Too Much InformationThe Wizard of Oz (Part 2 - The Production): Everything You Didn't Know
Your Tin Men of trivia are back for round two of their epic deep dive into the making of the most watched movie in history. On this episode, you’ll learn about the hellish production, which ended up injuring, maiming (or, at very least, psychologically harming) at nearly every member of the cast. The Scarecrow was nearly set on fire — but he was saved from his costume made of asbestos. The Wicked Witch actually WAS set on fire, and the frantic crew had to scrub down her freshly-burned skin with alcohol. A “heavily medicated” Judy Garland was emotionally abused by everyone from the studio execs on down — all for the name of MOVIE MAGIC! The wildly-expensive lightening caused brown-outs all over LA, the tornado sequence nearly choked the SFX team, and then there were the poor prop masters who made fake glass out of liquid mercury.
Between the accidentals, constantly revolving cast of writers and directors, and the outbreak of World War II, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ should have been a complete and utter disaster. How did it become a top tier classic, with special resonance within the LGBTQ community? Why does Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' sync up so well with the film? Did a distraught Munchkin actor really hang themselves in the middle of a scene? Take a listen, and all the answers will be revealed!
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Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the little known details, behind the scenes history behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your ten men of trivia, your abusive studio heads of pop culture hagiography. You're friends of Dorothy in a very literal sense. What we lack in brains and courage, we make up four in heart. I used all my puns last week because I didn't know this was going to be a two furs, so I'm really struggling. I'm sorry. My name is Jordan Runtagg and.
I'm Alex Heigel, and I also used up my ponds, but I also don't make up for it my lack of brains. Encourage with heart until you don't speak for me. Okay, of those three wake up four with anger. Okay, so you're wickedwy to the west.
Then okay, so you channel that that energy? Yes, okay, yes, Well, folks, today we are back for round two and our epic deep dive into the most seen movie of all time. It's been estimated that over a billion people have seen this thing, so let's hope that at least two percent of those tune into this episode, our ad sponsors will be very happy. I'm talking about The Wizard of Oz. It was one of four hundred and fifty six feature films made in nineteen thirty nine, but it's arguably the one with the greatest cultural legacy, and we're trying to figure out exactly why that is. Last week we focused on the background and cast of this film, and this week we'll focus on the production and onset stories. And honestly, the most wondrous thing about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is that no one died that we know of.
I could see Louis B. Mayer having hushed some things up. Yeah, I was gonna say, I guess it depends on what your definition of person was for like a nineteen thirties movie studio. I feel like at least some animals died. What do you think.
I know, at the beginning of last episode, you were kind of messo messo on the Wizard of Oz.
But did last week's episode change re view of the film at all?
No?
I mean I'm mint to mento on a concept of Oz is like a fantastical world. I don't really have any grudge against the movie. I think it's you know, it's like I said last week, it's like air, you know, hold a grudge against something that just has always been a part of your life. And sure there's no signs of stopping just in American culture. I mean, I guess soon like we're not going to have American culture anymore. So let's just be TikTok. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, we'll see if we get access to it in the wastelands.
You know, I am curious if the tradition of watching The Wizard of Oz together as a family has endured into the Zoomer generation. I know, I sound like an old man and the old man that I have sort of always been right now, But I'm curious, I almost yeah, I don't know, curious about what if the tradition of watching this movie together as a family is transcended into the generation below us the Zoomer.
Oh definitely not. No, I don't think so. Yeah, I can't imagine so, I mean, because like, first of all, they don't know what cable is. So like the idea of just like something being broadcast is alien. Why the air it anymore?
But I just mean like putting it on and gathering gathering folks around the family screen as opposed to the little mini personal screens and watching something together.
Oh yeah, I don't know. My family is in that cycle where the only thing that's on in family gatherings is something for the kids. It's bluey, Yeah, it was blue last time around.
It's always blue. It is always blue. Should we do a blue episode?
I don't know.
The only thing I know about Blue is that there was some episode where they were moving that made parents cry.
I mean, dude, everything makes everyone cry. It's twenty twenty five. What do you want?
Music? TV Lancening, the show so fun, the co host is.
Seconds and none. I mean, as long as we keep up the energy of somebody dying where you only really have up to go, I'll trust me.
There's every page there's there's somebody's either being in physical harm or emotional harm.
Good. Yeah, that's how the best movies are made. Yeah, it's not the best arts made. Yeah.
I and even Michelangelo was like on his back, high up there and probably in danger of falling at any second.
Yeah, yeah that sounds right.
Yeah, well, I guess on that note, we should dive back into the wondrous world of Oz. You know what this is again gonna be probably in the running for one of the longest episodes we've ever done, So no fact teasers for you. Here's everything else you didn't know about The Wizard of Oz. Folks, Welcome to the Yellow to Hell. I call this section one last bomb, a final failure for the road. I thought we were done with them last episode, but in discussing the nineteen thirty nine MGM film adaptation The Wizard of Oz, we have to briefly return once again to the epic failures of our friend L. Frank Baum, the lovable loser who wrote the original novel a rare triumph amid a lifetime of lurching from one poorly thought out scheme to the next.
Following the gargantuan.
Sales of the book and the hit Broadway version of Oz at the turn of the century, Bam was emboldened to take an even bigger creative swing, which restored his loserdom status. Allow me to quote directly once again from his laugh out loud Wikipedia page. One of Baum's worst financial endeavors was his nineteen oh eight fairy log and radio plays, which combined a slide show film and live actors with a lecture by bomb as if you were giving a travelog to Oz. I have to say multimedia venture is pretty innovative. But Bam, getting back to the quote from the Wikipedia page, ran into trouble and could not pay his debts to the company who produced the films. He did not get back to a stable financial situation for several years after he sold the royalty rights to many of his earlier works, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By all accounts that I read, he died exhausted and broke of a stroke in nineteen nineteen at the age of sixty two. But Baum's son, who presumably had more financial acumen than his father, managed to reacquire the rights to Oz before selling them to producer Samuel Goldwyn in the mid nineteen thirties for seventy five thousand dollars, which was a fair chunk of change. I want to say that was I think something like close to two million at the time. Ultimately, Samuel Goldwyn sold the rights to MGM Mogul Louis B. Mayer in nineteen thirty seven. Higel, I feel like you got to be the one that tell us about Louis B.
Mayor. Yeah, we alluded to these who I picture I think when the cigar chumping exec comes in, Yes, you know, yeah, the bee stands for bastard. Whatever Uncle Louis wanted, Uncle Louie got.
Uh.
He was the head of MGM, which is the time, the biggest studio in Hollywood, where as the saying went, there were more stars than in the heavens. They were open twenty four hours a day, six days a week, and Mayor wanted them to produce a new movie every nine days. And for that he made one point three million dollars in those days, money which today is a little bit closer to twenty seven million, five hundred and fifty two thousand, seven hundred and seventy eight dollars, which seems low. Actually, what does your average exec make? That that's like ten percent of the gross on some of these pieces that they come out with.
Sure, but at the time he was the highest paid man in America.
I can't believe twenty seven million, that's really not that much.
I think it was like that's the highest salary as opposed to like, I own this railroad and I'm just gonna take whatever it makes.
Like you know what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, he was the first person that earned a million dollar salary.
Okay, sure, man, that is just crazy. I know I had that thought too, but he seven million is like, you're poor by ninety nine percent standards. Oh you're not even a triple figure millionaire. The line around Hollywood anyway was LB doesn't make movies, he makes contracts. And this is that era when they were signing people like William Faulkner, f Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiel Hammett as Raiders, which is depressing. Yeah it is, but it's wonderfully parodied in Barton Fink. Oh yeah, one of my favorite movies about Hollywood. You know, he was an interesting guy. His negotiating tactics included histrionics on on both sides of the emotional spectrum. He's like the mom from the Sopranos. Yeah. One person would would say, you never won an argument with mister Meyer. If you're winning and he knew you were winning, he would cry and tell you how you were one of the fas, and you would put your arm around him and say it's all right. Papa Mayor was desperate to compete with the world conquering success of Disney's first animated full length feature nineteen thirty sevens Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which became the biggest blockbuster ever up to that point. It was also a genuine artistic achievement. Meyer wanted his own fantasy film that bested Disney in scale, technological innovation, and critical prestige, so he turned to his newly minted head of production, thirty eight year old Mervin Leroy, who suggested The Wizard of Oz is also got it. I almost, I almost got it out. Then you had to snicker halfway through. People were named Stupider back then. Yeah, it's Mervin with a Y, too, liesa with a Z, Mervin with the water the why. Yeah, it's too close to Murkin for me, Murkin Merlin, Yeah, Mervin. Mervin's not a name. Mervin's a name, Mervin, the Martian Stirvin, Mervin. I thought it was Marvin immersion it is. I'm messing with you.
Oh, how dare you anyway? How dare you do that to me? In front of company?
Leroy suggested The Wizard of Oz, and it was itself wildly popular and vaguely similar to Snow White, so Mayor greenlit what was known in studio records as Production ten sixty with a two point eight million dollar budget, was one of the most expensive films ever at the time. Nineteen twenty six is been heard clocked in at three point six million, and Gone with the Wind was about to cross the finish line at four million dollars for a budget, and Leroy was nearly fired for spending so much money. So again though, like what was one and a half million, one point three million a year is equivalent to twenty seven to five today, So four million, fifty million, that's like, so yeah, it's a fifty million dollar budget. Yeah, that's nothing.
I mean, I know, I know, but but I mean thinking like what houses are worth now, Like it's not a one to one.
Thing, No, I know, I'm just saying it's insane to think that, like that was the most expensive movie of all time, and it was like what you would used to make like a mid budget romantic comedy for if both of your leads were making ten mil a picture.
I mean, I yeah, I think it's just like there was less to spend money.
On when you were making movies.
Really, so much of it was in house with like people who were contracted for you know.
I was gonna say, they didn't have to feed you, yeah black or a child or a woman.
They certainly didn't have any like safety concerns as we'll see. Yeah, intimacy intimacy coordinators back then.
Anyway, Leroy was nearly fired for spending so much money, yes, to which I say, good for him. Yeah, you know, I mean it's not his money. Yeah, it's true. He wanted to do it.
He wanted to do it real big, and you know what he did, burvon Leroy kind.
Of a legend.
I don't think there's anything super problematic about him, other than all the crimes against humanity that went on under his wall.
I guess, yeah, why don't you read And I'll just look into that a little bit.
Yes, now we're going to talk about the screenwriters. Given my background as a screenwriting major and as of this week, a member of the WGA, I feel like I need to give a little more love to the.
Horde of writers who worked on The Wizard of Oz.
We touched on it briefly last week, but I've seen that they were between twelve and seventeen uncredited writers on this thing.
The studio.
They had this weird system in place at the time where they would hire multiple writers to work simultaneously, essentially turning it into a competition where the producers would pick and choose the best ideas of the Bunch. And The Wizard of Oz is kind of a rare instance where writing by committee actually worked. Early contributors included the poet Ogden Nash, whose work I don't believe was included in the final film.
We mentioned earlier.
This is the era when f Scott Fitzgerald came to Hollywood, so all these you know, literary figures were basically following the money.
It's like journalists flocking the podcasting.
There was also future Citizen Kane scribe Herman J. Mekowitz, whose big contribution to the film was the transition from black and white to color when Dorothy arrives in Oz. The man who wrote most of what appears on the screen is Nol Langley, who worked on the script for four months. He made the project significantly larger in scope and took some liberties from the original book. A lot of the writers working on this project did this. Historians have offered the opinion that this was less out of ego and more due to the fact that these writers were drunk most of the time. This is not me editorializing. I've read and seen multiple references to this in articles and documentaries. Noel Langley came up with the idea to make the whole story a dream sequence, and also to have the OZ characters have doppelgangers in Kansas. He turned in a draft in June nineteen thirty eight with a big stamp on it that said, do not make changes. I need one of those for some things I write and also just things in my life. The studio predictably neatly made changes. They brought on writers Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, a truly incredible name, to do some punch ups on Langley's draft.
And Langley was so mad. How mad was he he.
Demanded that producer Mervin Leroy take his name off the film.
Oh yeah, they hadn't created Alan Smithy yet.
Oh yeah, that's the name. When you want your name taken off? They put that as like a joy mesotype.
