Feb 21 (TheWrap.com) - At the end of the year, Academy Awards show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will produce a live, televised version of the musical "The Sound of Music." But before that, they've got the Oscars to finish – and that show, to hear them tell it, might as well use "the sound of music" as its own subtitle.

Veterans of the Broadway stage, television and film who have often specialized in musicals, Zadan and Meron detailed their plans (some of them, anyway) to TheWrap in a lengthy and wide-ranging conversation that took place this week in the office they share backstage at the Dolby Theatre. It's the first time they've been back to the theater since 2003, when the movie they produced, "Chicago," was named Best Picture and the venue was then called the Kodak.

(Photos from Neil Meron's Twitter account)

You watched 40 shows in preparation for producing one. What did you learn?
NEIL MERON: The great lesson, which was very interesting and eye opening, is the stamp that individual producers are able to put on the shows over the years. People try to shake things up every so often. I keep going back to the 1969 show, where Gower Champion was the producer. It started outside of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and he had installed a runway into the audience. You had 10 "friends of Oscar" instead of one host, you had performances that started in the audience and came onto the stage …

He tried to do an entertainment. He tried to do a Broadway show. He tried to do something that represented who he was as a director-choreographer. It was somewhat liberating to know that you can take such chances and you can have entertainment.

Are you trying to put your stamp on the show in that way?
CRAIG ZADAN: Well, we're putting our stamp on it in our way.

MERON: I think it really comes down to, what Oscar show would we like to see? That's why there's so much entertainment in our show. In going back and watching a lot of the shows, there were some shows that just gave out 24 awards, and literally nothing else. You get to the end of those shows and you just feel tired, because there's nothing to break it up or change the mood.

So that's why we decided to give ours a theme, which is celebrating the music of the movies. There's more music on the show than probably any Oscar show in a long time. And the performances are not naked. Everything is multi-media, and it's tied to the movies. So if you see somebody performing, you're also seeing a cinematic element to it.

ZADAN: We're very conscious that we're not doing the Grammy Awards or the Tony Awards. We're doing the Oscars.

The key question: If you have more music and performances than ever in the show, how do you keep the show from being four hours long?
ZADAN: The key word for us is pacing. Pacing is often a problem with Oscar shows, so we started to analyze, how do we pace the show and give it more energy? Every decision we made was based on that. Like, how do we take as much shoe leather out of the show as possible?

MERON: The truth of the matter is, you can see a 90-minute movie and it can feel like four hours, or you can see a three-hour movie where the pacing is great and it will fly by and you'll want to see it again. It really has to do with content.

You mentioned "shoe leather," the time it takes people to get to the stage. Other producers have tried to deal with that by giving out awards in the aisle, or putting all the nominees onstage together, or having nominees switch seats during the show. What are you doing?
ZADAN: For the awards where people are situated further back, we've devised a plan to sit them closer to the stage during the commercial break preceding their award. And as a result, instead of taking a minute or longer to get to the stage, they could be on the stage in 15 or 20 seconds. We've analyzed every aspect of it, every bit of minutia.

Care to predict how long the show will be?
MERON: Absolutely not. We're hoping to do our best, like every other producer.

ZADAN: Our goal is to keep it as close to three hours as humanly possible. We know it's not going to be three hours. But we've talked to [director] Don Mischer, who's done more awards shows than anybody, and we've said, "Where are the spots where an awards show lags, and what can we do about them?" And as we went through the show, we were able to pull out 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute ... It all accumulates over the three hours to give you more time for entertainment.

We're taking it very seriously. And we feel that if we cut it and make it as tight as it can possibly be, we have a shot at coming in at a reasonable time.

MERON: We want the show to be entertaining. We won't talk about length. We will talk about entertainment.

OK, let's talk about your host, Seth MacFarlane. I thought he was pretty funny when he turned the nominations announcement into a comedy routine, but he did raise some eyebrows.
ZADAN: That's right.

Is that the kind of thing you want from him as host?
MERON: Sure. I don't think he can help but be a little bit divisive. Some people love him, and some people think his humor goes a little bit too far. One of the great things about having him host is the speculation about how far he'll actually go.

ZADAN: A lot of big industry people said to us after the nominations that it was the first time they'd ever been entertained at that announcement.

And some others complained about a Hitler joke at 5:30 in the morning.
ZADAN: Mel Brooks had a whole career doing Hitler jokes.