When Dana Fox was twelve years old, she picked up the phone book at her mother’s suggestion, looked up the word “theater,” and began calling every number under that listing. “I just called the numbers, and I said, ‘Do you have a play, and do you have any auditions?’” Fox recalls. Most of those who answered were dismissive of the child on the other end of the line, but one theater company took her seriously. After a successful audition, Fox was cast in Brighton Theater Guild’s production of High Button Shoes. That persistence paid off in her career as a screenwriter whose latest film, Wicked: For Good, will be released on November 21.
Fox’s parents often took her to see independent and foreign films, where she caught the movie bug. “I think my parents thought it was a great way to expose me to the wider world,” says Fox. “I loved how movies transported you and made you feel things. I think movies let you travel the world even if you can’t go anywhere. I wanted to be a part of making people feel things.” She appeared in theater productions throughout middle and high school, and, later in high school, she directed a play. By her account, she did “a terrible job,” but, “I loved the camaraderie and the team building aspect of it.” Wanting to escape Rochester’s cold winters and follow in her father’s footsteps, Fox enrolled at Stanford University in Northern California after high school. At the time, Stanford didn’t have a film major, but she enrolled in every film course she could,and graduated with a double major in English and art history. “I kinda made my own film degree,” she recalls.
Fox wanted to enter the film business but had connections, so she enrolled in the University of Southern California’s prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program. Despite not having produced any creative writing at Stanford, “I already knew I wanted to be a screenwriter, but I was definitely too scared to try it or talk to anybody about it.” One course assignment, however, was to write a thirty-page screenplay; she could no longer deny her interest in pursuing screenwriting. During her second year in the program, she was hired as an assistant to writer–producer team Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Wednesday), fellow “Starkies” (as alumni of the program are nicknamed), and attended classes at night.
Later, she worked for screenwriter John August, and soon she had her big break. Jessica Bendinger, screenwriter of Bring It On, approached Fox as a “baby writer” and offered to guide her through the process of writing the screenplay that became The Wedding Date, her first produced film. “I was like, the answer is yes! I wanna do anything! I wanna! I wanna! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!” All Fox had to offer was a short film script about being abandoned on the highway on the way to a Grateful Dead concert in Buffalo (a true story), but that sold Bendinger on Fox’s writing abilities. The Wedding Date was released in 2005, but the praise of the script from the movie’s producers didn’t necessarily translate into good reviews (the movie currently ranks at 12 percent at the website Rotten Tomatoes). “That hurt so badly,” says Fox. “I was really proud of that script.”
This formative experience taught Fox to focus on appealing to the audience rather than the critics. “That was something interesting for me to learn,” She recalls, “Which is that I cared more about making people happy than critics telling me I was great.” Undaunted, Fox followed that up with What Happens in Vegas, released in 2007, and Couples Retreat, released in 2009, the latter of which found her collaborating with Jon Faverau and Vince Vaughn. That same year, Fox was featured in the pages of The New York Times alongside her writer pals Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers), Liz Meriwether (New Girl), and Diablo Cody, fresh off her Oscar win with Juno. “As women writers, we were in competition with each other, but we loved each other and supported each other and were just like nice to each other. At that time that was much more uncommon.” says Fox, who still speaks to all three regularly.
The 2010s saw Fox branching out into producing. In 2012, Ben and Kate, her first television series debuted; it lasted one season, and Fox served as executive producer. In 2016, How To Be Single, her first feature film as producer, was released. Both starred Dakota Johnson, whom Fox describes as “one of my favorite people.” But it was the Apple TV+ series Home Before Dark, which debuted in 2020 and ran for two seasons, where Fox’s career really turned a corner. The series, inspired by child prodigy journalist Hilda Lysiak’s reporting of a murder in small-town Pennsylvania, brought her into contact with Jon M. Chu, who directed several episodes. “I remember the day I met him he showed me the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians. I knew on some level he was special, and I had to try and talk him into doing this job.” When the series
wrapped, Fox approached him and said, “Just so you know, I will drop everything for you and work for you on whatever you want me to do for the rest of my career!” Chu made good on her offer, and a year later, approached her with an offer she couldn’t refuse. Recalls Fox: “I said, ‘I’ll do it, whatever it is I don’t even want to know, the answer is yes.’ And he goes, ‘Okay, I’m going to tell you what it is anyway, and he’s like, ‘Wicked!’”
This was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Fox had never seen the musical. She began combing through YouTube clips of the musical from all over the world. She met with Chu, cowriter Winnie Holzman, composer Stephen Schwartz, and producer Marc Platt on multiple Zoom meetings a week before and during the writing process. Fox got to visit the set briefly during production, which she describes as “incredibly magical.”
“It’s one thing to have an idea or type something into your computer. Seeing it come to life, especially when it’s made by such extraordinary craftspeople, is a gift I will always be grateful for.” Chu and Fox will follow up Wicked For Good (the sequel to Wicked) with an adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
After more than two decades in Hollywood, Fox now lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she relocated during the pandemic. Her mother lives close by, but her father remains in Rochester, and Fox still visits occasionally. For her, Rochester is about the people, but when she’s in town, she visits Wegmans (“Whenever I get there, I just get so happy!”) and Cobbs Hill. On a recent trip to New York City, Fox offered her children the opportunity to see the Broadway show of their choice, and they unanimously chose Wicked. For someone who began her career in local theater, Wicked brings Fox full circle. “I was just a person who lived there that wanted a big life and had big dreams. For me, that started in Rochester, New York, and took the form of musicals. I got to help out on the biggest movie musical in a really, really long time. I wish little Dana could see this.”
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of (585).
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