“Long before “Don’t Worry Darling,” or Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” or Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Stepford author Ira Levin used psychological horror to raise unsettling – and still unsettled – questions about our most intimate conflicts: individual rights vs. community pressure, the human body vs. the body politic, and rampant fears that we are all under attack by forces beyond our control.”
        –Tom Deignan (New York Daily News, 2022)

Though William Goldman (Marathon Man, The Princess Bride...) penned Stepford's initial 1975 screenplay (one which Levin deemed good in its original form), it was materially altered by the film's director, Bryan Forbes: “The final script that reached the screen was mine, and it differed greatly from Goldman's.” (Bryan Forbes, 1998)

Levin was “not crazy about the movie,” telling legendary talk host Larry King in 1991 “...there are a lot of things in the movie that really don't make sense, in terms of the basic premise.”

Lost entirely in the film is the book's examination of an issue sharing space on the national front-burners then (as now) with feminism — race. While it's widely considered that 2017's "Get Out" newly brought race to the suburban horror equation, Levin's novel incorporated it throughout, with the third of its three sections even changing perspective from (white) Joanna Eberhart to (black) Ruthanne Hendry. Levin was in fact incorporating an earlier play idea concerning a black family's move to a white suburb into the novel. You can read more about this in our 2022 feature Building Stepford Wives, on the following pages: Hummingbird Circle, The Lady of the Lane, We Need To Talk About Joanna (see "Off Duty"), and Make Mine a Double (again, "Off Duty").

The Stepford Wives laid the groundwork for a series of films that would come to define suburban horror for the next several decades. —SyFy.com (2017)

But it was Forbe's casting of his real-life wife (actor Nanette Newman) to play Stepford wife Carol Van Sant (as documented in Goldman's autobiographical "Adventures in the Screen Trade") that resulted in the film's most significant tonal misstep, and – ironically – perhaps its most enduring piece of visual iconography. As Levin told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1978: “They confused the idea,” adding in a 2003 New York Times piece:

“More than anything else, it was the costumes in the movie that set my teeth on edge. At a lawn party on a summer afternoon, the men are in jackets and ties, the women in floor-length dresses. In Stepford? The event would be a softball game and the men dressed like slobs. The women, bringing the beer and burgers, would be in hot pants and low-cut blouses. Or maybe wet T-shirts. And that final scene in the supermarket! The cart-pushing wives in picture hats and, again, floor-length dresses!”
    —Levin (New York Times, 2003)

Just as Rosemary's Baby's supremely novel-faithful adaptation made that film an enduring classic, if someone were to faithfully film Stepford – as Levin wrote it – the result would be a truly devastating film.