In 2014, Julie Oh—then a rising studio exec—settled into her seat at the New York City Center for a performance of tick, tick…Boom! It was one of five that June, all starring a post-In the Heights, pre-Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda.
tick, tick…Boom! was Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical, initially written as a one-man rock monologue. He’d staged it off-off-Broadway in the fall of 1990, six years before his musical Rent would make him famous—a fame he’d never know. Larson passed away unexpectedly the morning before his seminal work began previews on Broadway.
Since its debut, tick, tick…Boom! had evolved considerably, and Oh was blown away by it. “You know when you’re transported by a story because it feels like it was written for you? That’s me,” she says. The evening kicked off her seven-year journey to adapting Larson’s show for the big screen.
The result, streaming on Netflix and in theaters now, is a masterful film with Andrew Garfield in the lead role, and Miranda—fittingly—behind the camera, marking his directorial debut. Every piece of the production—from the casting to the myriad Easter eggs—feels like a sincere and intentional tribute to Larson, to Broadway, and to the return of theater, finally, to New York.
BAZAAR.com catches up with the producer who made it all happen. She’s been busy since that summer night in New York City so many years ago: After several years working as a producer at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, she hung out her own shingle (mid-pandemic, no less), OhCo, and set a first-look deal with Chernin Entertainment.
But for the moment, it’s all about reveling in the magic of seeing tick, tick…Boom!, at long last, come alive for the world on the big screen.
Let’s start from the beginning. What made you feel this had to be made?
I remember sitting in one of the handful of performances that they had at Encores in 2014. This was a couple months before Hamilton would start its first performances at The Public, and it was Lin playing the main role of Jonathon, or Jon, as it was at the time. Leslie Odom Jr. was playing Michael, and Karen Olivo was playing Susan. You know when you’re transported by a story because it feels like it was written for you? That’s me, sitting in a terrible seat in the mezzanine, crying through the entirety of a performance, even the parts that aren’t sad.
Later, I read a piece that Lin had written for The New York Times where he said he felt like this was a message in a bottle for him when he saw it in 2001, when he was in college. I was 26 years old, and I felt the exact same way. That was sort of the first spark for me in terms of, What could this be? What is the opportunity for adaptation, to evolve it into its truest form? And what are the steps to get there?
I don’t think that movie development is for the faint of heart. It takes a really long time, and you have to be committed to it. But I feel like everything that happened on tick, tick…BOOM! happened exactly the way that it was supposed to.
So what happens next? The wheels start turning …
At the time, I was a studio executive. I was at The Weinstein Company, and part of my job was looking for opportunities for adaptation. My first call was to Jonathan Mills, who is the agent who represents the Larson estate, and who, along with Al Larson and Julie Larson, has really been a shepherd of everything that has to do with Jonathan Larson’s legacy. He was very clear with me that it was not something that he thought the family would be casually interested in.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that because tick, tick… Boom!, which started out as a one-man monologue called Boho Days, is Jonathan Larson’s most personal show. He is writing about a character named Jon who is struggling with the same things that he is struggling with. I realized I didn’t have the answer for the Larson family, which was, How can we ensure that this will done the right way?
I heard Jonathan loud and clear, but for me, every no is just a beginning. And so, I thought, What would be the right way to do this? And it became really clear that Lin was the answer. I emailed him and asked him, and he has never responded to an email faster.
Had you had a working relationship with him prior, or was this a leap of faith?
I had been working as an executive on In the Heights, but this was the first time that I had reached out about a new project. I was now at Imagine, working with Brian and Ron, and it moved quickly from “Could this be a possibility?” to “How do I get to London to sit down with Lin and talk about making this a reality?”
We approached it as though we were making a musical. As soon as we had the first script [by Steven Levenson] in hand, we were like, “We should do a workshop,” and so, we held a secret workshop uptown in Washington Heights where we got to hear the music and the script out loud for the first time.
It was the first time that Andrew came into the process. We planned it for the day after his last performance of Angels in America, which is such a physically demanding role. His last performance was on a Sunday and the first day of our workshop was on Monday. And he came in and he threw himself wholeheartedly into it. I imagine it was really daunting for him, as an actor still in the mindset of Prior Walter, coming off of this really intensive role to suddenly be in a room and it’s basically, “How do you play Jonathan Larson, and can you sing?”
Right, super-easy ask. The irony, to me, is that when this is happening, it’s just before the entire world knows who Lin-Manuel Miranda is. And then, you literally had to wait years to get him freed up. And then, you finally begin shooting and the pandemic hits.
