How ‘In the Heights’ rose up to movie size: A talk with Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Jon M. Chu and star Anthony Ramos

Back to the beginning for a minute. “I’ve been working on ‘In the Heights’ half my life,” Miranda says. He’s now 41. “I started to write it as a sophomore at Wesleyan University, because I loved the art form and didn’t see any roles for me in it, besides Bernardo in ‘West Side Story’ and Paul in ‘A Chorus Line.’ And you and I both know I don’t dance well enough to play either of those roles. And that’s it for Puerto Rican dudes.”

So he wrote a musical, preceded by some short musicals Miranda describes as “Larsonesque,” i.e., in the vein of “Rent” and “Tick, Tick … BOOM!” by the late Jonathan Larson. “I’d already been writing it with Tommy Kail (who later won a Tony for directing “Hamilton”) for a couple of years. But it really got good when Quiara (Alegría Hudes) came on board for the libretto.”

“Hamilton” took years to develop, but it was nothing compared to “In the Heights.”

“So much harder than ‘Hamilton,’” Miranda says, “because the one thing anyone from Oscar Hammerstein on down will tell you is: Do not start your career with an original musical. They’re much harder. It’s easier to adapt an existing story, because you can create a spine and see where the songs go. With ‘In the Heights,’ every song we wrote changed the spine, which changed the shape. Which changed the show.”

The off-Broadway premiere, starring Miranda as Usnavi, came in 2007; the 2008 Broadway transfer sparked Hollywood studio interest in making a movie out of it.

“It was about as cliché as a Hollywood process could be,” Miranda says. “We win the Tony, and the studios say we’ll do anything to make this movie. And then we encountered the self-perpetuating cycle of: ‘Well, there are no Latino movie stars, so we can’t make it.’ And I’m thinking, well, if you don’t make the movie, there won’t be any Latino stars! ‘They don’t test well internationally.’ Well, they won’t test internationally, because you don’t make movies with Latino stars and release them internationally!” He smiles but the memory, clearly, rankles.

Years later, after interest in “In the Heights” had bounced around awhile, Miranda hooked up with producer Scott Sanders, who got Chu and Warner Bros. on board. Needless to say, Miranda says, “this was post-’Hamilton,’ and they were, like, ‘What else ya got?’”

mysharona1987:

All of them traitors.