was huge. Now they do shows in Canada every couple of years. I had already told them I wanted to be the first garden to showcase their work when they were ready to do something in the United States. 

Lise is the creative, inspirational person behind it all. She has a phenomenal team but she is the artist who takes the Alice story and turns it into these figures. When we told her we wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, Lise dove into the movie. She dove into the book. She studied, studied, studied, and she came up with the Singing Flowers, which flowers to use, and even what music to play based on what she got out of the book. I talked to her three days ago and we are going to do the show again next year, because it is so popular, and the Singing Flowers have some references in the book to an understory of blue flowers. So she's encouraging us to look at a blue tapestry under the Singing Flowers next year. That's the kind of detail Lise gets into. She's just so talented. Then we turn her concepts and the frames over to our horticulturists, and she has horticulturists who give us a plant list. What will grow in Montreal versus Atlanta is very different, of course, so we evaluate the plants beforehand so we know what will work here. Our horticulturalists have done this enough that they know what varieties of wet plants will do better here than they will in Montreal and vice versa. So we pick plants that will be as close to what they recommend so that the pieces look the way they're sketched out when we’re designing the show.

A topiary sculpture depicting the card soldiers and chessboard from "Alice in Wonderland" in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

FB
I really encourage listeners to check out the website and take a look at some of the photographs because these oversized books are so gorgeous. The Cheshire Cat installation is one of my favorites. The chessboard and the card soldiers are another spectacular exhibit. But tell me how a visitor would experience the Alice in Wonderland story walking through the exhibit. What story elements do you emphasize?

MPM
We have interpretive signs that talk about some of the pieces and a lot of people want to know what the plants are. But then we have a cell tour, so you can hear from horticulturalists talk about the pieces. But we do a very light interpretation because we don't feel like it's our job to interpret the book because everyone has different perspectives on what it means and what it meant to you as a child. We want you to bring your imagination. Often people go home and reread the book after they've seen the show. 

FB
That’s pretty inspiring. I bet a lot of English teachers are happy with you. You have the original text but you brought up the Disney movie. Are you talking about the Tim Burton version or the animated version? What parts of either of those are in the exhibit?

MPM
The book is really the inspiration for most of the show. But we all have been touched by those two movies. Everyone's seen them. The good news is a lot of guests are still reading the book to their children. It's timeless and that's really great. Not everything in this world we live in, especially with books, is timeless. 

It's a trio. It's the two movies you mentioned, Tim Burton and Disney, as well as the book itself, and then just all the iterations of it. We've got a really creative visitor center manager and he and his team have done this really beautiful fan of playing cards over the Alice in Wonderland table in our gift shop. It's just filled with all this stuff like the Red Queen and the White Rabbit and, of course, the Cheshire Cat. There's so much you can buy that's Alice-driven too. It's a real opportunity for retail. But I just think it's the trio that really has made this so inspiring to other people. But it's the book that inspired the creation of our show.

FB
Why do you think Alice keeps reemerging as an important cultural touchstone for people after all these years? What are the ingredients that make this story last? 

MPM
That's a really hard question. I think there is a part of the book that touched people as children without a doubt. The book is pretty idiosyncratic. 

FB
Extremely. A lot of interpretations. You can think of it as a whimsical story or you can think of it as a horror story. 

A topiary sculpture depicting the Cheshire Cat from "Alice in Wonderland" in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

MPM
It’s like we're terrified and infatuated with snakes because they're interesting, but they are scary. Alice is not a snake, but Alice is interesting because it is beautiful, mystical, and charming. Who doesn't want to shrink and meet the White Rabbit, right? But do you ever get out and do you ever return to your life? Then there's the whole layer of, “Was Alice really about drugs?”

FB
That came out of the 60s and 70s, for sure.

MPM
I do not doubt that some people come here because they're interested in that.

FB
Are there magic mushrooms in this garden?

MPM
All your listeners should not come here looking for mushrooms. People do eat a few before they arrive, I wouldn't be surprised. That part of it comes back when you're in your 20s or 30s. It's a generational thing. When you're a child, it's all beautiful imagery and you don't understand it, but you're enthralled. Then when you're older you’re thinking about it and you're not really sure what the meaning is. It's got a lot of depth to it, and that's part of the interest. 

FB
It always surprises me how much Alice is in culture. People forget when they say something like, “We've stepped into a looking glass, or we're down a rabbit hole now and there's no logic, and facts are not facts.” Alice keeps coming up in every conversation and people just don't realize this has all come from this original story.

MPM
Wasn't it Jefferson Airplane, “Go ask Alice, When she's 10 feet tall”? 

FB
I love that song.

MPM
You can't help but love that song. It’d be hard to figure out another book that has had that kind of an impact on us as humans. What about Wizard of Oz?

FB
Have you ever thought about doing The Wizard of Oz? That seems like a possibility.

MPM
I'll tell you the dream of ours. This is not a promise to your listeners, because we have a lot of work to do, but we would love to partner and do Where the Wild Things Are. The Maurice Sendak book is so important, so fanciful, so uplifting. He cared about literacy and children, which we care a lot about, we do a lot of reading programs in the garden. But also because Where the Wild Things Are would be such a good way to interpret the work that we do in Plant Conservation and Biodiversity. We have 35 scientists working in our Center for Plant Conservation doing work all over the southeastern United States, in the Caribbean, and worldwide to try to save magnolias in parts of the world like Asia and South America. But telling that story to guests is hard. Biodiversity and why we should care about plants is a hard concept for people to understand, because plants are everywhere, right? They're not going to be everywhere. They're disappearing and, as they go, so go the insects and the birds and the animals. If we could do Where the Wild Things Are, you'd have another story that has multiple stories to go with it, but that one hits squarely in the mission zone. That's our fantasy right now. We'd like to do that one day.

An illustration of Max and a Wild Thing from Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's boo "Where the Wild Things Are".

FB
That's a really strong choice. We'll put our collective energy towards that happening because people don't realize how many plants we're losing every year just as they don't realize the number of animal species we're losing. Obviously, those things go hand in hand. 

MPM
When we were little our parents would drive to Florida or California for vacation, every three or four hours we'd stop for gas, and my dad would get out and clean the windshield because of the bugs. When was the last time anybody had to clean bugs off a windshield? Where did the bugs go? If the bugs are gone, what are the birds eating? Well, let's see, 9 billion birds have disappeared. A lot all those things are pollinators for plants. So there go the plants. That's the simplest way to understand that web of life and the importance of biodiversity.

FB
It’s really important and it's great that you're doing this for children because it's their generation that's going to suffer. They're the young folks who need to really stand up for climate change and the difficulties we're facing. We just had a heat wave here and all these plants shriveled up so quickly. I hadn't seen that before in a matter of a couple of days. There are so many places on the planet where we're losing all of this diversity. 

MPM
Your sequoias are totally endangered. All those little plants, like little orchids in the rainforest that we're losing, it’s a big loss. And you're right, the kids are going to have to inherit the mess we leave behind.

FB
The important thing is, people can't take all that on, so you need to entertain and show them the beauty of what’s at stake. That's why I want to encourage people to go to the exhibit. If it's not this year, then go next year. There's so much creativity infused in this thing, the fairy tale aspect within the context of looking at these iconic characters and seeing the plants that make up the stylistic choices. It’s mind-blowing you can do this combination of the mosaic and the plants and create so much beauty. Then when you're looking at that beauty, someone's listening and you're talking about where these plants are disappearing. People can hear that because they're having it coming in. When I do school events and talk about my books, I spend so much time getting the kids on my side and I do not talk about writing and the difficulties of writing until the very end. So the teachers are happy with me but they're already on my side. So they can hear you, and that sounds like what you're doing.

MPM
That's so true. Years ago, we did some branding work and, as a part of that, we wanted to analyze whether we could lead with the environmental message. What we learned is that people care about that message but they don't come for that. They come for social experiences with family, friends, and loved ones. But once they're here, they want to understand more. They don't want to have it drilled into their head but they would like to learn more. That's what we can do with the magic of this show. 

We have the largest orchid center in the United States. There are orchids from a quarter of an inch big to eight feet big that are just spectacular with these incredible flowers and unique mechanisms for pollination. They're just as wonderful as the Mosaiculture Alice show. So we get you here for the bigger exhibit but then the experience is much deeper than that. 

A photograph of pink orchids from the Orchid Atrium at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

When we talked a minute ago about what to do about all these challenges and biodiversity, I always like to lead people with this idea. I know you probably don't have a lot of lawns in California, right? But we certainly do here. But for people who have lawns, planting pollinator gardens and not spraying herbicides and pesticides, you can still have a lawn with a little bit of messy weeds in it if you mow it often and really encourage wildlife to come back and insects to thrive. That's something anybody who rents or owns a home can do that can make a big difference in the world we live in today. I want people to think about what they can do without feeling like we're just beating our heads against the wall and can't make a difference. We can in our own small way.

FB
It's really true. Last year, I got married in my backyard so I ended up planting and I put in a little water feature. To your point, I'm shocked by the number of butterflies and dragonflies showing up. Insects are all over the place and now the neighborhood raccoons, skunks, and deer are coming. I can really feel what you're talking about. It happened within a very short time, 12 months, but it has a lot to do with those instincts. 

Being president and CEO of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, what are some of the things you do day in and day out that excite you? What are the challenges of running this organization?

MPM
Number one, I love nature and I love plants so I get to run an organization that's driven by that. If I'm having a hard day or there's an issue, I can walk in the garden. Yesterday I went to see the Alice show and went to look at the orchids. You can't come back to your office feeling bad after you've done that. You just can't. The same is true for everybody else who's listening. If you can't walk through a botanical garden when you're having a hard day, just go for a walk in the park. Go for a walk in the woods. It lowers blood pressure, stress, and anxiety, and we know our children are suffering from that at huge levels. 

When gardens were started hundreds of years ago, some were started for wealthy manor houses in Europe. In fact, in the 1700s and 1800s, the really wealthy and royalty in England and other places would send orchid thieves to South America. That was where the orchid rape happened, and they stole them out of the out of the rainforest. If they took a million orchids on a ship back to England, they would be lucky if 100 survived. Terrariums were finally built so they could keep the orchids alive. So some gardens started with wealth. Some started as medicinal gardens, particularly monasteries that needed medicinal plants to help people heal. Then a lot of gardens started with universities as science collections, all of which are good, and many of those are still here today. 

A topiary sculpture depicting a dragon at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

But today, public gardens exist for lots of reasons, not just a narrow few. Forty-five years ago the big gardens would have lots of guests, but not all gardens have that. But because the world we're in today is disconnected from nature, and the globalization of our populations, we have more people coming to botanic gardens now than at any time in history. So this is our century. The bad news is that it means the environmental issues have gotten so severe that people do want to come for other reasons. But the good news is we're the havens for our community. That was proven in 2020 during Covid. People flocked here. We were the only cultural destination in Atlanta, along with the zoo, that was open. We had to limit numbers through the front door but we were the place where people came to preserve their sanity and feel safe. So I love that this is a time when gardens are thriving and more important than ever. 

I also love to raise money and build so we're in a $150 million capital campaign. We want to build another eight acres of gardens that will be connected to the ones we have now. But the real catalyst for this is that the new front door for these gardens is going to be on the Atlanta Beltline, which is a 22-mile connected loop around the city for walking, biking, and scooters that will be done in 2030. It's changing the way we move through our community. We are going to be the cultural destination on the Beltline. So my comparison is, that it's like the Whitney Museum in the High Line Park. We're going to be the Whitney on the Beltline. We're going to have one garden and two front doors. One for people arriving with cars and one for people on foot or biking. That is great in terms of looking at sustainability and how we get our guests here. We're very excited about that. I think we're right at about $120 million raised and we'll break ground next year.

FB
How do you go about raising that kind of money?

MPM
I love to raise money and I love America and its philanthropy. We are unique in the world in that our tax system was set up a long time ago to benefit people who wanted to support nonprofits and, as a result, we have some of the most successful nonprofits in the world. You look at Atlanta, where there is really no public funding, very little from the city and the count, and none from the state to speak of whereas other big cities like St. Louis, San Francisco, and New York, have public money for nonprofits and cultural institutions. We don't here but we have a vigorous, wonderful cultural community of museums and the garden and the Center for Puppetry Arts, which has the most famous puppets in the world. 

All of that is because of the generosity of this community and America's culture of philanthropy. So we have big foundations, generous individuals, and very generous corporations that support the work that we're doing. That's number one. Number two is to raise the kind of money that we're doing right now. It takes a bold vision. Everyone in this city knows how important the Atlanta Beltline is to changing the city. The first two miles that opened, eight or nine years ago, there was immediately $4-5 billion worth of development along it with apartments, condos, and restaurants. Our section will be the green section because it goes through Piedmont Park and then to the garden through a quiet part of the city and it connects neighborhoods. 

I think you have to have a bold vision that makes sense for the community. That it's more than the nonprofit. It's about, how you make Atlanta a better place to be for the people who visit here or live here. Then you have to deliver on the promise and those are really the key things in fundraising, at least in the cultural community. I think it's much harder in social services.

The BeltLine, to their credit, is doing a lot of work on affordable housing to make sure that it's not all these really expensive apartments and condos. I think private equity owns about 40% of the real estate in Atlanta and that's really driven up housing prices here and in every city in the United States. But the Belt is doing a really good job as is the city. We have a mayor who's all about affordable housing to try and turn that around. That's not our focus or our mission but we want to make sure because you have to pay admission to come into the garden or you can be a member. You could buy a dual membership for $120 and come in for free year-round. But we're also going to do free programming outside the enclosed area in a courtyard garden that we're building, where we can do Tai Chi, or we can talk about pollinator gardens. We can let people take an herb garden home to their little apartments. We want to do things that are about equity as well. 

FB
Here in Los Angeles, we have the Huntington Gardens. 

A photograph of the Cactus Garden at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

MPM

I love the Huntington. When I first saw the Cactus Garden as a young horticulturist, I think I cried. I was just so moved by it.

FB
To your point, certainly, during the pandemic, it was a safe place to socialize but I've also noticed that even on weekdays, when I would expect it to be quiet, I show up and the parking lot’s completely full. It’s such a spectacular garden but it's also just a place to get away and have a walk. I was recently reading the biography of Steve Jobs and he talks a lot about going on walks with friends or co-workers to talk through problems and to get away from it. That's the amazing thing about going on a walk and then if you're in nature, things come into your mind that you just don't expect because you're looking one way, you're thinking about something else, and then you see an animal, a plant, or a cactus. You're like, “Wait, where did all this come from?” 

MPM
When I go there, I never go inside. I just stay in the garden the entire time. It's so well maintained and so beautiful and so diverse but it's interesting when you were talking about taking a walk. I hope your listeners all know how walking out in nature can help you solve problems and de-stress, and we need to get our kids to do that more often, or just go play. But we forget that human beings are animals. We're an elevated animal and so being in nature, where we are hearing animals and smelling things, that's what we're supposed to do. That's what our bodies are craving. We've just forgotten that in our busy lives.

FB
If you combine that with Alice in Wonderland, you're combining nature and what it was like to have a childhood imagination and wonder, which is one of the things you were talking about earlier. So you’re bringing those things together, the wonder of story, the wonder of character, the wonder of whimsy and fantasy. Bringing it back to the Alice’s Wonderland Returns exhibit, can you bring us back to your exhibit and highlight some of the areas visitors really admire and talk to you about the feedback you're getting so we can have our little walk through our Alice in Wonderland on this podcast?

MPM
When you walk into the garden from the visitor center, immediately, there are two books and they are 18 feet tall. These are huge and they're made out of steel with fabric and soil and then they're completely planted. The letters are the only things that are metal. Everything else is a plant that makes the binding of the book and the front of the book, and that starts you off. Everyone wants their picture taken in front of that because when you go home with your photos and show them to your family, you begin with the story, which is Alice in Wonderland. 

Then you go into the show and you walk over where our restaurant, Longleaf, is, and when people are walking somebody inevitably will look up to the left, and on top of a stone wall when you're coming around a curve, is the Cheshire Cat. He's just up there looking down on you like he should be. It’s usually a child who finds it because they're always looking. Moms are talking, dads are talking, friends are talking, and then they all stop and they all have to have their pictures of it. Then you come to a water feature, which is at the end of a grand alley of crape myrtles, and in this water feature is Alice herself, and Alice is spinning because she's going down the rabbit hole.

A topiary sculpture depicting Alice falling down the rabbit hole from "Alice in Wonderland" in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

FB
Oh, that's spectacular. And you have some teacups right near her as well, right?

MPM
There are two reasons for that. One is the reality of the book, you have to spin to go down the rabbit hole. The other is more practical. It's a 360-degree fountain. The reason is, that she's planted. There are trees here and sunshine on the other side. The plants all enjoy the sunshine in the shade. Otherwise, on one side of her, the all plants would get long and lanky in the shade and the sun is nice and tight and beautiful. So we had to turn her for photosynthesis. It's both the science and the art. 

Everyone stands and looks at her because the teacups are there and she's got cards on her and then she's falling down the rabbit hole. It's just so funny. I saw a Chinese couple there this spring when we had just put it in and they were so excited. Then you go over to the Red Queen, who is probably 20 feet tall and pretty intimidating as she's supposed to be. But what is she doing? Croquet. Remember what the croquet ball is? It’s the hedgehog.

FB
That's very clever. That's fun.

MPM
The hoop is one of the card soldiers. They have to bend to the Red Queen’s will so they have to bend over so they create a hoop for the hedgehog. Now you're just laughing. You're absolutely delighted. You're seeing details you never expected to see in the show. Of course, every moment is a photo op for family, friends, or whoever you're with. Then you go around another corner and you can hear music, or sometimes it's quiet, and the music doesn't come on until you trigger it, because it's triggered by movement. That's where the Singing Flowers are. They're 15 feet tall, and they're 12 of them, all along a linear pathway. They're singing this wonderful song to you like little cherubs and you're more mystified than anything. “Where did the music come from? What are these things?” It’s so delightful.

Then you end up in the Skyline Garden, which is wonderful because you've got this really beautiful urban view of Atlanta. You're above a huge water feature in a courtyard and looking down is the White Rabbit. The White Rabbit is about 25 feet tall and he is sitting in an umbrella, and he’s all white with a pink nose and whiskers. He's got his top hat on and there's a clock on him because he's always keeping time for when she has to leave. He is just awesome. I should note we keep the White Rabbit for the holiday light show so he gets lit up during the holidays. He is just a charming part of our holiday light show, which, last year, ABC News declared the best light show in America. We won the Light Fight competition. It's a fabulous light show. 

We have a canopy walk in our woodland and it's 45 feet off the ground with a 120 or 140-foot deciduous tree forest, we hang 1,500 light strands from nets in the trees, and they're all choreographed to music. It's fabulous. Then next to the White Rabbit on the lawn is the chess set you talked about and they're all the playing cards and the horses and the knights of the chess set. There's a great photo op in front of it and we have so many wonderful photos of families and children and friends together. People spend a lot of time there because there are so many pieces on the chess set. The lawn is a checkerboard lawn. It's a delightful show with the whimsy, the humor, and the delight from the book. And whenever you blow scale up like that, it's so surprising to people. They love it.

A topiary sculpture depicting the Queen of Hearts playing croquet from "Alice in Wonderland" in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

FB
I imagine these kids coming through. They're looking up and their necks are arching back, looking all around them at all these huge exhibits and characters. It's pretty remarkable.

MPM
I love it. Some of them come so many times. They lead people around because they know it so well.

FB
Having this conversation with you and you describing the exhibit was so compelling. It is very clear to me why you're the president and the CEO, and why you've raised $120 million of the $150 million. I want to get on a plane and come see that right now based on the way that you described it and the love, creativity, and care that is communicated through you in terms of the work that you're doing in this incredible exhibit. I really appreciate the time and your sharing your passion for Alice in Wonderland and this beautiful garden you oversee.

MPM
It's my pleasure, Frank. Come anytime you want. We'd love to have you. 

FB
So, let me just ask you a question, if you were to describe your husband as a character from Alice in Wonderland?

MPM
He can be really funny or kind of introverted when he wants and he's very creative sometimes. Right now, he works in the garden with the speaker tied to his waist to listen to the Braves games. Maybe he's the Mad Hatter.

FB
He'd have to be for being such a Renaissance person.

Thank you again. It was a terrific conversation. Thank you.

MPM
I enjoyed it so much, Frank. Thank you. 

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Dr. April James, Creator of The ALICE Way

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have wellness educator and opera singer Dr. April James join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation, and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor
Dr. April James, it's so nice to have you on the show.

Dr. April James
Thank you. It’s so nice to be on the show.

FB
Your approach to Alice in Wonderland and wellness is really interesting. The way you use Alice and the five steps is very clever. I’m excited to get into that. 

AJ
Thank you. I use them as they come to me.

FB
I want to start with a question about your introduction to Alice in Wonderland. Your website states it was Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which is very unusual that his film would be the introduction, given how long Alice has been in pop culture. Most of the time, people either read the book when their parents introduced them or they saw the Disney animated movie. Before you saw Tim Burton's movie, what did you know of Wonderland?

AJ
I didn't know a whole lot. I might have seen the animated Disney film when I was a kid. I'm sure it was on television and it might have flitted by my consciousness. But I never read the books as a kid. The only bit of Lewis Carroll I really knew before seeing the Tim Burton film was the poem “Jabberwocky.” I took a Victorian literature class in undergrad, at Queens College, and we had to read that for an assignment. I loved that poem because I was into medieval stuff. I had taken Arthurian literature classes, and I was really big on knights in shining armor. The mock Old English style in which “Jabberwocky” is written really appealed to me and I just loved that. But I didn't really know anything else about Lewis Carroll or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland until after that Tim Burton film.

Still image from Tim Burton's 2010 film "Alice in Wonderland," featuring Johnny Depp as Tarrant Hightopp/Mad Hatter and Mia Wasikowska as Alice Kingsleigh.

FB
Tell me about the experience of seeing the Tim Burton movie and relating that to “Jabberwocky” and its author. What was your reaction to the movie and where did you go from there?

AJ
I almost didn't see the film. I was at a really difficult point in my life. I returned to New York after getting my doctorate up at Harvard. I moved back in with my mother because that's what you do when you can't afford to do anything in New York. I came to call it a “Decade of Awfulness.” I was trying to build an opera career, some kind of creative career, but my mother kept having health issues and we kept having family friction because I have an older brother who was creating havoc at a distance with her. By the time March 2010 came around, I was borderline depressed and nothing was really working. But I was a member of the Actors Work Program, which is part of the entertainment industry unions, and I'd met someone who was a member of SAG. She had passes to the then newly opened Alice in Wonderland and she invited me. I thought, “Well, I don't really know anything about Lewis Carroll. I don't really care about Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.” I hemmed and hawed but eventually, I decided to go. I’d not seen a 3D film and I figured it'd be worth the price of admission. 

It just totally blew me away. The moment the music came up and the lights came up on the screen, I felt something reawaken in me. I'm a singer and a classical musician and the music caught my ear. There was some mystery and some magic and wonder and innocence in there. Then the visuals started to reach me and as Alice was going through her story, I kept finding resonances with my own life. Adults telling you what to do, “We think you should do this. Everyone should do that.” “What, I don't get an opinion here?” Then what really got me was the Mad Tea Party scene where Alice comes out of this clearing and there's a table with the Dormouse and the March Hare. Hatter’s at the end of the table asleep in his chair. As he awakens, he sees Alice coming out of the clearing and his face fills with delight. The moment his face filled the screen, I heard, inside my head, this British-accented voice go, “That's me.” I asked, “Me who?” No response. I just went back to watching the film and by the end, I came out of that theater and I felt this buzzing inside of me. Something reawakened in me. That's when I started being obsessed with Hatter, Lewis Carroll, and all things Alice.

FB
Had other films evoked such a strong reaction in you previously?

AJ
Not as strong as that. I had seen films that I just loved. When I was a teenager, I was really into the Beatles and I saw A Hard Day's Night. I'd sing the songs at the top of my lungs. Something like that. 

FB
Alice in Wonderland resonated with you to the point where you have a career built around wellness. You said you went back and started thinking about the Mad Hatter and all things Alice and Lewis Carroll. Where did the journey take you after the movie? Did you read the book? Did you see a documentary? What happened?

Illustration by Henry Holiday depicting the Butcher and the Beaver on the deck of a ship, from Lewis Carroll's 1876 nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark".

AJ
I read all the books. I read both of the Alice books and “Hunting of the Snark” and Sylvie and Bruno. I read biography after biography about Lewis Carroll and the more I learned about him, the more I fell in love with him. Especially reading the collections of his letters, I felt like I was encountering a long-lost uncle. That's how I felt and still feel about Lewis Caroll. He gets me. He gets children. He gets people. If we're in a foul mood, he knows how to pull us out of it.

FB
There are two camps when interpreting Lewis Carroll's books. There's the interpretation that it’s whimsical, very nonsensical, and magical. I suspect you subscribe to that interpretation because of the work you do. However, on the other side of it, people really look at Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as dark and twisted. The terror of being out of control in your body, growing and shrinking, and things like that. Were you able to see both sides of it reading the text? Did you have a really strong first impression of where Lewis Carroll was coming from?

AJ
My impression has always been that he's coming from the whimsical, nonsensical side. The good side, the magical side of everything. He was very interested in imagination and he was very spiritual and connected to God. This love of life permeates his best works. Joy and love are positive emotions that connect us to the good that's in the universe. The good that lies at the heart of all of us.

FB
I agree with you. The first word you used was imagination and that's what struck me about the text. As an adult, writing for adults and for kids, I always thought it was about keeping that childhood wonder and imagination going and how we lose it as an adult. In a lot of ways, Lewis Carroll was a very rigid man who taught mathematics, yet he was flipping to the other side with his writing. One part of your wellness program is about getting back to that youthful, imaginative joy that you always lived as a kid.

AJ
Exactly. One of the sayings I like is, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”

FB
Excellent. I love that.

AJ
Some people didn't necessarily have the happiest childhood, right? I had a good childhood but I had a rather responsible kind of childhood, too. “You're going to go to school and you're going to learn, and you're going to do this and this and this.” College was never a question. I was going to college. But I always wanted people to play with. My brother is way older than I am so he wasn’t around when I was a kid and there weren't any other kids my age in my neighborhood. So I really had to use my imagination a lot growing up. Creating worlds of wonder for myself. As we get older, for some reason, society tells us not to be playful, or we get this idea that can't be playful and do good work, which is absolutely not the case. I had to relearn that.

FB
Kudos to your parents because education is really important. You went to Harvard, which is exceptional as well. Tell me what your household was like in terms of the educational part of it versus the playful part of it. You said that when you were on your own, you were imaginative. Was there a crossover, or did you carve that out yourself and your parents were by the book?

AJ
My parents were both teachers. My mother was a special education teacher, and my father was an attendance teacher, which is like a truant officer, but you work for the Board of Education. So they were both really responsible and interested in learning. My mother comes from a family of teachers. Her mother was a teacher and her sisters were also teachers or librarians. It's a very educated family. I was always expected to go to school and do well, and it wasn't hard for me to do that. I liked learning. I loved reading. As a kid, I was in the library all the time, pulling out whatever interested me. I remember reading The Chronicles of Narnia series when I was a child. 

A photograph of wellness educator and opera singer Dr. April James holding a microphone and wearing a gold top hat.

