Unlike conventional musicals, where the characters sing at each other, “Chicago’s” creative concept requires musical numbers to be performed on a stage, to the audience. It took Marshall’s simple, brilliant solution–with help from screenwriter Bill Condon–to get Miramax to put up the $45 million needed to make the movie. Marshall has the numbers spring from the imagination of Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), the homicidal, fame-hungry flapper of jazz-age Chicago. This permits the linear, realistic story that movie audiences expect, while retaining the showstoppers from Bob Fosse’s 1975 stage production.
Marshall was a 14-year-old from Pittsburgh when he saw Fosse’s “Chicago”: he promptly bought the recording and danced around his living room. “I lived that album,” he recalls–“and it was an album then.” He became a Broadway dancer, then a choreographer, and eventually directed a 1992 revival of the show in L.A. Marshall pitched his concept for a movie version of “Chicago” two years ago, after Hollywood had noticed his well-received television remake of “Annie.” “I said to Harvey, ‘You need to embrace the fact these numbers take place on a stage, but if you have that and then also have the real world of Chicago–and cut back and forth between these two worlds–you can tell the story and still maintain the original intention’.”
For Weinstein, it was a gamble. After such expensive flops as “A Chorus Line,” the movie musical had been taken off life support. Even after Baz Luhrmann’s surprise hit “Moulin Rouge,” which came out while “Chicago” was in production, Miramax remained nervous. It insisted on big names as the leads and kept the budget tight. (Yes, $45 million for such an extravaganza is a modest sum.) And Weinstein took the slow road to the suburban multiplex, the better to build word of mouth. (It will finally go into wide release Feb. 7.) If you’ve seen a TV commercial for the movie and didn’t realize it was a musical, that was deliberate, too. Marshall knows that the future of a venerable Hollywood tradition may be riding on those big shoulders. “You think, ‘Oh, gosh, if this doesn’t work, then they’ll say the genre is dead’,” he says. So far, no worries. “Chicago” has already made nearly $25 million–and that’s a fact any studio head can embrace.
