How ‘Looking for Alaska’ Finally Found its Home on Hulu

Looking for Alaska is a modern YA classic. The John Green novel follows Miles “Pudge” Halter as he transfers to a southern boarding school where he hopes to find his “Great Perhaps.” What he finds is a tight-knit friend group that includes a beguiling young woman named Alaska Young. The book, with its candid discussions about sex, smoking, and teen ennui, became a hit, but it’s taken an awful long time for it to make it to the screen.

On October 18, a limited series version of Looking for Alaska, starring Charlie Plummer as Miles and Kristine Froseth as Alaska, will finally hit Hulu. Writer and executive producer Josh Schwartz first optioned the project fourteen years ago, after he fell in love with an unpublished manuscript by a then-unknown writer. After penning a screenplay that wound up on the prestigious Black List, Schwartz was eventually bumped off the project and had to watch years of false starts to get the film off the ground. When the final go at a movie adaptation fell apart, Schwartz leapt at the chance to pitch it once more as a limited series.

Schwartz gave journalists a quick overview of this fourteen year journey during the show’s recent panel at Summer TCA. Later in the day, Decider sat down with Schwartz and asked for more details on what exactly derailed this seeming slam dunk of a YA adaptation.

“Well, it wasn’t my fault! It’s been a journey, a long journey,” Schwartz said with a laugh. “I kept being asked to re-write the movie. You know, it was probably never an obvious studio movie to begin with and so every draft was about trying to insert different stakes, and trying to make it something that felt more studio appropriate. And it just kept getting further from the book, and I felt weirder and weirder about the work I was being asked to do.”

It was around this time that Schwartz found mega success with two new television projects: Chuck and Gossip Girl. Coincidentally, someone else involved with Looking for Alaska experienced a huge twist in fortune. The Fault in our Stars came out and became a massive bestseller — and made John Green a “household name,” as Schwartz put it.

“We would send The New York Times Bestseller list to Paramount with the YA list and number one would be The Fault in our Stars and number two would be Looking for Alaska. We would highlight it and nothing,” Schwartz said. “Eventually they did decide they were going to make the movie, and they were going to make it without me. That was, as I said on the panel, devastating.”

“I’ve worked on a lot of things that haven’t happened or fell apart or somebody else ended up getting to do it, and you’re like, ‘Well, that stinks, but that what happens.’ [With Looking for Alaska,] I could not get over it. It stayed with me. So that when I heard the movie fell apart, I immediately started thinking about, ‘Well, I know John probably doesn’t want to go down the road of another attempted feature adaptation, and what would a limited series be like?'”

Schwartz said he imagined full episodes based on individual events, like Barn Night, or tender scenes like the time Miles and Alaska stayed together for Thanksgiving. So when Schwartz pitched the idea of a limited series to Green, he was not only for it, but excited to make his own tweaks to the story.

“There are some things in the book that he — you know you don’t get to do-over once your book is published — so there were some things that he had some second thoughts about in the intervening years and he was really honest about that,” Schwartz said. Specifically, how the story leaned into the dreaded “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope.

Schwartz told Decider, “I think that we all worked really hard to make sure that anything that might get flagged as that, that we tried to work through that together. And that was really, really important to him.”

During the show’s panel earlier that day, Schwartz said, they wanted to “make sure that Alaska is a character who exists in her own right outside of just miles of the other boys’ point of view, somebody who you can really relate to now and understand in a way that was intentionally obfuscated in the book.”

Schwartz told Decider that it was very important for them to have a female point of view, so at one point they reached out to the last major director attached to the film version of Looking for Alaska, acclaimed filmmaker, writer, and actress Sarah Polley.

Schwartz said, “We reached out to Sarah Polley about doing an episode, but I think Sarah [Polley] felt that she had taken her shot at the version of the story she wanted to tell, and she wished us the best of luck with it.”

Nevertheless, Looking for Alaska has a strong female director shaping its vibe. Sarah Adina Smith, who dazzled audiences earlier this year with a different look at wild youth, Hanna, became Schwartz and producing partner Stephanie Savage’s choice to direct the show’s first episode.  “She just blew us away with her visual presentation,” Schwartz said. “There’s a lot of Alaska in Sarah [Adina Smith] as well, and she really related to the character. And also she’s a very organic filmmaker…she just felt like the perfect person to bring her to life.”

Schwartz told Decider that he had only just wrapped Looking for Alaska the night before we met, and that it fell upon him to direct the series finale. “Getting to direct the finale was a huge honor and responsibility and the cast was so great. And we shot the scene at the gym where they honor their friend and they do their big prank to honor their friend, and it was so joyful and emotional and cathartic. And we were all laughing and crying,” Schwartz said. “There was just such a relief…and that’s a memory I’ll carry with me forever.”

So it was that Looking for Alaska‘s journey to the screen started with Josh Schwartz, and after nearly fifteen years of work, it got to end with him at the helm.

All episodes of Looking for Alaska premiere on Hulu on Friday, October 18, 2019. Stay tuned for much more on the series right here at Decider.