Harvard was actually the first time I started to believe in myself and my ability to do anything. I'm a singer by inclination more than training. I've always loved music. I had these two tracks going in my life. There was the liberal arts education track, but I loved music, and I wanted to study music. However, I was discouraged from doing music as a major during my first bachelor's degree at Queen's College. I understood that, so I studied communications, and I went into TV and publishing. I hated it. I didn't like the field. After a couple of years of job to job to job, I was laid off right before Thanksgiving, and I said, “You know what? I'm going to go and study what I wanted to study before. I'm going to go back to Queens College and study music, and we'll see how it works out. That’s how I ended up at Harvard.” 

FB
Good for you.

Do you think that was a smart thing for your mom to say to you, versus saying, “Follow your passion”? I find that to be really difficult. I have two teenage kids, one who just went off to college and knows what he wants to do. He doesn't want to be in entertainment, he wants to be more in business. But my daughter, she's going all over the place. 

My father was a real entrepreneur, a risk taker, and he was like, “Yes, go do it.” I started off on the ski team and it seemed like a ridiculous idea that I would ever make money or that I would be good at it. And I would have to not go to college, where I was going to go to college part-time, and my mom said, “Absolutely not.” My dad, however, said, “Absolutely do it.” I wonder how you feel about your mom’s advice and, if you were giving that advice to yourself, what would you say?

AJ
It’s taken me a long time to get over my mother's advice. I realize that she was right in a way and she was wrong in a way. My father, even though he was an attendance teacher when I was growing up, was laid off from the city in the 70s. He was also an entrepreneur and he started his own driving school after a time. So I have both this toeing-the-line thing and the entrepreneurial thing going. Now, I understand and I actually appreciate my mother's take on the arts career-wise. I wish she'd been a little more nuanced in what she had said. 

After I got out of Harvard, I tried to have an arts career. My research was on women composers and operas composed by women. I started my own opera company and it was so difficult. Even if my mother had been in perfect health and we'd had perfect stuff going on in the family situation, it still would’ve been so difficult. I just said, “You know, what? I don't want to be a full-time artist.” I got to that point. 

But I understand what my mother was saying. What she was saying was it's very difficult to make it in the arts. You can, but it's not as clear a path as getting a nine-to-five job somewhere or getting a teaching degree and then teaching. I understand where she was coming from.

FB
It’s not just talent. Talent can only get you so far. If you’re an actor, you have to be so driven that what you're saying to yourself is, “I don't care if I do community theater, I am going to act. I am not thinking about being a movie star. I just need to be on the stage. It's how I live and breathe.” If you don't look at it that way, then you're not going to make it. You're doing it because you can't do anything else.

AJ
That's exactly it. I love singing. I sing all the time. I wake up in the morning, and I'm singing. During the day, I'm singing. I'm singing Bach. I'm singing Handel. I’m singing Mozart. All this gorgeous music that I love. I don't have to be out in front of people to do it. I came to that realization. I do need to be with other people. There's a pianist I'm working with now. I sing in choirs. I've done some recordings, but I don't have to be in an operatic role on stage.

FB
You found your way in terms of combining a lot of different interests. You have your website and your wellness program, the ALICE Way, which is how I originally found you. I love the way you describe helping adults rediscover their natural joy and playfulness so they can better navigate life's ups and downs. Alice in Wonderland is so deeply rooted in culture and brings lots of joy and amusement to people, and you've attached these five steps. Could you tell us the five steps, how you came to them, and why it's been effective for people?

AJ
Alice is not just the name of the heroine of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. For me, she also gives her name to the acronym for the five steps. They’re equations. “A” equals “Awe plus Authenticity.” “L” is “Love plus Levity.” “I” is “Inspiration plus Impossibility.” “C” is “Courage plus Clarity.” “E” is “Exercise plus Expressivity.”

FB
Beautiful. There's a double meaning for everything. Then you sign up for your program and you work your way through the acronym. People want awe in their life and they want to be authentic. To be authentic, you have to know yourself. And to know yourself is one of the themes of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Do you tie the story and Alice as the protagonist into the exercises?

AJ
That's exactly what I do. I have an online video course and I also do this in person. I'll talk about the video course as that's most accessible to people. I divide it up into chapters plus an intro and a conclusion. In the chapter on “A” for “Awe and Authenticity,” for example, I do a video where I introduce the topic by reading something from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that relates to awe. Then I tell a story from my life that connects to the same concept of awe. Then there's an exercise, a separate video, on how you can experience awe in your life. Most of the videos are under 10 minutes. I also have a 42-page playbook to accompany the course so people can do written exercises along with each chapter of the ALICE Way.

FB
Is there any crossover between the text that you're referencing and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland? Was there anything in his movie that you carried over for your program because you liked it? Or do you stick with the original, Lewis Carroll text?

AJ
I keep with the original. The original is the reason why the Tim Burton film is so effective. So let's reference the original work. I really want to encourage people to engage with Lewis Carroll and engage with his work. The ALICE Way is not just about me. I want adults to rediscover joy and I want to have other people to play with. But it's also about appreciating this man who was just such an incredibly loving soul and left us such engaging, enriching, and magical works that can still affect us. 

FB
That are still important 150-plus years later.

AJ
It’s amazing. How many times in a week do you hear the phrase “down the rabbit hole”?

FB
I bet you have heard it a lot more since you saw the movie. Before, you probably didn't even know it was connected to Alice in Wonderland. 

AJ
Exactly. I don't think I ever knew it was connected. 

FB
You use the word joy. Joy is having a moment in society and culture right now. Why do you think that is?

AJ
Joy is one of the most underrated emotional states.

FB
It's true. It's one of those things you forget as an adult. Speaking for myself, I'm usually waiting for some something really outstanding to happen, like having this interview, which will create great joy for me. As opposed to finding joy in the little things when you're just going about your day, like a really amazing cup of coffee. I think we should be enhancing joy in life. There's imagination and there's wonder and there's awe, and a lot of the things you talked about, but living with joy is a nice state if you can get to it.

AJ
Sometimes people think it's unapproachable or unattainable, but it's not it. I maintain that joy is our natural state. That's something Charles Dodgson understood. His cultivation of these child friendships and his love of telling stories grows out of a recognition that children come in joyful. We come in joyful. Dodgson was the eldest male child in a family of 11, so he got to experience that with his brothers and sisters. He was like the family entertainer. He would make up things for his siblings. I think that's where his love of the theater came from. He was able to access imagination and joy and saw other people who could also do that regularly.

There's something divine about joy and I think Charles Dodgson understood that joy and love come from the Divine Well. That's where we come from. That's the source we go back to. So let's keep that in our lives because that is the actual fuel for our lives. Good energy is the real fuel that keeps us healthy and that's why we need to cultivate these good emotions, speak good words, take in good thoughts, and do good deeds. That's what keeps us healthy as individuals and as a society.

FB
You certainly seem to be living the ALICE Way. At the same time as Alice and Lewis Carroll, there's a secondary character that has somehow found her way into you, is that correct?

AJ
Madison Hatta, Sonneteer.

FB
Can you tell us a little bit about her and her birth? 

AJ
This is what I mentioned earlier, the voice that came to me during the Tim Burton film. It was about a year later and I was obsessed with finding images from the film to use as wallpaper on my Mac. I came across one that had a picture of the Hatter and a poem on the side, which was written in a Hatter-ish voice. So I'm looking at it and then that British-accented voice piped up inside my head again and said, “I could do better. It's not even a proper form. It needs to be a sonnet.” I hadn't written one of those since I had a Creative Writing class at Queens College years previous. But I had been working with angelic energies a couple of years previous to that so I recognized this as a directive from a spirit. 

So I got out pieces of paper and a pen and I started writing. Then I started laughing because 15 minutes later, we had: 

"If I were not mad, what on Earth would I be? 

It is an unlikely prospect I'm sure you'll agree. 

Those voices that whisper when no one is near

Their meaning is all too entirely clear. 

I love out-of-turn. 

I sing in the rain. 

To me, this is custom, 

To others, insane. 

My past is a mystery shrouded in dreams concealed by blue starlight and moonlit by streams. My present meanders up on common roads. 

And as for my future, who knows what it holds? 

My friends, they're a mixture of whimsy and wise who come round the bend to drink tea in disguise. 

In a world where one plus one equals three, 

If I were not mad, who would I be?" 

Came right out of my pen. That's how I wrote it. Then the name Madison Hatta, Sonneteer came right out of the pen afterwards. 

FB
That was really brilliant. I can see the connection with Lewis Carroll and how strong it is in terms of the brilliance of that poem and how relatable it is to his work and to your own creativity. Thank you so much for sharing that. Have you published that somewhere or where would somebody find that?

AJ
That is in a little chapbook called Madison Hatta’s Book of Unreasonable Rhymes. That was published by Moonstone Press in Philadelphia back in 2015. They may still have some copies available. The ALICE Way is a course but I also plan to have it as my second book. I published my opening essay from that book, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” on the Gulf Coast Writers Association website. It won third place in the Non-Fiction category of their 2024 Writing Contest. 

FB
Amazing. How cool. 

Your first book was The Tenth Muse. Tell us about your first writing experience and what the book is about.

AJ
The Tenth Muse: How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera. A pastoral opera is shepherds and shepherdesses in love. That's the simplest explanation of it. 

Maria Antonio was a noblewoman who lived in the middle of the 18th century. She was well known at the time because she was a composer, poet, and singer, as well as a patron of the arts who wanted to turn the German Electorate of Saxony into the fine arts capital of Europe. She composed two operas. She wrote the music and the lyrics, and she sang as the lead. This is extraordinary for anyone of any time to do, but particularly at that time and for her to be a Princess. People wrote poems to celebrate her life. They named their kids after her. In fact, one of the people named after her was the Queen of France, who everyone has probably heard of, her cousin, Marie Antoinette.

FB
Wow, that sounds like it could make a good movie. She seems like such a fascinating character and so ahead of her time. 

Is there anything else you would like to talk about regarding your ALICE Way program? I really hope people will check it out. It's been so much fun talking to you about Alice in Wonderland. I really appreciate your taking the Mad Hatter and turning him into Madison Hatta. I named my reimagining of the Mad Hatter, Hatter Madigan. We both need that “mad” somewhere in the name. Yours was divine. She came to you. I think mine came up from below.

AJ
I call Madison the guardian angel of my sense of humor. She came at a time when I was starting to lose my sense of humor. I think we all need that reminder.

FB
Thank you for offering this wellness program and for the incredible amount of optimism you shared. Most importantly, I'd like to end on the joy that you communicated and the joy it's been having you on the show. We wish you the best of luck and thank you for taking the time to chat with us. 

AJ
Thank you for having me on your show, Frank. It's been wonderful chatting with you.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Joanna Groarke of The New York Botanical Garden

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have Vice President for Exhibitions and Programming for the New York Botanical Garden Joanna Groarke join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor
I’m thrilled to have Joanna Groarke on All Things Alice. She’s the Vice President for Exhibitions and Programming for the New York Botanical Garden, which has a fantastic Alice in Wonderland exhibit, Wonderland: Curious Nature, open until October 27. I'm very excited to talk about all the facets of the exhibition. Thanks for coming on, Joanna. 

Joanna Groarke
Absolutely. I'm happy to be here.

FB
How did you come to work for the New York Botanical Garden?

JG
I’ve been at the Garden for about 13 years and I've been in my current role for over two years. I've worked in exhibitions and interpretation, which is the development of all of the educational media you see when you visit including signage, audio tours, video guides, and mobile apps, since I started here 13 years ago. 

FB
That seems like such a dynamic job because of the diversity of tasks you have and all the different people you get to interface with, especially with this exhibit. You have a lot of cosplayers and musicians. There are the culinary aspects of it. There's the artwork, there are the books, and the library aspect of it. 

How was Wonderland: Curious Nature conceived? Where do you start when you're putting together something this massive? 

A photograph of a collection of brightly colored flowers and trees with a fake tree trunk in the middle under a glass ceiling as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

JG
It is a real undertaking. It’s a labor of love every time we create an exhibition, in particular, our summer exhibitions like Wonderland: Curious Nature. These are often original shows we're creating in-house with the help of many, many people, both inside and outside the Garden. We always say good ideas come from everywhere, so sometimes it's a concept that is very closely related to something that's happening in science or horticulture here at the Garden. Sometimes it's something one of us reads late at night when we go down the rabbit hole on some topic and it sparks an idea we then discuss together. In the case of Wonderland, I think for most of the time I have been at the Garden, Wonderland has come up periodically as a topic that's really ripe for exploration through the medium of horticulture because of the connections to science and botany and what was happening scientifically at the time the book was written. Also, so much of the narrative is animated by the setting of gardens and nature. Very early in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice looks through a keyhole and sees what she calls the most beautiful garden she's ever seen. One of the things she's trying to do throughout the story is to get into that garden and explore it. That speaks to our hearts also. Our exhibitions are very multifaceted, as you mentioned, but at our core, we're all plant people so we're driven by that interest and our wonder and excitement about plants.

FB
What were some of the plants or flowers that were in the book? You mentioned the exploration of Victorian gardens and some of the vegetation that was in the novel. Was that the starting point? 

JG
The plants and the garden settings that are described in the book are part of what first drew us in. One of the things we do with any exhibition like this is, very early on, we develop a plant list. We develop a checklist of objects and historical objects. If we're using the collections of our library, we have the LuEsther T. Mertz Library here at the Garden, which is the world's richest resource in all things horticultural and plant science. We draw upon those collections quite a bit for our exhibitions. We also have the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, where we have 8 million dried plant specimens that have been collected over hundreds of years by scientists, and we have many examples of those herbarium specimens on display for this show. 

A photograph of a pool featuring water lilies in the foreground and the Victorian-era New York Botanical Garden conservatory in the background.

The Garden was founded as a seat of scientific inquiry into the world of plants. Those two resources I mentioned are incredibly vital to the work we do to showcase that research. We were also founded to be a place where beautiful horticulture was celebrated. So my team in exhibitions and programming works closely with horticulture to develop these voluminous plant lists. One of the things we do is mine the text of the book and the images that have been created, both to illustrate the book and then in all of the many film adaptations. So we're noticing which flowers are talking to Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers. We're noticing what plants are mentioned. For example, on page one or page two, I think, Alice is making a daisy chain. We’re making notes all along as we read because that is a great resource for us to know what plants were grown at that time and would have been easily referenced by the author, and then also to start to build what the world of Wonderland, which is what we're trying to do through horticulture.

FB
What's great is that Alice is so deeply seated in culture, you're not just using Lewis Carroll's version, you're using all these various versions. You mentioned looking through the keyhole and that’s from the Disney movie and is not in the original text. I love that you're pulling all of pop culture into this exhibit. 

When you enter the exhibit, you are met by an oversized White Rabbit, which has an orangish, reddish, yellowish vest of some sort. I was wondering what flowers those were because it's such a stunning first image. Can you tell us what flowers you’re using and how you keep those flowers alive from season to season?

A photograph of a large topiary flower sculpture of the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

JG
The first rule is that I'm not allowed to touch the flowers. I am not a talented plant person when it comes to caring for plants, but I love them very dearly, obviously, so I work with my colleagues in horticulture. 

Our giant White Rabbit is about 12 feet tall and situated in our visitor center. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s first sign of Wonderland is when she sees the White Rabbit in his little waistcoat. We wanted to capture that moment when you are arriving and you realize almost immediately you're about to have a magical, whimsical experience at the Garden. We worked with our friends at Mosaiculture, which is a company based in Montreal. They produce these beautiful living sculptures that are based on the ancient art of mosaiculture, which involves creating these beautiful wire armatures that plants are then plugged into. The plants that are most prominently featured on the White Rabbit are a special variety of Sedum that has a little bit of a white tinge to the foliage so it makes him have his little white fur. Then Alternanthera, which is used to create the waistcoat. It has a very sophisticated irrigation system so we can make sure he's looking his best every day when you arrive.

FB
The irrigation system must be a work of art in and of itself. 

What about the library? You have the books displayed and the emphasis is on the enduring popularity of Alice in Wonderland. Have you come to a conclusion as to why Alice has lasted for over 150 years in your estimation?

JG
What spoke to me and what spoke to us as we were organizing the exhibition was the way in which Alice feels like this universal heroine. She is a stand-in for the reader, which is not unusual, but was unusual at the time, in particular, for children to see in literature. A heroine who was actively exploring the world around her. Yes, she was subject to the whims and events that adults, sometimes human adults and sometimes animal adults, put into motion. But she also has an impact on the course of the narrative and that wasn’t very common in children's literature at the time. That sense of empowerment and exploration of the world around you is one that really speaks to us and we thought would speak to our visitors. It deeply connects to the way we hope visitors of all ages will experience the Garden. We have a lot of programming for kids in our Children's Garden and our Edible Academy.

A photograph of an instructor leading a group of children in green shirts watering plant boxes as part of the New York Botanical Garden's Edible Academy program.

FB
What’s your Edible Academy? Where do I sign up?

JG
It's pretty great. It's one of my favorite spots at the Garden. We have two gardens that are really for children, although, of course, children explore the entirety of our 250 acres here in the Bronx. The Edible Academy is on the site of what has been our family garden for generations, and in 2018 we reopened it as the Edible Academy. 

We have classrooms, a greenhouse, and vegetable gardens throughout this space, and thousands of school kids come every year and plant the seeds, tend to them, and weed the beds. Then they learn how to cook with the produce they produce. We have schools that come repeatedly and they see the beds through the full growing season and then get to cook with the produce and bring the produce and recipes home. We have kids who come in every week for drop-in programming with their grown-ups and they get to have a similar experience over the course of the season. Then we do one-off visits where the kids get to participate in the growth, tending, and harvest. 

My own daughter has participated in the programs and the camps we hold there in the summertime. It’s a pretty special place. We encourage literally digging in and getting your hands dirty. So someone like Alice feels like she really resonates as a protagonist, who is herself getting involved right away in the events of Wonderland.

FB
When were you introduced to Alice and in what medium were you introduced? Then what was your reaction to that first introduction? There’s the family-friendly, whimsical interpretation and then for other people, it's more nightmarish and a little bit scary.

A still image featuring Alice and the Singing Flowers from the 1951 Disney animated film "Alice in Wonderland."

JG
I was a very bookish child. So bookish that when people my age reference things on television, I don't always understand the reference. But interestingly, for Wonderland, I was first introduced to it through the Disney film. But I would have pretty quickly picked up the book after seeing the film. Even in the Disney film, I was struck that it is a little scary. These giant flowers are being mean to her and the Red Queen is pretty scary and I think that is sort of inescapable. Our show is definitely meant to be enjoyed by visitors of all ages, but I think kids are a little bit drawn to frightening stories or the darker side of stories. As a kid, I remember feeling that was part of the story and feeling ambivalent about it. But one of the things that really resonants as I think about the books and the films, as we've been working on this show for the last few years, was how Alice, quite overtly, expresses her frustration with the world of adults and the world of rules that's around her.

It's very relatable. It’s also pretty revolutionary because she is very clearly well-schooled in etiquette and how to behave. The idea that kids both chafe against rules but also are aware of them and understand the structure that exists and they sometimes rely on it, is, in a lot of ways, at the heart of what I as a kid, and probably a lot of kids, find both exciting and a little scary about the story.

FB
Also how illogical adults can be at times with their rules and how they're putting you in this box. I found that to be very relatable as well. When I started working on my Alice projects, it was like if you buy an Audi and then suddenly you see all the Audi's out there. Same with Alice. Suddenly, I noticed “down the rabbit hole” was used in politics and music. Every single day I read somebody saying, “Down the rabbit hole.” So two years ago, when you and everybody on your team started this, did the Alice references and how deeply seated it is in pop culture start to bubble up? For instance, I didn't realize how many people were doing cosplay, whether it was the traditional Mad Hatter or Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter. It's everywhere. Did you guys have a similar insight when you were starting to build this out?

A photograph of a bed of white and red flowers arranged to create a red heart, on the lawn as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

JG
In organizing exhibitions like this, we're thinking about all the ways in which our visitors find meaning around the topic. We talk a lot as a team in exhibitions and then as a broader team here at the Garden that is responsible for the visitor experience. We talk about making sure there are points of entry that allow everyone to have the experience they want to have because that will make what they are seeing resonate more. It'll make them more excited about the plants they see. The cultural expectations and the cultural imagination that exists around Alice are things we definitely talked about and have continued to talk about throughout the run of the show. 

We had a feeling we would have a lot of people coming dressed as Alice and other characters, and that was in part because we had seen that with other shows where you might not expect it. Nearly 10 years ago now, we had a show that was focused on Frida Kahlo and her garden in Mexico City, and how the plants she grew there were impactful in her larger artistic practice. We had a lot of Frida look-alikes coming to the show, people who would dress up like Frida and her husband, Diego Rivera. We ended up organizing Frida look-alike contests as a night activity for some of our Frida Alfresco nights. 

When we had our exhibition of Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist, in 2021, we had lots of people dressed up as Kusama. We had a lot of baby Kusamas in particular, actually. So we knew this was something folks liked to do when there was a show that really appealed to them. We had a feeling that that would happen with Wonderland: Curious Nature. We have some opportunities for people to come and dress up. When people buy a family package ticket to the exhibition at the Garden, they can actually buy headpieces so each member of their party can dress as Alice or the Queen or the White Rabbit. We found that those were snapped up really fast. We had never done anything like that before so we weren't entirely sure how it would do, but it was really popular. 

Every time you work on an exhibition, you go in with a plan of what the show will be, and then as you start to have visitors, you make little tweaks and adjustments. We wanted to have opportunities for all of our visitors to meet some of the characters so my team organized that each month we have a different character or characters who are on-site on the weekends. Visitors can take photos with them and talk to them. Right now, we're in the midst of our Mad Hatter month, so we have the Mad Hatter here every weekend. We found that visitors really wanted a photo op as part of that, so we had to think a little bit about how we tweaked that experience. Then, as we were approaching the end of the school year here in New York City, we organized a “Mad for Summer” weekend where we encouraged families to celebrate the start of summer here at the Garden. We had never done that before but it was so much fun. Kids got in for free if they were dressed up in any costume or Alice-inspired garb. We had this weekend of so many fun activities, lots of photo ops, and interactive moments with the characters.

A photograph of an actor holding a violin and dressed as the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

FB
Why don't you give us a little rundown of those entry points? You have things for kids but you also have cocktail hours for adults. There's also food and I've read about a lot of different music. You had a Pride night with Malik Miyake-Mugler. Maybe you can talk about the diversity of the show and some of those entry points you keyed in on early to give people access and variety,

JG
When people hear about an exhibition focused on Alice in Wonderland, they automatically ask what there is for kids and families. But Wonderland has persisted for 150-plus years. It's never been out of print. It's been published in over 170 languages. We knew it was an enduring story for a reason and if a story endures like that, it's not only being consumed by kids. So it was important to us to make sure we had a lot of different ways for people to experience the exhibit. We have an exhibition in the library where you can see some of the original publications. You can also learn about what was happening in terms of science and botany in the 19th century in Britain and around the world. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published just a few years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which completely transformed not only science but modern society, in a lot of ways, with the ideas it was putting forth. So, in that environment, a book like Wonderland comes out. 

It's also coming out in an environment where there's an increasing acknowledgment of childhood as a different stage of development. Children are not just miniature adults but are considered to have a different way of learning and a different way of seeing the world. That was something we were really interested in because kids know that they're not adults, obviously, and adults know that kids are not adults. But we knew that adults in particular would find that story interesting. The idea that Wonderland is shaped by a lot more than just the desire to create something that entertains children, which is true of a lot of what kids consume. Even today, every show your kid watches has little Easter eggs for adults. The same is true when you're reading stories with your kids. So that was something we wanted to make sure we did. 

A photograph of a miniature landscape featuring flowers, pebbles, mushrooms, and a rabbit hole by artist Patrick Jacobs as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

But also we wanted to speak to the long-term cultural resonance of the story and the ways in which it's been interpreted through the lens of pop culture, through the lens of psychedelics, and through the lens of different artists. One of the things we have is a display of different herbarium specimens of different psychoactive plants and information about how studies of the mind, cognition, and psychology were becoming more and more prevalent during the Victorian era all over the world. The documentation of everything from coffee to cannabis to opium was not just in the scientific realm. The way different writers, doctors, and psychiatrists were starting to write about the effects of different substances on the mind was really interesting to us because that's a modern-day association with the Wonderland stories. While there's no actual evidence Lewis Carroll was partaking in any of these substances, most likely he was not, that association is really interesting and fruitful and has led to a lot of different cultural expressions, from music to the way some of the films and other adaptations have entered the world. That was something we wanted to talk about, especially because most of those substances come from plants and fungi. That's where we have something to add to the conversation because we have the expertise here at the Garden. 

We also wanted to invite contemporary artists. We have photographs by Abelardo Morell, where he created these incredible dioramas using illustrations from different editions of the story and then photographed them. We have work by Patrick Jacobs, an artist based here in New York, who creates these beautiful miniature worlds you peer into and it's like peeking into the rabbit hole. The three he made for our exhibition are called Portals for Alice and he was quite overtly inspired by the story. 

As we were looking into the contemporary art world, we worked closely with our guest curator, Jennifer Gross to develop our list of artworks we have on view, we became really interested in the work of this group called the FoldHaus Art Collective. They're based internationally and here in the U.S. They've done a number of installations at Burning Man and they created this work called Shrumen Lumen, which is two 15-foot tall kinetic mushroom sculptures. While you're standing outside of our conservatory looking at them, you'll notice that one of them moves and they actually appear to be breathing. They inflate and deflate, and at night they light up with different strobing LEDs in different colors. 

A photograph of two of the Shrumen Lumen lighted origami mushroom structures by FoldHaus as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

FB
Mushrooms are very popular in culture right now and there was an amazing article in National Geographic about all of the varieties of mushrooms. Do you guys explore fungi and the importance of fungi in the natural world?

JG
Mushrooms are definitely having a moment and we are very excited by that. Mushrooms are fungi, so they are not plants, but we do study them here at the Botanical Garden as they are so critical to plant life and environmental health. We have great collections of different specimens we were able to bring out and show visitors. We have organized a Magic Mushroom Weekend, which is taking place September 14 and 15. We’ll have different ways to experience mushrooms, from seeing how they are used in cuisine to how they are used to make dyes and art. There are innovative companies that are using mycelium to create packaging and building materials. Of course, psychoactive mushrooms are also increasingly being studied for their potential to treat all different sorts of conditions. While we will not be offering samples, we are eager for our visitors to learn as much as possible about the many ways in which mushrooms are used and appreciated.

FB
So there's not a rabbit hole you can fall down and try a couple of magic mushrooms?

JG
We do have a constructed rabbit hole, and we would encourage you to fall down it or pass through it in our conservatory, but we will not be facilitating that journey with anything you can consume. 

FB
Do you have some Alice in Wonderland Easter eggs in the exhibit that you would encourage visitors to search for?

A photograph of a pool filled with water lilies featuring a cutout image of Alice Liddell in a rowboat as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

JG
We have different depictions of the characters from the story seeded throughout the grounds and the conservatory. When you first enter our conservatory, you're in a Victorian-era glass house. Ours is among the latest built Victorian-era glass houses in the country, completed in 1902. When you enter one of the first things you see is a a pool of giant water lilies, Victoria amazonica, which were named for Queen Victoria and were a prized specimen plant during the period in which Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written. The Oxford Botanic Garden, which would have been where the real Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll would have seen these plants, was our inspiration for that first entry into the wonders of the plant world and how they figure in the story. Alice is there in a boat among the water lilies, a nod to the boat ride famously associated with the origin of the story. 

Then visitors pass through a doorway into one of our exhibition houses and they pass our homage to the Oxford Botanic Garden Flower Border. They actually do pass through what looks like a rabbit hole in the roots of a tree. Then they enter our version of Wonderland, where we have all kinds of wonders of the plant world, from giant tree ferns to carnivorous plants. Sensitive plant is one of my favorites. It's a Mimosa that if you touch the plant, it will curl up its leaves. Not everybody associates plants with having those kinds of abilities. 

