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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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