The Great and Powerful Oz

MORE people have watched “The Wizard of Oz” than any other movie — and a handful of them weren’t even listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” while they were doing it.

If you’re one of the few non-Amish who has never seen the 1939 classic, you’ll get another chance on Tuesday when Warner Home Video releases the film on Blu-ray for the first time. “The Wizard of Oz 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition” includes four discs containing the cleaned-up film, as well as hours and hours of extras (most of which have been released before). For $84.99, they also throw in a watch, though that item would have been cooler if it also showed you what time it was in LA, Tokyo and Oz.

Decades later, the movie still has a vicelike grip on audiences. And it all began, oddly enough, with a filing cabinet.

As you’ll learn from the DVD’s “Making Of” feature, journalist L. Frank Baum was encouraged by his mother-in-law to write books based on the fantastic stories he told his sons. One day, while staring at a filing cabinet, Baum noticed the drawer marked “O-Z” (just below “A-M”) and figured Oz sounded like a suitable name for a faraway land. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was published in 1900 and became an instant hit.

By the late 1930s, Louis B. Mayer was searching for a property to rival the popularity of Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” released in 1937. Producer Mervyn LeRoy had dreamed of adapting “Oz,” since he was 15, and he persuaded Mayer to buy the rights from Samuel Goldwyn for $75,000. The picture was set up at MGM in January 1938, despite ongoing worries from the studios over the film’s astronomical $2.7 million budget. (MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, Inc., tried to shut production down three times due to cost concerns.)

Some 14 writers and consultants ultimately contributed to the script, and it’s a wonder “Oz” turned out to be worth watching. The first pass from Herman Mankiewicz painted Dorothy as a simple farm girl who exclaimed about corn, “I guess it’s the best food there is!” Other versions contained stupid subplots and extraneous characters, including Bulbo, the Wicked Witch’s son who was going to be forced to marry the Cowardly Lion’s girlfriend.

In July 1938, writers Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf sent producer Arthur Freed a memo urging changes to the story, including having the Wicked Witch of the West capture the Wizard. The writers predicted, “We might possibly get an amusing scene between the real Witch and the fake Wizard, which would beat for comedy anything we have devised as yet.” Ouch.

Many of the memorable story elements are credited to writer Noel Langley. He changed Dorothy’s slippers from silver to ruby and suggested having all the actors who play Oz characters show up in real-world Kansas, thereby revealing Dorothy’s trip to Oz as a dream.

Casting was as chaotic as scripting. Shirley Temple was considered for the role of Dorothy, but producers thought the actress was too young to handle the part. Up-and-comer Garland was hired (after being ordered to slim down) at $500 a week — $2,000 to $2,500 less than her co-stars.

Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Man. After a few days of shooting, however, he became deathly ill from inhaling the aluminum dust that powdered his face, and he spent six weeks in the hospital. Jack Haley replaced him — and used a safer aluminum paste.

The part of Toto was filled by Terry, a 2-year-old female Cairn terrier (though producers considered having the part played by an actor in costume), beating out hundreds of other dogs. Terry’s trainer, Carl Spitz, spent months prior to the audition training her to do the tricks the part required, such as sitting, speaking, chasing a witch and catching an apple in her mouth.

Originally, producer LeRoy envisioned the Wicked Witch as a beautiful, seductive woman, stealing a page from “Snow White.” He initially cast Gale Sondergaard, but when producers decided the character should wear ugly makeup, she quit, refusing to allow herself to be made unattractive.

The actors who remained with the production didn’t have a much better time. Haley grouses in a DVD feauturette, “Like hell it was fun. It was a lot of hard work. Nothing fun about it.”

Much of the misery could be attributed to costumes. Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow costume took two hours each day to put on. Bert Lahr’s lion get-up, made from two real lion skins, weighed 50 pounds and was unbearably hot under the studio lights. It was also deemed so disturbing that he and Haley were banned from eating in the studio commissary while in costume.

Garland had it a bit easier. Her gingham dress was chosen for its “rural” appearance, and nine duplicates were made. Her white blouse was dyed a slight pink to keep it from reflecting under the lights. Five pairs of her ruby slippers are known to exist, each made of red satin and covered with 2,300 sequins.

Filming began on Oct. 12, 1938, and one of the most difficult sequences to create was Munchkinland. To assemble the tiny citizens, producers called on Leo Singer, the world’s “No. 1 midget monger,” as newspaper accounts of the time called him. He drove cross-country, eventually filling two buses with 120 little people. The actors performed the dance numbers, but every line they spoke or sung, with the exception of two, was later overdubbed.

Because of the Munchkins’ diminutive size, the production employed six “human elevators” — “husky men, at least 6 feet tall,” whose job it was to lift the small actors into position or up to water fountains when they needed a drink.

The production — which wrapped Feb. 27, 1939, according to a budget sheet reproduction included in the DVD set — was troubled at every turn. The second director, George Thorpe, was fired after his footage lacked a childlike quality. George Cukor replaced him, but left after three days, huffing, “I was brought up on grander things.” He did make important costume changes, including ditching Garland’s blond wig. Victor Fleming stepped in and became the movie’s credited director. (He, too, later bolted to finish “Gone With the Wind.”)

There were also effects mishaps. Wicked Witch Margaret Hamilton sustained second- and third-degree burns when her copper-based makeup caught fire as she descended a stage elevator behind her red flash of smoke. Her stand-in was sent to the hospital after being blown off a broomstick during the skywriting scene. Even Toto had to have a stunt double, after being buffeted by wind machines.

The film was cut together and shown to test audiences. The Wicked Witch initially proved so terrifying that producers made small tweaks, including trimming the hag’s skywriting message from “Surrender Dorothy or Die — WWW,” to simply “Surrender Dorothy.” The studio also thought “Oz” was running long and wanted to cut some of the musical numbers, including an extended Scarecrow dance number directed by Busby Berkley (it was excised, but is included in the DVD extras) and, incredibly, Garland’s “Over the Rainbow.” Executives felt it was undignified to have a star singing in a barnyard.

To promote the film, MGM unleashed a publicity blitz costing $250,000. In addition to full-page ads in Boys’ Life, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping and others, numerous publications wrote features about the film, including Cosmopolitan (a story called “Hollywood Discovers We Never Grow Up”) and Screenland (which ran down “Judy’s Crushes”).

Promotional materials clearly betray the studio’s influence, reading, “Comparisons are unfair to everyone. But you’ll have to compare it with ‘Snow White.’ Because the millions who loved that great production will certainly rave over ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

Here in New York, some 10,000 people — the World-Telegram newspaper account notes that they were mostly “women and children with a few men sprinkled among them” — lined up to see the film on opening day at the Capitol Theatre.

Despite that interest, “The Wizard of Oz” lost money on its initial release. It failed to turn a profit until its second run in 1949 and didn’t become an essential piece of America until CBS began airing it annually, starting in 1956.

“The miracle of the movie is that we live in a culture so totally different from 1939. Morals have changed, education, sophistication, all of that,” says Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne. “Yet we still respond to this movie in the same way that people did 70 years ago.

“I think it is one of the great classic movies,” he says. “It’s a film that can appeal to you when you’re a kid. The colors are like a comic book, vivid reds and greens. You can laugh at the Cowardly Lion. When you’re an adult, you get the wit, you get the asides and the cleverness of the script.”

Osborne says the film has one other element that makes it a classic: Judy Garland. “Everyone knows what a rocky life she had, and that adds a poignancy to her performance,” he says.

Maybe it’s time to watch it again with your family. Just fast-forward past the flying monkeys scene, unless you want your kids to end up in therapy.

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