A blurb written in 1998 by Rick Polito for a TCM screening of The Wizard of Oz was resuscitated on the internet two years ago and went viral: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” Eight years before that, during my college years in 1990, space limitations on the calendar film series I was programming inspired similarly curt descriptions. Mine, however, were not funny and only annoyingly glib. For 2001: A Space Odyssey I wrote one sentence: “Do we really need to write a description for this?” My flippant entry for The Wizard of Oz was no better: “You know this one too. It’s not like it hasn’t been on TV every year for the last 25 years.” Had I done my homework I would have known that, at the time, it had actually been on TV for even longer than that but, either way, readers were not amused. And rightly so, because no matter how familiar you are with The Wizard of Oz, the film has many layers, it deserves more than flippant sentences, and it rewards repeat viewings. More to the point, people who are only familiar with The Wizard of Oz from television will have a big-screen opportunity to tremble under the earth-ripping power of those opening cyclone shots, thanks to TCM and Fathom Events which will be bringing the movie to select theaters nation-wide on January 11th.
I asked my friend, and illustrator, John Adams, if he could assemble something akin to baseball cards for the principle cast members of The Wizard of Oz to insert into this post. This was five days ago. Asking someone to do work over the holidays with scant advance warning does not speak highly of me, but the fact that John stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods certainly speaks highly of him. May Glinda protect him from flying monkeys as we skip down the yellow brick road.
The pre-production for The Wizard of Oz reads like a high-stakes game of musical chairs. Directors who were brought in included Richard Thorpe for two weeks, George Cukor (only three days), Victor Fleming got the lion’s share at four months, with King Vidor getting 10 days. That revolving door extended to the writers, with one of the first being assigned to the project being none other than Herman Mankiewicz, a few scant years before making waves with his contribtions to Citizen Kane (1941). Nine other writers would eventually be assigned to help with The Wizard of Oz.
Normally when we hear about a movie with so many directors and writers churning through the production, it doesn’t bode well. But studios worked differently back in the 1930s and, even so, The Wizard of Oz is no normal film. Unlike many of the musical films of its time, The Wizard of Oz blended together the contributions of director, composer, and lyricist in ways that were absolutely integral to the narrative. Only two other titles from the 1930s did anything similar to this: Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933). In The Wizard of Oz the songs and dance numbers were not simply decorative but also functional. Without “If I Only Had a Brain” or “If I Only Had a Heart,” you miss out on serious character motivation. Without “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard” there is no road map. “Over the Rainbow” distills the entire story down to its true spirit. The songs perform serious alchemy and, like the ruby slippers themselves, they are very much part of the magic and story that transport us to another realm.
When MGM decided to tackle a cinematic adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children book (written 1899, published 1900) as a prestige piece they didn’t necessarily expect the film to make a lot of money. Which is good, because with a shooting schedule of 22 weeks and a budget of $2,777,000 (close to $50 million in today’s currency) it would take 20 years for The Wizard of Oz to turn a profit. The film did clear production costs, but by the measure of studio accounting, which adds various post-production costs to the bottom-line (the cost of making film prints, publicity, etc.), it would take a while to officially hit the black.
The Wizard of Oz also had the bad luck of being released the same year as Gone with the Wind. It may not have helped that audiences in the 30s – all too familiar with vaudeville – possibly found the vaudevillian actors and antics as they pratfalled and pranced along the yellow brick road a distraction. Scathing attacks by serious critics did not advance the cause, as when Russel Maloney, writing for The New Yorker, made his preference for Disney quite clear, adding that he “sat cringing before MGM‘s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.’”
Fast-forward some 50 years into the future and no less a literary celebrity than the award-winning Salman Rushdie himself would pen a love-letter devoted to The Wizard of Oz in an essay titled Out of Kansas (The New Yorker, May 11, 1992). You can also hear Rushdie and guests talk about the importance of The Wizard of Oz in a half-hour audio clip available from 2008 on YouTube. (See link at bottom.) Rushdie even claims the film “made a writer of me.” Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman is also a fan, and both make a note of E. Y. “Yip” Harburg’s lyrical contributions (Yip was an idealist who believed America was a land of abundances that should be shared).
But The Wizard of Oz is that rare film that bridges the divide between progressives and conservatives for a variety of reasons. (See Conservapedia link, also at bottom.) The studio brass at MGM was peppered with self-titled super-patriots. Also, Baum’s original fairy tale had something else that was uniquely American, as he purposefully set out to avoid the bloody tendencies found in European fairy tales. The film, however, is not without detractors. Given Kubrick’s references to The Wizard of Oz in some of his films (ie: obliquely in The Shining, and explicitly in Eyes Wide Shut), I was surprised to find out that he “loathed” the film (at least according to his daughter Katharina Kubrick-Hobbs in a September 1999 posting on alt.movies.kubrick).
A good chunk of the enduring popularity of The Wizard of Oz must be credited to an ironic (or perhaps a more apropos word would be “karmic”) twist of fate. In 1956 when CBS was denied TV rights to Gone With the Wind (this despite a $1 million dollar offer) as an afterthought CBS then offered up $225,000 for The Wizard of Oz. MGM agreed and even added an option for annual broadcasts. That once-a-year screening of The Wizard of Oz on TV is the single most important reason for so many different generations growing up with Dorothy and her companions. For those who grew up with television, vaudeville was a distant memory and the theatrical flair shown by the cast of Oz enhanced the fantasy.
For more information on the 75th Anniversary screenings of The Wizard of Oz that are taking place nation-wide, go to:
http://www.fathomevents.com/event/the-wizard-of-oz-75th-anniversary
To hear Salman Rushdie discuss the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-BWZQVSZH4
For fascinating political background: