It all started with a boy in a pink tutu.

That powerful visual crashed down on then-unknown writer Lee Hall one day in the late 1990s, the product of divine inspiration, or maybe luck. “I had this image in my head of a little boy on the streets of this particular village in England in a tutu, but I didn’t know why,” the scribe explains to Broadway.com via phone from the Imperial Theatre, where the boy from his daydream, now embodied by three precocious young actors in the musical Billy Elliot, is preparing to open on Broadway on November 13. But it takes more than a vision and pink tulle to create one of the most successful musicals in modern history, let alone one based on a screenplay that almost went unmade. So how did a peculiar story that BBC execs felt no one would want to see, pirouette out of the show-biz dregs and onto stages around the world? With some help from Hall, Broadway.com discovered it took persistence, luck…and a few thousand boys in ballet shoes.

Blue-Collar Beginnings
The story of Billy Elliot is, mostly, the story of its author. Born in Northeast England’s industrial Newcastle, Hall was raised in a blue-collar home just outside County Durham, the area that inspired Billy Elliot’s fictional town of Everington. Like Billy, Hall, the son of a shipbuilder and grandson of a miner, was creatively wired, a child who preferred drama and poetry to “manly” exploits like sports and fighting—a fact that did not always sit well with the family.

“I came up against expectations that writing wasn’t a job I should consider,” Hall says. “There was a lot of prejudice and a lack of understanding. So I suppose that writing was my ballet.” But there were bigger obstacles on the horizon than family approval.

In 1984, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took on the coal mining unions, announcing that, in order to subsidize the industry, the government would close 20 British mines, terminating tens of thousands of jobs. The announcement enraged workers and triggered the 1984 Miners’ Strike, which sparked a class war in Hall’s own backyard.

“There was a split in the 1980s: the prosperous South, and a depressed economy in the North where the big industries were,” explains Hall. “Times were incredibly hard.” Mining families went for an entire year without wages. Non-mining families (Hall’s included) held fundraisers to provide strikers with food and clothing. Meanwhile, pickets sparked violence across the country between protestors, “scabbers” (workers who broke the strike for wages) and government controlled police. “It felt like there was a civil war coming,” Hall recalls.

The strike, no real-life musical, did not have a happy ending. On March 3, 1985, Thatcher’s pit closure program won; the strike ended and mines began to close around the country. “There were about half a million miners before the strike,” Hall says. “I think the number now is just in the thousands. It was a watershed moment in British history.”

The Boy in the Tutu
The strike and its scars deeply affected Hall. After departing Newcastle as a young aspiring playwright, he began to shape the story of boy with a dream from a village in turmoil.

“The story was about my childhood, but I thought writing might be boring to watch on stage or film,” he explains with a laugh. Cue the vision of the pink tutu. “It came together once I worked out what that boy’s story could be. Dancing and ballet seemed a good metaphor for wanting to write.” The first draft of Billy Elliot (in which Billy’s Mum was still alive) was finished within three weeks.

The devil was in the details. The long script needed trimming. (Mum was the first to go, becoming Dead Mum, as she’s lovingly called in the stage version.) Hall also interviewed Royal Ballet School students from small villages, fleshing out his story with their experiences. The refined screenplay found support at BBC Films. Then someone hit the brakes.

“[The BBC] said ‘Nobody will watch a film about a miner’s strike, and they certainly won’t watch a film about a boy who wants to be a ballet dancer!’” Hall recalls. “I thought, ‘Have I gone mad? Why did I write a movie no one wants to see?’” Luckily, his next call was to old friend and successful stage director Stephen Daldry, who volunteered to direct the piece himself. Via a previous development deal with Working Title Films (Elizabeth, Notting Hill), Daldry put the script into the hands of producers Jon Finn and Eric Fellner. Choreographer Peter Darling, a former colleague of Daldry and Hall, was tapped to give the film its vital leaps and turns. Billy was on the move.