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The Wizard of Oz (1939)

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The Wizard of Oz is a classic Hollywood musical released by MGM in 1939. It was directed by Victor Fleming and was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. The songs were written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, and one of them, "Over the Rainbow," won the Oscar for "Best Song of the Year."

The movie is based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, though it departs a great deal from the source material.

Contents

Cast

See also: Wizard of Oz minor cast; Wizard of Oz vocal cast.

Crew

  • Art directors: Cedric Gibbons, William A. Horning
    • Associate art director: Jack Martin Smith
  • Assistant conductor: George Stoll
  • Assistant directors: Al Shenberg, Wallace Worsley
  • Choreographer: Bobby Connolly
    • Assistant choreographers: Arthur "Cowboy" Appell, Dona Massin
  • Color direction: Natalie Kalmus, Henri Jaffa
  • Costume design: Gilbert Adrian
  • Directors of photography: Harold Rosson (color), Allan Darby (black and white)
  • Makeup: Jack Dawn
  • Recording director: Douglas Shearer
  • Set decoration: Edwin B. Willis
  • Special effects: A. Arnold "Buddy" Gillespie
  • Vocal arrangements: Ken Darby, Roger Edens
  • Orchestral arrangements: George Bassman, Murray Cutter, Paul Marquardt

See also: LeRoy's List.

Precedents

The makers of The Wizard of Oz were strongly influenced by the success of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which showed that a fantasy film could attract an enthusiastic adult audience — a trick that earlier Oz films, including those made by Baum's Oz Film Manufacturing Company, had failed to master. Many of the changes made in Baum's original story were designed to recreate the success of Disney's movie; some of these, like a beautiful Wicked Witch of the West (to be played by Gale Sondergaard), did not survive into the finished film.

As a negative example, the filmmakers could look to the 1933 Paramount version of Alice in Wonderland, a notorious critical and popular flop. The film had boasted a distinguished cast of stars and character actors, including Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, W.C. Fields, Edna May Oliver, Charlie Ruggles, Sterling Holloway, and Edward Everett Horton — who were generally unrecognizable under their heavy makeup. For The Wizard of Oz, care was taken so that Bolger, Haley, Lahr and other players were recognizable as themselves despite lavish cosmetics and costuming.

(Fantasy was a tough genre for Hollywood. A year after the Oz film, an adaptation of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird that starred Shirley Temple would prove another notable flop, and ended Temple's career as a film star.)

Background

Making the film

Mervyn LeRoy produced the film, with Arthur Freed as assistant producer. Its genesis was complex, employing multiple directors and screenwriters. Fleming had the director's credit, though George Cukor, Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe, and King Vidor also worked on the project. An early plan to have Busby Berkeley direct the musical numbers never panned out.

Noel Langley is credited with adapting the original book, and Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf are credited as the authors of the screenplay — though more than a dozen individuals, including Herman Mankiewicz, were involved in various ways. The multiple versions of the film's script have been preserved; they make a stack five feet thick.

Jack Dawn designed the makeup for the characters. Makeup man Jack Young had the daily job of turning Margaret Hamilton into the Wicked Witch, while Charles Schram was responsible for the Cowardly Lion. By August 1938, the studio had set up a special annex where personnel drafted from the mail room and messenger service were trained in makeup; some of these people remained in the craft afterward. Still, so many actors and extras needed makeup in some scenes that the studio issued an open call to the local craft unions for free-lance hairdressers and makeup men.

Special effects for the movie were created by Buddy Gillespie and filmed by Max Fabian. Warren Newcombe created shots involving matte paintings for backgrounds, using techniques he originated. Sixty-five sets were used; the most complex was the Munchkinland set. As many as 150 painters may have worked on the film. Four separate horses were tinted for the Horse of a Different Color sequence.

