Winnie Holzman writes young women who cannot quite say what they mean, and makes the difficulty funny and painful. We rate her most highly when she stays close to that embarrassment; the plotting of the Wicked films sometimes gets in her way.
Fi1m perspective
Angela Chase wants attention and is frightened of what might happen if she gets it. In My So-Called Life (1994), Holzman treats that uncertainty as something worth taking seriously, and finds the comedy in it too. We winced for Angela because Claire Danes makes her wish to be understood so painfully awkward to express. This is the work of Holzman's we recommend most warmly. She notices how much trouble an ordinary remark can cause.
Before creating that programme, she wrote for thirtysomething (1987). In My So-Called Life, cinematographers Charlie Lieberman and Ernest Holzman give the performances room through their unshowy photography. That restraint suits writing so concerned with everyday discomfort. The narration is less restrained, sometimes explaining what Danes has already made clear. Holzman's attention to what Angela thinks is valuable, but we do not always need to hear it spelt out.
Her book for the stage musical Wicked (2003) supplied the basis for the screenplay she wrote with Dana Fox for Jon M. Chu's Wicked (2024). The film's most useful starting point is the shared room. Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba is put in a room with Ariana Grande's popular, appalled Galinda. Learning to tolerate one another gives the film something worth following, and Holzman's interest in the difficulty of getting along survives the change of scale. It is good material for her, even when the film takes too long over it.
At 162 minutes, that first film stretches half a stage show further than the material warrants. In Wicked: For Good (2025), Holzman and Fox face a more awkward task under Chu: completing the friendship while joining the story to The Wizard of Oz (1939). They manage the friendship, but the plot keeps interrupting it to get the familiar story into place. Erivo and Grande make it worth considering for musical enthusiasts, despite its length and laboured plotting. For the clearest sense of what Holzman does well, start with My So-Called Life.
Biography
Winnie Holzman is an American playwright, screenwriter and television producer. She wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked (2003) and co-wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025).
She created the television series My So-Called Life (1994–1995) and has written for Thirtysomething and Once and Again. Holzman trained at Princeton University and New York University.