In our plant Wonderland you can also spot the Cheshire Cat in a tree or the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. We wanted to give our visitors the experience of the wonders of the plant world while also giving them an opportunity to engage with those characters throughout the exhibition.

FB
It sounds like there's a lot for adults because there's the scientific part of it, the educational part, and the historical part of it. Then for the kids, they're going to see this magical rabbit and these big card soldiers. There's so much for them to do. It sounds like it's been really successful in terms of the number of people who have come. Are you guys all very happy with how it's turned out? 

JG
It's been it's been wonderful. It's been so exciting to see visitors during the day and also at night. We threw Wonderland parties in June and May when the show first opened and they're coming back in September. They’re nights when visitors can come and dress to the nines as whatever character they like or not and it’s basically a Wonderland dance party. We have DJs and some of the characters on hand. You can dance with Alice and the Queen of Hearts. Those are fabulous and fun. We love to create an experience where someone can come on a mission to see the plants of Wonderland or they can come just to have a good time. That's been incredibly successful and rewarding to see.

Two photographs of performers as Alice and the Red Queen as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

FB
People who love Alice love all things Alice in my experience. No matter what aspect of culture it is, if it has to do with Alice, they're all in. I first met these people at Comic-Cons. They’d walk by my booth and see Wonderland and they would come right over and talk about their book and art collections. 

What's been the biggest challenge in pulling something like this off?

JG
Anytime you have an exhibition in a garden, there are certain challenges. One of the big things that my team is always doing is working with artists and supporting them to showcase their work outdoors, which many artists are accustomed to but many are also not. Being mindful of, as you said, the myriad ways that visitors will be expecting to see Alice, and trying to deliver as many of those as possible is a really fun challenge. But it is a challenge because in the 150-plus years since the story first appeared, there have been so many opportunities to imprint on someone's mind what Alice means and what Wonderland is about. That's why working as a team with outside advisors, our guest curator, and everyone from food service to security to visitor services to make sure that the experience we're offering feels as robust as possible is critical. 

We have special tea parties that have been held as part of our weekend events but you can also come have a tea party with your family and friends in our cafe. That has been really popular and really special. As we introduce these things, we're planning really carefully. We had a friends and family launch where some of the staff attended one of the tea parties and got to sample the food, give feedback, and think about what that experience was like before the visitors ever stepped foot on the ground. It's all about the planning and the cross-departmental partnerships are really fun and really rewarding.

FB
You have four seasons there in New York. How do the exhibit and the plants change and how do you manage the change from spring to summer and now going into the fall? 

A photograph of different species of white and violet, blue, orange, and purple flowers as part of the "Wonderland: Curious Nature" exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden.

JG
A botanical garden is a dynamic environment. Last night we had torrential rain so we're constantly in touch with each other about what that means for for the garden grounds. We have people here 24 hours a day to keep the Garden safe and to keep the Garden operating. When there's a storm, we're in touch all day and all night. The summer exhibition is really a multi-season exhibition. It opens in mid-May and it runs through the end of October, so you’re really experiencing spring, summer, and fall. The horticulture team at the Garden is incredibly talented and the work they do is fascinating. What they're doing is developing what we call a plant palette, a range of plants that will be on view. They're developing, in many cases, three plant palettes, because what you see in the spring is different from what you’ll see now. In the spring for this exhibition, when you first entered the conservatory, you saw these incredibly beautiful foxgloves and Delphiniums and plants that were very English garden spring in their appearance and style. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

There were these poppies that were just gorgeous but a few days later, the poppies had wilted because that's what poppies do, and then something else was put in their place. Our staff is here every day, watering and tending to the plants. We're changing plants constantly. We bring things back into the production greenhouse when they've finished their flowering period and either put them into the collections to be used for display purposes when they flower again, or, in other cases, they’re annuals so we're composting them and they come back out around in a different way as mulch and fuel the future plants we showcase. It's an incredible process to see the team caring for these plants every single day, and then on Mondays, when we're closed, that's when the big changeouts take place. It's pretty incredible to see what they can do. 

FB
I love your job I like the environment that you live in. I like the people and the excitement of so much changing, day in and day out, just like nature. I really appreciate you taking the time. 

I have one last question for you. If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why? 

JG
This was really hard. I knew that this was coming, so I thought about it, which was good because I was struggling. This probably comes from that bookishness I alluded to, and also the work I do now, which is all about making visible what this place is and how it works. 

A still image of the grinning, purple striped Cheshire Cat from the 1951 Disney animated movie, "Alice in Wonderland."

It's probably going to be the Cheshire Cat. The Cheshire Cat has one of the best lines, “We're all mad here.” But also, the Cheshire Cat acts as a guide and helps Alice to make sense of the world around her, and not in a parental way, like a helicopter parent. He pops in, literally, and offers words of wisdom, sometimes slightly confusing words of wisdom, and then disappears and lets Alice figure it out for herself. While we don't want to pop in and then disappear on our visitors, part of the job of organizing an exhibition like this is to create just enough of an environment that is controlled by what we plan and how we lay out the space and what we tell you in the signage, but then to let you have your own experience. So that resonates. 

FB
Excellent answer. That bookishness has served you very, very well. Thank you for a very compelling interview. It was great to meet you, and I encourage everybody who's listening, if you have a chance to get to New York before this closes, definitely check it out. Thank you so much. Joanna. Really appreciate it. 

JG
Thank you. So nice to meet you.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Mark Saltzman

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have screenwriter and playwright Mark Saltzman join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor  
Thanks for being on the show, Mark Saltzman. I was delighted to come across your musical, somebody else who's been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It never ceases to amaze me how Alice has become a muse for so many creators. I'm really curious. Why do you think Alice has lasted so long and continues to be reinvented?

Mark Saltzman
I have given that a lot of thought. There's a uniqueness about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that nothing's really eclipsed. There's a looseness and an irrationality to the original books. I think that could only be from Reverend Dodgson, Caroll's intimate knowledge of logic, which allowed him to avoid logic. He knew where it would fall. Most children's stories have a moral and a very clear narrative. A beginning, middle, and end, with a heroine or hero who learns a lesson or something like that. Alice defied all of that. I think it's because of that uniqueness that nothing else has ever come along in the past 150 years that qualifies in the same way or entices kids when they first read it. 

Alice has inspired but really, where is the adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that truly, truly succeeds? The adaptation of The Wizard of Oz absolutely supersedes the original but with Alice, from stage productions to Disney to Tim Burton, they have just avoided the whole story completely. Nobody's been able to really wrap their arms around this elusive, mysterious piece of work by Lewis Carroll.

FB
That’s a really interesting take because you could never teach writing using that book because there is no beginning, middle, or end. You could never write a TV show, a movie, or a play for that matter, because it's so episodic and there is a randomness to it. But thematically, it's really interesting and really strong, because it's asking “Who am I?” 

To your point, there is no adaptation that stands out. There are just really good references like The Matrix. The Matrix did an amazing job. Tim Burton threw it out. You focused on parts of real-life Alice, Lewis Carroll's muse, Alice Liddell. I did the same thing in a different way with The Looking Glass Wars. 

Tell us the concept behind your play, Alice, Formally of Wonderland, A Musical Story of the Real Alice. The real Alice inspired Lewis Carroll and met Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son. So you went from there and did this show, which I'm assuming is some sort of romance. 

A still image featuring Alice Liddell in a blue dress and Prince Leopold in a kilt from the production of the musical "Alice, Formerly of Wonderland".

MS
Correct. It is a romance. We know there was some sort of relationship, presumably romantic, between Leopold and Alice Liddell and it seemed to have not been chronicled. Out of all the Alice works, somehow that was missed. I just loved this idea. Because for one thing, you knew going in this did not work out. In the Victorian era, if there was a romance, it was not going to end with them skipping down the aisle to be married. “So what did happen?” I wondered. When you're writing historical fiction, you want to always be plausible and factual as much as you can. From what I learned from my research talking to a Lewis Carroll expert at Oxford, it seemed they did get together. There was proof they had a hunting trip together up the Thames which echoed the original Alice in Wonderland boat trip. In the scene in the musical, I figured Alice would certainly reflect on that. Ten years earlier, she took this boat ride with an Oxford don, Lewis Carroll. Within those 10 years, she became this famous figure as the muse of the Wonderland books and now she’s on the boat with Prince Leopold. It also made me think, “Who is this young woman who thinks she is worthy of a prince?” She’s an Oxford professor's daughter who, for all we know, had never been to London. 

Then I started thinking about her character, being this beautiful young woman, one of the few young women in an all-boys school, and the daughter of a professor. I felt it doesn't give you the impression of a modest, humble, young lady. I thought, “That would be a fun character to write.” Then I started looking at Leopold the same way. What could he have been like? Here's a prince royal and he wants to go to Oxford, he wants to be educated. He’s not a Playboy Prince. They seem like they really would be interested in each other. Then, what would destroy this? Of course, Victorian society, not to mention Mom.

FB
She had a little bit of power back then.

MS
She did and she didn’t seem to use it for good very often. 

FB
Indeed she did not.

MS
She’s held in such high esteem, the beloved Queen Victoria. As England was becoming more and more woke and Oxford was trying to redo its past and take down statues of Cecil Rhodes and similar benefactors, Queen Victoria remained untouched. Here she is, the epitome of British imperialism. Who represents it more? I asked an English friend, “Why does she get a free pass? Why aren’t they taking down statues and renaming streets?” He said, “Well, she's Queen Victoria.”

FB
I got a little criticism for portraying her as a baddie, along the lines of comparing her to Redd as if they were doppelgangers. People said, “We really love our Queen Victoria so you're gonna rub some people the wrong way.”

MS
I could see loving Prince Albert, her husband. The more I read about him and his policies, which were much more progressive, I wonder if the history of the 20th century would have been different had he lived. He was kind of skeptical of the future of colonialism. Charles Dickens is writing here in this era. How much more blatant could the social ills of England be than in Dickens? Did she open a book? Did somebody mention workhouses and child labor to her? It seemed like all of England was aware of it because of Dickens and others. People were so riveted to his work, other than Her Majesty. It's hard to even picture those two in the same room.

Photo of 19th century monarch Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great and Ireland and Empress of India, featuring her sitting on a throne in a veil and crown.

FB
I'm with you. I've been playing around with it a little bit more in adapting my book series into a TV show. I didn't focus very much on the part of her story that you're focused on. But then when I started to work on the show, I thought, “Oh, let me see. What was she like as a teenager?” I jumped from her at 13 to her at 20 and then I brought her back to Wonderland, not dissimilar to what Tim Burton did, I suppose. But I was wondering what was going on in English society at that time. What was going on with Queen Victoria? What is something that would make Alice feel a bit more modern? I did quite a bit of research and came to the same conclusion. They're really giving her a pass. So, you have a scene on the River Thames with Leopold and Alice?

MS
Yes, that's maybe the one thing I can say is absolutely factual. They did take that boat trip.

FB
That's very romantic and very intimate. 

MS
What do they talk about? That's what it comes down to. Once again, you want to make it plausible but still a little surprising. I imagined she would have spoken about the golden afternoon, being on the river with Lewis Carroll. I imagined he would have asked, “What was it like that day?” 

FB
Do they have a perspective on the books in your musical? Alice is famous because of the book but does Leopold have a take on it that might reflect your take on Alice in Wonderland?

MS
Her first take is she loves what it did for her. She loves the fame and she loves the social position. Her dad does not. He thinks it’s too much attention and it's gone to her head. Leopold is so enchanted with Alice herself. He wants to know if the girl in the book is like Alice the real girl. It’s more about the young woman than the literature. But the book gets him curious. She says, “Really none at all. The fictional Alice is in a strange and dangerous land. She never thinks about her family, sister, or parents. She doesn't even miss them. If that happened to me, I would just be destroyed.” She'd be Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. This doesn't cross the fictional Alice’s mind. The girl in the book has a strange emotionality.

That’s another reason why the book is sort of unadaptable. The central character is essentially passive. She's just taking it in, like a camera, and isn’t motivated to get from one place to the other. In Through the Looking-Glass, there's a mission, but in the original, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she's wandering. Alice happens to make it home but she's in no real rush to get there. She seems happy to be away from her family. Leopold says, “She must have had a mother like me.” That’s their exchange. He's also a little interested in Dodgson and what he was like. Through my research into Dodgson, it seems like he was quite the entrepreneur.

A still image featuring Alice Liddell and Prince Leopold in a rowboat from the production of the musical "Alice, Formerly of Wonderland".

FB
He was way ahead of his time in terms of being in control of everything surrounding his work. He picked the artist, the print style, and even the font. I think he might have been the first author to come up with merchandise for a book.

MS
How come we don't talk about him the way we're talking about Walt Disney or any other entertainment industry titan? We like to put him in a garret.

FB
It’s a very good question. L. Frank Baum. We all know his story. 

MS
Dodgson was maybe the wealthiest don teaching at Oxford. They don't get paid a lot.

FB
He was one of the first people to explore photography. He was very ahead of his time in a lot of ways. But he was never married. He was entrepreneurial but he didn't seem to go out of his way to promote himself, even though he wrote endless letters to all of his friends.

MS
He did go out of his way but it was to promote Lewis Carroll, not himself. The characters were on plates and tea towels. There was always an Alice show somewhere. Not to mention, Through the Looking-Glass is an actual sequel. What did he do with his money?

FB
That's a good question. 

MS
Why don't we know that? I feel like there's some English social taboo around this.

FB
I don't understand why Charles Dodgson is not recognizable and why you have to say Lewis Carroll right afterward. But to my point, he didn't want any recognition. That's why he had that name he worked on. He came up with a bunch of ideas and it’s some kind of anagram. It creates space between him and the work.

MS
But, you can be pretty sure the bank accounts were in the name of Charles Dodgson. But that's what makes me curious. This aspect of him is just ignored. It’s like writing about Walt Disney and saying, “Look at how beautifully he drew,” and that's the end of it. You’re missing the whole point of building an empire and the “Alice Empire” is still with us. 

The Dodgson estate isn't making anything off it. But just as a thought experiment, if Alice wasn’t in the public domain, how much would his estate be taking in from the licensing of Alice projects around the world?

FB
It’d probably be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars but, of course, it wouldn't have been so successful if it hadn't been in the public domain. It wouldn't have been successful because it was so episodic. But once it was in the public domain, then you're just riffing off of it. But nevertheless, it's still remarkable. No matter what medium you think about, Alice is everywhere. 

I think the idea you put forth is right and I also think a lot of people can see what they want to see. Some people see it as a fairy tale, as it's described, while some people see it as a horror story. I think it was written for adults on some level. They didn’t have all the categories we do now - Children’s, Middle Grade, Young Adult. 

MS
This really wasn't meant for a huge popular reading public given the satire and references to local Oxford residents. It was meant for the Liddell girls and their family.

FB
Your show, Alice, Formerly of Wonderland, is in Santa Barbara but it originated in Wyoming, correct?

A banner image promoting the Wyoming Theater Festival featuring a silhouetted man with a hat in his hand.

MS
I used to be affiliated with the Wyoming Theater Festival and when the show was in the workshop stage, I brought it there to put it in front of an audience and see what I had. It was a very skeletal version but I needed to put it on stage because the musical element is acapella singing. Leopold was musical and joined musical groups at Oxford and I love musical theater. I thought, “How am I going to make this musical? I didn't want to do a traditional musical, it would seem like just another Alice musical. I thought, “I can use the Oxford Glee Club as a musical motif through it and Leopold would sing with them. I used some traditional British folk songs, Victorian parlor songs, and standard historical Oxford songs, and I wrote a couple of new ones. With six actors, it wasn't easy to get that big glee club sound but our music arranger, Jack Woodson, is so brilliant. He managed to make it sound like a big chorus. We were very pleased with the musical sound of it and that people consider it a musical even though it's very unorthodox.

FB
The glee club is a great idea. I didn't realize Prince Leopold was in the glee club. That's just a natural fit and using music of the time is appropriate. Plus, you don't have to deal with the rights.

MS
We used the public domain songs and my own because, as you know, music licensing is one of the most unbearable aspects of making good art. 

FB
When you say you're putting your show up, this is at the Wyoming Theater Festival so it's public and people are coming to see it, but it's rough. What's in it for the audience? Do they participate? Do they give notes? 

MS
Generally, I talk with the audience and find out what they think. But I found at that point, at the end of the show, I already knew the audience's reaction. If there's a joke and the audience doesn't laugh, you don't have to ask them. You just bury your head in your hands and now you have to fix it. But you can't find that out sitting in your office at the computer. You really have to have actors. 

This show has not had a typical development. We were in Wyoming then I went home and did rewrites and then COVID came. As soon as COVID started to abate, I did another reading here in Studio City at the Whitefire Theater. It’s a black box and I use that for my local experiments. We went in there with a bunch of actors and some UCLA a capella guys. Then I did one more when COVID was basically done. That one I actually solved the problems and then submitted it around and it found its way to Santa Barbara.

FB
How are people responding to the music?

MS
They seem very surprised. Even though we made no secret that it's a musical, it's a capella. I don't think that’s really processed until you're in the room. Such exciting things have happened because it's a tightrope act. I didn't see any loss of attention during the numbers. In fact, there's more leaning forward because it's such an act of derring-do to sing this much a capella. We had terrific actors who all had a capella experience and knew how to adjust if you feel yourself going off. There's so much nuance involved and so much concentration. Sometimes they even had to dance while they were doing it while with glee, they rarely had to do it. So it was a surprising and pretty unique element. 

A still image featuring Alice Liddell and glee singers from the production of the musical "Alice, Formerly of Wonderland".

FB
It's a romantic comedy so when you're fine-tuning, you're making sure you're putting those buttons on the jokes. Having seen it now, were people laughing where you needed them to laugh?

MS
At this point, all the bad jokes are gone. We also had two previews before opening night. Fortunately, most of the clunkers had been weeded out by then. I am going back up to see it next weekend and from what I hear, as the actors have been relaxing into it more laughs emerge because I think they feel free enough to explore and try different readings. “I'm going to try to get a bigger laugh on this so I'll hit that word harder. I’ll look right at the audience on this word.” They make these discoveries as they realize how to play this particular kind of comedy. 

I tried to do that in the English drawing room style. You can't do an Alice story without a tea party. Alice is trapped by her father into having tea with the young Oxford man he has chosen for her. Alice is already in love with Leopold so it's awkward, to say the least. I did that in a drawing room style and the actors got it to go into a different gear. Some of it's pretty broad. I figured one Wonderland character oughta have an appearance and I made that the Caterpillar. He really was the only one with actual useful advice in the novel. Other people were saying the most insane things to Alice but the Caterpillar really was helpful in his haughty way. I thought in her mind Alice, if she needed advice, could imagine herself going to the Caterpillar as a thought experiment. We have Matthew Greenwood, a British actor playing the Caterpillar and doing it in the style of one of the knighted-grade actors.

FB
What are the conflicts with Alice? You brought up Queen Victoria. That's pretty clear. Are there other conflicts these two lovers are dealing with?

MS
They both have parental conflicts. One of the things that’s also factual is that Queen Victoria was not a fan of Leopold’s desire to go to Oxford. It could have exposed him socially to the “wrong family”. There’s a very funny scene on stage, but it actually happened. There was a negotiation between Leopold and his mother as to how he would live there. Certainly not in student housing, God forbid. He would have to be in a rented house. There was a discussion about who needed to be on the staff. Would there be a doctor in residence? Talk about control over-controlling mothers.

FB
The ultimate helicopter parents.

MS
Queen Victoria demanded if Leopold had a dinner, she would have to approve the menu and the guests. 

FB
It was her youngest son. I think he was the fourth-in-line to the throne. So he probably knew he had no chance for the throne and the youngest are usually a little bit more rebellious. He had some health issues as well. 

MS
That's what made Queen Victoria feel it was valid to have 24-hour medical observation, but Leopold was having none of that. Alice has a conflict with her father, who wants to see her happily married but knows when he finds out about her relationship with Prince Leopold it just can not be. Alice’s father has the cream of England right outside his window, these Oxford guys, and he picked one especially for her, Edward Brocket. This is an invented character but I'm sure there were many such men. I made him the captain of the Christ Church rowing team and a medical student, a perfect guy. 

A still image featuring Prince Leopold in a military uniform and Queen Victoria in a crown and purple gown from the production of the musical "Alice, Formerly of Wonderland".

FB
Tall, strapping, big shoulders. Okay, I got it.

MS
Exactly. Played by tall, strapping Sawyer Patterson. When he walked into the audition I went, “Well, there it is.” As Leopold says, ruefully, Brocket is healthy. Leopold backs off and says, “Go with the healthy personnel and have a long life.” Alice is too insanely in love at that point. But Brocket isn’t a big dumb jock or a hostile Gaston. He's a good guy and he's exactly who she should have had. One of the reasons I made him a jock was eventually the real Alice Liddell married a professional athlete, a cricket player. That probably was on her radar. She married a famous man. She didn't marry the country doctor.

FB
That was Reginald Hargreaves.

MS
I think she still wanted to maintain her position. She married someone famous in some way so she wouldn't suddenly fade from sight because she married an obscure, even wealthy,  son of an Earl from Northumberland or something. I don't think she was married for money. I'm sure she loved him but it was good for her public image. A famous athlete was certainly an attraction. 

FB
I made the connection between Leopold and Alice having a love story. That was real because they both named their first child after each other. She had a boy she named Leopold and Prince Leopold named his daughter Alice. So I thought, “Okay, that's enough of a connection. There must have been something there. I'm gonna go with that.”

MS
When I got to that in my research I thought, “The universe just handed me the end of the play.”

FB
Is that the end of the play?

MS
The Caterpillar is a kind of wrap-around character. He gives that information and there's occasionally a little gasp in the audience. It hammers home the truth. 

FB
Beautiful. Very exciting. How long is it running?

MS
This is the last week. June 16th is the last show. 

FB
What's the hope for the next steps?

MS
It's six actors and off-Broadway sized. My last show in New York, Romeo and Bernadette, was off-Broadway. It was in a nice little theater on 42nd Street. I'd like to have Alice, Formerly of Wonderland follow that trajectory to Off-Broadway in New York.

A still image featuring the Caterpillar and other company members from the production of the musical "Alice, Formerly of Wonderland".

FB
Fingers crossed. 

What was your introduction to Alice in Wonderland? Did you read it as a child or was it the Disney movie? 

MS
I think I read it before the Disney movie. I was a big reader. Reading the initial books, I don't think was that life-changing because you're reading everything. I remember gravitating to  English children's books like Winnie the Pooh when I was really little. But when I was a little older, I found The Annotated Alice, which I'm sure you know. That was a rabbit hole I dove into. I talked to fellow English major nerds about this and it turns out, for a lot of us, that was the first literary criticism we ever encountered. It was the first time we recognized there's more to a book than we may have imagined. It was so easily readable and digestible. Martin Gardner did the notes in the margins.

FB
I thought it was brilliant. I think everybody should read it, even if you don't care about knowing everything about Alice, because to your point, it's so consumable and digestible.

MS
It gives you the goods. It's not holding back. Rather than reading a magazine article about literary criticism, The Annotated Alice was in these teaspoon-sized bits to take in and be fascinated by. In some way, that put me on a path towards being an English major in college. That book said, “There's more than you imagined here. Let us explain.”

FB
Have you thought about your play as a show or movie? 

MS
I have but if it's not Merchant Ivory making it I’m not sure I’m interested. The depiction of the Victorian period has to be so beautiful. I don't know if that's a Netflix movie. What else are we gonna have?

FB
They don't make movies like that anymore. Barely any movies at all.

MS
I don't really see how it could find its way into the media universe that way. I wish but we just don't live in that world. Maybe there's some English film company. But first, I want to move it down the theatrical path. 

FB
Your other show, Romeo and Bernadette, what was that about? 

MS
That was another fantasy, exploiting an English author.

FB
Wonder why they hate us American authors.

MS
We try so hard. Romeo and Bernadette started as a movie script that never got made. It’s essentially, at the end of Romeo and Juliet Romeo doesn't drink the poison. He drinks more of Juliet’s sleeping potion and that puts him out. He wakes up hundreds of years later and finds a girl who looks a lot like Juliet but she's an Italian-American girl in Verona on a family vacation. Romeo follows her back to Brooklyn and finds out she's the daughter of a mafia don. He gets involved with the wrong mafia family and the whole thing starts again, except they're happy. It was knocking around, including with some British companies for a movie and it didn't happen. Everybody said to me how good it was and how funny it was. So I made it into a little musical, nine actors, and we played New York with really nice reviews.

Promotional banner image for the musical "Romeo and Bernadette" featuring the New York skyline and animated figures of Romeo and Bernadette.

FB
That sounds like a great idea.

MS
We're mixing the cast album right now.

FB
Are you musical yourself?

MS
I am. I always say this, coming out of college I had an Ivy League English degree and the ability to play piano. What was gonna get me work? I started playing piano in New York for auditions and bars, got my feet on the ground, and started writing. On occasion, I'd work on a show like Sesame Street where I could also write songs in addition to the script writing and Alice has two songs that I wrote. So I tried to keep a toe in the musical world, too. I really love it and listen to a lot of music every day. 

FB
When you were writing on Sesame Street did you just suggest some music or did they ask you if you could write a song? Or was that just part of a song that you put into a script?

MS
I think one of the reasons they hired me in the first place was because they knew I was musical. I was writing songs and sketches for off-Broadway reviews. A Sesame Street actor was in one of them and she brought me over there and said, “He's gonna write for me now. When you were writing a script, often the writers were the lyricists. For Sesame Street, every sketch has to teach something. So if you want to teach that it's good to try new foods, you might do that in the form of a song or you might do an informative sketch. On occasion, I would be paired with a composer but other times a tune was hidden in my head and I would just submit it. Sometimes they’d take it, sometimes they rejected the music and passed it along. But it was a rare opportunity to be writing songs while writing television scripts.

FB
It sounds like a great experience and a great gig. 

MS
It was. It was exhausting though. It was the hardest scriptwriting I've ever done. It had to appeal to preschoolers. It had to appeal to adults. It couldn’t be lame. It had to teach something and it had to be funny. That's a lot in a little sketch.

A promotional image for the PBS show "Sesame Street" featuring Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie.

FB
So you’re saying it's difficult to put all that into a little sketch? Or were the powers that be demanding these things have to all work together? Were they difficult or was it just the actual writing and creating that made all those elements gel? 

MS
Everyone agreed this was the Sesame Street formula. This is what made Sesame Street, the notion that the humor was not going to be lame. It was going to be sharp humor, like any sketch comedy show. If you think about it, if you're writing for Saturday Night Live or any other comedy sketch, it just has to be funny. But with Sesame Street you have to do all those things at once in every single sketch. They'd be tested on kids to see if the sketches actually did teach them. In my time the head writer was focused on television comedy, not education, but over your shoulder was the Harvard School of Education saying, “That's not teaching.” Also remember, this is public television so the wages aren’t going to be like the compensation at a network. So if you're a good comedy writer, what are you doing here at PBS? It was tough to find the right kind of writer and keep them. But if you didn't get paid in wages, you got paid in Emmy Awards.

FB
I saw Mrs. Santa Claus was one of your other projects.

MS
That’s a TV musical musical with songs by Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!) and starring Angela Lansbury. It still seems to be a perennial online. I used to get contacted about people enjoying it. We gave it a progressive slant. I still can't believe we got away with that. Mrs. Claus comes to New York in 1910 and she gets involved with the women's suffrage movement, child labor, and unions. The feminists love us for it. It’s an easy way to teach how difficult it was to vote and how to organize around that. I'm pretty proud of that one. I'm glad it's been living on. 

