About a week before The Queen’s Gambit made its debut on Netflix, Allan Scott, BA’61, was working with his collaborators on the final edits for the TV series that would soon become an international sensation.
“Editing a seven-part series is quite the undertaking – not that I was the editor, but I was supervising it,” says Scott, the show’s co-creator and executive producer.
Those final edits marked the end of a 30-year journey for Scott. He acquired the film rights to Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel about Beth Harmon, an extraordinarily gifted, but troubled chess prodigy, in 1990, and had been trying to bring The Queen’s Gambit to screens ever since.
“From time to time, it looked like we were going to get it made and then, for one reason or another, we didn’t,” says Scott. “I worked on 11 drafts of a screenplay and I’ve worked with nine different directors on this over the years.”
Some of the directors that Scott had serious talks with included Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter) and Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor). At one point, Scott was working closely with Heath Ledger on an adaptation. Ledger himself was an accomplished chess player and The Dark Knight actor was planning to make his directorial debut with The Queen’s Gambit.
Those plans were shattered when Ledger died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2008.
“We were talking on the phone literally the day before he died,” says Scott. “We were talking about the music we might use [in the film]. He knew nothing about the music of the fifties and sixties [the period during which the story takes place] and I knew everything. We had a lovely chat about that. After Heath died, I just didn’t want anything to do with it, so I left it alone for about three years.”
Netflix, for one, must be grateful that Scott ultimately returned to the project and brought it to the finish line. The streaming colossus recently announced that The Queen’s Gambit, which premiered in late October, has already become the most popular scripted mini-series in Netflix history. It’s a hit in North America, in the United Kingdom, in Israel, in Argentina, in South Africa, in Russia – pretty much everywhere.
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