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Turning Broadway musicals into movies sounds easy since you start out with a great blueprint, but when DREAMGIRLS opened in 2006 it clearly hadn’t been a dream project.

The Broadway show had premiered Dec. 20, 1981 and ran for 1,521 performances at the Imperial Theatre. It won six Tony Awards in 1982 — including lead actress (Jennifer Holliday) and best book of a musical (Tom Eyen).

DREAMGIRLS’ film rights were controlled by David Geffen, who’d co-financed the stage production. Geffen passed on numerous movie proposals that strayed too far from Michael Bennett’s staging of the play.

After Bennett’s death in 1987, Geffen explored possibilities for DREAMGIRLS with lyricist/producer Howard Ashman, whose film and stage credits include the book & lyrics for the 1982 Off-Broadway hit LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Geffen’s DREAMGIRLS movie was to be a vehicle for Whitney Houston as the key character Deena. Houston, however, wanted to sing not only Deena’s songs, but also the stand-out hit “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” that was sung onstage by Effie, another lead character. That wasn’t going to happen and stalled development. When Ashman died in 1991, the project drifted into limbo.

Originally, DREAMGIRLS was to be distributed by Warner Brothers since Geffen Pictures was based there. But in 1994 Geffen launched DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg & Jeffrey Katzenberg and closed Geffen Pictures. DREAMGIRLS stayed at WB. By the late ’90s, WB was moving forward with Joel Schumacher (BATMAN FOREVER) to direct.

Movie musicals seemed a good bet then since Touchstone Pictures had scored with its 1993 Tina Turner bio-pic WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT. Schumacher was going to cast Lauryn Hill as Deena & Kelly Price as Effie. Then suddenly movie musicals were dead because WB’s 1998 Frankie Lymon bio-pic WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE died at the boxoffice.

DreamWorks finally decided to green light DREAMGIRLS after the movie version of the Broadway hit CHICAGO became a 2002 boxoffice and Oscars hit (six wins, including best picture). Fate intervened and had Bill Condon, who wrote CHICAGO’S screenplay, run into producer Laurence Mark at a December 2002 party and talk to him about making a DREAMGIRLS film. When they went to Geffen, he agreed to have the very busy Condon write a DREAMGIRLS screenplay. Condon sent it to Geffen in January ’05 and it became a go project.

DREAMGIRLS opened in exclusive release Dec. 15, 2006 and went wide Christmas Day via Paramount, which by then owned DreamWorks. WB had dropped out, unhappy with the film’s $70M budget.

Written & directed by Condon and produced by Mark, DREAMGIRLS starred Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles & Eddie Murphy. It grossed $155.5M worldwide and received eight Oscar noms with two wins, including supporting actress for Hudson.