A promotional image from the 1996 TV musical comedy "Mrs. Santa Claus" featuring Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Anna Claus and Charles Durning as Santa Claus.

FB
Do you see many Broadway shows? Anything you're a fan of that you wish you had written? 

MS
When I get to New York there's never enough time. The last thing I saw was a production of Sondheim’s show Merrily We Roll Along. I had tremendous affection for it when I was young. It first opened in the eighties and finally, people are making it work and it's a hit now with Daniel Radcliffe. I love that. I also saw Sondheim’s new posthumous show, Here We Are. To be involved in musical theater at all is to be worshiping at the feet of Sondheim. Whatever might be playing of his, I'll make a special effort to go see.

FB
Do people come to you about writing a book for an idea? Or do you generate most of your ideas and work on those?

MS
It works both ways. I'm trying to think what people in theater have come to me for that has actually been produced. There's so much of it. If I'm doing it myself, I have my steps. I know what to do but it can be very painstaking and slow and I'm not sure collaborators can put up with that. People do come to me and I'd say fifty percent of the projects I want to work on and fifty percent I don’t, whether it’s because I've done something like that before or I just don't see how it's ever gonna get done. But it's always flattering when someone comes to you and invites you to work with them. But I would say the shows I've had produced have all been originated by me.

FB
Theater is much like film or television. There are a lot of plays or musicals being developed that we never get to see because it's really difficult to get them up on their feet and for all the elements to come together. One of the things that's really underrated is the book writer. To get that book right to make a musical work is really hard. 

MS
It's no different from screenwriting or TV writing. It's the same skills. you know, playing songs. But if you find yourself with those skills at an early age, wouldn’t you jump into TV? I did. I needed to make a living,

FB
They don't pay very much in theater.

MS
As they say, “You can make a killing but you can't make a living.”

FB
So if you've done Wicked, you're good. 

MS
Pretty much. But there’s only one or two shows like that per decade. Yet there are so many other positives about it. But if you're starting out and you do need the paycheck, you really can't do theater. The payoff is after opening unless you were lucky enough to be commissioned, which you won't be at an early age. You could be working for years on a project and then get to opening night and hope for the best that maybe now you’ll get paid. Whereas, in TV and film there is a union, of which I'm a proud member, and the union makes sure, like any union, that you get paid at a specific pay rate. On the other hand, you're selling your copyright. Whereas you own the copyright in theater and you have the final word on casting and the script. That's all up to the playwright.

FB
It’s the same with the novelists. Part of my interest in writing was born out of losing copyright and being frustrated and saying, “I'd like to be the author from beginning to end and play in my own sandbox.” Not that those always pay enough to pay the bills and so forth. But creatively, It's so fulfilling. 

MS
That's it. There are other rewards. The union jobs for money, the theater, and novel jobs for us.

FB
If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland who would you be and why?

MS
The Annotated Alice is still in my head but it’s the White Knight. There's inventiveness and kindliness about him. The Caterpillar was helpful but had that horrible attitude, which I exploited.

A colorized illustration of the White Knight and Alice by Sir John Tenniel from "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There".

FB
And he's stoned a lot.

MS
If only. To me, it would take that horrible haughty Oxford edge off him. He seems to me, and I wrote him this way, as the most Oxfordian of any of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. That attitude of “Who are you?” That superiority is so absurd. Whereupon the White Knight is humble and kind but completely inept and not helpful at all. But at least she didn’t end up in an ocean of saltwater or having your head stretched. At least he was kind. I think that the Caterpillar’s attitude is coming over decades from The Annotated Alice. It was pointed out there and I never forgot about it. I also remember there was speculation that the White Knight was the Lewis Carroll self-portrait because you can't imagine him as any of the other characters. The White Knight is slightly ridiculous and that might be how Dodgson felt with his speech impediment, that he was a figure of ridicule. He probably was ridiculed because of the way kids talk about their teachers.

FB
Riding in on the horse also puts him above everybody so that's got to feel good.

MS
It’s a quiet episode compared to beheadings and croquet. That was always a place in the books where I felt at home.

FB
Very good answer. I read in an interview, that somebody asked you if you were an expert on Alice in Wonderland or Lewis Carroll and you said you weren't an expert, but you did so much research. I did the same thing. I went to Oxford and spent six months there and it was so much fun.

MS
This is the one place where the show expresses anything I felt, but Prince Leopold has a speech where he says, “Oxford is Wonderland.” That's how I felt. I've been to places in Europe before and nothing was ever like Oxford to me. I just can't compare it to any other place I've been. I would love to spend months there. 

FB
I've always been a big fan. I love the British Museum and then being in Oxford it does feel like its own Wonderland. There are Wonderland Gardens that look like they are from Oxford. I didn't even realize there were so many people who create Wonderland hedges out of characters.

It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you, Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

MS
Thanks for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Stan Just

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have video game developer Stan Just join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor 
Welcome to the podcast Stan Just. Thanks for being on the podcast. It’s always exciting to talk to another creative person who has been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. But I'm particularly interested in games because when I first started writing my books and I went to comic book conventions, people would always say, “We've read all of your books, but what are you going to do?” So I had the idea of doing a game, but, this was so long ago, it was in Flash. A lot of people came to it but I didn't know I could monetize it with microtransactions or anything. So it cost me a fortune. People were really happy but I didn't make any money. Then Flash disappeared two years later and all that work went for naught. Since then I've had a keen financial eye watching how people put games together and monetize them. 

Stan Just
I've had a similar experience with my first game that went out last year. We spent a lot of money and effort on it but, all in all, it didn't pay it out. Not many people bought it.

FB
I hear it's pretty tough. I also had an agent for a while who worked exclusively in games. This was probably 15 years ago. My book was first published eighteen years ago and we went to all of the Activisions of the world. I would get in the room and I would pitch a vision of what I thought the world could be in the game. In the room, people seemed really engaged but at the end of the day, if there wasn't a movie first, they weren't interested. They would say, “Come back to us as soon as you have a deal with Warner Bros. I thought, “Well, once I have a Warner Bros. movie, what do I need you for?” Warner Bros. Games would have probably wanted to buy it. It’s hard to be independent out there.

SJ
Absolutely. It's very difficult to be publishing games right now.

FB
Let’s talk about your game though. I'm gonna get into your history. I want to hear about your work on The Witcher games. I’m a big fan of the TV show. 

You're the CEO of your company. It's called Covenant.dev. Tell us about the inspiration behind your upcoming game To the Star. 

Cover image for the upcoming Covenant.dev video game "To the Star," featuring a blue and purple fantasy landscape and a male character dressed in fantasy costume.

SJ
It's a survival adventure game that is aimed to support cooperative gameplay for up to four players. It’s a game in which players explore a whimsical fantasy realm inspired by Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince, craft bizarre objects in their private dimension, and fight incredible creatures on their way to the star. The initial inspiration and the initial idea kind of came out of the blue. I was thinking about a game that would have a relatively simple main objective. This main objective was the spark. It’s inspired by the notion of a star falling on your planet and you want to get to it and uncover the story behind it. So that was the initial idea. 

It evolved after a few months. We were exploring what the star will be. What kind of environment or what kind of a planet did it hit? Is it Earth? Maybe it could be something different? That led me to be inspired by this literature and led me to answer the question of what the star is. We decided to go more fantasy. It won't be a comet or asteroid or something like that. It will be more whimsical, more fantastical. There’s a character on the star and that character has a story. I don't want to spoil too much but he comes from a different planet and he crash lands on our planet. Again, our planet is not normal. It's more whimsical because whimsicality is something cool and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity, as the creators, to do something new, to do something crazy, to do something surreal. It’s easier to surprise the player. If the game was set on Earth, it would be more grounded and more boring in the sense that people would have seen it all before. There's not much room for surprise. So it was, let's take the story of The Little Prince for the character on that piece of a planet that fell on our planet. He traveled some ways across the galaxy. He has a story of his own. 

FB
Let me ask you about combining genres. You have a fantasy, you have sci-fi, and you have Earth which is very grounded. So when you start to put those pieces together, how do you find a tone that feels consistent in terms of the gameplay and storytelling? Because, from my creative process and experience blending different genres, if it feels fresh and grounded enough that it's not just random, then you feel like you've come up with something new that people can relate to. But if you combine too many things, they bump up against each other and then it doesn't feel like a new form. 

SJ
I absolutely agree. If you mix too many things, it just becomes an unattractive blend. You need to be very careful about the believability of the world and the believability of your creation. For example, the sci-fi aspect is very, very limited. When you say “sci-fi”, many people think of technology and spaceships and lasers. We don't have any of that. For example, the vehicle the character is on when he crashes on your planet is not a spaceship. It's just a fragment of earth. There's no technology there. The player doesn't have the feeling of, “This is a sci-fi technology kind of thing. It’s rather a fairy tale, whimsical thing.” 

That’s the most fun part, creating a believable world that is different, and whimsical, so the player can believe in this fantasy and be immersed in the atmosphere. Even though there are crazy things happening, it is all within the constraints of your creation. For example, we've got a character who’s a honey bee that is in the form of a jar with wings. But this creature doesn't, for example, relocate within light speed, it doesn't suddenly grow a shotgun and shoot you. It wouldn't fit the story setting. He needs to fly. He’s a jar filled with honey, so he needs to be heavy in the animation. The movement needs to be believable even though it's a jar of honey with wings. 

FB
There's a logic to the weight and so you feel it's not a speedy thing. It has its limitations. You bring up whimsical aspects a lot. Alice in Wonderland, to some people's minds, is really a whimsical story because there are a lot of absurd things that happen. But, at the same time, there are a lot of people who interpret Alice in Wonderland as very dark and nightmarish because you're out of control, you're shrinking and you're growing. It depends on your point of view. 

Do you see Alice in Wonderland as a fantasy? Do you see dark elements? Which elements did you blend in? What was inspirational for the game?

SJ
That's a very interesting question. We use some scarier elements to a degree because we are still targeting a relatively young audience (10+) so we do not want to use very significant fear themes. That said, even if I watch animation or Disney movies with my five-year-old, there are some fearful themes. They're oftentimes very useful in storytelling in order to show there is a threat or a challenge that the protagonist needs to overcome. This is useful in games as well, which rely pretty heavily on the notion of challenge. The challenge doesn't need to always be scary. But if the challenge isn’t scary from time to time, if it’s funny, it’d be rather irritating. If something is rather scary, you're feeling motivated to overcome it. 

My point is that it will be used from time to time but it is not something you will see often in our game. It’s rather very visually appealing, even during the night. The biomes in the game, during the day, look like a fantasy world, dreamlike. But at night, they look similar to the Avatar movies, which is also attractive. So people don't need to be afraid of the dark, right? We do not play on this theme anymore because we've played on this very often in our previous game. Now we're not using it.

Screenshot from the upcoming Covenant.dev video game "To the Star," featuring a male character standing in front of a lake in a nighttime fantasy forest.

FB
Can you share anything specific from Alice in Wonderland? Or is it more the idea of somebody coming in on a star and coming into a new world like Alice falling into the rabbit hole and encountering these quirky characters and the conflict she feels as she's navigating this world? For instance, is there a Jabberwock?

SJ
Not yet not in the current design but we are using bits and pieces. We are using references to either Alice or The Little Prince whenever we feel we'd have a good idea of how to use it. For example, in terms of enemy design, that's definitely a direction we will be going in. But not necessarily in the format that you might expect. The rabbit was a very important character, obviously, in Alice but it was a positive one. We are using the rabbit in the form of an enemy, a very important enemy. I won't spoil much, but it's in the form of an iron Golem. It manipulates time and it has watches incorporated in its body. So we’re playing on this notion of a rabbit with clocks but it’s a scary one and he's actually a robot with a clock. We want to be creative about it, we don't want to just copy-paste things. 

FB
I love that idea because it incorporates elements from Alice in Wonderland but, as we just talked about, it has a sci-fi feel because it's a robot. It serves both purposes, it gives you the whimsy of Alice that people will identify with and think is cool but it's got the sci-fi bent. You're talking about the development of To the Star, where are you in the process and where are you trying to get to?

SJ
You can break the development of a contemporary video game into a concept phase where you do all the thinking and writing, and then prototyping, then you usually go for something called a vertical slice which is a representative fragment of the game. So concept, prototype, a very rough element of the game, then the demo. Then you go into full production. All the enemies, all the story, all the environments, and at the very end, you're debugging. You're erasing any mistakes that you made along the way. Currently, we are after the prototype but before the production so we are trying to do this demo that will showcase the idea that we've got and hopefully get some interest from potential investors in order to fund the project.

FB
So, the demo is to show off the design and the gameplay. When you say investors, are you talking about going to publishers? Or are you looking for hard money, then move it along and take it to publishers afterward? Or are you going to be the developer and the publisher and have it on Steam or Twitch or something like that?

SJ
We are considering both options. We are a stock option company and we are considering issuing shares or getting a publisher and proceeding down that path. 

FB
As a CEO raising money and doing a stock option, that's its own beast.

SJ
I have been there already. Our previous game was financed through both options. We started with issuing shares and then signed with a publisher.

FB
What was your previous game?

SJ
So the previous game was called Gord. A gord is a Slavic fortification from ancient times. It’s a strategy game, a very dark game based on Slavic mythology that we adapted to our needs. We actually wrote the whole mythology around the game. This is posted on YouTube, the player has an option to actually read through our version of Slavic mythology before playing through our story. 

A screenshot from the dark fantasy strategy video game "Gord" featuring two characters battling a giant spider in a spooky forest with a large dinosaur skull.

FB
Wow, that's amazing. Did you grow up writing? There’s so much creativity and writing needed when developing games, especially when you're building worlds. Was that something you did a lot when you were a kid and into your adulthood? 

SJ
No, unfortunately, not. I was always somebody who had a talent for organizing stuff. That's why I became a producer and that's how I started my career. But when I became an independent developer, owning a small studio, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I needed to learn a lot of things. I really enjoyed both writing and directing so that was something I was really keen on doing. We even received a nomination a few days ago for a Digital Dragon Award for the Best Polish Narrative for Gord. That's quite an accomplishment for us.

FB
Congratulations. Since you're playing in the Alice space, why do you think Alice continues to be a muse for so many creative people, whether it's musicians, movies, or games?  In your culture, Alice is big like it is in all cultures. Why do you think it translates?

SJ
It’s appealing to me because it really opens up your imagination. There aren't that many creations of literature that you actually know. Works that have so much imagination and, at the same time, are not totally crazy surrealistic things that don't make any sense. It's still believable and very appealing in that manner. But from a utilitarian standpoint, as I have to emphasize as a game creator, it is very practical to have such a setting because then you can allow yourself to do a lot of strange things and still have it fit in the setting you've chosen. Because not all the settings are like that. If you go with a realistic setting, you cannot teleport people or do anything magical. You are constrained within your setting. So the more open-ended setting you choose the more weird mechanics you can throw at the player and surprise them. So that's very valuable. 

FB
What about the value of Alice in Wonderland being recognizable, or the value of The Little Prince being recognizable so that the player is grounded at the beginning of the game? You have Wonderland as a brand, as an IP, that's helping position your game.

SJ
Absolutely. That's a good point on its own because when I'm saying I've got a game that’s inspired by this piece, then immediately people who know and like the inspiration can relate to the game. They already know how I'm positioning the product. So that's very valuable. Because if I would say I'm doing a fantasy game, we wouldn't be talking. 

Screenshot from the upcoming Covenant.dev video game "To the Star," featuring a fantasy plain environment with a cartoon skull with two glowing eyes and giant chess pieces in the background.

FB
Exactly. That's true.

SJ
That’s very valuable. I've learned that when talking with investors but also publishers like you, you need to have a short sentence where you explain what your product is an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton, especially the movie. You immediately know it’s these mechanics with this setting.

FB
They understand what it is. You're taking a brand and you're redefining it for your own storytelling. Hundreds and thousands of people have done it and it's really going to come down to the execution. If you execute right and you get that tone and you get that playability, then the investors can see there's a way of selling it. It works in all businesses. As you said, Alice in Wonderland is a universal story and a universal world. It’s been around for so long that we almost forget how often it interplays with our day-to-day life, so why not put it into gameplay? 

Why did you choose a survival adventure game for To the Star? 

SJ
Gord was a strategy adventure game, as I called it, so strategy adventure and now survival adventure. The main genre would be adventure. Doing adventure games is something that is very close to my heart. I think this notion of traveling, going on a journey, is very attractive and I had an idea of how to execute it. Why survival? Survival video games are not necessarily defined by the fact that somebody is struggling to survive.

It’s not the only element of the definition. It gets tricky when you’re talking about game genres. For example, if you ask somebody from the games industry what the definition of a survival game is, they would say the survival aspect is one thing, but there is also the base-building aspect. The progression of the character or the crafting itself as a core mechanic is very important. Crafting is a part of the definition of a survival game. Those mechanics are useful in your journey in order to craft stuff, have better gear, and in our game you also grow food because Alice has magical food so we wanted to build on that. Then we figured out we've got a survival adventure game. This genre is also very popular on our target platform. So that was also an argument. 

FB
As the CEO of a company you get to work with your team on the creative aspects and then you have the business aspect. 

You mentioned when you're pitching to investors, you have to have your elevator pitch. What games do you reference when saying to investors, “It's like this game versus this game?” In movies, it's “this movie meets this movie.”  Do you have an equivalent for your game that our audience might be able to relate to?

Screenshot from the survival action-adventure video game "Grounded" featuring four shrunken characters surrounded by giant vegetation, a soda can, and bees.

SJ
The main game we reference is called Grounded. We say it’s Grounded mixed with Tim Burton's interpretation of Alice in Wonderland because we are using a lot of swirly shapes and Burton-esque art style. We wanted to use it in a positive and optimistic version, not a dark one, not a scary one. This is also our angle because a lot of survival adventure games are scary, very grounded, and very down on Earth. We want to offer the game to the same audience but give them something more positive, something more whimsical, and something more fun, hopefully.

FB
This just popped into my mind. Do you have a boy or a girl?

SJ
I've got a boy, Gabriel.

FB
Since you've had Gabriel, how has your thinking towards games changed, if at all?

SJ
Absolutely. My thinking about indie development actually started when I was preparing to be a father. Then he was born when I was actually doing my first indie game. So my child and my company are being developed simultaneously. It definitely affects me as a creator. In my first game, Gord, we were playing with the fact that you were a steward supervising a village full of subjects. You needed to provide them with food, tuition, housing, etc. But there was also a sanity parameter. You need to take care of the psychological aspect of their health.  

As a psychologist by education, I was asking myself what would be the strongest stressor, the most emotionally heavy thing that would affect the mentality of your subject. So, immediately, the death of a child popped into my head. Being a father affected some of the decisions I made like putting children into Gord. There are also some aspects of To the Star but I cannot spoil it.

FB
I have two children, 16 and 18. I'm a little further along than you are but when I was writing my novels, the way they would see the world, the way I would tell them stories, and the way they would react to these stories really influenced my writing. That whole thing you talked about with imagination and opening up your imagination when you're a kid and having these really powerful imaginations. That became thematic in my books as a magic system. Because you start to lose that when you get older. The world wants you to fit in a box. There's no such thing as a box for kids. 

Can we chat a little bit about The Witcher? I’ve actually never played the game but I've watched the shows and it's a very deep mythology and very complex in the way they tell the stories using different timelines and then connecting them. But can you talk a little bit about your experience with the game? Then, have you watched the show? 

Still image of Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia holding a sword from the Netflix fantasy drama series "The Witcher".

SJ
My first question is, have you watched the Polish show from the early 2000s?

FB
I have not. How are they different?

SJ
There are a lot of similarities, especially to the first Netflix season. However, the early 2000s adaptation had a much lower budget and production capabilities. The Witcher franchise is very political, it gets very complex. There aren't as many main characters as in Game of Thrones, you've mainly Ciri and Geralt. But I would say The Witcher is on par with Game of Thrones in terms of complexity. 

When I was playing the second installment of the game, after just thirty minutes you've got the dialogue, you've got so many names of regions and characters. If you haven't followed the books you can get easily confused about what's actually happening. The people are trying to explain the political dynamics of the world and how it came to be in the current setting. That's not often seen in video games.

FB
You see that in novels because you can read it slowly and you can go back. For The Witcher game, why do you think that ended up working? It was so complex and there’s so much to carry in your mind. Or was it that, if you couldn't carry it all, the playability was still really engaging? Because that's a lot to ask of the audience or the player.

SJ
Absolutely. The games are often framed in a way that allows the player to choose what they’re interested in and what they want to ignore. There is a deeper story layer that you can get into and it will be rewarding to you but if you're not interested you can just follow the marker on your map. You keep the dialogue, skip the cutscenes, and just follow the marker, kill the guy, and get the reward. You can fine-tune the game to your needs. That helps. 

Then The Witcher games were framed in a way that they had their own Unique Selling Point (USP). The main USP of The Witcher franchise was the choices and the consequences. We tried when working on the third installment, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, to make a game where you felt the choice and the burden of the choice you've made along your journey. The game definitely succeeded in that, although it was very difficult to pull off because it's a complex game. It has a lot of quests and a lot of missions. It’s a very long game. Then the quest designers, who were the best in the world, actually needed to control that. So they needed to say, “All right, so if you just ignored that guy a few hours before and then you get into a romantic relationship with this person a few hours later, then it somehow intertwines into this aspect of the game. It gives you a bonus option you can pursue. That was very, very complex. I was the producer of the cinematics and the dialogues and we had around 1,500 interactions. In each interaction, there was a lot of branching off in how you could go about your dialogue. That was very laborious to pull off and still give value to a lot of those options that you chose.

Screenshot from the action role-playing video game "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" featuring Geralt of Rivia and Ciri sitting against a tree.

FB
How many years did it take to develop that game? I mean, I'm assuming it's built off of games one and two, The Witcher and The Witcher Two: Assassins of the Kings, but given the complexity you're talking about, it’s a long haul.

SJ
I wasn't at the very beginning of the concept phase of the game, but I think it was five years. The next title I worked on, Cyberpunk 2077, took even longer and it went even further in terms of the consequences and how you behave within the world. 

FB
Have any other games come along since The Witcher games that have anywhere close to that level of complexity? 

SJ
Yes, especially Baldur’s Gate 3, which launched last year. That’s a very complex game but they do it in a different way and it’s also fantastic. But The Witcher has its own flavor. 

FB
I assume you're not playing The Witcher with your son yet?

SJ
No, no.

FB
Does he play any games or do you allow him to play games?

SJ
I allow him to play games. He has his own phone, on which he cannot call, but he has some games there. Those are the only games I allow. They’re usually logic games, chess, and learning words. 

FB
Very, very good parenting. How about other kinds of games, like tabletop games? Are you a gaming family across genres? 

SJ
Absolutely. We try to play as much as we can. However, video games have the advantage of oftentimes being flashy and very rewarding, and also being very helpful in regards to showing you moves that are allowed and preventing you from doing something that is not allowed in the game. I'm thinking about chess, for example. On the physical chessboard, you can do some stuff that is not allowed by the game but is still fun to do. But in the video game version, you can’t. So I see many advantages of the video game, but tabletop is something that we utilize as well.

FB
I understand you lecture quite a bit about game development. How are you in front of an audience of I'm assuming students?

SJ
Right now, I feel rather good, especially if prepared. I’ve been lecturing for a few years now but at first, it was a struggle for me since I'm rather an introvert. Also doing it in English because it's not my native tongue. But right now, especially if I'm prepared and not improvising, it’s going pretty well.

FB
What you just said about improvising versus being prepared is a critical component of speaking in front of a large audience. I did a lot of school visits. If you're talking to fifth or sixth graders, they're so happy to be out of class you can just start telling them a story. It's great when you get around eighth graders where they've hit puberty and they're all trying to be cool. They're all chatting and there's a couple hundred of them. You better be on your game to get them engaged and if they're not engaged, you better be brave enough to call them out. Whenever I did school events, there were always the two kids who weren't paying attention that I focused on, not the hundred who were engaged. I would try and make a joke like, “Do you guys want to go make out somewhere?” Then the audience would laugh and they would be embarrassed and they would shut up.

SJ
I wasn't brave enough to talk in front of the younger audiences.

FB
It’s a different skill set but I enjoyed it almost more than the adult audiences because with the adult audiences, they're really engaged in the process. But when it's a young audience, especially fifth and sixth graders, they would just sit on the ground, it looked so uncomfortable, and they would just look up. You’d just have to find some way to turn their attention away from the friend next to them and then they would be like, “Whoa,” and so you tell a little story. It really showed the power of storytelling. 

The other part of it is you're teaching, so once you have them, then you can communicate the lesson, whether it’s the struggles of being a writer or being a game developer, and how that relates to life and overcoming challenges. Lots of times, the teachers wanted me to say how many times I had to rewrite my book because their students would write their work once and say, “I’m done.” And the teachers would say, “No, you have to rewrite it.” So I would show photographs of all of the notes from my editor, the things they liked, and the things they didn't like, which were in red. On the first page, there'd be a couple of items in red, and on the next page, it would be full of notes. The kids would go, “Oh, whoa,” and I'd say how I had to rewrite it ten times. The English teachers would come up to me afterward and say, “Thank you so much.” 

Screenshot from the action role-playing video game "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" featuring Geralt of Rivia battling a giant Fiend amongst the ruins of a castle.

SJ
The rewrite process you’re talking about is also very often used in video games. It's always very painful. One of the ways CD Projekt RED is doing what they're doing is through iterations. When they were asked in an interview how they achieved such high quality in the writing and quests, they said, “Through iterations.” Some people were working on their quests for a year or two but their work actually ended up not landing in the game. Somebody else took over, rewrote it, and then they released it. You were working on the game for some time and you’d be amazed that your work hadn’t actually made it to the final version. That's sad but this is the cost of quality. I've done many versions of a trailer for To the Star. I think we're currently on the twenty-second iteration and I'm getting a feeling from my editor that he's already tired with my notes. I think we need to be wrapping up. 

FB
Luckily, you pay him. So he has to continue until you're satisfied. Just have them read Steve Jobs’ biography and they'll probably be very happy he has you as a CEO. In the movie business, that development process can be very similar. You're developing and developing and sometimes you do over-develop and you don't even remember what the inspiring idea was in the beginning. Then it turns out to be terrible and you have to go back and bring in another team and they go back to the beginning. But, in redoing things, if there's somebody in charge, if there's the general and they're making the decision it’s okay. It's when there's a committee, that's the problem. I don't mind rewriting it over and over if my editors have good notes but at the end of the day, it's my decision on what the sentence is, what the paragraph is, what the chapter is, and what the book is. I imagine you're the one who says, “Okay, this is good enough or this is perfect. Let’s put it out there.”

SJ
That’s how we structure our work at my company. I am a big fan of participatory management styles that invite anybody to participate in the process regardless of your position in the company. Whether you just joined and began or you have been a director at some posh company, that doesn't matter. If you have good ideas, then just bring them up. Hopefully, I will see that and use that in the development process. But also, I do agree with you that there needs to be a person who actually keeps it all together, a vision holder.

FB
I really appreciate chatting with you today. I wish you luck in finishing To the Star, your Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Prince video game.

SJ
Awesome, thanks for having me today.

FB
It was really fun. Thank you, take care.

SJ
Bye bye.

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All Things Alice: Interview with Jake Curtis

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jake Curtis join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor  
Welcome to All Things Alice Jake Curtis. I'm interested in your creative journey as a young writer and how one comes to their creative process and aspirations. Where did it all start in terms of writing? Were you someone who loved to write in school?

