Lin-Manuel Miranda stood onstage at the United Palace theater a few blocks from his home and, as usual, put on a good show.
It was the first day of the Tribeca Festival, and the historic theater blocks away from where he grew up and wrote his breakthrough, the Tony-award winning musical “In the Heights,” was about to screen for a boisterous crowd a day ahead of its national release.
As the crowd cheered on, Miranda put a positive spin on the experience.
“In the Heights” launched Miranda’s career straight out of Wesleyan and turned him into a Broadway wunderkind before “Hamilton” cemented his seismic role in popular culture.
Maybe it was because the story of overzealous bodega owner Usnavi along with his friends and neighbors didn’t have the kind of flashy “It” factor that turned Miranda’s revisionist “Hamilton” into a global ear worm.
But even that commercial fixation on A-listers at odds with Miranda’s vision doesn’t fully encapsulate why the movie hit so many roadblocks as its budget ballooned from $15 million to $55 million and only director Jon M.
“That’s the funny thing about Hollywood,” Miranda said on Zoom a few weeks ago, recalling his first round of meetings at studios in the wake of the “Heights” success on Broadway.
In the ninth season of the show, Miranda was one year into the runaway success of “Hamilton” and playing a caricature of himself on the HBO comedy, holding all the power in the room during a Hollywood meeting with Larry David.
The irony was that, at the time, the boss chair had eluded Miranda for a decade, and he was eager to mock the system that kept frustrating him even as he star power rose.
Until he met Chu, no amount of agents and producers could demystify the disconnect between his Broadway success and the obstructions he found in the studio system.
By 2010, Miranda was juggling constant interview questions about the “Heights” movie, including rumors about Lopez.
The narrative is steeped in the melting pot of the “Heights” community — the idea that immigrants from Dominican Republic can mesh with Puerto Ricans and mishmashes like “Chile Dominican Ricans” to forge a unique bond.
That mentality was part of what kept Hollywood from truly diversifying until the past decade, and one reason that Miranda said motivated him to effect change from the start.
Miranda noted that while he adores “West Side Story,” the success of the original movie established the wrong expectations for generations of projects with Latino leads.
Joe: Retaliation” behind him, Chu was ready to tackle projects that had greater cultural resonance while working with Hollywood on its own terms. “I’d done enough movies around town that I knew the system,” Chu said.
One of those projects was “Crazy Rich Asians,” went on to gross $238.5 million worldwide.
We wanted to extend the power of the musical, not to just break out in song and dance but draw in the sky if we wanted to.
“When our characters dream about not being there, we’re almost like an art installation in the streets or the bodega,” he said.
“The things we fought for were that we wanted to shoot on location and it can’t all be recording stars.
Nevertheless, the story has managed to meet its moment more than Miranda could have expected.
Now, Miranda is basking in the glow of “Heights” as the first step toward a more stable relationship to Hollywood: Later this year, Netflix will release his promising directorial debut, an adaptation of “Tick, Tick…Boom!” starring Andrew Garfield; the streamer also has “Vivo,” the animated musical saga written by Miranda’s writing partner, Quiara Alegría Hudes.
“It’s a good time to have a big movie reminder that we, Latinos, are the fastest-growing population in the United States,” Miranda said.
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