Talking to Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire, author of “Wicked,” talks to the Examiner’s Jackie Sonnenberg about his story. Gregory Maguire: I didn’t know copyright law when I began Wicked, and only learned after submitting it to my agent that L Frank Baum’s literary estate had come out of copyright just months before I finished my book. I had assumed it had been out for decades. I did therefore have the rights to use what I wanted of Baum’s books, but any inventions to the story made by MGM I had to imply rather than quote directly, as the MGM film is still under copyright. (Hence no one could sing “Over the Rainbow” directly, though I could imply they were singing it, and hope my reader would make the connection.)”  He says he hopes to start the “fourth and perhaps final book of the Wicked Years series - we’ll see - and wrap up a lot of questions that have been asked in the first few books,” he says, within the next two months. “I consider that my story of Oz is perhaps as real as (but no realer than) the story of Dorothy…. Which is to say that the lives of children are real, their perceptions are real, and there is a value of truth and sincerity in their innocent apprehension of their lives–just as our adult perceptions, adjusted for life experience and the subtler sadnesses of human motivation and behavior, are also real. I mean never to contradict Dorothy’s story or Baum’s Oz, but to say two pairs of eyes can see the same incident and read different meanings in it. (Witness two children of the same parents, one of whom thinks the parents were angels and the other monsters.)” See how the first interpretation gets done with Wicked tickets now!

Posted in Uncategorized on April 21, 2009

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