Yeah, they messed with your cut so much.
He eventually calmed down and allowed his name to be used on the project, but sadly he was not invited to the premiere nol Langley. When he finally viewed the final product, he was not impressed. To put it mildly. I saw it in the cinema Hollywood Boulevard at noon, he later said, the most depressing time and place to see The Wizard of Oz, I have to say. I sat and cried like a bloody child. I thought, this is a year of my life. I loathed the picture. I thought it was dead. I thought it missed the.
Boat all the way around.
I had to wait for my tears to clear before I went out of the theater. Thankfully, he warmed to the movie when it was released in nineteen forty nine. Suddenly I could see it objectively for the first time, he said, And I thought, it's not a bad picture.
Not a bad picture, you know, just a good little band.
Langley was ultimately named in the credits, but you know who wasn't the Munchkins. One hundred and twenty four members of munchkin Land were not mentioned by name, but instead we're credited as the singer midgets, as the Munchkins. And you recall they made half of what Toto made for their salary. Yeah, but at least they got a collective star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Louis B. Mayer's on here is like having groped con Judy Garland and some other stuff. But there's almost like the first Google result. It's kind of funny. The first one is the Telegraph the Monster of mgm ah, and then something from a site called Hollywood Essays that just says Louis B. Mayor was no sexual predator. Here is my statement, huh, written by his great niece. Ah, what is her statement? I guess she writes that Judy Garland made these claims in a biography that was never published.
Oh yeah, we'll talk about that. She had just the tapes of herself at someone godly hour pilled up out of her mind that she was going to use as a memoir.
Yeah, and then now they're all on YouTube. Yeah. So she recanted the thing about supposedly recanted the thing about Mayor groping her. But yeah, the bit was that he would show her where to sing from and post over her left breast. Yeah. Yeah, and then he fired her on summer stock because of her she was just not showing up to work.
I mean I'm kind of with him on that she was a no show and I think on a couple movies. And at that point, was that when they terminated her contract with MGM.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Mean granted she was strying out on the pills that they gave her. Yes, I say that they were just sure force feeding her.
Yeah. I mean he also, you know, covered up Clark Gable killing someone while drunk driving. Wow, this is interesting. There's a story in Vanity Fair that a dancer named Patricia Douglas had been raped at a wild MGM party thrown by Louis B. Mayer in nineteen thirty seven, and instead of bartering for her silence, Douglas went public and filed a lawsuit.
She's one of the first people to come forward after experiencing sexual assault in the film industry, leading to a massive scandal that MGM buried by initiating a smear campaign against Douglas and by buying off potential prosecution witnesses. She left the industry after her rape, but appeared on camera sixty five years later after having been contacted by biographer David Sten who discovered that she was still alive. While investigating the story of the nineteen thirty seven rape and cover up. I mean it's the first me too story.
Yeah, Jesus Christ, that is really crazy. Wow. Oh yeah, Eddie Mannix is involved in this, that fix her. I don't know Eddie Mannix. He was just like the guy who ran around and got women abortions and collected stars to dry out. Wow. Okay, this was all thoroughly depressing.
Yeah. I mean, one of Judy Garland's earliest I can't even call it gigs, but she was kind of famous for doing house call performances for older male stars.
In Hollywood when she was like fourteen.
She sang a version of You Made Me Love You at Clark Gables House when she was like fourteen, and he came over and kissed her afterwards.
Yeah. It was just something weird.
About like fourteen year old singing like torch songs and nightclub jazz ballads at someone like Clark Gables House. Yeah, maybe I'm old fashioned. Esther Ralston, that name sounds familiar.
Yeah. She was one of those women who didn't make the transition from silence to talkies, and she alleged that her career was sabotaged by Mayor when she refused to sleep with him. Carrie Beauchamp, author of a book about women in early Hollywood, said Luiby Mayor chased actress Gene Howard around the room when she said no way, and went off and married Charles K. Feldman. The agent. Mayor banned Charlie from the lot and wouldn't allow Feldman's clients to work at MGM for a long time afterwards. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess he was just sort of a general piece of Yeah, but they didn't really pin too too much on him.
His Wikipedia page, it's an entire section that's under the heading being a father figure. Oh yeah, yeah, Yeah. Elizabeth Taylor called him a monster, which ooh.
Takes one to no one. Okay, well this is pretty depressing. Where were we directors?
Yes, we mentioned the laundry list of writers who worked on was It of Oz, And unusually there was a laundry list of directors who were done this as well.
Yeah, the film cycle through a truly insane number of directors. Basically, this picture was like made in varying stages of completion before being scrapped. Because they had all these writers and all these directors who turned in visions and then were like no. Producer Marvin Leroy initially wanted to direct the picture himself, but Louis B. Mayer convinced him that this was a terrible idea and he'd likely never know a moment of peace for the better part of a year. Instead, the producer hired Norman Taurog, who shot test footage before getting the boot, and his tenure were so brief that in later years he claimed he had no memory of working on the film.
It's because we'd be mayor did the men in black thing to him?
Get out of here? Yeah? So four other people then came through. And this is interesting because so the log line about this era of Hollywood is that like directors were just there to point the camera right, because like the studio dictated everything else about the picture. And then the log line is that you know, in the dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dunt. During the turbulent sixties, no, a bunch of the first generation of usc film brats came out, and that's where you get the easy rider raising bulls generation, right, and they that's where you got like the mold of the American filmmaker switching over to more European style auteur stuff rather than being completely just a soft puppet of the studio. I don't know which came first.
I don't know if the studio declined and then suddenly you had kids with cameras that were out making their vision and you had all these American auteurs, or if it started to decline because that became the style and it was also cheaper than having this gargantuine studio with ye you know, paying salaries to a million different people.
I don't know which. Well, the sixties were a turbulent time, Jordan, I'm not sure if you've know if you know that, but it's crazy no, because it's gone. It's come back around now because like the log line for all the Marvel things is that, like they would, you know, all the directors get a script and it's like, okay, your your big action sequence is here and here and here, and that's already been being pre visualized for the past eight months, so you have no say in that, and whatever you do is still going to look exactly the same as the last three of these. So and I guess even more now that like Netflix, is and Amazon are doing all this original content. I mean, who directed the Rings of Power? I don't even know what the Rings of Power are?
I mean I subscribe to the Martin Scorsese like these Marvel movies are like theme.
Park rides, like I don't, I don't know. Let's not get in there because people will have strong, strong opinions about that. Anyway. So cast and crew were company men. They're paid weekly over course of years for their contracts, and they also just had a little control over choosing which roles they were you going to do next? Directors were assigned to films and kind of an autocratic fashion, and so on and so forth. So when looking for a director, these studios and the producers generally wanted someone who could just follow orders. And this would explained by the next director in line for Wizard of Oz, which generally described as what you write a limp fish, that's what I. R MGM had a better phrase for him, proficient to the point of boredom. That so mean it's good. Though. He was known for his efficiency, bringing in pictures on time and under budget. Shut the train run on time. Orders sound like anyone we know, just thanks to a little little known filmmaking technique he used called only giving them one take for a shot. Wizard of Ozy story, A little little hack for you there. Unless they screw up, just do one. Yeah, come on, these new Hollywood brats with their one hundred and thirty eight takes. Wizard of Oz history and Algee Harmetz would later write in her book The Making of the Wizard of Oz. By nineteen seventy six, Mervin Leroy could not remember why he chose Richard Thorpe to direct The Wizard of Oz. Nor does Thorpe know why he was chosen. Presumably he had a resting bpm of somewhere between eighty and one and could keep his eyes open. I guess anyway, he was on. He was on production for two weeks before it was delayed when the original tin man Buddy Ebsen inhaled quite a large quantity of powdered Confectioner's Great Aluminum and nearly died. Yes, he almost died. Producer Mervyn Laurie took this time off to review the dailies that his director had shot and decided that he hated them. Thorpe had made some interesting choices. Admittedly he wanted Judy Garland's Dorothy to have a blonde teuseled hairstyle, wear tons of baby doll makeup and act like a cartoon child.
So Shirley Temple they were going to cast Shirley Temple couldn't get her, so they basically dressed her up as Shirley Temple.
Oh, I was just thinking about Betty Davis and whatever happened to baby Jane. Oh, I guess is obviously supposed to be like a Shirley Temple character. Oh wow, yeah, I mean yes, yes, And and you know, admittedly Thorpe might have gotten this from John Arneil's original drawings for the OZ books, or as you mentioned, for the fact that the studio originally wanted Shirley Temple. So he was kicked off after two weeks, and then he went to Palm Spring sustled off. Then they just put him on a one way. They got him a one way. They have trains there back in the day or rose.
It's just those like up and down push cut things on the train. He had like a bindle and yes, exactly, here's your thing. Sad walking away music from Incredible Hulk played. No.
The reason he was sent there was hilarious.
The studio pr director sent him out there because reporters wanted to interview him because the story that they gave him to like restore his dignity was like, Oh no, he came down with a terrible case pneumonia. We got to press on with another director.
Get out of town, so nobody talks to you.
Oh no, he's recuperating in Palm Spring.
Sorry, he went to live on a farm up state. He returned to his home planet. Mervin Luri would later say, wonderful guy Dick Thorpe. Was he related to Jim Thorpe? I was thinking that I don't know of Pennsylvania fame. He was a wonderful guy, Dick Thorpe. He made some fine pictures. But to make a fairy story is a different kind of thing entirely. I'm sure it is. Mervin, and I don't think you get to call them that. She didn't quite understand the story. He just didn't have the warmth or the feeling to make a fairy story. You have to think like a kid. None of the footage that Thorpe, allegedly brother of Jim, appears in a film. Did you find out anything about looks like they're not related. Mm bummer. Next up, George Kukoor Cuker Qukore Kukore. I don't know, it's a Sunday, dude, I'm not sending my best. Legend Legendary director George Kukor, who later directed Judy Garland in A Star Is Born and won an Oscar for My Fair Lady, stepped in as a consultant for three days while they searched for someone permanent. I mean that would have been enough to film like a third of the film, right, any other film? Yeah? Yeah. Kukor was already committed to shoot a little picture that you might be familiar with called Gone with the Wind. You yeah, you self proclaimed syniste, though nothing was shot during this period. Kukor, a director who was known to quote work well with women, which you know, no matter how we slice it, that phrase in the thirties meant something gross.
Yeah, it's not the as gross way. It's a it's a different kind of euphemism.
Yeah, okay, I see what you're I see what He got.
Great performances on film out of women, Greta Garbo, Captain, Hepburn.
He used women artistically, did yeah? Uh? Anyway, on that three days, he made a number of changes. He added bows to the ruby slippers, he toned down the sets backdrops, he made Margaret Hamilton's makeup more intense, and he suggested that they cast Jack Hayley's The Tin Man Wants Buddy Ebsen was choking to death in his own lungs on again very fine heavy metals. Most importantly, he was instrumental in defining Dorothy's now iconic look. He opted to remove the blonde wig and baby doll makeup and instructed Judy Garland to just be herself, her little pill addled self. He wanted her to be as down to earth as possible, to serve as counterpoint to the fantasy of OZ, and the actors around her were all making bold choices, so he wanted her naturalism to be a counterpoint. As Garland biographer Gerald Clark wrote in his book Get Happy, Kukor instantly saw where Thorpe had gone wrong. His Oz was not believable. He had invested so much effort in making Judy look pretty, for example, that she looked not like a simple farm girl from Kansas, but a Hollywood starlet masquerading as a simple farm girl. With heavy makeup and long blonde hair. Even her acting seemed artificial to kuk Or, as if she had instructed to be cute to act, as he described it, in a fairy tale way, which does make sense. Yes. Next up we have Victor Fleming, who is something of an odd choice for this female led fantasy film aimed at children. Fleming was a big, rough, rough and tough sort of man's man, you know, the kind where they're Sternham and Gut were very large, but they had weak chest and shoulders. He would He liked to bike and go big game hunting with his friend Clark Gable. Fleming would shoot wildcats out in the Hollywood Hills and line their carcasses up outside the door of his home. He once saw ali cat trying to mate with their family cat and shot the cat dead from one hundred and fifty feet away. It's kind of impressive. He was best friends with John Wayne, with whom he'd later form an anti communist organization, and Fleming was also a Nazi sympathizer and opposed America from entering World War Two. So there was that. But in his past Fleming had directed Clark Gable and Gary Cooper and Westerns, but he was eager to make a film that his daughters could see. I made The Wizard of Oz because I wanted my two little girls to see a picture that searched for beautiful and decency and sweetness in love in the world. He said. His professional mount mantra was that obstacles made for better pictures, and he would soon second guess this, as he would later say that The Wizard of Oz was the most problematic movie he'd ever made.
