But when New Line Cinema asked if they were interested in Hairspray, they jumped. “We understood how to make it cinematic,” Zadan says. “We really went after it with passion.”

The pair have a philosophy when they approach an established and well-loved show: Change it.

“We go back to the notion of reinvention versus re-creation,” Zadan says. Sometimes, other producers “are sort of married to the original show, and they want to re-create the experience you had in sitting in the theater in seeing the show on film. That fails. That always fails.”

The two reached that conclusion after years in theater and film. They met in 1975, when Meron, a theater student at Brooklyn College, invited Zadan, who had written a biography of Stephen Sondheim, to take part in a lecture series. Zadan asked Meron to be his assistant. “We found a mutual language and continued from there,” says the 52-year-old Meron. The two worked primarily in theater until Zadan found a movie he wanted to produce—Footloose, a defining film of the early 1980s. By the time Zadan made his second feature, Sing, in 1989, Meron had risen to the rank of business partner and co-producer.

In 1992, Zadan and Meron convinced CBS to mount a small-screen version of the 1959 musical Gypsy and persuaded Bette Midler to play the lead. The show garnered critical praise and 60 million viewers, leading to a fresh attitude from Hollywood. It allowed the producing pair to do other stage-to-TV transfers, including Cinderella, Annie, and The Music Man.

Their television musicals had budgets of between $12.5 million and $15 million. In comparison, the budget for Chicago was $30 million; for Hairspray, it’s more than $70 million. Part of the difference comes from the fact that in Chicago, nearly all of the songs are sung on a theater stage, while in Hairspray, the musical numbers take place in a high school, a TV studio, and on the streets of Baltimore (actually Toronto, where the movie was filmed).

With Hairspray out of the way, Zadan and Meron are finishing work on The Bucket List, a nonmusical dramedy about two terminally ill men who set off on a final adventure. Other projects include a production of A Raisin in the Sun, which is set to air on ABC next year, and a new TV version of the 1954 musical Peter Pan.

Securing the rights to Peter Pan took more than 10 years, because they had to get approval both from Sony, which controlled the underlying film rights, and from the authors of the original musical. Hairspray was easier because New Line Cinema owned the original 1988 John Waters film and had a major stake in the Broadway show, which debuted in 2002.

Meron says nailing down rights is the trickiest part of getting movie musicals made. Some shows make considerable money for the authors or their estates when licensed for stage productions. “If a feature film comes out and flops, that could impact the viability of doing another first-class Broadway revival or a national tour,” Meron says.

Although Zadan and Meron don’t have another big-screen musical in the works, other producers are taking their shots. Across the Universe, an original movie musical using songs by the Beatles, opens September 28, and a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd hits theaters in December. Others in production include the Abba musical Mamma Mia and Nine, a musical inspired by Federico Fellini’s classic 8½.

For Tom Sherak, even his experience with Rent doesn’t turn him off to making another musical someday. “Hey, if someone is making Jersey Boys, give me a pen and a piece of paper quickly. I want to be involved. I just want to.”