The Devil Wears Prada: Studio Development Process at its Best

So, here’s how old I am: I was an intern in producer Wendy Finerman’s New York office when her VP brought in Prada as an unpublished book proposal.  Back in those days, photocopies of manuscripts were slipped between scouts in padded envelopes using physical messenger services.

The proposal was about 70 pages and not for a novel — the true story of Lauren Wiesberger’s experience as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue. (Wintour was so litigious that it was later fictionalized. Lawyers told Fox they had to change key things like her iconic hair, so Miranda Priestly’s silver look was born.)

Fox snapped up the rights for Wendy to produce immediately. No packaging was needed — no talent or director added first. The concept and especially the title was enough to pull the trigger.

From there, the five year development journey began.  As an intern, I did research and took notes in meetings with the first writer Peter Hedges. But there’d be several writers before Aline Brosh McKenna (then coming out of the Sex and the City writers room) finally cracked it — writing the script that got Meryl Streep and became the classic movie. I’d go onto several other jobs, leave the industry for politics and come back to Fox as they were shooting. I remember spending one day on set (a restaurant in NYC) and meeting a young Anne Hathaway (had no idea who she was as I’d never seen Princess Diaries). I also remember when they first delivered the iconic poster with the red devil shoe design to our offices. By the time I was at the premiere (the first row/worst seat in the house reserved for the assistant book scout!) the movie was destined to be a huge hit.

Today, that system of studio development is almost extinct. Buying a book proposal “clean” with no “take,” and no “package” as an OWA ( “open writing assignment”) is rare. One studio exec being in the same job for five years, getting the studio to pay hundreds of thousands if not millions to have one writer after another do draft after draft? Extremely rare. These days, a hot book proposal might have a director or actress attached, get slammed into a streamer, and they’d probably green light the second draft of a script — a sloppy mediocre “movie” would go on the service and everyone would forget about it in 2 weeks.

With Prada? It made over $300M at the global Box Office, inspired a West End musical, a legacy sequel 20 years later, not to mention a million Substack memes to this day. The old school way of studio development was costly, inefficient — often wasting millions of dollars on movies that didn’t get made or bombed. But it also yielded great studio movies that stood the test of time. That system also provided stable jobs for decades (development execs, producers assistants, literary scouts etc. ) and paid WGA-unionized writers enough to have successful careers and stable lives. So, there’s a lot to be nostalgic about, and to feel grief about what has happened to our industry. With almost the entire team back for the sequel (Now at Disney who bought Fox) I’m eager to see it, but also extremely nervous as these 20-year-later sequels don’t have a great track record.