Almost as problematic as his politics.
Yeah it's weird that you would say that about a movie and not about the Nazis. Yeah, yeah, it is weird, isn't at Haigel Fleming handled most of the footage that you see in the film, including the most notably the technicolor sequences. The men on set liked him, and the women not so much. So. There was another incredibly named man coming in, King Vidoor, King Vidor. That's so close to the Godzilla villain, King Guidora. I think it's King Vidor. Another director will switch up. Wasn't even necessarily tied to the Wizard of Oz. It was tied to Gone with the Wind. Clark Gable, the lead of that film, had fallen out with director George Kukor, who, as you recall, was more of a quote women's director quote and not exactly in line with Gable's brand of drunk driving, dick swinging machismo, and the Star threatened to walk unless his good buddy, Victor the cat killing Nazi Fleming was brought on to complete that picture. So weeks before its completion, Fleming departed the Land of Oz, though he would come back at nights bearing a pistol to assist with editing.
No, that was just my lock on the door and asked to be shown papers.
Yeah, you know, we don't actually know that he had he had a gun on him when he was helping with the editing. We can probably assume. But this ended up working out well for Victor Fleming. Since Gone with the Wind was a it was the longest. It had the most biggest oscar sweep until Hill like The Return of the King or Silence of the Lambs. We should know this.
I thought it was large boat. I thought it was Titanic.
Oh, it might have been large boat. Yeah yeah, yeah. So King Vidor was brought on for about two and a half weeks to lay waste Tokyo. I'm sorry, I mean finish the movie. His contributions were more or less just the black and white sequences which were shot last, including the over the Rainbow scene. Vidor was a classy guy who downplayed his contributions to OZ while Victor Fleming was alive in an effort to preserve his dignity. And then Fleming died of a heart attack in nineteen forty nine, which did give Vidor the next thirty years to gloat with impunity. Shooting for Wizard of Oz begins in October nineteen thirty eight. A week in we have our first OSHA violation, which didn't exist then, and did it? Or that just doesn't exist now, so it doesn't exist now, or then I don't like it existed. Then there was a brief middle period of American life when your employer couldn't kill you, and it's gone now. Anyway. A light on the set exploded, sending sparks showering down on Garland and Ray Bulger, whose costume was made out of straw, but.
Don't worry, it was lined with asbestos and.
Less we forget, probably a real skin mask. This set the tone for the next six tortuous months of shooting. Jack Haley the tin Man, would later say, people question me like you're questioning me now, saying, oh, it must have been fun making The Wizard of Oz. It was a lot of hard work. It was not fun at all. There's nothing funny about it. He would also say that working in The Wizard of Oz was quote, not acting. It was movement, which is either very zen or very very depressing. Most MGM films around the time took twenty two days to shoot Oz took eighty six. Most of these six hundred strong cast and crew worked six days a week, and the elaborate hair, makeup and costumes required four am call times, and then they wouldn't leave until seven pm or later. Filmed almost entirely indoors on five s down stages across the MGM lot which is now Sony Picture Studios, where they filmed Jeopardy and Wheel four, Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen, paved Paradise parking Lot, et cetera. Ordinarily one camera was used on a film at the time, but according to cinematographer how Rawsome they used nine on Oz because the sets were so large. He also had to deal with the nightmare of reflections from the tin Man suits and Dorothy's slippers. Speaking of the Tinman suit, director Victor Fleming made a bit of a booboo. He spent three days shooting early scenes with the Tin Man using the unrusted version of the suit, which are supposed to be meant for the scenes after he arrives in Oz and gets you know, the oil happy ending and a sand down. So they had to read. So they had to redo those three days of shoots and that distressed Mervyn Leroy so much that he took to He took a bed like Brian Wilson for three days. And so while Oz was not the first film to use technicolor, that goes to a film from nineteen seventeen, which the first year that the process had actually been invented, called The Gulf Between but The Wizard of Oz did advance the technology significantly. What they called the Technicolor three strip process was incredibly expensive at the time, which does partially explain why the film was two point seven million dollars or about sixty million today. As we mentioned earlier, the bright lights required to light for technicolor shooting meant that the temperature on the set was around one hundred degrees. The other thing that I've heard about the Technicolor project was the process was that some of those lights actually gave people vision problems, like permanently. Yeah, where did I just read that? One second? Some actors and actresses claim to have suffered permanent eye damage from the high levels of carbon arc illumination because carbon lights had highly actinic ultraviolet. So I don't know what that means, but it was bad for people's eyes. That does not sound good. You don't want actin in your eyes unless it's fast act int actin. Didn't John Madden do those commercials? Yes? He did, a classic guy. So these daylight bright lights that were needed to shoot the Technicolor brought the production's electricity bill alone to about two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars or four point nine million in modern money. In other words, a tenth of the entire production budget was spent lighting the film, and it was so intense that lighting the studio for these shoots resulted in brownouts in Culver City in Hollywood where they were shooting it. The only thing that the crew could do to cool at set down was to pause production and throw open the doors of the sound stage. One of the most indelible effects in the film is when Dorothy steps out of the CPA hued farmhouse and into the vibrant colors of munchkin Land. So indelible image that they made that whole movie about it called Pleasantville, Right, Yeah, they just took that. What if we made that into a movie and teaching fifties women to masturbate makes them be in color? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, So, initially production had planned to employ a process called stencil printing to achieve the effect. They would basically hand tint each frame individually, sort of like rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when you paint directly onto the film cell. And that was funny. Snow White came up earlier because one of the things that was considered so beautiful that animation was the way that she was rendered, and that was the animators using their wives blush on the cells, so they would color it and then dot and then like you literally use like makeup powder on it on her.
Cheeks, are on the whole thing, just to give it on her cheeks.
Yeah, yeah, on her cheeks. Wow. So that approach was ultimately deemed too difficult and costly and was abandoned, so they went to the much more simple and ingenious technique during reshoots in May of nineteen thirty nine. So to film that color transition without cutting away, the entire scene was shot in color, but with the inside of the farmhouse painted cepia. So when Dorothy opens the farmhouse door, it is Judy Garland's stand in wearing a dress that has been dyed to match the inside of the farmhouse, and then they opened it onto the set, which was filmed in color. Great stuff, isn't that cool? Yeah? Then the wonderful line Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. Yeah.
There's some really cool videos on YouTube that break down this effect in much greater detail.
So it's very cool. I wish I knew more about how technicolor worked, because I was trying to give like a dummies version of it and I don't even understand it. Yeah.
No, I looked too, and then I just this was kind of the most I got into it. Yeah, they don't shoot on that anymore, do they?
Actually? No, they don't. Okay, well I guess with digital they really don't. But no, the last technical the last the team even last year the fifties. Last Technicolor film was in nineteen fifty eight. Five really yeah, what do they use that panavision or something? No, Panavision's a lens. I think they went to code chrome. Eastman color, Sorry not code chrome was home movies. Eastman color was the thirty five milimeter. What was the last one, you know, off hand with? The last Technicolor movie was Foxfire starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, filmed in fifty four. The last American made feature photograph with a technical or three strip camera. Now you can just do it with a filter and Instagram anyway, that's all boring. It's a good look editing making that compelling. I thought it was cool. Yeah, I mean you and I do. But uh, Jordan talked just about tornadoes.
Yes, Now we're at a section called HiT's a Twister.
HiT's a twister. All I can think of that is is Johnny and Airplane Good. Yeah, it's a twist. It's a twister.
You know. I couldn't fit this in anywhere. I meant to put at it last week and I didn't. The person who's uh Auntm's voice gone Dorothy. Dorothy, that's a Munchkin character who's dubbed. And then I think they they like sped it up slightly so it sounded like a woman's voice.
Okay, okay, anyway, I'm glad. I added.
Another ingenious, simple practical effect is the tornado that delivers Dorothy enter farmhouse to Oz. Or Wait, the farmhouse landed in munchkin Land. Is munchin Land like a dish trick of Oz, or like a suburb of oz.
Jesus Christ, dude, don't even get into this in that's regor maguire thing. There's all of these other places in Oz and there's like racial tensions between some of them, and it's it's a whole thing.
Man.
Don't even don't even ask that question. Don't even get started. We didn't even you didn't. We didn't. We didn't say it didn't happen. We're not talking about it. You won't believe how much it didn't happen.
Okay, all right, head technician, Buddy Gillepsi, that's the kind of guy I want on my film set, handling all the specials egs. Buddy Gillepsi, he initially tried to make a tornado out of a cone shaped bit of rubber, But it hasn't who among us?
Who among us?
But it looked terrible and was soon discarded.
But here's the thing.
He spent eight grand on it, which is close to one hundred and forty thousand dollars today, So presumably Uncle Louis B.
Mayer had some words for him. I just love the idea of somebody going by, probably Mervin right, just going by and seeing this guy futts in with the big thing of rubber and being like, well, what do you got here? Got it buddy? Yeah? H does it look like a tornado? No, no it doesn't. How much did this cost? Well, we're we're still getting the we'll send the invoice to you. Yeah, yeah, it's checks in the mail.
But he redeemed himself with a comparatively cheap solution because the final shot you see in the film was created with a thirty five foot muslin stalking, which is essentially a giant pantyhose that was so in the shape of a cone. The top was towed around the sound stage on a gantry and the bottom was fitted into a.
Slot on the floor. So you know, that's why it's so thin.
It's just moving around a track on a slot on the floor of the sound stage, and the thing spun as it moves while dirt, dust and wind blew against it, and technicians were more or less just expected to breathe that stuff in, which is one of the less egregious OSHA violations we'll discuss in this episode.
I'm just gonna say, grading on a curve or that's nothing. They used to called Fuller's Earth, which I'm not familiar with. I wonder how toxic that was later found out to be. Yeah, I know, I'm not sure.
Uh.
I think this is so cool.
So the shot of Dorothy's house falling from the sky was captured by dropping a miniature prop house from a ladder onto a painting of a sky that was painted onto the floor of the sound stage, and there was also some dry ice to simulate clouds. So they dropped this house and filmed it in slow motion falling away from the camera, and then in post production they reversed it so it looked like it was falling towards the camera, which I think is so smart.
It's movie magic, so much movie magic. This episode you did Fullers Earth is like you know how we don't make many things in the United States and like export them. Yeah, fullers earth. The US has an almost seventy percent world share of it. I've never even heard of it. We're little world's largest. I guess it's used in fashion, like for textile stuff. Oh weird, It's been used to clean the top. Oh good, it's in cat litter. So these guys are just breathing in cat litter. Yeah well, so, I mean this is interesting. In movies. It's used in pyro explosions because it spreads farther and higher than most natural soils the blast the blast looks more impressive. Fooler's Earth is widely used in makeup, props, wardrobe, and set dress departments because it is considered a clean dirt, safer to yours around people, and cleans up easily. However, health concerns in this regard have been debated. Citation so cool. Yeah well, at least it wasn't filled with like ground up hobos and newspapers and okay, so that was one of the less egregious OSHA violations.
Now let's get to probably next to Buddy epsod almost dying, one of the biggest. Yes, we're moving from movie magic to a little segment that I like to call movie movie Mayhem was right there, movie may Oh, you're right, you're right, So okay, okay, I'm not going to hold it against you. We've talked about the ten man saga and the permanent lines on the Scarecrow's face from his mask, Judy Garland's crushed rib cage from her corset, and her pill problem, Toto's sprained Paul. But we've saved the best slash worst injury for Sweet angel Baby Margaret.
Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West.