For us, starting production March 2020 seemed like an auspicious date. Before that, we used every ounce of time that we had. Lin and Steven Levenson even went down to the Library of Congress with our historian consultant, Jennifer Tepper, where they discovered songs that are not in the version of tick, tick… BOOM! most people know. They went back to early drafts on floppy discs that are all in the Library of Congress in the Larson archives.
So by the time we were in 2020 and going into production, there had been so much thought and care and discussion and trial on the screenplay. And we got a whole eight days in. Our last day of shooting was March 12, 2020, which was the day that Broadway shut down. We were shooting outside of Jonathan Larson’s real apartment on Greenwich Street as the world became increasingly scarier. I’m really grateful that Netflix made the decision to put all of their North American productions into hiatus. Anyone who wasn’t local, we had out on a plane the next day. At the time, we thought that it was maybe going to be two weeks of a hiatus. It ended up being six months.
And then, finally, the call comes that you’re resuming production, and how do you feel? I think there was a lot of fear, but also, especially in our industry, a desire to get back to work, because you know how many people can be employed by one single film.
It wasn’t like we just went on hiatus. It was a constant conversation. Netflix paid out our entire crew until the end of the production period. And every two weeks, we would do these things called Tick, Tick, Zooms. We’d pull the entire cast and crew together for these epic Zooms that were just everyone checking in on each other. “How is your family? How are you doing? Are you going crazy?” And everyone from Lin to Andrew Garfield; to our DP, Alice Brooks; to PAs; our sound mixer, Tod Maitland, would all join. We moved from doing those to playing trivia together. We could give updates on the conversations we were having, trying to get production back up safely.
And it evolved to a place where we were able to shoot almost everything that we had wanted to, including party scenes, including live singing. There was a lot of learning, a lot of conversation, and a lot of collaboration on the best way.
What is your biggest hope for this film, now that it’s being released into this world?
I’m most excited about the possibility that 10 years from now, there will be someone who watched this movie on Netflix when they’re 13 years old and it inspires them in some way. It sets them on some life path. It’s their own message in a bottle.
You mentioned that the Larson family has been a big part of this project, and gave their blessing early. What was their reaction to seeing it for the first time?
This movie only exists because we have the support of Julie Larson [Jonathan Larson’s sister], and Al Larson [his father], and the family. There was never a moment in which we were not checking in with them. Julie is an executive producer on the movie. She was there with us on set every single day, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. Every single time we showed her anything, her response would be, “Keep going.” We shared with her Lin’s director’s cut, and she took some time to process and came back and said, “I feel like I’m spending time with my brother again.”
I imagine that’s everything. And it makes me think of “Sunday,” a number that takes place in a diner and features some incredible theater legends. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen the film yet. But three of them are actors from the original cast of Rent, who obviously knew, and I assume, loved and feel greatly indebted to Jonathan. Did they share with you what it felt like to be part of this movie?
I think this movie is a love letter to anyone who has made their life’s work the theater. The days that we spent shooting “Sunday” in the Moondance Diner were a fever dream for all of us. Not only was it so extraordinary to have everyone come together at a time when theater was dark and there were no performances on Broadway, but the way that we were shooting it, the Moondance Diner stage was right next to the set for Jon’s apartment. And so, during a break, Lin, Daphne, Adam, Wilson, and I went to the set. They had been there on Greenwich Street, they recognized the details. We gave them time in that set to reminisce, and I don’t think the movie would be complete without them in it.
You almost can’t process it as you’re watching it, as it kind of reveals itself. And the homage it pays to Sondheim too. It is an incredibly rich experience for anyone who loves the theater.
Theater is so generational. Stephen Sondheim was so encouraging to Jonathan Larson, even writing a recommendation letter that Jon could send to anyone saying, “I endorse this young artist.” You think of who he’s now been to Lin, and who Jonathan Larson was to Lin. We were trying to layer all of that history in the movie, and it culminates in that scene.
My favorite Easter egg is one that I wouldn’t have known had you not told me, but at some point in the film, Sondheim leaves a message for someone, and it was actually Sondheim, which is insane.
The other thing that I really love is that, in the scene where Jon is presenting his new musical to an audience of his peers, the audience is actually made up of composers. If you look, you have Jeanine Tesori, who wrote Fun Home. You have Stephen Schwartz, Jason Robert Brown, Shaina Taub, Dave Malloy, Helen Park. It was our last day of shooting. To have made it through a COVID production period of 43 days without any shutdowns, and on the last day, to have all of Lin and Steven Levenson’s peers come and commit the time and energy to be there was really special.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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tick, tick…BOOM! Producer Julie Oh on the Power of Jonathan Larson’s Musical
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