Jake Curtis
I've pretty much always done some kind of performance thing. I come from a big family of writers and artists who are all too loud for their own good. So growing up, you had to learn to talk fast and talk loud.

FB
Was that at the dinner table? Or was that all the time? 

JC
Twenty-four seven. We used to say that everyone was unconditionally loved, but not everyone was unconditionally liked.

I came to performing and writing from improv actually. I started doing a lot of improvised comedy when I was 12-13 and it was huge for me because I'm quite an anxious person in general. I’m an analytical person. So the chaos and acceptance that has to come with improv was pretty huge for me. There's no second draft. There's no planning.

FB
There's no getting out of it. I thought improv was the most terrifying concept I'd ever heard of. I'm not going to get up on stage and then somebody's going to tell me some little story and I'm supposed to go from there. I admire the chutzpah at 12. But I suppose at 12 it's like sink or swim. So much stuff is going on at that age.

JC
I was a big lover of live comedy shows. England, especially then, had a really vibrant live comedy scene. Going up to the Edinburgh Fringe at young ages, you see all these shows, and at first, I became obsessed with the idea of an audience. I think that was always the bit that gripped me. It's not so much the glitz and glamor of a million followers, but it was getting to watch these people who can walk into a room with 20 people and just connect with them and entertain them for an hour. I've always approached writing from an entertainer's perspective. We're all dancing monkeys making something fun. So I did improv for years and it excited me and I got to go around the world and do shows in Canada and the US.

FB
So there was something more structured than you getting up there as a young person and doing something in front of the class. Were you part of a troupe? 

JC
I was part of a troupe called School of Comedy, which is an amazing company in the UK that gets professional sketch writers to come in, but then they have a troupe of kids to perform the sketches. We did shows up in Edinburgh for two years we would perform around the country at festivals and comedy gigs. That was an amazing experience because we were very much treated like we were a part of a professional show. Like we were an asset and a commodity and a member of the troupe. They were lovely and respectful. But also it was like, you have an expectation. There are people out there who have come to see a show and you are the people to deliver it.

Photograph featuring a marquee for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with pedestrians in the foreground and stone buildings in the background.

FB
How many shows would you do a day?

JC
When we went up to Edinburgh, we would do a show every day for 30 days or for 21 days, which is the length of the Fringe. You're on a full run there. Then, generally, you'd have a week with a couple of shows or a little run at some theater and then a couple of months without a show. But we were working and it gave you this idea of having to accept how the audience reacts. I think a lot of writing classes and creative media share the message of “Oh, you've got to tell the story that's yours. You've got to find your soul or your calling.” That’s wonderful and people need to be told that, but I think it does sometimes remove the audience from the question. It tells you to find the thing you think is funny, but I love performing to live crowds because you're reminded even if you think it's funny, it doesn't really matter that much if they don't. We’d go into shows where we had sketches that had been written for us and that killed five shows in the last five shows. But you deliver it and the crowd doesn't like it. You can either just say, “Well, this is my schedule and I'm gonna keep going,” or you can try and change it on the spot, try and work out what this crowd needs from you and the show. 

FB
Obviously, when it's going well, it fuels you and you can charge ahead and you will take chances and it's invigorating. When there's a lull or you feel like the audience's leaning back and they're not engaged, for me, I had a sense of panic when I was doing some plays. I went, “Oh, it's one of those.” I would get into my head on the negative side and trying to find a way out of that into the next moment and being present was difficult. 

JC
I've done shows that have bombed and kept bombing. Sometimes you're in the mud and you've got to stay there. In those shows, I would just try and make as much eye contact with the people on stage as I could. You don't have to look at the crowd, right? And I’d try and tell myself, “I'm here having a good time with my friend, not bombing and ruining these people's night.” But generally, with the crowd, I always took that as a challenge and it's a challenge you can win. Especially with comedy shows, people want to come out and have a good evening.  Now working as a writer, all these decisions you make are fueled by “We think these markets might want a script that looks like this.” I hate all of that because it's not real. You're like, “Oh, maybe I can do it. I'm a technician.” But when you have a crowd, it's you and them. It's head-to-head. My panic mode was usually monologuing. If I'm getting stressed, I'm just gonna keep talking and I'm gonna keep going until I hit something. I'm gonna move faster. I'm gonna go through more ideas until you find a little inkling of a laugh and then just grip onto that for dear life.

FB
Is that what you did with your family? Is that what the competition was, people gripping on for their lives to find a little kernel to be heard? 

JC
One hundred percent. You’re waiting at the dinner table like, “Come on. Someone mention dog. Someone mention dog.” Someone brings up the word dog and you’re like, “That's interesting! Listen to what happened to me today. I went out and I met three dogs.” You’ve got to take your time when you have it.

FB
Wow, that must have been hard to even get the food and drink down. That’s a diet in itself.

JC
When someone else starts monologuing, you speed eat. I just loved the immediacy of improv and the presentness and the engagement. For me, the joy of making art is making it for a specific person or specific people. 

FB
You were making art in that moment. There wasn't a committee telling you, “I think this joke will work or that joke will work”. The audience is telling you instantaneously, which you don't get when you're writing a script for television. That’s amazing because you're basically writing on stage as you're going.

JC
It forces you to engage in the truthful fact that the majority of art is just people observing other people and enjoying it. There's this top tier of if you can write a sentence so good it is etched into history. If you're gonna write “to be or not to be,” go for it. But the majority of art isn't the cleverest thing you've ever heard. It's some people watching, reading, whatever, some other people and trying to enjoy it, trying to have a good time.

FB
It’s the connection to the human experience which is why it's interesting you're describing your family because so many stories are about the dynamic of family and it's very relatable. So when you tap into something like that you're going to engage the audience in a meaningful way. Your family dynamic sounds really exciting and really competitive and that set you up with the mindset of “I'm being creative all the time, not just when I’m improvising. But my whole family is creative.” Did you have actors in the family? You said writers?

Headshot of writer Jake Curtis, in which he is wearing a blue shirt.

JC
In the immediate family, we have a lot of writers. My sister's a writer, my dad's a writer, my little brother's a writer. My mum was a TV presenter in the 80s, which was cool. She used to do little practice things like she’d be playing songs in the car and, in between them, she'd be like, “Okay, you could introduce this one.” I'd have to be like, “And this next song coming on is a smooth hit from Lionel Richie,” and try to time it to the intro to the song. It was all just fun. Then in the extended family, they're also very loud. I have like 30 cousins on my mom's side and we have actors, we have everything. It was just a general feeling of trying to have fun trying to push yourself. I thought if I was going to be able to make a career in the arts, it would be partly from muscle growth. How many reps can I do? How many different art forms? I spent so long doing comedy sketches, I don't do those anymore, but the experience all of it filters into everything else I do.

FB
Is comedy the genre you've started to really hone is comedy, whether it's television or film?

JC
Comedy is definitely where I lean. That was where all my experience came from in improv. I think these things are muscles, especially comedy. I think people often underestimate how much of a muscle comedy is because people are so naturally funny. But it is a very different thing, being funny to four friends than writing something that can slot into a specific scene in a specific script.

FB
It's completely different. When you're with your friends and you're saying it out loud, it can come or go. But when you write it down, people can judge the rhythm and the cadence of it. Somebody's got to perform it to really nail that cadence. It’s a lot different putting it on.

JC
I sometimes hear writers, who are great writers but haven't done comedy, saying, I think I might, for my next script, just do a comedy.” That's great and maybe it'll be amazing but I think the reason I'm good at comedy is, I hope, twenty percent something natural in me but I did a hundred appalling improv shows before doing a hundred mediocre improv shows before doing fifty decent ones. I have so many scripts that are so bad and so unfunny, so many files on my phone, stand-up gigs, improv, and freestyling. This is the thing I've done the most and I'm still mediocre to okay.

FB
It's the 10,000 hours. It's the failing over and over. I don't know if people realize what a gift that is, as the learning part of the process. When you talk about great comedians and you see their shows, if you see multiple shows, they are so specific night after night. They're hitting every one of those beats. They're so worked out. It's kind of remarkable how specific they are from performance to performance. 

JC
That was a part of why I felt so lucky getting into comedy so early and the fact that my family did treat it as a serious pursuit. I was able to go through a lot of that education and a learning phase while I was at school. Because I think it can be really daunting if you go through life and you hit 24-25 and you go, “Oh, maybe I want to do comedy.” It's a six-year path to being kind of fine.

FB
Starting at 12 and starting to perform, it's not dissimilar to sports. If you do it at a young age, it's so inherent by the time you get to your late teens. It’s instinctual but you need all those reps. Starting that young, the filters are off and so you're just doing it. It’s not as if you're 24 and you want to do comedy for your career and you wonder how that's gonna work out. I think that makes a big difference. With your family being so into all the arts, did you find that to be really nurturing or is there a competitiveness or an expectation you feel moving forward?

JC
Not so much. There's a competitiveness in my family anyway. I'm one of four kids and we all do very fairly similar things so there's a bit of a jostling. But no, I think it was very much, “If this is a path you want to go down, go down it.” Me and my siblings do similar stuff but it's different. My sister writes incredible feminist literature I couldn't write and my little brother writes very dark, edgy films I also couldn't write. It wasn't as much of competitiveness but it was more of “This is a legitimate career and a path you can take. If you're gonna go down it, take it seriously and put in work, put in the hours. We will drive you to the classes and pick you up but you've got to put your practice in and put your head down.” It wasn't treated as a fanciful thing.

FB
With a lot of creatives, the family or the parents treat it as a fanciful idea and not dependable.

JC
I remember one time when I was 16 we had these national tests and I did really well on the physics one and I suddenly got this brain wave of, “Wait a second, could I be an engineer?” I was like, “Oh my god, this is a radical thought. A steady paying job, career development.”

FB
Nothing like my family. 

JC
I’d become the black sheep.

FB
You're working for Intel.

JC
It would be bizarre for them. It was always something I just appreciated and kept going and kept trying to see where I could go. I did a lot of improv. I got to do some shows I loved. I got to do two 50-hour-long shows in Canada with the group Die-Nasty, which was a great experience. It was really COVID that ended that portion of my life. I was already writing a lot by then but when COVID happened all improv obviously shut down. More than most industries improv took a really big hit. It turned out the improv theaters weren’t the people with big financial stores and genius financial skills. So improv took a really hard hit there. Then I just dove fully into writing. I've always enjoyed performing as an act for myself, but needing to get my face out there was never a priority. So I really tried to dedicate myself to screenwriting as a way of building a career I would enjoy. 

FB
Why did you move from the UK to the US? Was that for educational or opportunity reasons?

JC
I was living in the UK until I was 19 and then I moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern University and study film there. I made the decision entirely based on improv. In the UK, I was doing what is known as Chicago-style improv, which is long form. Chicago is the mecca of that with Second City and the iO. So I Googled best colleges for improv and some dudes' blogs came up and at number one he had Northwestern and the Titanic Players. I went great. I applied to two schools. I applied to Northwestern and then I applied to Yale because no one in England had heard of Northwestern. So I thought, “If I can get into Yale and reject them, then I'll tell people I chose Northwest.” Then Yale rejected me so it wasn't a great plan. But yeah, I went for the improv and it honestly was amazing. I was in this group, the Titanic Players, run by Mike Abdelsayed. It’s an amazing, incredible organization. I got to do so much improv at Northwestern. It wasn't the worst decision.

Photograph from a show put on by the improv group The Titanic Players of Northwestern University featuring two actors on stage.

FB
Then you had the city so you could go to Second City and you could see some of the best improv in the country. You were getting your fix for sure.

JC
A hundred percent. I go to do shows downtown and they brought in guest improvisers to teach workshops. It was an amazing experience.

FB
Also, it's a great city when you're twenty-one years old.

JC
I don't regret the decision at all. I love Chicago so much. Oddly enough, of everywhere in America I've been it's the place that most reminds me of London. So I felt quite at home there. Lovely people, lovely food, and some of the best improv in the world.

FB
Who were some of the people that inspired you in terms of your comedy? 

JC
The first people were a lot of English comedians and stand-ups that I doubt people listening to this podcast have heard of but there are people like Daniel Kitson and Tim Key. These incredible people who would just do one-person shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Partly due to the financial situation, one person shows basically dominate and it's amazing because it’s so personal. I love these very personal stand-up shows. Moving to Chicago, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi are like the greatest duo in Chicago improv history. They've been doing the same show for 35 years. They are genuine masters and are so grounded and confident and know each other so well. But honestly, my biggest inspiration was watching American sitcoms. That was kind of why I wanted to come to America. I grew up watching The Office, Parks and Rec, and How I Met Your Mother. All these shows. For one, they’re so phenomenal and they also made America seem so cool. I was like, “This is great. I'm just gonna go to America and meet all these beautiful people and date them. It'll be great and everyone's funny and the sun's always shining.”

Still image from the NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation" featuring Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope.

FB
Did you discover that?

JC
I discovered it was exactly like that. I have not been sad a day since I arrived in America. No, it turns out they're a little unrealistic at points.

FB
So moving to LA, what was the transition here?

JC
So COVID happened and I was in Chicago and I started writing more. I only had a year left on my visa and I didn't know if I could stay in the country. So I thought, “If I have a year, I should go to LA, the ‘City of Dreams.’” So I moved to LA and I got a job working for a motivational speaker, which was a weird experience, especially during COVID. 

FB
Why was that weird? 

JC
There was a point where I was locked down in my house and seeing no one. Except once a week, I would drive to this guy's house, set up a camera, and he would motivationally speak at me for one or two hours. All of his stuff is just down the lens of the camera so I was going from total solitude to this man rambling about the meaning of life, and passion and purpose. Then I was going back to my tiny, empty house, and editing more videos of him talking about the stuff. It was just a bit of a jarring experience, but a wonderful one.

FB
Did any of it stick for you?

JC
It definitely got in there. It's definitely deep in my subconscious. I can still hear his voice if I close my eyes. But I was doing that for a year and then I was working on my writing, but I felt like I needed more training, especially because so much of my experience had been in performance and live comedy. So I ended up applying to grad schools to do a master's in Screenwriting. I got into the American Film Institute, and ended up going there, and that was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

FB
How was Ed Decter? He introduced us and having him as a professor, what was the takeaway, the one thing you have been able to put into action? 

JC
Two things come to mind. Because I think the first, which was something I really loved from watching Ed, was where you can get to if you put all this time into screenwriting. I had so many examples of these great improvisers I'd seen who have this, it seems like a superhuman ability to improvise. You drop them in a scene and they know where to take it and where to go. It was seeing those people initially that made me want to do improv. I think it was amazing coming to AFI, all the professors who teach there have to also be working writers in LA. Ed Decter, who I was lucky to get in my second year, is a very prolific writer and has written so much stuff in so many genres. We were a class of six writing six very different scripts and watching him have immediate feedback for every single type of script, which ninety-nine percent of the time was immediately correct, was an amazing thing to see. 

We talk about scripts so often like they’re hyper-personal, the story only you could tell, but if you get a really good screenwriter they know the direction a script should go from reading it. Getting to see that up close and getting to see someone be able to latch on to a story someone's trying to tell, work out the key elements, work out what's going to translate, work out what's not translating, and immediately know a direction to go in. That got me excited and inspired because I think it can be depressing as a writer to think your only option for success is writing your soul's calling. That's wonderful. I hope to one day write a film that is me in a bottle but that's a scary prospect. Going to AFI gave me much more of an approach to what a working writer looks like, of what a functional writer looks like, of someone who just gets the job done and who knows what a script needs. 

FB
Ed has written a lot of sitcoms. That's where he started. So he has experience in sitcoms but the scripts he's been writing lately have been adaptations of various kinds of mystery novels. He has a broad range of genres that he plays in. A couple of the latest crime dramas he's written were really startling to me, because, we obviously did There’s Something About Mary together, but also he's done so many sitcoms. So I can understand why you guys would have bonded. Also the experience of seeing him jump from genre to genre and script to script, I had a similar experience. We put a little mini-room together that he ran to break The Looking Glass Wars novels as a television show. Seeing him run the room was also another aspect of television production, writing, and development that I hadn't seen before. That was unique for me because I hadn't had that experience of taking my novel, breaking it up, and saying, “Okay, here's where we have to get to for the middle of the season. Here’s where we're trying to get to at the end of this season. Okay, now, let's reverse engineer it and figure out the best opening.” It was pretty exciting. 

It was not dissimilar to what you did with my world. I asked you to write a lore story and this idea came from you and a number of other young writers that I was introduced to from AFI, who play all these different kinds of games, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I looked at all the lore stories that go along with those games and I thought, “Well, I want that.” So you wrote this story, The Brother’s Wilde, which I'd like you to talk about. It’s a lore story, a prose short story. You did an outstanding job. Really brilliant, beautiful job. You used aspects of my universe and you made them feel fresh to me, which was like Santa Claus showing up. 

Graphic featuring knights and a purple skeletal being with the text "Dungeons & Dragons" superimposed over the image.

JC
It was a wonderful experience for me because I've played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. I love that world and the high fantasy genre, but it never felt like something I was allowed to play in for actual creative work. That was my treat on the side at the end of a long week. So getting approached to write something in a world of high fantasy that already exists and writing backstories was such a treat for me. It felt like getting to my fun times for work. But it was also an odd process. I've never really written based on other people's worlds before and other people's work. So that was interesting and fun getting into that and trying to see how much I could stretch. The odd thing for me was when I got into it, I was very excited. I'd written out all these plot points and the beats and I was confident in the story. Then literally as I opened up the Word document, I remembered I hadn't written prose in like seven years.

FB
Be careful what you wish for.

JC
I’d forgotten it was a completely different art form. I got ready to open up Final Draft and then I was like, “Oh God!” It took a little bit of adjusting. The part I forgot was you can't refer to someone by the same name every time in prose. In the script, someone is their name and it does not change ever. But I was suddenly deep on synonym.com, “I can't say ‘the great warrior’ again”. The mighty fighter, heroic hero, I was going deep into my vocabulary to try and switch something up. It was an exciting thing to get to work on. I think especially because Alice is a world that is so rich throughout culture. It’s kind of a bedrock piece of story. There are things I brought into the story that are pieces from Dungeons and Dragons. There's a lot of Alice in Wonderland lore baked into Dungeons and Dragons like Vorpal swords and Jabberwock. It didn't feel like building on something completely new. It felt like being given a chance to play in a world that is so familiar.

FB
As a Brit too, Alice in Wonderland is probably the most famous piece of literature that you would have grown up with, right? So I can understand that and also the idea that Alice is everywhere. Of course, it makes sense it's in Dungeons and Dragons. You took what was familiar from Alice's Adventures, Lewis Carroll's work, you took elements from my world, but then you brought this brother story together. Tell us a little bit about that part of the story, because you did often reference your younger brother.

JC
I have two younger brothers who got amalgamated in the story. I always try to start from a place of relationship because I think that gives you the most fuel for a story and is the part you can’t retroactively put in. If you tell me this story needs a bigger fight scene, I can go do that at the end. But if a story isn't built around a relationship, it's tough to slot it in. So I wanted to build The Brother’s Wilde around a relationship. I was looking at the House of Cards, which was where we wanted to focus the story, and I thought brotherhood made sense. It’s this military organization and the brotherly bond felt like it made sense. I have two brothers who I fight with a lot. So that made that track. 

But then I was interested in this idea of the houses and I loved the thoughts of the personality types associated with the houses. Me and my brothers are very different and if we're gonna have two brothers in the story, let's put them in two different houses. Let's have them hate each other for the very reasons that make them unique. If we're trying to expand the House of Cards we've got to bake it into the DNA of the House of Cards. So I wanted to build around there. Then I came up with these characters who are half brothers from a philandering father, who they both hate and there’s no love between them. At that point, it started to feel real to me and it started to feel fun. It felt like playing because you built this world and we have this amazing world of the House of Cards which has these rituals and dynamics built in. It was such a gift to build these two brothers who hate each other and try to give them a situation to learn why they need each other.

Illustrations by Sami Makkonen of card soldiers for "The Looking Glass Wars: Crossfire" by Frank Beddor and Curtis Clark.

FB
You were tasked with an origin story, an early origin story of the House of Cards. They send card soldiers on missions and when they send people on missions, they decide what kind of hand they're going to deal. So you came up with the idea of “A Hand in History.” The Brothers Wilde is the beginning of the card soldiers going on these various missions when they're tasked with saving the queendom or battling a competitive state.

JC
I loved the idea of basing it around hands that are chosen and selected because that plays into the joy of Dungeons and Dragons and these old fantasy novels. It’s the idea of “The Party,” the troop. Every story is based around who was selected to go on this journey. That's what's so beautiful in a lot of these adventure stories, including Alice in Wonderland, it's not the adventure that's enticing, but it's the uniqueness of who's gonna solve the adventure.

FB
The skill set they have and seeing how they're challenged when they use their skill set with these various obstacles. That’s the Dirty Dozen idea.

JC
I think that's where a lot of modern fantasy and films go wrong. They put a lot of their energy into these big set pieces, these big boss fights with CGI characters. They put a lot of time into the obstacles when actually the thing we care about is the people solving them. In The Lord of the Rings, you care about Frodo, you don't care that there are nine Nazgul. That's what makes Alice in Wonderland so beautiful, and your novels, they revolve around the people going through them instead of the giant nature of the battle. 

FB
It’s fantasy but you need to be with the characters and with Alice, it's so identifiable. It’s a “Who am I?” journey, and she finds agency in who she is and pushes back against the illogical world that she finds herself in. But it's also very amusing. When were you introduced to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

JC
I couldn't say an individual date because, especially in England, it was just a part of culture growing up. My earliest memories were of my mum and my dad reading me the book. I must have been 10 or 11. The 1951 film was something I watched a lot. I love animation. I write a lot of animated stuff. The specificity of the visuals and the tone baked into that film was a real inspiration for me growing up.

Still image of Alice and the Mad Hatter drinking tea in the 1951 Disney animated film "Alice in Wonderland".

FB
Why do you think it's lasted so long? You said it was in culture and this is generations after it was first introduced. Every generation re-interprets Alice. How do you view Alice in Wonderland?

JC
I think the reason it has lasted is there are so many ways you can connect with it. It is such a beautiful human idea, the girl who falls through the looking glass and gets swept away on an adventure. The part I really gripped on to from a young age was the world-building. It was the idea of this world that works, that makes sense. It doesn't feel like someone who's picked, “Oh, this would be a fun scene. This is a fun character. That would look good.” 

It lives and breathes like a world. Something that really drew me to it is I think a lot of world-building goes dark, “It's a grungy forest with scary people in it.” Then obviously some other world-building goes saccharine and we're in heaven. I love the feeling in Alice that there's a danger to the world but there's a wonder to it as well. There's a whimsy and a seriousness. The world feels like it shifts based on the situation, like ours does. There's no one thing to it. I just love learning more about the world, learning about the characters who inhabit it, the places to go, and being able to build this kind of escape.

FB
I love the whimsy and the silliness of it and it reminded me of another book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorites growing up because of the silliness and the use of language. I really identified with that aspect of Alice. Many people think of it more as more a nightmare because of getting big and small and being stuck in a place where there's no logic. 

JC
The lack of logic, I love. I know quite a lot of people who I would identify as crazy people. They would as well. We have a lot of fun mental health issues in our family. I always grew up with this acceptance that nothing's gone wrong. There are crazy people who exist in the world and that's fine. I think Alice, in a youthful way, takes that on the story. It accepts there are people who are going to make some weird decisions and that’s okay.

FB
It really does capture that. In terms of pop culture, you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons and the references in video games, I've noticed there’s a huge through line of Alice. In almost every game I've ever seen, there's some Alice component. Do you have a favorite Alice in pop culture item that you like? 

JC
I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. I love the video game Borderlands, which has a lot of Alice imagery. I think my favorite is probably the Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel, which I just love. It’s this beautifully illustrated graphic novel about Batman going into Arkham Asylum and gradually losing his sanity. It’s very inspired by Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the villains in Batman already are. There's very much these threads of madness and the Mad Hatter.

Even the Penguin, there's all this imagery that lines up. So you have this beautiful graphic novel of him just going progressively mad, surrounded by Alice in Wonderland motifs and imagery. That’s what feels so special about Alice in Wonderland, it can be drawn for inspiration for something light for a younger audience but it could also be drawn for a very dark and disturbing graphic novel. And it works the same. It’s just beautiful. I think that's what happens when you're able to create something that taps so deep into a human level. It means you can use it in so many different ways. 

Three panels by Dave McKean from the graphic novel "Batman: Arkham Asylum" by Grant Morrison featuring Batman and the Joker.

FB
A lot of stories now are based on IP because people like stories that are familiar and told in an unfamiliar way. On the business side, there's a recognizable aspect for the marketing. I know this is not lost on you because you're working on an animated series that's based on Edgar Allan Poe, but your spin on it is a little different. Can you talk about that?

JC
I've been working for a couple of years on a series called A Raven in the Woods. It’s a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe as a child. I loved the language, the poetry, the darkness, and, similar to Alice, the acceptance of madness. That’s where they meet in the middle. Poe, like Lewis Carroll, doesn't treat his mad characters as nothing. They’re just his characters. They’re not irrational. They are just who they are and they are to be dealt with. 

So I loved Poe and felt there was something so visual in his language that would pair well with animation. He writes in this incredibly emotive, twisted world that I thought could be best represented by animation. There are a lot of great live-action adaptations but they're all dark and gloomy rooms, which is technically accurate. But when you're reading Poe’s work, it doesn't feel like a dark gloomy room, it feels like a twisting shadow and peering lights. I thought it worked well with animation but I didn't want to do a direct translation. Similar to how you engage with the Alice world, I wanted to bring the feeling and the parts of Poe that I love into a new story that worked as a standalone piece of animation for kids. It shows a young Edgar Poe trying to get his brother Allan through the woods before Allan is turned into a raven. Allan's cursed and as they move through the woods, a lot of the people in the woods have gone mad. There's a curse on the woods and there's a big, mysterious overlord. A lot of the “mad” people speak in rhyme and speak in poetry. 

It’s this adventure through the woods and the logic in my head was that this was the real-life adventure that inspired the later Edgar Allan Poe to write his stories. He actually wasn't very creative at all; he was just mining from two weeks he had as a kid. It’s got a lot of the characters and the elements and the moments of his work, but it's its own story about a kid trying to deal with a lot of the themes that come up in Poe. Themes of fear, how to overcome that, and how to deal with yourself and the world when everything feels mad.

Photograph of famed 19th-century horror and mystery author Edgar Allan Poe.

FB
Not dissimilar at all to Alice. I think that's really relatable and answers the question we often get from executives “Why now?” Given how chaotic the world feels, it's great to deal with stories that are realistic to the anxiety that kids feel, whether it's the various wars they're reading about or the climate and the fact that there's nothing they feel like they can do about it. I've noticed that with my kids. So stories that are thematically similar to what you're talking about answer that question of why it's important. 

JC
Thank you. I think we need this stuff. We live in a chaotic time and our art needs to reflect that. Thankfully, we're not the first people to have lived in a chaotic time so there are lovely things from the past.

FB
We’re also trying to get grounded in what's real. One of the things about Alice in Wonderland, if you look back on it, the question is “Is this a dream? Is this real?” Trying to parse out reality versus fantasy, facts versus fiction, which we're dealing with a lot of late. That sounds like a really exciting project. 

JC
I'm working with a producer, Rick Mischel, who's wonderful, and we've teamed up with TeamTO which is a great French animation house.

FB
They're terrific. I love their animation. 