She suffered second and third degree burns in her hands and face when filming the end of her first appearance in munchkin Land, when she vanishes in a puff of smoke. You know, I'll get you my pretty little dog too, and then the puff of smoke and she's gone. In reality, she disappears through a trapdoor on the floor. Then there's an explosion and there you go. Easy, simple, not so much. Unfortunately, the crew didn't give Margaret Hamilton enough time to disappear through the trapdoor on the sound stage floor before hitting the pirate technics. This incident occurred two days before Christmas nineteen thirty eight, which makes this whole story so much worse. A single mom too, a little boy at home. Their Christmas is all screwed up. According to the Making of Wizard of Oz book, which is an incredible text. Flames caught her broom and hat, scalding her chin, the bridge of her nose, her right cheek, and the right side of her forehead. The eyelashes and eyebrow, and her right eye had been burned off. Her upper lip and eyeland were badly burned.
And it gets worse.
At first, Margaret Hamilton didn't understand why everyone around her seemed so panicked, because, as far as she was considering, she just felt a flash of heat on her face.
Yeah.
Then she looked down and saw that most of the skin on her hands was gone. She would say, it looked as though quote, someone had peeled an orange.
Let's just sit with that for a minute. Oh, that's bad. It gets so much worse.
The crew realized that Margaret Hamilton, you'll may recall, was wearing extremely toxic copper based green makeup, which they needed to get off her before it got into her bloodstream and poisoned her. Because you know, she didn't have skin anymore. The only way to get this makeup off was to frantically scrub her freshly burned hands and face with alcohol.
I was about to make a joke like, what did they do for battery acid on her? And no, they just poured rubbing alcohol into a raw layer of nerve endings. Yep.
Years later, she would describe it as the worst pain she'd ever experience.
She said, it hurts so much that you just tremble. You can't help it.
The injury required a trip to the hospital, which the studio did not pay for.
Ah, there's the cherry. Hamilton was forced to call a friend to pick her up from the studio and take her to the emergency room.
That was always amazing to me, she'd later say that the studio didn't send me home in a limousine. This would be keeping in character with the studio, who literally called her the next day in the hospital with barely disguised frustration and asked when she planned to return to the set. The doctor reportedly grabbed the phone and cheot out the studio executive, saying, she will be ready to leave when I damn well say she is, and not a second before, and honestly she should sue you. Margaret Hamilton would be out for six weeks with pay, thankfully, and as she convalesced at home Judy, who was presumably devastated that her only friend on the set was gone, because you remember that the men on the set, the tin Man, the cowardly Lion, and the scarecrow all resented her in kind of ostracizer, paid her regular visits and helped looked after her little boy.
I know.
When Margaret Hamilton finally did return to the set, her hands hadn't healed and she was forced to wear green gloves to protect her exposed nerve endings. She's been quoted as saying, I wouldn't sue because I know how this business works, and I would never work again, which is pretty much what Buddy Epsen said when he almost died. I returned to work on one condition, no more fireworks. Immediately upon her return from recovering from being set on fire, she was promptly asked to film another fire really.
Scene that very same day.
This was the sequence where the Witch was seen skywriting with her broom, you know, surrendered Dorothy. In reality, this was a pipe with smoke shooting out the back. When Margaret Hamilton asked why she was required to wear a fireproof costume during this scene, she was informed that there was a greater than zero chance that the broom might explode. Keenly aware that the crew didn't have her best interest at heart, and probably keenly aware of the fact that she was a working single mom, Hamilton refused to do the stunt. Instead, the task fell to her double, Betty Danko. Hamilton took Danko aside and give her a heads up and then went home, and by the time she arrived home, she got a phone call informing her that the broom had indeed exploded and Betty Danko was in the hospital. Danko would say, after eleven days in the hospital, it felt as though my scalp was coming off. I guess that's because my hat and my black.
Wig were torn loose.
While writhing on the floor, having the two deep wound on her legs and thigh examined, a customer angrily ran over to her and demanded, what.
Did you do with the hat? I have to turn that in, you know.
The hat was eventually recovered high up in the rafters of the sound stage where it had been blown by the explosion. For her trouble, Betty Danko earned herself thirty five dollars for her day's work and a hysterectomy movie magic. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, that was a lot to take in. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Oh man, that's a bad one. We've talked about some bad on set accidents. That's that's a bad one.
A young John Landis read about this and thought, I can beat that.
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment, I talk about toxins.
You like talking for a while? Well, Jordan, please, I love toxins metaphorical literal. Understandably, Hamilton was a little wary of doing fire scenes for the remainder of the shoot, having heard that her double lost her reproductive organs to a pipe bomb room, but she still had to film the part where she sets fire to Scarecrow, and as you may imagine, her faith in this crew was at an all time low.
Uh.
It's like that you look over and it's like the key grip is like a horse. Yeah. The guy lighting Pyro is just like a guy they found in the alley that day. Uh, she'd later say after an earlier experience when my broom caught fire, it was almost too much for me. But when I was assured that Bulger's suit was as beestos and there was little danger of it catching fire. Now, Jordan, there's different kinds of asbestos. Yeah, they're all bad. Yeah. Well, did you know that the snow that was used in the poppy field scene was chrysto teal asbestos? I did not, and I wrote this, does that name make it less toxic? It's very pretty sounding. It would be a beautiful name for a girl. As Atlas Obscura elegantly put it, the film literally douses its main characters in carcinogens. There is a scene where Ray Bulger is dancing around wearing asbestos as abestos flakes rained down on him.
Insert yo, dog, we heard you like asbestos, so we yes, yeah.
And then he died of cancer. Yep. Asbestos was fairly common on film sets at the time. It was like Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas all used asbestos snow. There are sources out there that do refute this claim for Wizard of Oz. But here's another fun fact about that poppy field scene. It took twenty two men one week of NonStop work to make forty thousand fake flowers for that set. There's not a lot of people that know that. It's a good fact. I'd like to start measuring things in fake flower hours your man hours used, but I'd like I'd be like, oh, that's gonna be about ten thousand fake flowers of work. The toxins were really the friends that were made along the way in Wizard of Oz.
Toxins are a character in the Wizard of Oz. We don't talk about it. It's as a character, a character.
The toxins were his and I always would be. The prop team.
The but Ray Boulger story Q Rhapsody of Blue, Yeah, the prop team was regularly exposed to what we now call poison.
The breakaway glass that the cowardly line. What I made a joke about this last thing where they were talking about, was it Jean Harlow's hair dye was used with the old thermometer mercury. Yep, that's what they did to make breakaway glass that the cowardly Lion dives through an oz. They poured resin into a pool of mercury in a closed room movie magic. So understandably, by this point production had gained something of a troubled reputation in the press, and MGM tried to order producer Mervin Leroy shut down production. Moore, however, refused and fought back, and MGM simply closed the set to visitors. Another fun aspect of this film that you may have gotten ahead of us in guessing about was the treatment of the monkeys. Initially, they considered using cartoons, but this plan was quickly aborted because it was too safe, so they first used miniature rubber monkeys, and then some stuntmen on wires thrown in for good measure. Two of these actors suffered bad falls when the wires that held them in the air broke, and as your beloved Algean Harmetz later observed to The New York Times, some of those special effects had never been done before. There were no unions at that time. Stars and lesser players were indentured servants for studios. Jordan, take us to a little place we like to call Judy Garland's private hell.
Yes, yes, the abuse of negligence wasn't just physical on the set for Judy Garland it was also psychological.
As we touched on in the first episode, the.
Sixteen year old Garland was plied with highly addictive dexadrene pills to keep her a little sparkle in her eye, keep her energized, and curb her appetite on the set. A side effect of this drug is paranoia and insomnia, which doesn't.
Exactly contribute to tip top mental health.
Perhaps this is why she was known to burst into wild fits of uncontrollable laughter on the set.
This occurred during the scene.
Where she meets the Cowardly Lion and makes him cry. After one too many laughs, director Victor Fleming took her aside and smacked her across the face, ordering her to quote, get out there and work.
He would later say he immediately.
Regretted it and wished that someone punched him in the nose for what he had just done. There would be open debates between the the director, cinematographers, and customers about how to quote fix Judy's flaws, speaking in ruthlessly harsh terms as if she wasn't standing right there.
Jesus Christ.
She would say, I was studied like a piece of merchandise. It didn't occur to anyone that I might have feelings. In addition to the painful course that she was ordered to wear to maintain the figure of a twelve year old, Garland allegedly consented to have her teeth capped disguise the fact that they were misaligned. And this is for some reason of everything we've talked about, the craziest thing of all to me. So you supposedly, I've seen this in reputable sources. Put rubber disks in her nose to alter its shape. I don't know how you would speak and sing with rubber things in your nose.
I yeah, that's weird, I know. For I know. One of long Cheney's tricks was like fish skin for the Phantom of the opera makeup what Yeah. Cheney applied putty to sharpened the angle of his nose and inserted two loops of wire into his nostrils, which were themselves darkened with black eyeliner to make a skeletal shape. Extra wires were concealed under putty and the skull cap. Extra wild concealed under the putty around the nose and the cap. The bog cap were attached to Chenes's nose to pull his nostrils upward. There are some who stated that in certain shots Cheney manipulated his nose with spirit gum and fish skin, but that has not been verified anyway, so she's lucky she got off with rubber disks.
Writing in her book The Making of The Wizard of Oz, film historian Aljeehermet says that Judy viewed herself as quote the undesired repository of her voice in signing Judy Garland, MGM had bought an extraordinary voice, unfortunately attached to a mediocre body and a badly flawed face. In the next seven years, the voice would be trained, the teeth capped, the nose restructured, the thick waist held in by corsets, and the body reshaped as well as possible by diet and massage. Judy Garland was like a leaf held under a magnifying glass by someone who wants to set a fire.
That's an incredible line. Ah God, yeah, yeah.
Even the nice things that the studio tried to do for her came with a tinge of cruelty. When she was designated an official MGM star during production, whatever that means, she was awarded a dressing room trailer which was wheeled onto the set for a ceremonial ribbon cutting. When the ceremony had ended and everyone headed off to lunch, Judy tried to open the door to a new dressing room and discovered it was locked. They hadn't entrusted her with the key, and she promptly burst into tears.
I thought they would have just like it was gonna be like a cartoon boxing glove came out and just got to the right nose, with the recording of Victor Fleming saying, get out there and work. Yeah, my god, this is just dickenzie. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaking of dressing room horror stories, Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, would later say that hers really sucked.
I always thought they got me mixed up with an actual witch. She'd later say.
They must have thought that witches don't have very nice dressing rooms, because mine was simply awful. It was a square of canvas, and the floor had some sort of dirty looking rug on it, and there was one chair and a card table with a light over it. Meanwhile, Glinda the Good Witch Billy Burke had pink satin fur rugs and a chaise lounge and apparently when Glinda wasn't there, Margaret Hamilton would eat her luncheon.
There instead, crying softly. I know, good Lord, yes.
Well, given all the pain and misery on the one hundred degrees set, filled with carcinogens and monstrous creatures, gasping for breath, sticking of sweat, and occasionally getting burned alive, you'd be forgiven for believing that urban legend that one cast member, usually reported to be a munchkin, decided to end it all and hang themselves on set in the middle of a take.
This is like the most yeah, probably the strongest memory I have of this film. Sam is like being some you know, snot nosed little kid who's been erased by decades of alcohol abuse, and mine saying this, repeating this fact to me. Yes.
For years, viewers have claimed to see a swinging body hanging from a noose or the shadow of this.
I've seen both versions. At the enter, it's totally there. It's totally there.
It's at the end of you were off to see the Wizard musical number as Dorothy, the Tin Men, and the Scarecrows skip down the yellow brick road. In reality, the shadow belongs to an exotic bird. Obviously, it's believed to be a crane borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo, which was added to the set to beef up the whole wild wilderness thing. Though it looks mysteriou us on granny VHS home video and probably doubly so during the TV broadcast of the fifties and sixties, modern four K versions of the film clearly reveal that it is a bird and not a hanged munchkin.
Although you know, this is one of those things where like when you when you first see the movie as a consumer, you're like, there's no way that's a hanged munchie, and and then you get a little bit more into it and you're like, it's definitely yeah, And you come around to it at the point that we have and you're like, that could very plausibly be a dead munchkin.
Yeah, yeah, especially if for knowing all we know now, Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't It wouldn't surprise me based on everything we've just talked about.