Betty Danko, Hamilton's stunt double, was badly injured in an accident on the set; Hamilton suffered burns in another incident. Two of the flying monkeys were hospitalized after falling from the wires that made them "fly." Ray Bolger wore a suit protected with asbestos for the scene in which the Witch sets the Scarecrow on fire. Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Woodman, but endured a severe allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup the character wore; he had to be replaced by Jack Haley.

The film was edited by Fleming and Blanche Sewell; Fleming worked in the editing room in the evening, after directing Gone With the Wind during the day.

MGM studio records placed the cost of making the movie at $2,769,230.30 (in 1939 dollars) — half a million dollars over its budget. Production occurred between 12 October 1938 and 16 March 1939. (The movie had originally been scheduled to begin filming in the Spring of 1938 and to be completed by the end of that year; but delays in virtually every aspect of the production rendered that original schedule moot. See: Timeline.) Test screenings began in June; final editing was completed by 5 July, and the musical score finished on 9 July. The movie premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on 15 August 1939.

And after

The film won two Academy Awards in 1940: in addition to Harburg and Arlen's award for Best Song, Herbert Stothart won the award for Best Original Score. The movie was nominated in four other categories too, losing the Best Picture Oscar to Gone With the Wind. (Judy Garland received a miniature Oscar for the best performance by a juvenile.)

The Wizard of Oz was a major hit with audiences; the film earned $3,017,00 for MGM during its initial exhibition. This, however, was not enough to equal the production costs plus the million dollars spent on distribution and advertising. The film did not make a profit until it was re-released, ten years after its original showing; in 1949 it earned another $1,500,000 at the box office.

The first television broadcast of the film took place on 3 November 1956 on the CBS network; the audience of this initial broadcast has been calculated at over 44,000,000 viewers. A second TV broadcast of the film in 1959 (at an earlier hour) won an even larger audience. Annual broadcasts of the film followed through the ensuing decades, leading to the film's reputation as a classic.

By 1983, the movie had earned somewhat under $6,000,000 at the box office, and $13,000,000 from television broadcast rights. Ted Turner bought the MGM film library, including The Wizard of Oz, in 1985; by 1988, worldwide television sales had increased to $34,500,000, plus $16,700,000 from the sales of 850,000 video cassettes.

The film has been restored using new technology more than once, including a major effort for a 1998 theatrical re-release and the 2009 release of the film on blue-ray DVD.

Miscellany

Billie Burke played a beautiful witch, at the age of 55; Margaret Hamilton played an ugly witch, at the age of 36. Hamilton found it unpleasant to eat while in costume: her green makeup got onto her food.

During the Tin Woodman's solo dance, a puff of "steam" is emitted from his funnel hat. MGM technicians simulated the steam with a puff of talcum powder.

For the poppy-field scene, stagehands planted 40,000 artificial flowers into the floor of the set on Stage 29 at the MGM studio.

More than 300 extras were used for the Emerald City scenes.

Despite the remarkable aspects of the production, the MGM publicity department perpetrated wild exaggerations of the relevant facts. MGM publicity director Howard Strickling released a 32-page memo that claimed that 9200 actors "faced the camera" in the film, that 3200 costumes were created, and 6200 personnel "on all branches of production" worked on the project. His numbers were nonsense (yielding one costume for every three actors, for example). In fact, about 500 performers appeared in the film, and a thousand costumes were created. MGM had fewer than 4000 employees in total in the late 1930s, and not all of them worked on The Wizard of Oz.

References

  • Hugh Fordin. M-G-M's Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 1996.
  • John Fricke, Jay Scarfone, and William Stillman. The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History. Warner Books, 1989.
  • Aljean Harmetz. The Making of the Wizard of Oz: Movie Magic and Studio Power in the Prime of MGM and the Miracle of Production #1060. New York, Knopf, 1977.
  • Paul Nathanson. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1991.
  • Jay Scarfone and William Stillman. The Wizardry of Oz: The Artistry and Magic of the 1939 M-G-M Classic. New York, Random House, 1999.

External links

Retrieved from "http://oz.wikia.com/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939)"