JC
They’ve been amazing so far. Wonderfully French, which has been a great treat. On one of the first calls, the head of finance was just sitting 10 feet away from the camera stroking a cat. I was like, that's the kind of stuff we need. We're working with them and a director called Christian De Vita, who's an incredible director. He’s done a lot of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton stuff. We're working on putting together a packet for it and then going out and trying to sell it. It's been a great, great process and hopefully, it will lead somewhere.

FB
Fingers crossed. We'll want to check back in with you and certainly have you on the show when you need to promote it because it's coming out. 

I'm curious about the romantic comedy genre. I would imagine that you know something about that and that it's been lacking. It's one of the staples and one of my favorite movie genres. Why do you think we've lost that? 

JC
It’s a really tough question. My dad has made a lot of romantic comedies. That's his bag. It’s tough. I feel like there's very little to be learned from him because the truth about him is that he is literally the sappiest romantic person in the world. It is one hundred percent genuine. That's how he talks, thinks, and breathes. But I think it's a really tough thing. One thing, it's a genre that needs to keep changing. Action is action, and you need to develop it, but honestly, action holds up. But both romance and comedy are things that develop as humans develop. If you are romantic in the way people were romantic in the 1950s, you'll probably get arrested. If you tell jokes that were funny in the 50s, you are not getting laughs, I promise. I think these are things that need to keep being pushed and reinvented because, with both romance and comedy, it’s the feeling of something new. The feeling of being in love is, “I've never felt like this about a person before.”

FB
What about the formula of the meet-cute and the tension of “clearly they’re not getting along”?

Still image from Rob Reiner's 1989 romantic comedy film "When Harry Met Sally" featuring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in a diner.

JC
We got used to the formulas. I think you can get used to the formula for an action film and it doesn't lessen it. But to me, When Harry Met Sally, feels radical. It’s weird. It cuts away to things, it's skipping time. I think romantic comedies have to feel unique because it should feel like meeting a person who's shifting your life. When we get used to the tropes, they can still be good if you want to make The Notebook. That’s proper romance. But I think with a romantic comedy, it has to feel fun and it has to feel fresh. That takes reinvention. 

I think we're in a weird spot at the moment where no one's quite cracked it in a while. We're all just really familiar with the tropes. Everyone watched these films, everyone started acting like the people in these films. There are all these people pretending to be leading men from romantic comedies in the 90s, and 2000s. They're all on dating apps and it's horrible. When you go on a dating app you see 200 people's perceptions of who they are as a romantic lead. You watch everyone label themselves as the Hugh Grant type. Or, “I'm just a witty guy,” or “I'm the Billy Crystal, he doesn't care.” These things are so played out. You've got to find a way of making something feel weird and fresh and new. But that's really tough when we work in an industry that doesn't like taking chances on fresh and new stuff. Also, let's be real, romantic comedies live and die on the stars, on the chemistry. It’s tough to get a weird, new, fresh take that two stars are willing to sign on for and they happen to have chemistry. I think it's a really tall order. 

FB
I agree with that. With all the dating apps, trying to find a way to make that at all romantic seems to be an impossibility. But also, somebody will do it and it'll break out and maybe there'll be a fresh take on it. But to your point, we have all sorts of other genres that people are spending more time on. I just miss the chemistry between two stars. The Notebook is something my daughter has gone back to and it works because both male leads are equally appealing. So she really has a dilemma that you can buy into. But that was based on a novel that was highly successful. 

So the kinds of movies your dad wrote, were his own ideas, right? They weren't based on anything, your dad had a romantic idea. For example, your dad wrote Notting Hill, which was one of my favorites. There's an ongoing joke with my stepkids because whenever they say, “What should we watch?” I'm like, “Well, what about Notting Hill?” I've been saying it over and over and over so many times that they're dead. They look at me like, that is the dumbest joke ever. But it's a good movie. The chemistry between the two leads is so amazing. 

JC
I remember once asking my dad, “Did you know when you were writing these films that ended up being big hits, that they were going to be hits?” He said, “Absolutely not at all. I really didn't feel it. I just wrote and tried to stay passionate about it.” Then he paused and went, “Actually not Notting Hill. I was sitting at home and I thought, ‘What if a movie star fell in love with a random guy?’ And I went, Oh, that's a hit.’”

FB
Also, you have Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom with that smile that would just crush anybody. Then you have Hugh Grant, who's a very contained performer and when those two come into contact, it's gold. It's wonderful.

Promotional image from the Amazon romantic drama series "The Summer I Turned Pretty" featuring stars Lola Tung, Gavin Casalegno, and Christoper Briney sitting on a beach.

JC
I think one thing that's worth looking at is that romantic comedy is being explored in other mediums successfully like the Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s a smash hit for a younger audience and that's a rom-com, essentially. Even looking at someone like Taylor Swift, her songs are romantic, amusing, and comedic at points and that has gripped people. Obviously, people want these kinds of things. I think it'll just take someone breaking a new way of doing it in movies.

FB
Certainly in television. My daughter keeps telling me “Dad, it's one girl, two guys. That's what you need to do. Just focus on teenagers. Two guys, one girl. That's the formula.” She's watched all those shows you've talked about. 

You have a funny story about your grandmother knowing the Liddells, Alice Liddell, which you have to share with us. That’s the first time I've come into contact with somebody whose family member knew the literal muse for all things Alice, for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for my books, for your writing The Brothers Wilde. 

JC
It’s a bizarre and wonderful story. My grandmother, my mum's mum, Lady Jill Freud, is an amazing woman. She's 96 or 97 right now but World War II broke out when she was little, six or seven. She was living in London at that time with her family and they knew London was going to be bombed ruthlessly. So the British government enacted this thing they called “the evacuation,” which was an insane thing to happen. It could never happen nowadays. They literally took every child in London, took them to a train station, put a number around their neck, and put them on a train somewhere. They literally just shipped them off. When they arrived at these stations, people from the local towns came to the station and just went “Yeah, I can take two,” or “I run a farm, I can take two young boys to work there.” These kids just got rehoused for what was, at that point, an indefinite period of time.

So my granny was sent to Oxford and taken in by this family, the Butlers. Mrs. Butler was 100 and wasn't allowed to know there was a war on because they were worried it would scare her. But the house was run by these three Butler sisters. Two of them were university professors and they were three unmarried older women. They had been three of the kids that Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, had taken down the Isis River in Oxford when they were younger. He'd done these long boat journeys down the Isis and he would read them stories every night. He would come up with stories and a lot of his early things were first tested out on these little girls. So my grandmother lived with the Butlers and they had these toys from their time with Lewis Carroll he had actually made by hand. He was a great craftsman and he had made these toys.

Black and white photography of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" author Lewis Carroll.
Sepia-toned photograph of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in the 1865 novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

So every Sunday afternoon, my granny would be allowed to go into the drawing room and play with these Lewis Carroll's toys. It was this incredible time in Oxford where all these great writers and poets and people who were allowed to not fight in the war for academic reasons would write. So she lived with the Butlers and she met Alice Liddell. Alice was close with them and would come over and she was this sort of enigmatic figure known and revered around Oxford. She had tea with J.R.R. Tolkien. By her memory, he was a friendly guy. 

So it was just this amazing time she was around Oxford and absorbing it. But also it was a time of war and chaos and people dying. When she talks about it it's this very mixed feeling of this beautiful time but so underpinned with fear.

FB
Was she there for the entire war?

JC
She was there for the entire war pretty much I believe. She was there for five years of the war. By the time the war ended, she was 16-17 and had been at C.S. Lewis' house for a bit and she stayed on to manage his estate for another year or two, I believe. Then at the end of that, she was accepted into RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but couldn't afford to go and C.S. Lewis paid for her entire education. He covered it and she went on to become an early movie actress.

FB
What an amazing story and an amazing life.

JC
At that time in Oxford, there were so many incredible people, incredible minds all talking to each other. These were discrete authors. They all knew each other and they had writing groups.

FB
Could you imagine those writing groups? Wow, that would have been intimidating.

JC
“Yeah, I don't know if this White Rabbit character is really working for me.”

FB
“I don't think a closet is where you want the kids to go through. No one is gonna buy that.” The video you sent me of your grandmother, what's that from?

JC
She’s an incredible woman with incredible stories. A few years ago, I sat her down and we talked through her life and everything she'd done. It was a really wonderful experience. It was something I wanted to do, obviously to have the footage, but also it is such a privilege to get to talk to someone who's lived through wars and everything. I mean, ninety-seven is a lot of years.

FB
You’re very fortunate in terms of being surrounded by so many creative minds and creative family members and having a template on which you can base your creative aspirations. It's been really delightful to listen to you articulate what you've experienced so far, in your life and I really, I really appreciated you working on this project. I didn't know you very well and you delivered. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy hearing this.

JC
They're good, fun people. There’s a quote from a Madness song written on our wall at home that says, “There's always something happening and it's usually quite loud.” That summed up our family well.

FB
That's great. I hope you'll come back when your show is produced.

JC
Thank you so much for having me. This was such an absolute treat for the day and just fun to get into all this and chat about comedy and things

FB
Thanks a lot, Jake. Bye.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast!

All Things Alice: Interview with Eshel Ezer

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have my dear, dear friend Eshel Ezer join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor  
Eshel Ezer, welcome to the show. I’m really excited to be talking to you today. You are a photographer. You’ve worked on There's Something About Mary, you did Wicked and worked with Julia Stiles, you did the art in Birdbath, you took photos at my first wedding, and you did a colorful piece of art for my parents’ 50th anniversary.

I have really strong memories of the There’s Something About Mary job. When I first went to the marketing department, they were really excited about the movie and there was a lot of pressure to deliver really great marketing materials. We had to have a photoshoot with Cameron Diaz, so I put my hand up and said, “Hey, I have a photographer who would be great. I believe he's worked with Cameron.” The head of marketing said, “If you can get Cameron to sign off on it, then we can hire him.” And you had done a job with her before and she was excited to work with you again. 

Still image from the 1998 comedy "There's Something About Mary" featuring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz.

Eshel Ezer
I don't know how old she was when we first worked together but she was extremely young. She was a model then and I shot her a few times. We shot for a hair magazine, a big editorial with some famous hairdressers. It was for Modern Salon or American Salon, one of the two big trade magazines in the hair industry. They always used to do just hair, regular photoshoots. This fashion editor had a vision and we hooked up and I told her, “If you want us to do photo shoots together, let's be creative. Let's try and give another dimension to what regular hairdressers used to do.” So we came up with more of a fashion concept story and connected the hair into a bigger story with more body and action. The hair is part of a scene. I think that was the first job I did with Cameron. 

We came up with a crazy scene. We shot it at a historic hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was the star model in the editorial. It came out phenomenal. So beautiful. The hair was great. It was not cheesy or corny.

FB
She is remarkably photogenic. When you see her in real life, certain angles are magnificent. Then there are other angles that sometimes you go okay, she looks like a regular person. But when you take a photograph of her or she's filmed in a movie - just stunning.

EE
She's a professional. It’s not just how she looks. It's her energy. She brings something with that smile, in her eyes. She’s a free soul. A Southern California girl who got hooked up in this fashion scene when I met her. We liked each other. She loved the photos. I liked the way she was not complaining about anything. Crazy hours, lava lights, and very specific directions.

She came to my apartment on Kings Road and I did a photo for her. It was beautiful. I shot her behind one of our windows, which was an old Los Angeles window with the squares. She just looks so innocent. So I think we had this thing. My mom was visiting when I was doing that shoot. It was more than just a young model. There was a connection.

Cover of July 1990 issue of "Seventeen" magazine featuring Cameron Diaz in an American flag jacket and wearing American flag earrings.

FB
No wonder she was so interested in working with you. I didn't realize at the time. I knew you two had worked together before but I didn't know it was so successful. The same chemistry seemed to be there when we shot the poster photos for There’s Something About Mary. 

Just to go back, she is a relentless worker and she never complained on Mary. She didn't complain when she came to that photoshoot. There was no prima donna posing at all. She just got right to it. But I remember the concern was her skin had broken out and we really needed to do a good makeup job. I thought we might not even be able to do the shoot but the makeup artist did a fantastic job and then you guys went to work. What do you remember about the photo shoot? Do you remember the shot that ended up on the poster? 

EE
We had a creative meeting right before the shoot at Fox. We were meeting with the head creative director, Tony Sella. We sat at his office and the advertising agency brought over 70 different layouts and you could tell that he's not flipping over anything. I sat quietly. Let them do the talking and I'll shoot it. But then Tony looked at me and said, “Eschel, what are you saying?” I didn't know how to say none of what they showed was good.

FB
You were trying to be diplomatic.

EE
I was. I said, “I think I know what we need to do.” But the other people kept on talking. Tony Sella said, “Guys, the photographer’s talking,” and everybody became silent. I said, “She's so innocent, she's so beautiful, and she has this incredible free spirit. We need to capture that so everybody can relate to her.” Tony Sella said, “Meeting over. He knows what he's doing.” 

So on the shoot, Cameron was in makeup for three and a half hours. The makeup artist did a great job but it was killing our time. Then they wanted to have hours on styling. Then her manager said “Guys, that's it. She has to go, you have half an hour.” I said, “Let's stop it. I cannot shoot it.” We spent five hours on prepping and it's super important - hair, makeup, styling. But now I need the equivalent amount of time to shoot it. Tony Sella arrived and he negotiated with the manager. Cameron was unbelievable. She was, “Let's have fun. Let's get the best out of this day. I don't want to leave so don't tell me to leave.” Her attitude was in our favor for getting the best shoot done. 

Still image from the 1998 comedy "There's Something About Mary" featuring Cameron Diaz.

Now, I knew that I was gonna have a problem in a technical sense. It was before digital so everything was on Polaroids. I knew that the first Polaroid had to be beautiful because if the first Polaroid was horrible, she would lose it. After so many hours, she knows her limitations, and it kills your confidence. She was an actress by then she wasn’t a model anymore. We built a crazy lighting setup. I'll never forget it. We had so many lights. It had to be smooth but with contrast at the same time so it wouldn’t be boring and flat and the photo would have some depth. 

I did the first Polaroid and it was amazing. Not for me but it was amazing enough for her to say “Wow, it's beautiful.” But for me, it was not and I knew I had to work on it because when you put so much makeup on and then add the lights, you’re gonna see the difference between her skin color on her neck and her face. So you need little touch-ups so it’s not gonna look like she has a mask on her face. Then you need to work with the lights and everything is going to be nice and smooth. Then Tony Sella said, “Eschel,” and he stood like an inch away from my face. Tony said, “Make all America love her.” In my entire 25-year career as a fashion photographer, I never had more difficult creative direction than that. 

When we started, she started to loosen up and she felt amazing. With the direction, it was to try to get her not posing. We used the wind machine just to have the hair blowing. Nowadays, with digital touch-ups, you can do it right away. You go to the computer and say, “We have the shot.” But when it's on film, it needs to be processed. So we kept on shooting. I knew we had shots that could be the one. Sometimes the first one is the best but you just cover more. You take more film and shoot more. The bending, chin-up look, and smile is such a simple photo. I think that’s why all of America loved her. It's a simple photo, nothing looks made up.

Poster for the 1998 comedy film "There's Something About Mary" featuring Cameron Diaz in a pink dress, photograph by Eshel Ezer.

FB
It captures what Tony was asking. You fall for her because she is the All-American woman - the haircut, the pose, and the kind of whimsy that she communicated. You feel the joy of the process. 

What is your technique to bring out that with models and subjects? Is it different each time? Is the physicality a big part of it? Is it about the story and trying to tap into the character? Because you're not going to say to her, “Hey, America needs to love you.” You're just going to say, “Be who you are because we love you. I love you. Everybody loves you.” 

EE
There is a technique. Every successful photographer has his own technique on how to connect. Throughout the years, I've learned what I have to do to create this connection. So later on, when it's show time, you get more out of the shoot than just a photo, you get feelings, emotions, and connection. What I did with her was exactly what I was doing, just on a more appreciative and sensitive level because of who she was. Our past connection, for sure, helped. And yes, the moment she knows you're not just using words when you say “You're beautiful and I easily fall in love with you.” If she knows you’re not just bullshitting her because you want to get the job done and leave which, technically, this is what happens. But it's telling a story to her. The story is so important, especially because she's an actress. The story is so important. It has nothing to do with the movie. It's the story of the photoshoot. Who's the character? What are we doing here? What are we doing together? What kind of feelings and emotions would we like to capture for her? At a certain moment, all barriers were off and something amazing happened.

FB
I love that guy, Tony Sella. I remember from the first meetings when they put all the different posters up, he had a real sense of the artist. The art had a little Steve Jobs in terms of the aesthetic. I certainly did not hear that he shut down the room. Those are the talking heads. They're the same people from different departments giving notes over and over. They end up diminishing the idea by little paper cuts. But Tony recognized one, the photographer who's actually going to grab the shot is speaking, and two, once you said what you said, he cut the meeting off, knowing that you have to execute. 

I remember the manager throwing his weight around and Cameron standing up because that's who she is. It was a very stressful shoot because there was a lot at stake. We knew it was going to be a successful movie and we were rushing to come out in the summer when we were originally supposed to come out in the fall. Then right at the end, I snuck in and said, “Hey, Cameron, let's do some photos.” You did the same technique on me and I have some of the goofiest photographs of all time. But there was Cameron Diaz and so they all look pretty amazing because she's amazing. So I had the glow. I printed out some where I had at least a decent expression. But in looking back at some of the stuff we did, I was going “Oh, no wonder I never printed that.” Trying to dance. It was deeply embarrassing.

Four images of Frank Beddor and Cameron Diaz from a photoshoot for the marketing of the 1998 comedy film "There's Something About Mary", photographs taken by Eshel Ezer.

EE
It’s embarrassing to stand in front of a camera when that's not your job. 

FB
But those are some of the best photos I have of being on that movie because it was just a camera, myself, you, and Tony, there was nobody else. You nailed it. Every time I see the poster, I'm exceedingly proud of our collaboration.

EE
That poster, the real size, hangs in my studio in Tel Aviv. Everybody saw that I was so in love with the movie and they’d ask, “Why do you have these?” “What do you mean why? I shot it.”

FB
You shot Cameron when she was 16 and you also ended up shooting Julia Stiles for my movie Wicked, when she was 16. Both movies came out around the same time. Wicked went to the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998 and There’s Something About Mary came out in July 1998. What I discovered on Wicked was that I thought Julia Stiles was a movie star in the making. She was remarkable in the film and she was very photogenic. I told her I was going to pretend she was already a movie star and put her solely on the poster in the same way we did with Cameron Diaz. But I needed some really great photos so you and I went to work on that. Let's talk a little bit about that shoot.

Wicked is a murder mystery that takes place in a gated community. Julia Stiles basically takes over her mother's role when her mother is killed. So it's a little bit of a Lolita-esque story. We needed to find the right balance of seductress and thriller. She had some really great costuming so we brought some of that in and we went with some All-American jeans, a t-shirt, and then some nightgowns because of the dynamic with her father. It's no secret she wants to take over her mother's role in all capacities. So walk us through what it was like working with Julia in comparison to the There’s Something Mary shoot and some of the choices you thought were important to capture the essence of the film and who she is as an actress.

EE
It's a totally different agenda when a person is just a model or it's an actress. You basically have to shoot for a very specific assignment with a very specific name. So it's not just to capture the beauty, “Let's make you beautiful and do it in the desert or the beach or in a convertible.” That’s how you come up with stories for editorials. When you shoot editorial, just a story and a beautiful model, then you just go and perform. She's a good model and you're a good photographer, so you create whatever you want. 

When it's a movie, and it's an actress what I have to do is hit right on the complexity of the characters. With Wicked, it was like a week-long job we did in one day. I remember we shot in the studio and we went on the rooftop and we did a lot of stuff on the rooftop in many different styles. The movie is called Wicked and Julia’s the lead part so we tried to bring out the wicked part of her personality.

Photograph of Julia Stiles for the promotion and marketing of the 1998 thriller "Wicked", photograph taken by Eshel Ezer.

FB
We were looking to bring out three things, the danger, the vulnerability, which you also capture, and the seductress part of it. Remember, we're talking about a 17-year-old, so it felt a little daring walking the line with her parents there. But Julia, like Cameron, was completely up for it and wanted to take a lot of chances.

EE
She is, and I will never forget, extremely smart. Her IQ is way above average. Usually, we say “high IQ” for somebody who needs to go to a different profession. But, with Julia, I think it enables her to play different characters very easily. There was 100% cooperation with whatever we said and wanted to do. She was jumping in and out of different characters when we wanted to bring the softness and the purity. But then there were the twisted colors and the shadows. The wicked side.

FB
Didn't you use certain filters to get some of these crazy backgrounds from the sky? 

EE
Many times I use colors on lights to control and get the right density. But these are manipulations of the film that I knew would bleach out skin. The photo will come out like pure porcelain with this coldness and if we're going to use the red lipstick it will pop because I knew what this manipulation of the color is going to do. It's like skin dyeing. 

Photograph of Julia Stiles for the promotion and marketing of the 1998 thriller "Wicked", photograph taken by Eshel Ezer.
Photograph of Julia Stiles for the promotion and marketing of the 1998 thriller "Wicked", photograph taken by Eshel Ezer.

FB
Explain to me why the film is so different in the photographs for Wicked and the technique you used.

EE
First of all, there is a format difference. When you blow up certain formats you will hold the grain. In film you speak about grain, in digital you don't have grain. If you want grain you need to create. Back then, with film, different types of films had different sizes, different densities, different contrasts, and different ways the film would react to different lighting and exposure. What I wanted was to have the technique help us go all the way to the extreme. It’s mind-blowing to see her expressions combined with the lighting, the unique processing, and her look with the makeup. It changes so much. It's really mind-blowing to see because you see the complexity of the character. She has so many different sides. It's wicked. 

FB
Your passion for the work and the idea of creating something fresh was ever present when we worked together and now it's many years later and you have a different career but I can still feel the passion you have for doing quality work. It really comes down to this being your art. 

We met years and years ago.

EE
We bonded over scuba diving.

FB
We bonded over scuba diving in Cozumel. Then I asked you to shoot a poster for a play I did called Birdbath. I was super nervous and really bad. I had to have a few drinks to relax and then we really got into it.

EE
We got into it.

FB
It took a while. But once we got into it, those images were very arresting. 

EE
I remember our conversations to understand the play, what it’s about, and what we would like to capture. “So the poster will show just the actors? No, that’s boring.” We wanted to try and bring something from the feeling of the play. We used overtime exposure and transparent images. Nobody does these things anymore. Now you take Photoshop and “bang, bang.” But it was incredible to create. One of the things that we did technically was, we had to have lights on the outside but we were on the second or third floor in this building downtown and we didn't have the budget for cranes with lights. We had nothing. I really think we were never prima donnas. Creative people do creative things. We had to bring lights from the windows at night and we pulled these stands and we extended the stands and we tied them to things inside the apartment. We just drove the lights from the inside of the loft and tied them with ropes so it wouldn’t fall on somebody in the street.

Collection of photographs from Leonard Melfi's play "Birdbath" directed by Susan Peretz and starring Frank Beddor and Melissa Tufeld, photographs taken by Eshel Ezer.

FB
What we were doing was, on some level, illegal. Sneaking into the building. Putting up lights. Not asking for permission. Just apologize later.

EE
Let’s go do it. Get it done. Beautiful.

FB
You had an art show that I helped organize and Tony Scott was the first one to buy your art. Tell me that story.

EE
It was a project I started during my second year in art school back in Israel. We got an assignment to shoot something in motion. So I took my brother to the beach in the Mediterranean just after sunset. I used a strobe flash and I was holding the camera and he did something in the water with the sun behind him. The manipulation of the colors of the film created magic. It was stunning. Then I had the final exam and exhibition at the end of the second year in school. Then I left Israel and went to New York to complete my studies but I kept on shooting this project.

One of the things my teacher in Israel said was, “This is beautiful. Try to see if you can get closer.” And I kept thinking, “What does it mean to get closer?” He's in the water, I'm with a camera. It's not an underwater shoot. How am I gonna get closer? Then it just kind of became a memory. But it was a project I wanted to keep on progressing. It meant something to me. It was a man's body coming out of the water. I thought, “This is what I want emerging out of the water, man's creation is from water.” The ocean is my forever love. With my old injury in the army where I shattered my back, I was physically in pain for too many decades. So there was a lot of emotional involvement for me in creating this image of a man's body coming out of the water with a lot of power, but also experiencing and projecting pain. That was the general idea. Then I had to start seeing what kind of colors I wanted to use and how dramatic I wanted to be. We shot this project every time I visited Israel for 10 years. We kept on taking pictures in the Mediterranean, but also in the Dead Sea, with crazy hours because at the Dead Sea, we had to shoot at sunrise, and at the Mediterranean, we had to shoot at sunset. 

I needed the sun as a background, as my theater. As an artist, nature is a background and if you know how to work with it, you can do whatever you want with the background. You don't have to be in the studio, you can do it outdoors if you control the lights. So in the Dead Sea, the sun will be behind my model in the morning, and in the Mediterranean, it will be behind him at sunset. I needed the glow of the sun at those times.

Photograph of a man coming out of the water with the sea in the background by Eshel Ezer.

FB
Just the beginning and just the end. 

EE
It could be very apocalyptic. A very extreme environment. You don't see it with the naked eye. It’s the film that later sees it. So we kept on doing the project. I visited home in the winter and we used to shoot it in January or February in the Mediterranean when it's 11 degrees centigrade (52 degrees Fahrenheit) in the water and it's blowing and raining. We used to stand on the beach looking at each other, “We're crazy, right? We're not going to do it today. We are going to do it today. No, we are not going to do it. Yes, we're going to do it.”

FB
You’re saying “We're going to do it,” because he's the one going in the water.

EE
We were both in the water. He needed to be underwater. That was the thing my teacher told me, “Try to get close.” So I had a wide angle three feet away when he was coming out of the water, splashing water. I had my camera in one hand with the aperture, speed, and everything set according to what I wanted to achieve with manipulation of the light. In the other hand, I was holding a stove, a flash, with gelatine over it for the color that I wanted to create. He would go underwater and come out, splashing all over the place, and I had to grab the shot and move the camera away. Otherwise, it's all gonna get wet. So it was just him and me, for years no assistance.

Three photographs by Eshel Ezer of a man coming out of the water.

FB
And how did Tony Scott become involved?

EE
That was crazy. You're artistic and you're creative, and you're an entrepreneur with the way you think and the way you see the future, and your ability to connect to different areas. We were speaking about these photos and we became such close friends, we shared things clients or friends in the business don't usually share. We said we needed to do something with these photos. They have to be seen. But I didn't want to do a regular show. I don't care about going in to schmooze the galleries. I'm a photographer. I have an agent. I have to be nice to everybody and do these political things with the ad agencies and creative directors. I didn't want to do it in the galleries. So we said, “Let's do it ourselves. Let's do two nights. We're going to use your house. We're going to show one photo. We're going to have a party. We're going to do the first night for friends and we can do the second night for industry people.” We showed one photo and we had a light table with some slides.

FB
That one photo was spectacular. Remember, when you had to go blow it up, how obsessed you were about getting the grain right? Those poor people in the lab. 

EE
It was the biggest size back then. It was museum quality. So it will be preserved for 200 years guaranteed. Who the hell is gonna live to see if the colors stay right or not? So we blew it up and the grain just became like, “Whoah!” 

FB
It was part of the picture.

Photograph by Eshel Ezer of a man coming out of the water tinted in green.

EE
So we hung this huge thing on the wall and we covered it with a very light blue sheet. We hung it in a way that we could pull a string and the whole thing would fall. We had to have this surprise factor. Everybody walked in and there was this huge thing covered. People knew I was a photographer so they thought it was probably some picture. We waited and waited and people were anxious. We pushed it later and later we said, “People are probably gonna leave before seeing it. We have to unveil it.” 