I mean, what are they what are they doing it? They're not doing a corpse check at the end of the day, they were They probably weren't even making sure all the fires were out and then they were just like down at an opium den and like or I don't know whatever whatever they did throw darts at rats. I don't know, Like what did people do for fun in this horrible period of American Holly would drunk drive and try to get out of it. Yeah, drunk drive crushed starlets to death a lot of cocaine, probably similar to the intense humming of evil that was described by g I soldiers liberating Dacou. It was understandable that the curse of the Wizard of Oz set passed into legend, but misfortune followed the cast even after they were freed from that oppressively hot, heavy metal saturated talks, infumed racist child striking a drug addicted greatest place on her movie Magic. Frank Morgan aka the Wizard was badly injured in a car wreck months after the film's release. And then there's the tragic tale of poor anti m actress Clara Blandick suffered debilitating help problems in her later years. Quoting from her extremely baroquicked page, I'm.
Gonna say, I'm guessing that all the wikipediaddors for the Oz related pages are all X Theater kids, because all of these pages for anything Olls related have a flair for the dramatic.
Yeah, well, you know. On April fifteenth, nineteen sixty two, Blandyck returned home from Palm Sunday services at her church. She began rearranging her room, placing her favorite photos and memorabilia and prominent places. She laid out her resume and a collection of press clippings from her lengthy career. She dressed immaculately and an elegant royal blue dressing gown, with her hair properly stiled, then took an overdose of sleeping pills. She laid down on a couch, covered herself with a gold blanket over her shoulders, tied a plastic bag over her head. She left the following note, I am now about to make the great adventure. I cannot endure this agonizing pain any longer. It is all over my body, nor can I face the impending blindness. I pray the Lord my soul to take amen Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, The worst thing is that she would have canonically been in hell, because if Catholic, it's immortal sin, you know.
So, yeah, well that's sad. It's like the Bells suicide go on?
Familiar with that?
No, According to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon widely debunked book, she set her room up perfectly, all these flowers and pictures, and chose her outfit very elegantly, and then took an overdose of something. And oh and she like pooped herself. I think all the above. I think, yes, out of everywhere, it was everywhere, And I believe if I'm not mistaken. According to Kenneth Anger's version, she just drowned in the toilet. She like passed out with her head in the toilet and drowned in the water there. But that's Kenneth Anger being a messy, messy man.
Well, you know, as the famous apocryphal quote grows, I drank to drowned my demons. I went to the toilet to drown my demons, but they learned how to swim. Sunrise sunset. God, this was such a miserable Why do people like movies?
What if?
I what did we do to this world? What did we do to this world? What do to us? I hate movies now? Oh no, I don't love don't I don't love the movies anymore?
Oh no?
Well here this is slightly warmer.
Although this, for some reason, this like truly creeps me out, even though it shouldn't, Like there's nothing inherently creepy about it, but it always kind of set me on edge to the point where I've.
Never actually done this. Yeah, I mean I never did this. I think our film club did it once in high school, but I wasn't there for that day or else. I never went back after watching Requiem for a Dream. It was one of the two two things that happened in film club in high school. Anyway, we were talking, of course, about the Dark Side of the Rainbow, which is the practice of beginning your viewing a Wizard of Oz concurrently with Pink Floyd's nineteen seventy three album Dark Side of the Moon. No one knows how where or when this initially began. It is just one of those things that simply was one day pre Internet and just passed into every dorm room and high school in America. From a practical standpoint, you could probably date it to around the era of home video in the early eighties, because it is a lot easier to adjust the timing in that prior to that, you would have been doing with reels for a TV broadcasts. Tradition dictates allegedly that you start the album on the MGM lion's third roar, although some people suggest you can also do it on the first. It's multiple schools of thought. Maybe I'll just do this tonight.
This is not that long.
Yeah, maybe I will too. Yeah, it's like a tight ninety. It would also make sense that it would only also really work during the CD era, because if you got up to flip the record, you would mess with the synchronization of everything unless you also positive film. It's a whole thing.
You But that don't have to be a home video, Yeah, it has to. It definitely has to have been when home video and CDs were.
So that's eighties though that's late eighties. Yeah, it has to be. Yeah, sometime sometime in the eighties. Yeah, I'm trying to think of this. One of my Tom Waight CDs was one of the ones, early ones that came with those warning things that were like this has been master oh yeah, mastered for CD and may reveal limitations of the original recording because people were not used to being able to hear the tape hisss. Yeah, and it freaked them all out. They thought it was a real train coming right toward them. Idiots film picks anyway. The first mainstream reporting on this phenomenon was a nineteen ninety five article by Charles Savage in the Fort Worth Journal Gazette, which then gave rise to a host of early web forms, the catalog the many coincident is that pop up during this synchronization. In two thousand, the Turner Classic Movies Network made a special broadcast of the film that signaled when to start the record. The aforementioned Charles Savage, who is now pull up surprise winning Washington Correspondent because there's upward mobility for the and not for me as a court contort to sit like Jimminy Glick and this share podcast. He wrote on the topic again for The New York Times a few years ago. Quote. Part of the enigma of the Dark Side of the Rainbow is that even today nobody knows its origin. Back in nineteen ninety five, my effort to figure out who did it first went nowhere, and no one has made a credible claim to being its originator. In the decades since then, we are left to speculate why anyone would have thought to try putting the two works together, or if it was instead born of coincidence itself, perhaps the album was playing in the background when someone channel served to the movie on television and noticed what was happening. As hard as this is to it's at least statistically more likely to happen with two of the most popular mass entertainments of the last century. That is correct. You are talking about a film that billions of people have seen and an album that was on the charts for like five years. Anyway, if you've ever tried it, it is an experience. There are enough points of motion on screen at any given time from music to sync with something, but the coincidences between Dark Side and Oz are uncannily specific. Jordan lacking round, what are those?
Dorothy balances on a fence in her Kansas yard As the line bouncing on both Waves plays in the song Breathe. The alarms from time start blaring. As the film cuts to the evil Miss Gulch coming to get Toto. Dorothy runs away from home. At the line no one told you when to run. Professor Marvel urges Dorothy to go home at home, home again. The foreboding Great Gig in the Sky begins as the tornado descends and cries, Yeah, that whips.
Actually, that is a clip I have seen.
Claire Torre's wordless vocals rise to a frenzy as the storm rolls in and begins shifting to gentle dreaminess just as Dorothy is knocked unconscious. Money begins to play with the cash register sounds just as Dorothy opens the door into technicolor, which is fitting considering how expensive that set was the build. Yeah, right during brain Damage, the Scarecrow, who you'll recall is in need of a brain, flops around as Roger Waters sings The Lunatic is on the Grass, and in the conclusion, the album's closing heartbeats.
Play as Dorothy listens to the tin man's chest. That's pretty nuts. Yeah, it's a lot o man. Maybe he'll do that later. Yeah, what else we got going on? The super Bowl is literally playing asp taping this.
Uh.
The connections are specific enough that even the most rational minded folks could be forgiven for wondering if, maybe, just maybe Pink Floyd did this intentionally, which makes a lot of sense. This is a band that was seriously considered making an album entirely with sounds from furniture. That's true, and they recorded Abbey Roads Studios, known for pushing the boundaries of recording technology in Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dundunt the Turbulent Sixties. The band, however, has steadfastly denied the story for decades. Guitarist David Gilmour suggested that the theory was simply the result of internet obsession. Drummer Nick Mason had the best quote, It's absolutely nonsense. It has nothing to do with the Wizard of Oz. It was all based on the sound of music the film Yes Yes, Yes Yes. Roger Waters stated that the connection quote has nothing to do with us, but described it as a cosmic coincidence. During an appearance on Joe Rogan, Roger Waters tells a story he heard about a Louisiana cop who pulled over a tour bus for weaving. Once he entered, he supposedly discovered Willie Nelson in the back listening to Darkseide while watching Oz. Water was concluded by saying, I don't believe it for a minute, but I like the story. Charles Savage, the guy who has went on from reporting this originally for the Topeka what and then Wanapulitzer reached out to William Neilson's publicist upon hearing this story, and it took them four minutes to respond by saying, it doesn't sound true. Balmer, I kind of want it to be true. Sunrise, Thus glorious, sick transit, Gloria Jordan. I was going to say thus ever to tyrants, but.
Well, finally this hellish production wrapped and it was time to enter into post production, which was slightly less physically dangerous, but just a soul destroying.
Now. The version of The Wizard of Oz.
That most people have seen is one hundred and one minutes long, but the edit played at test screenings was about eleven minutes longer, clocking in one hour and fifty two minutes. Now, the average film run time in nineteen thirty nine was around ninety minutes, so the producers knew they had to slash some scenes. After three sneak previews in the comparatively sleepy California towns of sam Bernadie, Pomona, and San Luis Obispo, the creative team headed back into the editing room to make some tough decisions. Among the money cuts to the film included the Scarecrow's elaborate dance sequence following If I Only Had a Brain, supposedly directed by Golden Age of Hollywood era choreography legend Buzzby Berkeley, who fun fact, was driving drunk the wrong way down Highway One in nineteen thirty five and got into a head on that killed two people and went to trial for manslaughter.
Movie Magic Yeah.
Also cut was a reprise of Dorothy's Over the Rainbow sung while she was trapped in the Witch's Castle, and a reprise of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead. Film performances of all these sequences have been lost, but the audio still exists.
Thank yes, I needed a longer version of both of those. I hate a reprise. Honestly, it's fine in this show, but when you're listening to it like it is an album, you're like, no, I heard this song already. Film chop up the better song. It's my biggest beef with defying gravity. Chop up, don't chop up this other song that is great to remind me of a previous song that was not as good? Well, what's the song that chop up? They just interpolate and quote from, like every other song in the first act. I do love how many thoughts you have I Wicked. Wicked is so fascinating to me because I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but it's like the guy who did Stephen Schwartz, like he came out of retirement to do this essentially and like knocked it out of the woods.
You know.
He wrote Godspell, he wrote Pippin Oh, and then he like contributed lyrics to Pocahontas the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And then in two thousand and three it was just like, I'm going to adopt this weird Gregory maguire thing. He was just a lyricist from like he's not even that old, No, but he had not been working in Broadway for a while, basically from nineteen ninety one to he wrote three songs in an off Broadway review, and he wrote lyrics to a musical called Rags that came out in eighty six, and then he started working for Disney and dream Works with Alan Menkin and didn't do any more Broadway until two thousand and three, and then he came back and was like, oh, I'll just do this thing that's become like the biggest twenty first century musical, just wild, like he just came back to be like, I still got it? You know? Is it the longest running musical now? No, that Phantom closed. No, it would have to be lim is No is closed to a thing name is close too, But those were both on for like thirty years, so I don't even know. It hasn't even been around for thirty years, I guess. I mean, like, what is the longest, like currently the longest continuing?
Oh, the nineteen ninety sixth revival of Chicago Lion King and then Wicked.
Okay, man, I.
Saw Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scher singer best thing I've ever seen on Broadway.
Incredible, No, incredible, She deserves so much more, probably won't get it.
No classically trained opera singer Jesus Christ.
Why did she acquiesce to being made into like a hoe because of that? Because why are we doing podcasts? Because it paid the truth?
I mean, I I think she brings like I definitely think that she was positioned as being like of that group and then it never really happened.
Well, it was still a band called the Pussycat Dolls and their origin story was that they were as first right, Yeah, yeah, I don't.
I don't know why she would have gotten involved with that when it wasn't literally a record label project. I'm not, yeah, and that I don't really know, but I got the sense that she brought some of the like I should have been a huge star.
And I am not as big as I believe I should be.
Energy, to the Sunset Boat, to her performance as Narma Desmond. It's great, so so good worth seeing. This has been Jordan's theater review Corse. Yes, and I don't. I don't really care about theater much, but that was unbelievable.
I don't care for the theater. I don't care for the theater.
It turned that's back on me, and now I shall turn my back on it.
I said good night, I said good day, Oh boy.
Also cut from The Wizard of Oz were smaller dialogue sequences. Apparently a lot of these were scenes with the Wicked Witch because Margaret Hamilton herself was worried that she was gonna She was a former kindergarten teacher and she had She was very aware of children's fears and what that would do to kids, so she.
Actually lobbied to have a lot of her stuff cut.
