She's the wizard who shot both 'Wicked' movies. Her road to a Hollywood career was far from magical

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Cinematographer Alice Brooks still has the feather she found on Will Rogers State Beach the day she told her mother that she would rather work behind the camera than in front of it.It was a big moment.Though only 15, Brooks had been working as a child actor for a decade.

By the time she was 10, she had done almost 40 national commercials, a tribute to Mary Martin on Broadway and an ongoing skit for “Late Night With David Letterman.” Brooks’ sister was having even more success; the family had moved to Los Angeles from New York to further the girls’ careers.On the day Brooks found her feather in 1994, she had just had her seventh and final audition for a small part in the rom-com “While You Were Sleeping.” It was down to her and another girl and Brooks knew she hadn’t gotten it.She also knew that she didn’t really want it.Visiting her sister on sets, Brooks had become increasingly enamored of the lighting crew.

“I thought it was magical to sit on a dark sound stage,” she says over Zoom from her home in Maine, “and one by one, a light would go on and out of very little, you created magic.That’s what I wanted to do.”After the audition, Brooks and her mother walked on the beach and Brooks told her, “I don’t want to be an actor — I want to be a cinematographer.”“My mother said, ‘I know.

Let’s figure out what we can do to make that possible.’ I looked down and there was this little feather.I got it framed and it’s moved with me everywhere.

It’s a reminder of the moment when I declared my dream.”If that sounds like something out of a fairy tale, in many ways it is.A magical feather would not be out of place in “Wicked: For Good,” the second of Jon M.

Chu’s “Wicked” films for which Brooks served as director of photography and cinematographer.Opening wide on Friday, “Wicked: For Good” continues the story of Elphaba (Cynthia ...