There were two important people I invited. One was a good friend of mine, an ex-model, and actress, Emmanuelle Sallet (Pytka). She was in Under the Cherry Moon, the Prince film, and she did beautiful photo shoots. She had a very famous perfume campaign in Vogue and Elle. She moved to LA and I met her at the agency and said, “Oh my god, I have to shoot this girl. Who is she?” We became best friends. I have amazing photos of her. She got married to one of the top commercial directors, Joe Pytka. Back then he was doing the Pepsi commercials with Michael Jackson. He was the biggest commercial director.

FB
He’s also a wild man and really hard to work for.

EE
Their story is crazy because she worked on the set with him on the Pepsi commercial and he threw her off the set and then apologized and took her for dinner. And married ever after. 

FB
My first wife worked with Joe and he loved her because she was so expressive. But, he was a bear to work with, though if you gave a lot, he loved you and would work with you over and over. I heard stories about anybody who wasn't in front of the camera, certainly, if you were in front of the camera, you were at risk, but anything around the camera you were definitely a target.

EE
I had never met Joe before but I invited Emmanuelle and I asked her to bring him because I knew who he was. Then, I was standing next to the photo speaking with the people who gave me my first shot in L.A. Tony Lane and Nancy Donald, the co-creative directors at CBS Records. I shot album covers with them. They knew me as a fashion photographer who was shooting rock bands so they were asking me about the photo, “Okay, Eschel, we know you shoot rock bands, what is this?” 

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony Scott coming in. Tony was a friend because I worked with his ex-girlfriend, Tanya and he loved the photos. I shot crazy photos for some editorial and she brought them home and Tony saw them and said, “I have to meet this photographer.” So Tony and I became friends and I invited him and Tanya to come to our opening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony coming with his red baseball cap and I saw him coming closer to the photo and then stepping backwards. Then coming in again and going backward. With his heavy British accent, he said “Eschel, Eschel, what is it?” I said, “Tony, what do you mean? It's a photo”. He said “No, but what is it? Is it a photo or a painting? I cannot decide.” I said “Tony, It’s a photo.” He said, “So how did you do the grain?” 

He went in and out to see the little parts of how the film was breaking. I shot it on high, extreme grain 35 millimeter film so when we blew it up that big it became like a painting. So Tony asked what I needed to finish the whole show and I said, “Well, I need money.” He said, “You'll have the money. Let's have a meeting.” So I went to meet him at Paramount, he was editing Days of Thunder at the time, and he said, “I want to do more. I want to buy it.” I said, “What do you mean you want to buy it? You can't. It’s Frank's photo.” That was our arrangement. 

Eight photographs by Eshel Ezer of a man coming out of the water.

FB
I wanted the first one. Remember we framed it and you didn't sign it? That was so stupid. I should’ve had you sign it first.

EE
We're so dumb. But anyway, I said, “That's my friend's photo. It doesn't matter how much you pay.” He said, “I need one.” I responded, “Well, I'm not making another one.” So Tony said, “I need to talk to Frank. I want to buy it for Anthony Quinn’s 75th birthday.” He had just finished shooting the movie Revenge with Quinn and Kevin Costner and Tony wanted this photo for Quinn’s 75th birthday. So he flew me to New York and I printed another photo at a different lab. I killed them because they were not used to the size and the preciseness of the colors and the grain and all those things. But we printed it, framed it, and I personally delivered it to Anthony Quinn’s penthouse in New York. The son opened the door and we delivered it as a present from Tony Scott and I left and that's it. And it remained a great story.

FB
I was also just reminded of the crazy story of when the two of us went to a party and we had just seen Dead Calm, which we were always talking about. “That movie is amazing! The girl is stunning!” 

EE
And she walks in with a girlfriend. Nicole Kidman. Our jaws just dropped.

FB
Well, I had to go talk to her. I was so nervous and I started screwing that up. Luckily you were there. You were calm like, “Yeah, we saw the movie.”

EE
She was so impressed that we loved the movie.

FB
She was so into it because it was her first trip to America. She was stunning. She was engaging. Sweet. Somehow, I got her phone number. I said, “We should go get coffee.” She goes, “Yeah, sure. I would like to.” I’m like, “You would?!”

EE
For us, she was the star of Dead Calm. For her, we were the Hollywood people and she had no clue how to get around in Hollywood. 

I met her again maybe a year later. I shot this little commercial in Miami and then we drove up the coast to Daytona where Tony Scott was shooting Days of Thunder. It was the weekend they did the Daytona 500 scene. Nicole and I had lunch together on the set and Tom Cruise was there. 

Still image of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise from Tony Scott's 1990 action film "Days of Thunder".

FB
I talked to her two or three times trying to set up when we could get together because she had a hard out. She was leaving on a Friday and I'm like, “Okay, let's try and figure out when we can get together.” She goes, “Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not gonna be able to get together with you. I'm doing this movie Days of Thunder and I'm flying down Florida and Tom Cruise is in it.” As soon as she said Tom Cruise, I thought, “That's it. Tom Cruise is going to fall in love with her.” Easiest prediction I've ever made.

EE
On the set, Tom had a flu or something and then a few days later Nicole had the flu and everybody knew that they were dating.

FB
That's funny. 

EE
Insights from Tony Scott and his second assistant director, Scott Metcalfe.

FB
You also do really beautiful black and white photographs. You were kind enough to come to Minnesota and shoot black-and-white photos of me and Sandra prepping before we got married. Then you took a bunch of photos at the wedding.

EE
I used a red filter to get the clouds to pop like crazy. It makes the blue skies extremely dark and the contrast with the white clouds is just unbelievable. It enhances the contrast on the skin. You look amazing, bro. 

Collection of photographs by Eshel Ezer of Frank Beddor and Sandra in a wedding dress and tuxedo.

FB
That’s what 20-year-old skin looks like. 

You also did a photograph in Minneapolis with my two brothers, Steven and David, and my sister Michelle. We wanted to have a photo as a gift for my parents for their 50th anniversary. 

EE
We flew together to Minnesota to shoot it and I had to dig through your siblings for their characters. Who is what? Where is the complexity? Of the four siblings, there is a reason why each one of you is doing what you're doing. There is a reason why she's on the sofa like a princess in the front. We worked and we used this technique again so her skin has the same tone as Julia in the Wicked photos.

FB
Completely different from what you did with There's Something About Mary but it's a style and a technique that you have used throughout your career.

EE
It was important to bring out the personality. I remember the conversations with each one of you. You look like a Hollywood producer.

FB
I still have that jacket. I wore it two days ago.

EE
That’s crazy. It looks good. There is a reason why he's jumping in the air. The one you blew up was the one where his legs are spread out and he looks like an X-Wing. The skies are brighter and you can see the branches. With this brother, we did some with the helmet on.

Photograph by Eshel Ezer of Frank Beddor, Steven Beddor, David Beddor, and Michelle Beddor outside and in various poses.

FB
Yes, but my mother would have lost it. She could barely accept that three of us were not smiling, at least Michelle was smiling. My mom hated photographs where the kids weren't smiling but to your point, it does capture an essence. 

EE
It was a very, very unique, exhausting job to understand the characters.

FB
You have to deal with somebody else's family. Can you imagine? 

EE
It was a great experience. Everything we did was with a lot of fun and joy.

FB
Then remember you came up for the Seattle Film Festival and shot PR for Wicked. 

EE
There are shots of Julia lying on the carpet, right? We had to show her and Patrick from above. They can be in any magazine. 

FB
Do you miss it? You're no longer shooting photographs but I'm really struck by the level of professionalism, passion, and artistry, as if we just did this two weeks ago.

EE
It was a major part of my life for 25 years. But the fact it has been doesn't mean the stimulation is not sustained. It didn't fade. It faded as a profession because I didn't want to do it anymore. I got tired of doing it and, at some point, I didn't see the purpose anymore.

FB
Also a big physical toll on you.

EE
Crazy physical toll. Big toll on the family. It got to me that I would have to take pictures for the rest of my life if I was gonna make a living. I felt enough was enough. I was in the studio shooting cosmetic catalogs or swimwear catalogs and most of them were always artistic. There was a photo I took in Africa with an American model in a bathing suit holding a cheetah out in the wild. It looks like theater and it’s beautiful. But I started asking myself, “What is it for? What's the purpose?” It's a catalog and a catalog is for people to buy. So it's not really the art of generating something for others. 

FB
We all transition. We all have to evolve. 

Photograph of Frank Beddor and Eshel Ezer looking at pictures and recording the podcast.

EE
I even felt that at some point, most women around the world are not models. When I take pictures that extreme, “Does it do good to women or bad?” I got to a point where I felt it was bad.

FB
People are not that perfect.

EE
Nobody's that perfect and nobody can be reached or touched like this. It was also the feeling of, when I'm on the set, I know what I want to get and I can get it. Because technically I know what I'm doing. But also emotionally, I know what I'm doing. I know how to talk to the models to get the sensuality or the feelings and emotions I want to get. But when the job is over, I'm done. I walk away. It left emptiness and I needed to move on and do other things. 

To be able to build two good careers is not easy. It’s hard to do one over a lifetime but it's not over yet. So who knows where we are going? I'm in the middle of a very exciting career that I have become very good at and it's great to have these different colors inside as a person. 

FB
We're really taking a step back to a period of time that was really creative for me. I produced two movies back to back. A lot of other opportunities came along through producing those movies and you were right there and I was listening to you and your aspirations. Then I transitioned into writing The Looking Glass Wars series and all the art that came with that. Hopefully, the artistry continues even if the medium changes. 

EE
We’re such good friends and we've been friends for decades and it's crazy. No matter how many years go by, we stay so close. But it has always been your level of understanding the business, but also having the creative eye, and the sensitivity to judge and know what's good, what's not good, what you're looking for. So seeing your artistic side inside your creative way, also as a businessman, I think made it very nice for us and easy for us to connect, because we could speak about things.

Photograph of Frank Beddor and Eshel Ezer.

FB
It’s about choices. When you're making creative choices, some are elevated, you hope they're elevated, but you're still making a choice. So when you point to this one photo, where I put a dot and you put an “X” was because we both went, “Yeah, that is a choice.” We want to use those choices. We've had a lot of creative choices. Whether it was There’s Something About Mary, working with Julia for Wicked, doing Birdbath together, or something very personal like my first wedding.

EE
It's funny, my oldest son is sitting next to us and hearing stories that he has never heard before. I have to tell you we always had crazy laughs and hit it off together on a crazy level with where we could go as friends.

FB
You were my first male friend, my first guy friend, that I felt was an intimate relationship in the sense of, I'm letting my guard down. That is where the artistry comes from, the vulnerability. We're making choices, some good, some bad, and we did that for very many years. To your point, coming back here and having this conversation is crazy. So thank you for spending some time with us and sharing your stories and creativity.

EE
What a great idea. It was fun being here. Thank you.

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast! If you’d like to hear Gerard’s excellent narration of The Looking Glass Wars, click here!

All Things Alice: Interview With Jared Hoffman

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jared Hoffman join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Frank Beddor
Welcome to the show, Jared Hoffman. I'm happy to have you on. I wanted to chat with you about your background and your aspirations. My friend Ed Decter was on the show and he was your professor at AFI. He called and suggested we work together, which has been a fantastic collaboration because you bring a unique sense of humor to the blogs that I don't have. Whenever somebody has a unique voice, I always like to exploit it for as little money as possible and I feel like I've done a really good job with you. But it turns out that I pay you more for blogs than anybody else. 

Jared Hoffman
I'm glad you've also said that now so that everyone can resent my blogs.

FB
I wanted to go back to your pilot because it was a very funny take on high school, which is a genre I've played around in a little bit. Tell me about your experience at the American Film Institute. I'm imagining they said to write something personal or meaningful, something you know a lot about. Is that why you wrote that pilot? Or was there something you were working out that you didn't work out with your therapist?

JH
I'm always working stuff out with my therapists. That's an awful process. But in my first year at AFI, the things I wrote weren't necessarily personal things. Everything I write has some kind of personal flair to it but there was no real connection. And there was no “Why are you writing this?” It was mostly just, “Oh, I liked the idea. It seemed like a fun thing to chase.” But when I was going into year two, I realized that while I had samples that I liked, there was nothing I was really proud of besides a spec script I wrote, which is only useful for writing contests right now. They’re not used at all in the industry anymore. Unless you write a 9/11 Seinfeld episode.

FB
Do you mean that in terms of television or that you can't sell a spec script?

Still image from the Netflix animated comedy series "Big Mouth" featuring the characters Nick, Andrew, and Jay.

JH
A TV spec. I've noticed the term, for some reason, keeps changing but in my first year, we had a TV comedy writing class and a TV drama writing class. I wrote a Big Mouth episode. We were writing an episode of an existing show. That was really the only thing that I was like, “This is good.” It was the only thing that was actually based on any kind of truth about me. Once that clicked for me, it was like, okay, everything has to be incredibly personal for it to be good, at least at this point in my career. So going into my second year, I knew I had to write something personal, specifically for Ed's group because Ed wanted us to have some ideas coming in. 

Ed handpicks his group based on what everyone else has written and because of their personal stories. Ed's awesome and he's very aware of what will help you find success in the industry in the sense, especially as a young writer. I could write some crazy fantasy, high-concept thing that has nothing to do with me and it'll end up in the pile of high-fantasy concept things that a bunch of other new writers have and no one's gonna take a second glance at it.

FB
Right, right. 

JH
Ed wanted a paragraph pitch on what you wanted to write about. Also, I knew Ed before going to AFI. He's actually the one who convinced me to apply to AFI. I remember in the first class he said, “Just so you know, Jared is friends with my daughter, proceed.” Then John, one of your assistants, pitched an idea about a knight because he has a history background. I think he got to the second sentence before Ed interrupted him and said, “No to all of that.” Then we just went to the next person. I was like, “Oh, cool. You said that we know each other. That's great. Now everyone hates me.” I think Ed only passed two out of the six ideas to go on to the next steps. It took people weeks to get past even the idea phase to the beat phase of the script. 

I always said, “Ed bullied me into writing well.” He didn't really bully us, but sitting in the beat phase was probably the most frustrating thing ever for everyone in that class. Everyone was just like, “I just want to figure it out on the page.” And Ed was like, “I don't want that. That's not how this works.” I came up with an idea based on my therapeutic boarding school when I was 16 and the idea was a kid starts hearing the voice of Christ, but he's basically at a place where if you were to say that you'd end up in the padded room. So it evolved from back to my original high school. I'm not going to say the name but it was a madhouse. I have really fun stories about that place. It was an all-boys Catholic school and everyone was weirdly really close and very touchy when there were no girls around.

FB
That’s scary territory for me for a couple of reasons. One, I went to an all-boys Catholic school for my freshman year of high school and then St. Margaret's, an all-girls school, merged with mine. I'm going to go back and just quickly take issue with the notion that Ed was bullying you because that's what my kids say. I have a senior and a sophomore and they talk about their teachers being bullies at school. I said, “You are being teased. Bullying at school is when you come home bloody or the gym teacher has a paddle with little holes in it or you get hit on the hand by a nun. That's bullying, not somebody teasing you for making a stupid comment.”

JH
Oh yeah. It was not actually bullying. I remember, after the first class, when almost everyone's ideas were shut down, most of them weren't something that was going to stand out. I remember someone said, “You're gonna be alright because Ed likes you.” I go, “Oh, no, Ed knows me. That just means he has my cell phone number and he's going to call me and tell me to fix things. I have more classes.” He was a great teacher. I really wanted him. It’s known that Ed is one of the harder teachers at AFI and some people were afraid of that. I dropped out of college, so when I was at AFI, I kind of felt like the dunce. But it was like, “I'm here. I'm paying all this money. This is graduate school. I don't want the easy teacher.” There were no easy teachers at AFI but I would rather have someone who would force me to be better.

Image of the Warner Bros. Building on the campus of the American Film Institute Conservatory.

FB
It’s not just being tough on the story and tough on the writing. It's the preparation for life in the business. I'm curious now that you're out of school and you're trying to make your way in terms of selling your projects. The pilot I read that you wrote at AFI was such a great concept. What have you learned from Ed? What was unexpected as you're going through this as you’re going down this path of trying to get projects, meeting with producers, writing spec scripts, and trying to get jobs? 

JH
The most unexpected thing was a vast majority of people who go to AFI don't outline, and I was one of them. That's how I can tell if someone is serious about writing. I'll be like, “I've been outlining for the past couple of weeks”. And people are like, “Oh, I don't do that.” You don't have to but it'll be better if you do. So that’s one thing I learned, how important the outlining phase is. 

I grew up in the film industry. I always say that I'm nepo-adjacent. My father passed away 17 years ago and my mom was a makeup artist. All of those connections more or less dried up in one way or another. I've gotten this far in the career not for lack of trying to use the connections that I gained through my family but, actually, the only success I've found has been through connections I fostered myself. Or being lucky enough that Ed is friends with you. The only reason he found out that we lived close to each other at the time was because I was late to class one day and the gate wasn't working. I sent Ed a picture and he immediately goes, “Is Frank your neighbor?”

FB
That’s funny. I didn't know that.

JH
Navigating the industry has been really interesting coming from my perspective, especially growing up in it and seeing how it worked as a kid and now trying to figure it out on my own with how much it has changed. There would be times when they would just be like, “Okay, so this is something that isn't done anymore.” Just trying to figure out what is actually useful. One of the shocking things is how much truth there is to a lot of the jokes about the industry in shows and movies. I had a meeting and I learned that someone doesn't read. I was just like, “Oh, I thought that was not real. I thought that was a joke.” Right? But, they don't read. Someone else reads for them and tells them. I was like, “What? How can they make any good decision?” Well, they do. I guess, at this point, they're in a part of their career where they don't have to read. Or, something else I realized is you have to write a lot of “Thank You” letters. I'm not the best at writing thank you letters. I've always found them to be a little kiss-ass-y.

FB
I haven't received any myself.

JH
Sorry, Frank, I have yours in the mail. I promise.

FB
In school, I'm assuming there were pitch meetings and learning how to pitch and how has that translated to you? Talk about the ways you're trying to get out into the world and take meetings. When you do have opportunities, what happens? I know you had a meeting for that game you love so much, Warhammer. 

Illustration of an Ultramarine in blue and gold power armor holding a battle standard with a blue flag, topped with a gold skull, inspired by the miniature tabletop wargame "Warhammer 40,000."

JH
I didn't have a meeting for that actually. I asked my manager, “Is there any way you could get a meeting for this?” She said, “I’ll look into it.” She emails me back the next day and goes “You don't have a sample for this.” Warhammer is high fantasy and sci-fi and very serious. All I have are jokes. She said, “I can send your stuff, but I'm gonna look stupid doing that.” I was like, “Yeah, no, that makes sense.” Now I'm trying to push the fact that I’m helping you with The Looking Glass Wars lore.

FB
You're so into the lore of Warhammer. It’s the idea of “Get me a meeting because I am so deeply seated in that world. I get all of it. I have the books. Let me just tell them all the great things about it. If nothing else, they're going to feel good about their show coming up.” Yeah, exactly.

JH
Exactly. So my manager and I made a deal. I'm going to write a 10-15 page sample based on that universe. Luckily, there is no shortage of stories in that universe that I can take inspiration from. I'm gonna give that to my manager. I was hired to write a treatment for a producer over the holidays and just finished that a week ago. So now I’m finally able to sit down and write my own stuff again. There are a lot of things I want to get done because right now I only really have one sample that's being sent around to get meetings. Luckily, it's the sample you read that won me the AFI contest as well. So I'm going to send that to her to have a little bit more leeway getting in the door. But I believe, with Warhammer, they're actually making a movie first.

FB
So they’re not putting a room together, which is what you would be ideal for.

JH
Exactly. I believe they're going to make a show based on how the movie does. It's Amazon, MGM. Henry Cavill, and then Games Workshop, or maybe Citadel. So I’m just trying to navigate that. I've never written something specifically to get a job.

FB
It’s a very good idea. Because it's hard to know what's going to work and everybody will say,  “That's never going to work. This is how you have to do it.” But there's no rhyme or reason to it. If it's a good piece of writing and it connects and it's about the subject matter, people will respond to it. I've told the story a million times about the World War II feature I wrote. It’s about the skiing and climbing troops who fought during World War II. I wrote a treatment, a short story, and I thought would be The Dirty Dozen on skis. I knew nobody but ended up getting it to Kennedy/Marshall and getting a deal at Paramount. By the way, I sent a letter. Everybody really laughed at me. That's when there was snail mail.

JH
I feel like with email now, it's become really easy to ignore emails.

FB
It’s like vinyl. It’s nostalgic to receive a letter. 

Where does the writing talent come from? Your mom's side, your dad's side, or both of them? Neither?

JH
My dad passed away when I was nine. He only was a dad. I never got to know him as a person. That being said, my mom does say I am a lot like him. I've always been someone who likes to tell stories and luckily I've had a very interesting 27 years here so far. Or at least interesting enough to get adults’ attention. When I was a kid, I always wanted to talk to adults and have them actually pay attention. I realized the first time someone really paid attention to me was when I said something funny. So, starting from that, I was always trying to crack jokes. I was never a class clown. I talked a lot during class, but I was never the funny kid at school. I was always good at getting essays done. Everyone else would always be like, “I've been working on this essay for a while. How are you?” I would say, “I'm gonna write it tonight.” And I’d do well, depending on how good the spelling was which, as you know from reading my work, is not good.

FB
Even with spell check. So I don't know what you were doing way back then.

JH
Here's the thing. I'm so bad at spelling that spell check has no idea what I'm getting at. But I would turn in these essays and get passing grades. Then I realized if I spent a little bit more time on it and got better grades, I was going to go to college. I didn't feel like I was ready yet. So I took a gap year and I lived in Indonesia for a while. I went through a program that set me up with families to live with, but one part of the deal with the program was I had to write articles about what I was doing and stuff like that. I remember reading other people's articles and I thought, “Oh my god, what?” I just watched a South Park episode last night where they’re in San Francisco and everyone is smelling their own farts because they’re so pretentious and so smug. 

But I was reading these articles and thinking, “Who are these Hemingway wannabes with their flowery language? You went for a walk.” So I started teasing these other articles in mine and they got attention. I would tease the reader. I was like, “Why are you reading this?” I wrote one where I said, “This is about cars. If you don’t like cars, don’t read this. I don't care.” I'm not going to talk about brindled dogs. I still don't really know what brindle means. That was when I fell in love with writing funny, sarcastic things.

Still image from the 1998 thriller "Wicked" featuring Julia Stiles and Patrick Muldoon

FB
You did an amazing job. You did what you just described in the blog where we played around with the upcoming movie Wicked, the musical supposedly, and my movie, Wicked, that I made years and years ago starring Julia Stiles. One of the things I was asking you to do is do a comparison of the two trailers. But what that morphed into was the idea of having a musical come out, but hiding the fact it’s a musical in the marketing for the film. You did a very, very good job, very sarcastic and funny. I really love that piece, which people can read on the website. 

I wanted to go back for a second because I wanted to tell you a little story. You didn't mention your dad's movies. I don't know if you know this story. Years and years ago, these two filmmakers came into my office and they showed me five minutes of a horror movie. 

JH
I have a feeling I know where this is going.

FB
I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” I can't remember exactly what I was thinking at the time but I definitely knew I wasn't going to have the money to help them complete it, which is what they were looking for. Years later, I met Oren Koules. who was a producer and was interested in something of mine. We went into his office and he told me he had just produced this movie, and it turns out he produced it with your dad and a guy named Mark Burg. It turned out to be the first Saw movie, which has gone on to be probably the most successful independent film series of movies. Do you have any recollection of your dad making Saw? 

Still image of Billy the Puppet riding a tricycle in the 2004 horror film "Saw" directed by James Wan.

JH
It’s burned into my mind. They shot the first Saw it in two-ish weeks. It’s wild. I believe the total budget was $1.4 million but the shooting budget was actually only $800,000. The extra $600,000 came later for marketing. I remember my dad telling me a little bit about the movie. I was six or seven. I remember going on set. It was shooting somewhere in Burbank on this tiny little soundstage. I just remember the brick. The outside was brick. Before going in there, I remember my dad sat me down in the car and said “I'm shooting a horror movie. There's gonna be a guy in the bathroom.” The police station was right behind the bathroom and then there was a bedroom. It was all very tiny, shared walls.

FB
Minimal sets constructed to maximize the production values and minimize the cost. Your dad, Oren, and Mark saw more than I did. Boy, do I regret that decision. I should have put my house up and thrown down the cash for that.

JH
I remember my dad saying, “There's a guy on the floor and you can see his brains and there's a big pool of blood. Then there's two guys chained up.” I was there when they were shooting the scene where Cary Elwes cut his foot off. I was sitting behind the monitor watching it. I was so interested. As a kid, that could have been potentially scarring. But the thing is, I was so interested in how they did it and how they made it look like he was doing these things that it didn't freak me out. I was much more interested in how they were hiding the fact he still had his foot. The only thing that scared me was Billy, the doll. Everything else was not scary to me. And there was a toilet that was filled with gross stuff.

FB
Dolls are always the scariest. 

JH
I'm seven. I'm a boy. I thought that was the funniest thing in the world. My dad's making a comedy. I was on that set a lot growing up. I think James and Leigh were younger than me now when they shot that.

FB
The director, James Wan, that guy has gone on to do some huge movies.

Image of "Saw" and "Furious 7" director James Wan, wearing a blue shirt and black jacket, standing in front of a promotional marquee for the 2014 supernatural horror film "Annabelle".

JH
He's everywhere. James and Leigh wrote it. James directed it and Leigh acted in the first one. I remember my dad having a meeting with James once. James was so young and he came to our place and I was so little. I was like, “Cool, this is a guy to hang out with.” My dad was gonna have a meeting with him and I was like, “No, you're coming with me.” I dragged his hand and we just hung out.

FB
He seemed like a high school kid when I met him. 

JH
He was in his early 20s when he shot that, so yeah, younger than me now. 

FB
Exactly. In the short, they had a few scenes which were really great.

JH
The scene in the short was the bear trap scene, which is now very famous. Oren is actually the body that Amanda has to get the key from, which is kind of funny.

Before Saw, my dad worked at Disney and I remember we went to Australia because he was shooting George in the Jungle 2. 

FB
That's a better movie for a six-year-old. 

JH
That set was amazing. George’s treehouse was fully functioning and I got to play in it. For a five-year-old at the time, that was fun. There were trained birds. It was a great time. I remember when Saw became what it was because it always felt like a little movie that could. It was shot in two weeks. Then there was a newspaper article and my dad was in the newspaper. This is when being in the newspaper was still a big deal. They misspelled my dad's name. He had two G's for Gregg. I remember it just all kind of changed, overnight, it felt like.

FB
It was a sensation. The box office performance was a big surprise. Now, micro-budget horror movies take off all the time but Saw just came out of nowhere. It’s rare that a couple of producers and a manager would throw their own money into it, which was a ballsy move. It's one of the rare success stories where the original creators still own their own creation. 

Still image of Cary Elwes as Dr. Lawrence Gordon, sitting in a grungy basement staring at a saw, in the 2004 horror film "Saw".

JH
It’s really an amazing thing. It's one of those things that just doesn't happen. It's wild. I have so much love for the Saw franchise. Even though they're not getting a Pulitzer, they're just fun. I think that's something people want, just something enjoyable and kind of crazy and out there.