I think she said that she still had a problem afterwards with when her face appears in the ORB when Dorothy's like looking in on Uncle Henry and LTM. And then all of a sudden, her face appears and she's like starts cackling, and they do like the close up zoom into her face, which is truly terrifying. She's like, yeah, that's the scariest moment of the film for me.
So a lot of those were cut.
The aforementioned skywriting sequence where it's a surrender Dorothy.
The full version originally was surrender.
Dorothy or die, and they decided the or die was a little little much.
All these people, these people almost dying on the set, and they're like, I can't say it. I can't say it, can't spell it out.
Literally more movie magic in a way that's slightly less lethal. That skywriting effect was achieved by production using a hypodermic needle filled with dye in a tank of cloudy water, which I think is really cool. Uh, they had to write the words backwards in order to be filmed. I don't really know why that is, but I'm sure if I stopped and thought about it for a while, I could figure it out, but I'm.
Not because when you ran the film forwards, it would be appearing. Or did I just say something that makes me sound even stupider. Yeah, they were there appearing. You know, it's like they write them out. What if they ran it a different way, then they would disappear a third there to four undiscovered third way?
What if the words traveled through time made it so that my parents didn't meet, and what if the words have to reunite my parents? Think abouting it back to me? Yeah, no, I put a treatment together. How about my desk by Monday?
Getting my cigar in your face? Get out there and work, you fat pig. There was another scene that was cut.
This is incredible because all I can think of is Nicholas Cage where the wicked witch covers the tin Man with bees in order to turn him into a beehive.
Which rules that is awesome. Not the bees. Yeah, they're my eyes from the inside. That would have been so cool and so actually horrifying because you know, they just would have thrown bees at him.
Oh my god, Like oh yeah, he's wearing like like illuminum pace, so I won't get his skin.
Yeah, No, that's fine, just like literally thrown you know, yeah, just pelting him with Oh my god, god movie magic. I believe they filmed that too. I have no so they actually did just throw bees at him. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I've not been able. Yeah, looked that up right, I should have looked into that more. Okay.
In the final cut of the movie, there is a line where a wicked witch threatens to turn the tin Man into a beehive. Apparently she made good on it and the director's cut and unfortunately that footage is nowhere to be seen. All the cut footage was destroyed. I mean, we talked about this in the first episode. The studio wasn't sentimental about this stuff. They didn't care that they had priceless props like the ruby slippers and the lions helt.
Oh they were animated. Oh really?
Yeah, I actually surprised they took the trouble.
That's a bummer. Wow.
Yeah.
Well.
The most infamous loss scene in The Wizard of Oz it's actually also teased in the film's dialogue, is the legendary Jitterbug musical number. It's fairly famous because it was extremely elaborate. It took five weeks to film and cost eighty thousand dollars or one point four million in today's money, and now it's totally lost. I think there's like like some really shake eat janky behind the scenes footage, but that's all the song and dance musical number was meant to take place. As Dorothy and her friends approach the Witch's castle just before the flying monkeys fly in to attack the haunted forest. All those words mean nothing to me. In the final thing, the Witch can be heard telling her flying monkey guard winky guard. I don't know why they call them winkies. I think that's an L frank bomb thing. They'll give you no trouble. I promise you that I've sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight.
Out of them.
And so in the final cut of the movie, those words seem meaningless, right, But in the original version you see that the wicked Witch has dispatched a bug to make them dance until they collapse with fatigue, which I believe is the plot of They shoot horses, don't they? It's like a dust bowl era dance off, well, like the dancing until you die thing is like a that's like recognized back into medieval literature that they have the Saint Vitas Dance.
Oh yeah, they called the Saint Vitus Dance. It's where the heavy metal band and then the bar that I believe is now closed got its name. Yeah. And that stuff's actually really interesting too, because they it was like whole towns that would start dancing like seemingly for no reason and just kind of do that until they collapsed, and it was People have positive that it was different, like kinds of religious ecstasy that it happened, or church services or something. But the more out there and strangely plausible and kind of cool theory is that it would happen when the grain supplies went bad. Because one of the kinds of fung guy that LSD is derived from is Barga. I think, yeah, right, is off is derived from Rye. So they would talk about like basically the whole town was like tripping on acid and just dancing around until they all collapsed because they were all unintentionally poisoned with LSD. Wow.
There's a similar story of a ghost ship called the Mary Celeste. It went missing in the I want to say, like the eighteen seventies, I think somewhere around and then it was eventually found months later, and it was boarded and the ship was completely empty, and they couldn't figure out why because everything looked fine, and there were all these theories about maybe it was mutiny, maybe it was this, or was that. But they did look at some of the food supply.
And there was a kind of probably our good, I don't know, some kind of.
Fungus on it that was deemed to have maybe made the people go crazy or have some kind of visions or something that would have affected.
Them to make them want to abandon the ship. And that's one of the possible explanations. We should do an episode just on ghost chips. Oh my god, I would love that. I love ships. I know you do boats. Please ships for my father. Ships They beat me too. Yeah. Yeah.
So this dance sequence and the Wizard of Oz, they danced at the Jitterbug.
Get it, I do bog jitter but yeah.
The scene was caught by producers who not only were worried that slowed down the movie, but they also this is weirdly pressure. They felt strange about shoehorning in a scene that revolved around a contemporary dance craze. The Jitterbug was very big in the late thirties, and they were worried with date it. Yeah, but it would take away from its timelessness, which I thought was very considering. A lot of these movies were fairly disposable at the time in a pre home video world. Yeah, I thought that showed an uncharacteristic degree of foresight.
Yeah.
So the scene was cut and the master is believed to be lost, And while the audio for the song exists on record, only a few grainy behind the scenes shots of the sequence have survived. However, and this is kind of weird. The song would make its triumphant official debut in the OZ canon in twenty sixteen, when an animated Tom and Jerry feature called Tom and Jerry Back to OZ.
Received a straight to video release.
Jitterbug appeared in the movies a fully animated sequence, marking the song's film debut seventy seven years after being cut from the original movie.
So my question is this, there are melee weapons in OZ, right, Like we take that? What's that? Like a spear? Like the guards have spears? And right, do you think the wizard has a gun? I thought he had some. Well, he has the voice, right, big Robot, but he has a.
Flamethrower essentially because he's got those two flames on the side of his like weird head projection thing, and so I would assume we would have the technology to have a flame thrower.
He's got those well sure, but I mean, like, what if I came to Oz with a gun, I'd be a god among men.
I mean, okay, now I'm trying to think. Because Glinda the Goodwitch has the bubble, do we think that that bubble.
Is like a it's like a force field? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's just for transportation. Why are they so scared of the Witch's just scary? How does she kill people?
She shoots flames? She shoots fire from her fingers too. Remember when she's like right by the ruby slippers and she starts shooting fire from her fingertips. I mean yeah, but like crappy nineteen thre fire, not like like good fire twenty first century Union fire. Yeah, yeah, not like the kind of our boys make, uh, not the kind I won the war? Do you think she was, like does she have like Darth Vader powers? I guess it's really what I'm drying.
Like cycle, like like the pinch thing. Yeah, or does she have anything or just like it's just like, oh, like she does, she's me, She's got yeah. She she has a deft way with a bond mot and makes sparks from her fingers like what, I don't I don't know.
It's all just that she can like like summon seeing where anybody is through her crystal ball at anytime and do what with that information? And she commands an army, she commands the flying monkey's army, so like, but that's power.
I guess that's supernatural. I see. Well I guess, well, yeah, yeah, I mean I guess I don't know why the I guess monkeys are pretty threatening, you know, like if they were flying chimps, you know, they could like they rip faces off, they do terrible things.
Well you read the books though, at least the Wicked books, so I would assume, No.
I haven't. I haven't now, I mean, well, that's the thing is that's not canon. That was all like, that's just all Gregory Maguire made up. So like in the original OZ books, Like, I don't know, is there a scene where is there like a nine to eleven in OZ?
I mean I would imagine a house I guess they celebrated the Witch's deaths of never Mind.
Yeah, that was a good nine eleven. Uh yeah, I know, I don't know.
You know, what's been so long as I sat down and watched this, I don't really remember why the Munchkins find the Wicked Witch so threatening.
Yeah, like if somebody was like, oh, she killed a bunch of people, or she, you know, blew up the World Oz Center or the Alfred p Ozza building.
Why is the Wicked Witch so feared? Let's see the AI overview, which I did not request, no, you never do. Is feared because of her immense magical power. I understand cruel nature, which is pairs very poorly with magical power and relentless suit of Dorothy, combined with her menacing appearance and the chilling way she uses her magic to inflict harm on others. Okay, see there you go, making her a terrifying and formidable villain unrelenting malice. Yeah, it's portrayed as purely evil with a strong desire to cause harm. Okay, powerful magic a wide range of magical abilities, including but not limited to, controlling flying monkeys, conjuring storms. I could see conjuring storm killing the crops.
Yeah, I guess if Yeah, you're in agrarian society.
Casting spells, which allows her to inflict a significant damage on those who oppose her vengeful motivation. Yes, because Dorothy killed her sister. Okay, yeah, symbolism of fear in the film The Wicked, which often represents the fear of the unknown and the power of unchecked evil.
Okay, well calm down here, professor. Let's you know, we're not doing lit analysis here. I want to know, like what her atrocities were. Yeah, I don't I would ask you about atrocities. Yeah, well, thank you. No, I don't know. I I mean, obviously, look, it's a fantasy series, so she we're not going to talk to she like, you know, flayed people in the town square. But I would like to have that intimation in there other than her fingers spark But the storm thing makes a lot of sense. Sparking. If you're suddenly devastated by a tornado and you look up and there's Margaret Hamilton saying I did that, I would fear her, yeah, or a try out. Yeah, but you start to answer my first question of what if I went to OZ with a gun? Would that be new technology to them, would I become all powerful?
I'm guessing that their technology seems to be frozen at like turn of the century. So I bet you they've probably seen like single shot muskets. Oh interesting, maybe a six shooter Okay, but yeah, I don't know if you got like an AK forty seven or something.
I think that you can probably lay waste to a yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, all right. This is an interesting point though, that I actually hadn't thought of.
According to Raymond Knapp, who's writing in the book The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead. The song vented the anger and frustration that had built up after the massive stock crash which all but broke the human spirit in the thirties. And he goes on to compare of the Wizard, who's a con man with a lot of empty promises, to President Herbert Hoover, whose big promises to relieve the depression were mostly empty. That's interesting, got his ass never thought of that? Yeah, all right, well, okay, we're making connections. We are we are speaking of connections, the rainbow connection speaking, Yeah, a different song about rainbows. One of the scenes that was on the chopping bark, and very nearly lost was the scene in which Judy Garland sings the Immortal Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the deathless anthem of optimism for the clinically burned out as you bummed out well Fordian slip there. The song was written by composer Harold Arlen and lyricist Edgar yip Harburg, who spent most of their days golfing and playing tennis, preferring to work at night.
What a Life. Yip Harburg also played a large uncredited role in developing the screenplay, and so many of his words had to dovetail with the script. Harberg claimed his lyrical inspiration for Over the Rainbow was quote a ballad for a little girl who was in trouble and wanted to get away from Kansas, a dry, arid, colorless place. She had never seen anything colorful in her life except the Rainbow. Is one of the last pieces of music written for the film. Harold Arlem is out for drive on Sunset Boulevard with his wife when inspiration finally came. He was in the habit of carrying around manuscript paper, so they pulled over the legendary Schwabz drug store. Is that near Poopies on the Strip? I'll puss that in.
We all hung out in the coffee shop called Poopies up on the Strip.
Genuinely, I don't know. Sun Said Boulevard that far from the Strip.
Sunset Boulevard is the Strip.
He's the Strip, right, Okay, I don't anything about La. We got to go to LA together, must we. We'd have a good time. I mean, yeah, we would. We'll just do a boys' trip to LA like a long weekend.
Yeah, oh my god, I think you all sorts of we can look at the ruby slippers.
Wow, that's gonna be our pots so underwhelmed together, got tevy drinks.
It's a weird teeky plays. So go to the go to the l Coyote or Sharon taytaut our last meal.
Oh, we'll get stuck in traffic together. I'll snap at you and you'll flinch at the sound of my voice for the rest of the weekend. Anyway.
That was the I learned how to use Google Maps driving in Los Angeles for the first time in like twenty twelve. I'd never used I didn't have an iPhone at the time, and I didn't like understand the blue.
Dot and just how it all worked.
And I was trying to and like my girlfriend was driving, or maybe I was driving and I was I forget. It was just an absolute disaster. I developed a driving phobia for a time. I'm kind of past it now. And it started then as me trying to figure out what this blue dot meant while navigating like the four O five.
It was awful. You're like an Amish man, like the blue dot is me and my soul is in there. You let this machine into our home.
Oh.
She was just getting so pissed at me.
And then like, of course, the more stress they get, the more I can't do simple tasks.
And it was terrible. Oh my god. Anyway, Interestingly, the bridge of the song Someday I wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me after children's piano exercise.
Yeah, hence the half steps. Yeah, a half step trips. Probably learning how to do a trill. Yeah, probably on the opposite end of the sophistication spectrum. A rare strativarius violin was used to record the orchestral accompaniment. It's probably worth the entire butchet of the film.
Yeah, it was probably played by some guy who fled Europe like the week before. Wow, yeah, yeah, I mean seriously, the La fell San Francisco, Phill, I'll have like the enormity of the European That's why the European Classic. One of the reasons why the European classical tradition became so strong here was that it was stronger in Europe first, and then all of those people fled over here and started teaching and playing. Whoa yeah. I mean not that we didn't have it before, but like when people talk about like Leonard Bernstein being like Lenny, When people talk about Lenny being somebody told him you could be the first great American conductor, Like, it's because Europe was just like, well, what does America have like hmm, race records and uh, you know string bands like rag time music? Is rag time viewed as race records? Yeah? Well, I mean yes initially because it came off of rag time? Isn't is a shortening of ragged time, which was what they called syncopation? And I think, wow, and I think that it's all a matter of what got where, right, because like I assume some of the best selling Scott Joplin stuff did make it out there because like Stravinsky and like, you know, guys like Stravinsky were hearing like when they got here and started hearing jazz, they loved it. Like you know, there's this story about Stravinsky going to Birdland to see Charlie Parker playing Charlie Parker recognized Charlie Parker recognized him, and he quoted the Firebird Suite in one of his solos, and Stravinsky like lost it and flipped over the table, like laughing and cheering. That's amazing.
Wow, it's insane to think of those people sharing a time, let alone a space.
Yeah, well it's I mean, it's so funny when they talk about, you know, with all this stuff about Nosfaratu. Recently, someone was talking about how in Nosfaratu the or in the original Dracula, the Van Heusen character is like the one who gets all the credit as this vampire hunting archetype. But in that book there's like an American cowboy who comes as part of like Jonathan Harker's boys, and the cowboys like, well, why don't I just chop his head off with my big knife I carry everywhere Because I'm an American cowboy, and that is actually what happens. He does, indeed cut Dracula's head off with his big bowie knife he carries everywhere. And some have theorized that that is based on Teddy Roosevelt because oh wow, I think Bram Stoke, I think, if I remember correctly, Bram Stoker and Teddy Roosevelt knew each other. And so bram Stoker was like, well, I gotta put my friend Teddy in this book. Is this big dick swinging cowboy who just chops Dracula's head off? That's sweet, you know. And then there's yeah, so, and then there's stuff like Dracula could have conceivably tasted Coca cola, Yes that I have heard, you know, I like that, So maybe he wouldn't have needed blood.
Yeah, it's a game that my friend Morgan and I play of. Like so and so lived until nineteen seventy seven, they would have seen the release of Greece, Like, yeah, you know, it's just weird stuff like that. Yeah, Like oh, Buddy Epsen, the tin Man, like Saw nine to eleven.
You know, what did he think?
Why didn't they throw to him for a quote? What's just what is what is Buddy Ebsen this ninety two year old? I mean like Mickey Rooney saw like Gagnum style.
Yes, yeah, wow, you sure did. And Vine one of these munchkins saw Lil naz X. Yes that's correct. Yeah, think about that, why don't you? Okay? Anyway, when the producers were looking to make cuts to tighten up the movie, Over the Rainbow was one of the first scenes that they considered cutting because they felt it slowed down the pace of the movie and would go over the heads of the kids who were the intended audience, which, to be fair, it does. It is a draggy torch song. Yeah, I remember being really bored by it as a kid. Well, you know, when you're a kid, you just don't understand how hard it is to just hop from one octave to the next. They were also worried about letting Garland sing in a barnyard, which they believed was quote degrading.
I never thought about that until researching this. It never occurred to me.
They're shoving pills down this girl's throat and slapping her on the face because they don't like her acting. But they're like, we can't let her sing in a barnyard, otherwise people will.
Talk, and she says a little pitchy with those rubber things up her nose. Don't work on that, But don't worry. We'll keep her out of the barnyard.
Producer Mervin Leroy, his assistant Arthur Freed, who was himself a musician, and director Victor Fleming believe that losing the song would be losing the emotional heart of the Kansas sequence and fought hard to keep it in, apparently getting into a screaming match with Louis B. Mayer. Shockingly, during this no one was killed. I know, seriously, just like they're like special testing. He's like, I brought this new effect in that we're going to use on Gom with the wind. It's just like an actual cannon goes off in his office. It's like, what do you want? Yeah, yeah, Instead, they cut the reprize of over the Range that Dorothy sings while imprisoned in The Wicked, which is lair. Apparently, when Garland sang that version, she and the rest of the cast just began to weep because the scene of her singing that in a prison was simply so depressing. Despite this, Judy always cherished Over the Rainbow. Later in her life, she wrote a letter to composer Harold Arlend detailing what the song meant to her. Over the Rainbow has become part of my life, she wrote. It's so symbolic of everyone's dreams and wishes that I'm sure that's why some people get tears in their eyes when they hear it. I've sung it thousands of times, and it's still the song that's closest to my heart. Her daughter Lorna Luft described it as the most perfect marriage of a song and an artist that's ever been. And speaking of depressing, let's talk about another depressing thing. Over the Rainbow. Probably the most famous cover version of it is performed by famed Hawaiian obesity victim Israel Kamaka wuwo Ole, who mashed it up with What a Wonderful World back in nineteen ninety three. Apparently, he called a small Hawaiian recording studio belonging to one Milan Bartosa at three am insisted he had to come in and record this cover. Now, most people would have said no, why are you talking to me at this hour? Most people would have said no. But this man known as Iz was so charming that Milan agreed to give him thirty minutes. As Milan would later recall in Walk's the largest human being I had ever seen in my life. Israel was probably like five hundred pounds. And the first thing at hand is to find something for him to sit on. The security guard gave Israel a large steel chair. Then, as Milam would say, I put up some microphones, do a quick sound check roll tape, and the first thing he does is somewhere over the rainbow. He played and sang one take and it was over. Unfortunately, is Isa's reputation is one of the most popular Hawaii musicians, was mostly posthumous. He died in Honolulu from complications of his morbid obesity on June twenty sixth, nineteen ninety seven, at the age of thirty eight. Voice of an angel. Yes, as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more. Too much information after these messages, well back to the Wizard of Oz.
Speaking of editing, this is sort of as good at place as any dimension that the Wizard of Oz is chalk full of continuity errors. Cinema Sin's voice, it's tempting to wonder if it's a result of this thing having nine hundred directors over the course of his production, but I don't believe that's the case. One of the most obvious errors is the length of Dorothy's pigtails, which varies wildly throughout the film, particularly in the scene where she meets the Scarecrow. Different angles have for braids at very different lengths. Props more for vanish such as Dorothy's bouquet from the Munchkins that just disappear after she's handed it, all the moment when the tin Man's spear magically transformed into an axe. It was also a shot in the scene when Dorothy and co or leeing the apple throwing trees where she's wearing black shoes instead of the ruby slippers.
Gasp.
But predictably, the audiences did not care about these minor errors. As you mentioned earlier, The Wizard of Oz was released in the three test markets Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Arson Wells grew up, and Dennis, Massachusetts on the Cape on August eleventh, nineteen thirty nine, and then at the Strand Theater in go ahead and say this, buddy, oh Okanama Walk, Wisconsin.
Nice. I actually think that was fairly close you did. The name was derived from who no Moe walk the powa, tommy term for waterfall. Oh nice, Well that's the place where the Wizard of Oz.
The Final Cut had its third screening on August twelfth, nineteen thirty nine. Interestingly, the original trailers didn't use any of the Kansas sequences because MGM execs wanted moviegoers to think the entire film was in technicolor.
Imagine how pissed you would be if you.
Got in thinking it was gonna be this technicolor extravaganza, and for the first twenty minutes it was this dreary Sepia barnyard.
This is my regular life. Yeah, oh wait, wait, wait, wait, wait wait. The State Cartographer's Office of Wisconsin has released a new online map called Pronounce Wisconsin.
And you click every town and it reads it to you.
Yeah. Incredible. I gots zoom in where the oakmal Look? Where is this place? Wisconsin? It's a big state, Jordan, I don't know. Google it tell me which part to click around.
In Okay Southeast just outside of Milwaukee Economy.
Here. I'll do it again.
So instead of an arsen Val soundboard, I can hear it when you play you don't have to do that, Milwaukee.
No, I can't.
You don't have to do that, Milwaukee.
Okay, who what Tosa? Anything else? Clem for you while we're here. I think we're good.
It would have been much better if it was in Alice Cooper's voice for Wayne's world.
You know, yeah, that would have been they That was a missed opportunity. Oconoma walk? How about that Economa walk? That's never not gonna be funny? All right, back to this thing we're doing, this thing of ours.
One version of the poster was emblazoned with the phrase it took two years to planet, which is a hilarious bit of chest beating for the studios to use that on their promotional materials. For marketing and promotion, MGM spent a whopping quarter million dollars, or a tenth of the Wizard of Oz budget, which is worth five point seven million today.
Again, nothing five point seven million that'll get you, like what a spot on Good Morning America?
Maybe that seems like a fairly high promotional budget today, right?
Maybe I thought the log line was that half of a fields like oh, or was that like roughly half of what a film's budget was and then it only went up from there.
Okay, I guess I can see that, although maybe at this time there were just less things to advertise on.
I guess that's true. We're talking about radio and newspaper.
Posters, paper. But wait, this is incredible. This is some like insane bar trivia for you. This is one of the most mind blowing facts I learned while researching this. Okay, the OZ promotional team inadvertently birthed a fashion staple that we know in love today, the graphic T shirt.
This is this is nuts.
In the book The History of T Shirts, a book that I assume surely must be riveting, author Alyssa Mertis writes that the first ever promotional T shirt was made for the Wizard of Oz and it was a replica of the ones that you actually see in the movie worn by the citizens of Oz who are re stuffing the scarecrow.
Oh.
Made by Haynes. It's green and emblazoned with the words AWZ in white letters.
That tracks yeah.
And I was trying to see if any one of those were sold at auction.
I couldn't find any. They look kind of cool. Were they made out of asbestos? Plausible? You've been reading along with me, dipped in mercury.
The Wizard of Oz had its Hollywood premiere on August sixteenth, nineteen thirty nine, at the famous Graelmin's Chinese Theater, and the New York premiere the next day featured in live performance by Judy Garland and for some reason, her frequent on screen partner Mickey Rooney, which he was just there.
You couldn't like keep that he could have that. No, No, for those of you who who.
Maybe were forgetting from last week's episode, they were frequent on screen pairing. In the Andy Hardy series of movies, Judy's character is in love with Andy Hardy, played by Mickey Rooney, and in real life, Judy Garland was in love with Mickey Rooney who rejected her every chance he got. And now she was stepping out on her own and becoming a big star or incredible vehicle for her talents, and Mary.
Had had to be there. Mickey Rooney put his dumb, little piggy face into things.
Yeah, I don't really understand it. Who are like actress and actor duos now that are always together. I'm trying to think, Uh, what's his name? The little fellow little British guy in Zendia daya Tom Hollands. Yeah, wellpefully the dating though, well they're now engaged. But yeah, I don mean, we don't have that anymore.