FB
Over time as they tried to heighten the gore factor it was called torture porn. Which is legit, on some levels. But as the franchise evolved, they've found ways to develop more interesting storylines. The visceral thrill of that first one was extremely intense. Have you written any horror?

JH
I've written one horror sample. It’s okay. It's not the greatest thing in the world. I do love horror, just as a genre. As a comedy writer, people always say horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. I think there is always a pull for me to write horror and I have some more ideas that I'm going to play around with soon. Horror doesn't get as much awards love, except recently, thanks to Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. It's starting to get taken more seriously. People are starting to realize horror isn't just for teenagers. It can tackle really serious topics in an approachable way. It’s the same with comedy. If it’s done correctly, it makes serious topics approachable. It also makes it feel like you're not being hit over the head with a message.

FB
You’re right. Jordan Peele really elevated the genre with his movies. They’re really enjoyable and scary, but they have something to say, which is great for any genre. That distinguishes it. Then you have a broader audience where people are like, “Hey, there's something else going on here.”

JH
Exactly. I think have to trick people into listening if you really want to say something. We're inundated with information. We're inundated with people posting on social media about something happening somewhere and how you should care about this thing. It’s almost like a care fatigue after a certain point. Everyone's always telling me to be upset about something. If you really want someone to listen, you have to kind of trick them. If you're posting it on social media, the only people who are going to listen are the people who follow you. They're following you, most likely, because they agree with you or they're friends with you. You’re not really saying anything, anyway. It's just shouting into an echo chamber.

FB
Which is why storytelling is so powerful. You want people to be entertained and captivated but at the same time, it’s your chance to say what you want to say. If you do it subtextually they're going to feel it. It's going to be communicated because you've felt it and thought it when you put the words on the page. Then if you make the film or the TV show in a way that lets that subtext come out, people are going to get what it is you're trying to share so badly.

This is a podcast about Alice in Wonderland so I'm curious, before you started working for the Frank Beddor Wonderland Factory, what was your experience with Alice in Wonderland growing up or in pop culture?

Still image of Alice and the Mad Hatter from the 1951 Disney animated film "Alice in Wonderland."

JH
I mentioned my dad worked at Disney when I was a kid. So I had all the Disney VHS tapes. My initial introduction to it was the Disney animated movie. I've mentioned it in some of the blogs that I've written, Alice in Wonderland is not pop culture, it is pop culture. It's become a part of our language. Before I started working with you, I didn't actually notice it as much. I would notice it if there was a specific reference or something like that. But through working with you, I’ve seen how it's just everywhere. It’s to the point where people don't even realize that it is an Alice in Wonderland reference. It’s been really intriguing and eye-opening to me. I feel like I took the red pill.

FB
One of the first blogs you did for me was Alice in Wonderland in politics. I don't know how many cartoons I've seen with Donald Trump as the Red Queen saying, “Off with your head!” They use “down the rabbit hole” in these political cartoons. They often talk about the Mad Tea Party. They’ll put a lot of political people around the Mad Tea Party and start cracking jokes about the absurdity of what they’re doing. So to your point, it's the perfect reference in that context. But then you might go over to music and you'll get a Taylor Swift song that's talking about a breakup and there will be lyrics about stepping through the looking glass and going down the rabbit hole of love. It really is everywhere. I love that blog you did and I know that that was one of the early initiations into, “Oh my god look at all this Alice stuff.”

JH
I remember when I turned that in to you, my first thought was “Okay, I just got this job and now I'm gonna get fired.”

FB
What was it about the blog that made you think that?

JH
In the introduction, I made jokes about how you were keeping me in a cage and forced me to write these blogs. Or how you were beating the blogs out of me. 

FB
Because we had just started and you were making fun of me. 

JH
I thought, “He's either gonna get it or he's not gonna want to work with me anymore.” But I figured, “Well, this is my style of comedy.” I do love writing these blogs. They’re a lot of fun to write. They're always interesting to come up with and I always can go on some weird rant.

FB
Sarah sent me links to all of your blogs so I could reread them. We haven't been working together that long but it's such a big body of work already. I think it’s 16 or 17. 

JH
I have a file just called “Frank” on my computer and it has folders inside of it to break up all the different things that I've done for you. 

FB
You’ve done a series of blogs comparing IPs, the clash of the IPs. You've written about Alice in Wonderland versus Star Wars. Alice in Wonderland versus Lord of the Rings. Alice in Wonderland versus Harry Potter. You’re very funny in those because you're writing it so you're the judge, jury, and executioner. You're like, “Oh, I think Alice wins this one.”

JH
I think I mentioned in almost every single one of them, “This is an Alice in Wonderland-themed website. Who do you think is gonna win?”

FB
Tongue in cheek for sure. It's interesting because you think about the impact of Star Wars, which is so deep with publishing, theme parks, video games, TV, and of course, films. But then you look at Alice in Wonderland and you talk about how it’s been around 150 years, how it’s one of the most quoted literary works, the phrases that are used every single day. It’s a fun way of letting people compare and contrast Alice to other properties and enlighten them as to how much their favorite stories last and are in our pop culture. It's the lasting impact that is so remarkable about these particular stories. What do you think it is about these stories, as a writer and somebody who wants their stories to live on? What do you think it is about some of these genres and stories that allow them to last for so many years? 

JH
I think specifically with Alice in Wonderland, it's political satire. 

FB
On one level, for sure.

JH
But it's also political satire that's a children's story, as well. 

FB
It's also a fantasy.

JH
It's also fantasy. It's imaginative. It’s the perfect storm. It has just a little bit of everything to keep any kind of reader interested. As I was saying that, I was thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Those movies’ audience ranges from kids to grownups. It's because it has a little bit of everything. They're a little scary. They're a little funny. It’s enough to keep everyone entertained. That’s the most important thing at the end of the day, that we create entertainment. If you manage to capture someone's imagination and take them on a journey successfully, it'll endure the test of time. 

Still image of Totoro, Satsuki, Mei, and two other spirits from the 1988 Japanese animated film "My Neighbor Totoro," directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

When I did Alice versus The Lord of the Rings, it was interesting because the Tolkien estate owns the word “Ent.” Just think about the words that were created. It’s the inventiveness of it. What was Tolkien on? It’s the same thing with Lewis Carroll pushing the limits of the human imagination. Putting something that inventive onto paper draws people in no matter what. Same thing with Star Wars or Dune.

FB
It seems to me that these stories communicate and tell a story that feels fresh, but are grounded in something familiar. Star Wars did that. The Lord of the Rings really did a deep dive and made you feel like you're in an alternative world. Harry Potter in the same way. Alice in Wonderland, Carroll was writing it for himself. That's the best kind of work. There are so many genres of publishing now, whether it's picture books, young adult, or middle grade. It just goes on and on. It’s all in these categories and then it's okay, “What do I want to write? Where does it fall?” Somebody else tells you where it falls but if you write from the heart and it’s something you care about, hopefully, it comes through.

JH
I think that goes back to what we were saying in the beginning. They were writing for themselves. The Lord of the Rings was actually a bedtime story Tolkien would tell to his kids. It comes from a place of not telling a story because you think that there's going to be an audience for it. If it's good enough, an audience will come. It doesn't matter. 

These are worlds that very creative people have managed to invent, and through that, other people were like, “How did you come up with this?” I think that's why they've managed to endure, it’s just the inventiveness. With Star Wars, even though the story beats are ancient, it's the world that drew people in.

FB
They're classic though, the reluctant hero. That’s a classic trope. How you tell that story is the most important thing and Lucas told a reluctant hero story in a way that no one had ever seen before.

JH
Exactly. At AFI, they said there were only really six stories. Man versus man. Man versus the World. Man versus Nature. If you boil every story down, there are actually only six. It's just how you tell all of those six.

FB
By the way, you've not only written blogs for me, but you've written some lore short stories set in The Looking Glass Wars universe. I knew you were a little bit nervous about writing prose when you first started because your mom told me you were nervous. 

JH
I was nervous about writing prose. Because my writing style is not that of a proper essay writing style. Those who have read my stuff will completely understand. I like to write like I'm talking to you or you're in on the joke with me. So when I was writing these lore stories in the universe that you've created from Alice in Wonderland, there's a lot of whimsy but there's also some seriousness to it. I wanted to treat your material with the respect it deserves and give you a good product. I was nervous, but in the end, I was really proud of what I came up with. When you called me and said those nice things when I'd sent it to you, I was like, “I have no idea.”

Front and back depiction of a Card Soldier by artist Doug Chiang, inspired by "The Looking Glass Wars" series by Frank Beddor.

FB
I genuinely really, really loved it. The stories are meant to go along with a card game and you're deeply seated in the tabletop and gaming world. You've also been very helpful and instrumental in helping shape that game along with Sarah my producer's partner Marco, who's taking the lead on creating this tabletop game. These all have this kind of collective energy, especially all of you writers from AFI that I've been introduced to and trying to shepherd, between the lot of you, some product that I can make some money off of. 

But it’s really trying to shepherd that creative, collective team energy to create this game. It's really enjoyable to have fresh ideas and creativity and have it all come together for a reason. So your lore stories are for a very good reason. That’s to broaden the world of The Looking Glass Wars and the Card Soldier premise. I've really enjoyed it and you've done a fantastic job. But before I let you go, I'm going to ask for your favorite Alice reference in pop culture, if you have one. It can be the Disney animated film, because your dad worked at Disney, which is a pretty cool job if you're a kid, for sure.

JH
As a kid, but now as an adult, I'm like, “Oh my God, my poor father.” 

FB
If you were a character from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who would you be? And why?

JH
Well, probably the March Hare. I think he’s interesting. I remember as a kid I always thought, “Who's this rabbit sitting next to the Mad Hatter, who's just as crazy?”

FB
I don't think you hear about the March Hare as much because that's how crazy the Mad Hatter is.

JH
Exactly. And it’s not necessarily an Alice reference, but my favorite thing I've written a blog about was the 1999 Alice in Wonderland TV movie with Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle. When I first got the job here, I wanted to pitch a joke article that was, “I took LSD and watched Alice in Wonderland so that you don't have to.” But after watching that movie, I don't need to even pretend to do that because that movie is just so jarringly weird. It’s so odd and interesting. The cast is insane.

FB
Whoopi Goldberg is the Cheshire cat. In that blog, you were casting the remake version, which was funny. So people should check out some of your blogs on frankbeddor.com. Do you have any projects you're excited about? 

JH
It’s just a bunch of things that are in the works.

The treatment I was hired to do, I don't know what I can say about it. Lots of comedies coming, which I'm very excited about. One is inspired by when I went to college for five minutes I  joined a fraternity and I was just thinking about hazing. So it's a comedy about hazing. The whole idea is there are those coed fraternities and they're technically educational fraternities but are not educational. There's an honors fraternity, which is coed. They’re not about throwing parties and all that stuff but the idea is that a kid who has just joined passes away and it looks like a hazing death. So they have to hide the body and it turns out all the fraternities on the campus have also killed. They’re like, “Oh, no, we kill a kid like every year.” The best example would be a comedic Pretty Little Liars set on a college campus. There are these idiot frat bros and then this honors society becomes cool because someone's died.

FB
It’s a send-up of that culture. I'd like to read that. Sounds like a fun read. You could do a version of this that is not that far away from your dad's movie.

JH
Hazing still exists even if they say it's not legal. But to me, I've always just found it hilarious, to an extent. Obviously, the kids that are legitimately torturing people are messed up. But you could turn that into a thriller. There was the movie Goat, which starred Nick Jonas.

FB
Also maybe focus on the reason people connect in that environment and the longevity of those relationships.

JH
My old roommate went to a very big party school and he’s talked about the hazing he went through. I do think that there is some kind of bonding experience. “We made it through.” It's that kind of hypermasculinity stupidity. I think, to an extent, guys like going back to caveman brain every now and then.

FB
My son is at the age and he's looking for colleges and we’ve been talking about certain schools and I’ve said, “This school, you definitely have to be in a fraternity because the whole social structure is based on that.” He’s not into that but a lot of people do it and a lot of people have lifelong friends from it. I suppose you might be right about that. 

JH
That being said, there were a lot of times when the guys I was in the fraternity with would say, “We’re brothers.” I would go, “No, you guys are my drinking buddies.” There are a couple of longtime friends that I did make but there were people I didn't like here. It’s interesting to look at fraternities. The people who take it really seriously, it’s kind of weird. I was straight up when I joined. I was like, “I'm here because this is how I can get into parties.”

FB
Good luck with it, let me know when I can read it. In the meantime, you're writing a blog for me so I'll expect it shortly. already. I think writers who are entering the business write in the mediums that they're offered. You've taken this opportunity to write these blogs and I'm really proud of the work that you've done. Seeing it collectively is impressive. I hope we continue but maybe we can transition into some television work and make both of us a little bit of cash eventually.

JH
That'd be fantastic. Thank you for not only having me here but for even taking a chance on me and hiring me. John and I and maybe five other writers from AFI are the only ones who are actually writing. It’s hard. So I appreciate you taking me on and giving me almost too much freedom with the blog.

FB
I'm realizing that now but yeah, live on the wild side. So thanks for coming on, man. It's been a pleasure to hang out and to talk.

JH
This was great. Bye. 

For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice,  please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast! If you’d like to hear Gerard’s excellent narration of The Looking Glass Wars, click here!

ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH TERESA LIN, PART 3

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 who 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 episode, it was my great pleasure to have Teresa Lin join me as my guest for Part 3 of our deep dive into our creative process! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.

Image of screenwriter Teresa Lin set against the book cover for the coming-of-age supernatural mystery novel "Static" along with the logo for the "All Things Alice" podcast.

Frank Beddor 
Hey, everybody, welcome back to All Things Alice. Today I'm with my savant, creative wife, Teresa Beddor Lin. Today we're going to use Alice as a muse, as a metaphor for creativity as it relates to a separate project, Static, which is a book project I'm very proud of. I had nothing to do with the writing of this book but I did have something to do with the publishing of this book. I'll give you a little background. 

I have a friend, Eric Laster, who's written a number of books. His first book was published through Simon and Schuster and he had about 90 pages of a young adult paranormal mystery manuscript. I read the pages and I fell in love with the concept. I kept asking him, “Hey, when can I read more pages?” Over time, he would share pages as he felt confident in the work, and at the end of the day, when he finished the novel, I blurted out, “I would like to help you publish this book.” I was working on Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X., at the time and I wanted to start a small publishing company called Automatic Publishing. I decided that Eric's book would be the first that we would publish under the new imprint. 

It was an amazing creative experience. But at the same time I was working with Eric on the book, I was also thinking about adapting the novel as a television show. That's what Theresa and I are here to talk about, the process of adapting a literary work and what choices you make when turning it into a viable TV property. The name of Eric Lester's book is Static. It's a coming-of-age, murder mystery, young adult novel. Here’s the book jacket description: 

“When Curtis Brooks starts receiving phone calls from his older brother Wilt, who’s been dead a week, he’s sure it’s to help him find evidence that will lead to a murderer’s arrest. But Wilt claims he wasn’t murdered; his calling, meant to help him adjust, is standard protocol for newly deceased at the Aftermart—a kind of inescapable, ever-expanding Walmart filled with discontinued products.

Wilt’s death ruled a homicide, Curtis embarks on a dangerous plan to find the killer, which soon has him scheming against a billionaire and floundering toward love with his brother’s ex-girlfriend Suzy, all while struggling through high school and his single mom’s poor choices.

Why does Wilt help Curtis win over Suzy, even as he organizes a rebellion at the Aftermart? Who’d wanted him dead? Curtis risks his life to answer these questions, in the process forging a bond with his brother unlike any they’ve ever had.”

One of the things that I really fell in love with was the relationship between the two brothers. At the beginning of the book, they're estranged, and by the end of the book they've come to really appreciate and love each other in a much deeper way. Having said all of that, I'm going to let Teresa read you the pitch for the television show. Then we're going to get into some of the reasons why we made these choices and changes.

Eric Laster, author of the coming-of-age supernatural mystery novel "Static," posing with folded arms in a blue sweater.
Cover of Eric Laster's coming-of-age supernatural mystery novel "Static," depicting an illustration of a smartphone under blue light.

TL
In terms of the brother story, Static the TV show has evolved into a brother-sister story. We wanted to drop in on the point of view of an unreliable narrator, who was Curtis and is now Danni. Danni is 16-years-old and investigates her brother Wilt’s murder so his soul can move on in the Aftermart. We had to really hone in on what the Aftermart was and for the purposes of the show, the Aftermart became a retail way station where souls shop until they find the item that resolves their death. With Danni and Wilt, there are a series of calls that only they can hear and they must work together through absurd comedic and dangerous circumstances to catch the bad guys, bringing the family back together and learning the most challenging lessons about love. When we're conceptualizing a show, we're always thinking about the engine. What’s driving the show forward? What are the characters going through that would create an arc for them? How do they change? How are they tested throughout the show? In the book, there were souls were shopping in the Aftermart but then they went to counseling. There wasn't a way in which the shopping connected to the character’s sense of resolution. 

FB
What you're talking about is there is a particular item that has a deep resident meaning for each character, which is a clue to why they haven't left this way station. Resolving that mystery helps them transition to wherever they're going to transition. One of the big things about the book and the show is setting up the mystery. 

TL
The mystery in both places. When Danni, the 16-year-old sister, digs into her brother's story, she finds out this whole world and this whole life that her brother had that she didn't know about.

FB
One of the things that's not in the book that you introduced, separate from having a brother-sister story, was that Danni is really into murder mystery TV shows.

TL
We really had fun setting up and coloring Danni's character. In creating the tone for the show, we really wanted to make her an unreliable narrator. Somebody obsessed with solving murder mysteries. Somebody who had been on medication her whole life, and then suddenly decides that she's going to come off of her meds and she's gonna take life by the horns and do this one thing for her brother. So through her lens, you have her enthusiastic deep dive into creating a case out of her brother's death that may or not be real, but as we follow her into the story, the details of what her brother was involved in become larger than life.

Graphic of a chalkboard featuring an interconnected web of suspects from the coming-of-age supernatural mystery novel "Static".

FB
What’s really fun is her two friends who are really supporting her because she's grieving and they think she's going through these many different levels of grief.

TL
The seven steps of grieving. They're trying to name it for her and, of course, she has these severe mood swings and they're playing along in support of her while they're on this murder mystery investigation, digging into places digitally and going behind the scenes.

FB
At first, they don't believe her and it's really amusing because they're speculating on what's going on with her. These are two boys who have a lot of hormones and are not that interested in exactly what she's interested in. But eventually, they come around to believe that what's happening is real for her.

TL
There’s a whimsical and mischievous element to the tone of the show. Then on the flip side, with the supernatural or the paranormal, you have the Aftermart that feels as grounded as going into a Target today. It’s a mirror of our world. There's a hierarchy in the afterlife, with people who are obeying or are working for the Wu, which is the organizing power of the Aftermart.

FB
One of the pieces of feedback that Eric and I would often get when promoting his book at Comic-Cons or school events, was readers were really interested in the Aftermart. They were interested in how it works and the characters in the Aftermart. So in the television show, we decided to explore that and give equal weight to Danni in our world and Wilt in the Aftermart.

TL
In the novel, the Aftermart started as just a place for discontinued items. One of the ways we thought it would make a good engine is if the things in the Aftermart resonated with these characters and had sentimental value to wherever the soul is stuck. It could be an egg timer. It could be an action figure. Something that’s connected to an unresolved memory. So when you find your item, you're able to flash back into that memory. Then you can check out, essentially.

FB
I still want to find a character whose item is a toilet with a clear back and the tank is an aquarium. 

TL
We had a lot of fun doing research for the show because we got to look up a lot of discontinued items from the 70s and 80s.

FB
There are things that young adults wouldn't even know about. Certainly, my kids don't know what an 8-track was. But there are all sorts of funny toys and concepts. That’s been fun, finding shelves for some of our favorite nostalgic items.

TL
It was fun thinking about how the Aftermart would be organized. We came up with the idea that it would be organized by era. I certainly enjoy thinking about the difference between our experience in the analog world versus the digital world and how that's changed because the only way Wilt and Danni are communicating with each other is through a smartphone. 

FB
Only Danni can hear him.

TL
And everybody else only hears static. 

FB
Hence the title. 

Why don't you talk about why you thought it would be better to have a brother-sister story versus two brothers? How different might that dynamic be? It sort of plays itself out in the beginning when Wilt is with Suzy, his girlfriend. They're a couple years older than Danni and they're completely ignoring her and they have a sexual life together. Danny is coming in and interrupting. It gives it a different flavor. 

TL
Danni has always been on the outside of love. Her obsession in the beginning with solving murder mysteries and reading science fiction and fantasy shows that she's always been curious about what life feels like for the people on the other side. Even though her brother is one of the most popular kids at school, Danni's always lived on the fringe. Maybe it's because of her medication or the childhood trauma she’s been holding on to and has repressed these feelings. When her brother dies she rises to the occasion and starts to feel the need to do something.

There was something interesting for me about her relationship with Suzy. That goes beyond the attraction between them and the attraction to life, to being alive and seen and wanted and desired. I think for Danni, Suzy and Wilt had that meaning for her. She wanted to step into what her brother had and perhaps keep that alive.

FB
One of the other things that we were interested in doing was maximizing the setting. We thought Los Angeles would be a good setting because it's very diverse. It’s not in the novel but because we’re turning it into a television show, we needed to get real specific.

Collection of four different images depicted the Los Angeles neighborhood of Koreatown, set within a teal border with text reading "Danni's Neighborhood" in the middle.

TL
One of the choices we made was to make Danni and Wilt biracial. So their mom is Korean and their estranged father, who eventually comes back into their life, is African American. I thought it was really interesting to shine a light on biracial families and the coupling between African American and Koreans, specifically in Los Angeles. We have a large Koreatown in Los Angeles and I thought it would be really interesting to have some of the underworld goings-on happen around there and use that to color in some of Danni’s choices and the places she goes to do her investigating.

FB
After working on the outline and conceptualizing these changes, then it's the writing process. I'm interested in how you brought these choices together when you approached the pilot script.

TL
There were a lot of different evolutions and drafts but the anchor and the primary piece of it has always been Danni and her POV. It’s telling the story through her lens, setting her up as the unreliable narrator and letting us in on her thought process. Being able to see her spying on her neighbors and creating this big story out of nothing. Having her be The Girl Who Cried Wolf one too many times.

FB
You came up with that great scene, which was like a scene from Rear Window, to open up the pilot and it caused a lot of havoc at the apartment complex for her mother and for the neighbor. A detective shows up, who ultimately becomes a love interest to her mom.

TL
There was a lot of that. For me, a lot of what makes a show great is creating characters that people want to spend time with and who people want to root for. If you can create somebody who's lovable, even though they're awkward and weird and strange. Especially if they're awkward and weird and strange, because we all, in some ways, feel that way inside. It makes those aspects of herself feel relatable and accessible.

FB
One of the ways we accentuated the unreliable narrator is that she’s on medication and seeing a therapist. 

TL
Yes. You have her therapist weighing in on her instability and her need to stay on her medication. There is a clear point in the pilot where she flushes all her medication down the toilet and decides to go cold turkey. There's an aspect of the show that deals with mental health. It deals with grief and it deals with growing up in a broken family. It deals with feeling estranged from your own family and making choices about how to get back to a place where you understand each other. There can be an ocean of division and silence and disconnect between family members, as most of us can understand, at one point or another.

Static is about this disconnection that they're trying to bridge through solving Wilt’s murder and through connecting with Wilt now that he's dead and in the Aftermart. Danni wants to do something so his soul can move on and reconnecting with her mother is also a big piece of this. What defines family? What defines that connective tissue between your family members when life has gotten so far away from you and things feel so hard? What are the things we do that bring us back together?

FB
It’s all true in the story. It’s true in the pilot but that's all subtextual. That makes good writing because you need that bubbly, attractive, whimsy of the Aftermart and the absurdity of the phone calls with Danni and Wilt. Danni’s two friends, Lou and Jeremy, who are in high school and find this stuff funny. The dynamic between Suzy, who's lost somebody, and mourning, but wanting to post on Instagram about it. There's a high school coming-of-age angst and comedic element to it. One of the shows that we were referencing in comparison to Static was the Netflix series Sex Education.

Still image of Aimee Lou Wood, Emma Mackey, and Asa Butterfield standing in front of yellow lockers from the Netflix series "Sex Education".

TL
It’s not as raunchy as Sex Education but there are certainly similarities with the tone, the humor, and the melodrama between the characters. There's a lightness to the way their friends show up for each other. Despite all the dark stuff that they find out in the clues, it’s her getting excited about finding clues that takes us from episode to episode. Those reveals are fun to do.

FB
How about Wilt somehow helping Danni meet up with Suzy? He’s sort of encouraging it. Of course, she's the most beautiful girl in high school so Lou and Jeremy are shocked when Danny goes and even starts to talk to Suzy. There's a connection between them, an attraction, which is interesting.

TL
Their attraction to each other, both on soul and gender levels, is really relevant now, talking about, “What is attraction? What’s okay?” 

FB
Because they both loved Wilt. 

You could pitch this as a comedy. 

TL
Absolutely. It’s a drama but there’s definitely a lot of whimsical elements to it. Tonally, we were thinking of the movie Ghost. For those of you who don't remember, it starred Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Swayze, and Demi Moore.

FB
You have Shawn, the counselor in the Aftermart, who's very uptight but comedic and trying to control what is uncontrollable. 

TL
Parts of the Aftermart are structured a bit like The Good Place and there's a certain hierarchy and structure that mirrors the bureaucracy in our world. But for the characters, if you think about Ghost and how funny it was when Whoopi Goldberg was going around hearing ghosts and no one believed her, and she just looked like a lunatic. I thought a lot about her while writing Danni. How convinced she is because she really does hear Wilt and she can't believe nobody else does. She's just going for it anyway. That makes her a really lovable character to me.

FB
We’ve spoken to a couple of directors and we've landed on one that we're going to be working with. I haven't gotten the approval from him to talk about him. 

TL
We're excited to have a hot director attached.

FB
He brings a look and feel to the project that I think is really unique, especially in the Aftermart. 

Graphic of a Walmart-style department store set inside a teal border with text reading "Into the Aftermart" superimposed over the image.

TL
The director referenced the Meow Wolf exhibit in Las Vegas. The Aftermart has a very similar quality where there are corridors that go to nowhere and doors that open to no place and things are sectioned and recategorized.

And, of course in the Aftermart, there are levels and corridors that lead to another level. You see souls check out from the Aftermart and go beyond it. What the afterlife looks like beyond the Aftermart gives us a great way into the second season. The first season works really well and we love the idea of solving murders and resolving deaths from the other side. So the idea for Season Two is that Wilt and his friends in the Aftermart, stabilize a technology that allows them to connect with the living. So with Danni on the side of the living and Wilt on the side of the souls, they start to solve murder cases from both sides. So we're very excited about that direction.

FB
With the pandemic and then the Writers’ and SAG strikes, a lot of projects had been put on hold, including this one, and now people are trying to find their way. This is a young adult novel, therefore, it's a young adult show. I see a lot of those types of shows on Netflix and other networks. We are taking the material with our hot, young, talented director, and we're gonna go out and sell it. Hopefully, the next time we talk about Static, we'll be in pre-production or shooting the show. 

TL
I hope to share some more good news with you guys.

FB
If anybody would like to read the novel, you can pick it up on frankbeddor.com. Thank you, Teresa, for sharing your insight.

TL
Always a pleasure. We love talking about our process. 

FB
It’s always fun to talk about getting from point A to point B and trying to make progress as creatives. I guess I'm gonna have to start a new podcast, All Things Creative with Teresa Lin.

TL
We’ll make sure to keep creating things so we have something to talk about.

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