I think it's because, like I guess it's because like once people started dating outside Hollywood and it became more derigerve for guys to have like model girlfriends or like musician girlfriends or vice versa, and you know, it didn't really matter who they were with from the studio. I don't know, I don't care, Okay, I don't like the idea. I will say that I don't like the idea of like these young women who were like I'm going to be a big star, and then like some big, sweaty, stinky guy like Louis B. Mayers like, here's your studio assigned boyfriend. Yeah, look over, and it's like a thirty five year old man with a glandular problem. He's like, hey, Dolly, I'm taking you out in the town tonight. Don't scream.
I like that.
That only makes me wanted more movie magic exactly.
You murdering movie magic into my headphones is a top five haunting moment in our entire journey on this show. Well, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney had a residency at the theater where The Wizard of Oz premier to New York for two weeks. They performed a set after every screening, which is kind of insane. And then it gets crazier because the third week after the New York premiere, Judy was joined by Ray Bolger and Burt Lair the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lyon for a post screening for its Can you imagine watching The Wizard of Oz in technicolor in nineteen thirty nine and then having Dorothy, the Scarecrow and Cowardly Line come out live and in person afterwards to sing these songs live.
I just think that's awesome. I would have rioted, you know, it would have been too much for my primitive nineteen thirties brain.
You were still worn over the train coming towards Yeah.
I was not over that. That's why the mad Bomber went on his whole thing. He couldn't handle the star power of the era.
The Wizard of Oz opened nationwide on August twenty fifth, nineteen thirty nine, about a week before the outbreak of World War Two.
In Europe.
Hell yeah, it received widespread acclaim. The New York Times provided my favorite review, thanks to critic Frank Nugent.
It's all so well intentioned, so.
Genial, and so gay that any reviewer who would look down his nose at the fun making should be spanked and sent off supperless to bed. Miss days when that qualified.
As a review, Oh god.
He considered it quote a delightful piece of wonderworking which had the youngster's eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters. Not since Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs says anything quite so fantastic succeeded half so well now. The New Yorker, on the other hand, that snobby sister of the Gray Lady, was less enthused get her ass. Critic Russell Maloney declared the Wizard of Oz.
A stinkerroo.
That appeared in The New Yorker That is worse than Boffo.
I was gonna say, you know what in a famous pan variety declined to call it boffo. I gotta start saying boffo more.
That was my uh, that was my twenty twenty five years Resolution.
Start saying boffo more I thought would have been your yearbook quote. One of my favorite tweets of all time.
Resolution number one start referring to the toilet as the John the year's resolution number two. Everything else falls into place, and it was on New Year's Eve twenty nineteen too.
Oh yeah, yeah, uh. The New Yorker review.
The New Yorker pan, I should say, continued the movie displayed no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity. I don't like the Singer midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially bothersome in technicolor A wow. Yes, It's interesting to note that a lot of critics at the time found the special effects in The Wizard of Oz to be really distracting, which I guess makes sense considering like talkies were only ten years old at that point.
Yeah, and I mean I think critics always generally do, I mean, even they think it's a gimmick. Yeah, now that I'm trying to like lionize some pieces, like you know, the Polar Express or whatever, but like even you go back to like the golden days of like practicals that I'm obsessed with, and people are always like Oh, it's a crutch relies on po I can't. I'm not defending polar Express though those are. That is a genuinely soul destroying look at technology. You love it though, because you love zemchis slut. Yeah, he really after a really fell off God, he fell off hard. A lot of critics also.
Weren't fans of the sort of modern updates to the source material, which I find really interesting, like the Wicked Witch using her bruin, the skyright over oz. They really objected to the modern to the then modernization of the what were then thirty nine year old books. I find that interesting. I mean, well, the books are written, there was no flight.
Isn't that crazy? I thought you were gonna be like there was no sky. I can't get over that thing about the what he said about those nice little people.
I don't like the Singer midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially bothersome in technicolor.
That's a pull quote for the Ages. Yeah.
The critic for The New Republic Otis Ferguson was also displeased with the Munchkins, believing them to be a transparent attempt to mimic snow White with her seven Dwarves, which honestly he.
Was right about that.
It's a connection I had not considered. Yeah, I mean it's a cigar chomping exec moment.
Really mean, yeah? No, how meany does Wall have seven? Give me a one hundred and twenty four? Bring them from Europe? Yeah? Ship them in? Uh oh, he continues.
The movie has Dwarves, music, technicolor, freak characters, and Judy Garland.
Sounds like a good Friday night to me, say the Aristocrats.
It can't be expected to have a sense of humor as well, and as for the light touch of fantasy, it weighs like a pound of fruitcakesing wet.
I prazy? Sure? Sure can he say that?
Though?
I mean, I guess he could at the time.
I don't think the term fruitcack had that connotation at the time.
Okay, yeah, it's interesting.
The movie is better than average, but not perfect. Contemporary reputation is probably best illustrated in Film Daily's poll of five hundred and forty two critics naming the best film of nineteen thirty nine. OZ weighed in at number seven. Granted, in later years, film historians would deem nineteen thirty nine to be one of the greatest years in cinema history, with the release of classics like Gone with the Wind, Withering Heights, Babes and Arms, Goodbye Mister Chips of Mice and Men, Mister Smith Goes to Washington and Stagecoach, but still seven?
What were the other ones? What was ahead of it? A bunch of movies about ships?
I so probably yeah. I think I tried looking this up and I couldn't find it.
They do love movies on movies about ships, man, But was it?
Of OZ took a back seat to Gone with the Wind at the Oscars, losing its nominations for Best Picture, Best Cinematography.
Art Direction, and Special Effects.
It did, however, win two Academy Awards for his music, Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
For Over the Rainbow. Of Course.
Judy Garland was awarded a miniature Trophy for her performance in the now defunct Juvenile Award category, which she predictably dubbed the Munchkin Award.
Oh honey.
It was presented to her by Mickey Rooney. You can't let her have her moment.
Jesus Christ Rooney. I really don't like him. I never never much cared for it, never I've never cared for Mickey, and I've always said.
That is that awful racist caricature he does the breakfast at Tiffany's.
Yeah, that's super bad. Anyone with eight wives, I assume just must be awful. Yes. Yes.
Judy, on the other hand, by all accounts pretty deep, pretty deep, pretty funny, funny. Lady Lucille Ball would say that there were a lot of comedi ends out there, but Judy Galland privately, one on one was legitimately hilarious.
And that's high praise coming from Lucy.
In addition to the many talk show appearances, there are tapes circulating that she made in the early sixties when she was attempting to put together a memoir to basically earn some money at that point. We touched on this earlier in the episode known as Judy Speaks, and available on YouTube. The tapes are a fascinating, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious document in which a very pilled and or liquored up Garland names names as she rants about all the people who screwed her over over the years and made money off of her while she was living out of a plastic bag at fans houses. Sadly, the memoir never came together before her death. However, while recognizing the litany of horrible stuff she dealt with, it's important to take a lot of what she says, especially later in life, especially concerning the Munchkins, with a grain of salt. Even her own shouldered admitted this. In a nineteen eighty nine special celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, Liza Minelli touches on this while surrounded by her half siblings Larna and Joey loved our mother had an amazing sense of humor, and everyone who really knew her knew what a funny, bright witty rack on tour she was. Her vocabulary was immense, and she had a way of telling a story where she could change anything so that anything she talked about would become an epic joke. And we used to love to listen to her. She did that several times telling stories about the Wizard of Oz, and they've since passed. In the myth people believe a lot of the things that she's told, which in fact we know are not true. In a similar note, I would like to share a story that circulated in the press in nineteen thirty nine. It sounds like Studio planted pr hucksterism to me, but I like it so much that I want to print the legend. In December nineteen thirty nine, a few months after the release of The Wizard of Oz, a little girl named Natalie Norris was recovering from what was reported in the press as quote a major operation when she took a turn for the worse and was placed in critical condition, suffering quote a nightmare of delirium. She began rambling about the Wizard of Oz, claiming in her fevered state that she was, in fact Dorothy. Her mother and doctor wrote to Judy informing her of this sad tale and thinking that maybe a word from the Star would somehow be helpful given the little girl's tenuous state. Judy first sent photos signed love and Kisses Dorothy, promising that she would take the little girl to Oz, where they'd have quote lots and lots of fun. And then Judy visited the little girl at the Anaheim Hospital in person and stayed for hours and talked with her. Some reports say that she actually showed up in her Dorothy outfit, but I think that's an embellishment, which is probably for the best, because I would imagine.
That would have blown the little girl's mind in a bad way. I just like the idea of her, like leaning in close and everyone thinks sick, like talking to her all sweetly, and then she's just this like gin perfumed breath and she's like, listen to me, I am Dorothy, and don't you forget it, just like squeezing harder and harder on her shoulder.
Let's get we be made straight. Wu wei'd be mayor groped me for this, and you will not take it away. I've killed before and I will.
Do it again. Oh my god, she was sixteen. Yeah, we laughed because it's horrible. Yeah, start this next story. Judy died of an accidental drug overdose. No, yeah. Anyone familiar with the broad strokes of Judy Garland's life knows that it had a very sad end and middle and beginning, really all of it. She died of an accidental drug overdose, apparently of the same sleeping pills that her mother had given her as a child, on June twenty second, nineteen sixty nine, at an apartment in London. She's pass be the second most famous person in the world to die in the toilet, Elvis being the first and Lenny Bruce getting the bronze.
She wasn't using the toilet though, she was just sitting on it while she was going through her pharmacopeia.
Her funeral was held a few days later in New York City on June twenty seventh, hours before the Stonewall wriots began in Greenwich Village just after midnight on June twenty eighth. The link between those two events has likely been overseated and exaggerated over the years. No participants recall her death as being a direct factor, although one Stonewall patron said that some people had come from the funeral that night to drown their sorrows. Since it was illegal for gay bars to have a liquor license at that time, Stonewall was a private bottle club that required members to sign in. Many used the pseudonym Judy Garland. No press reports at the time cite her death as any sort of inciting incident. Gay rights pioneer Bob Kohler is quoted as saying, when people talk about Judy Garland's death having anything do much with a riot, that makes me crazy. The street kids face death every day, they had nothing to lose, and they couldn't have cared less about Judy. We're talking about kids who were fourteen fifteen, sixteen. Judy Garland was the middle aged darling of the middle class gays. I get upset about this because it trivializes the whole thing. So while it would be inaccurate to say that Judy's death directly led to the Stonewall Riots, she was certainly an important figure in the queer community at that time. The Advocate has referred to her as the Elvis of homosexuals, and this was largely due to her role in the Wizard of Oz. Famously, for years, asking if someone was a friend of Dorothy was a barely coded way of asking if they were a gay person. Precise reasons why Judy and the film were embraced by the LGBTQ community are complex and varied. Judy herself supported homosexual people in a myriad of ways throughout her lifetime, including by marrying them. Two of her husbands were rumored to be closeted, her father was rumored to be closeted, and she introduced her daughter Liza to her first husband, Peter Allen, who was gay Garland supported LGBTQ causes finance actually and personally at a time, but that was not socially acceptable. She frequented gay bars with openly gay friends, including director George Koker, which royally pissed off the brass at MGM, and the gay community supported her right back. Her daughter Lorna Louff wrote in her memoir that in the mid sixties, Judy was a homeless brooke who showed up at the homes of her mostly gay fans with a plastic bag filled with her few possessions, asking to sleep on their couches. Judy Garland, Okay, I just that's just so shocking to me. Movie magic. Sure, during this period, when she was struggling to find work, she'd reliably get booked at gay bars. In New York press reports in the sixties frequently commentated on her passionate legion of gay fans. Time magazine had a memorable euphemism, calling them the boys in tight trousers, which was afraid that they employed on multiple occasions over the years. This same nineteen sixty seven time piece featured interviews with psychologists who were asked why homosexual men were so drawn to Judy and their insights are surprising in a number of ways. Actually, they theorize that the attraction to Garland might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived by so many problems homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria. Yeah, and that Judy was beaten up by life and battled and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her. It is interesting because there is a one of the horror podcasts I listened to. It is called brain Rot and it's about like eighties trash movies, but it's hosted by a gay man, and he talks about why the concept of the final girl like resonates in so much of the gay community as far as far as horror film goes, and he basically gave the exact same opinion. You know. He was, like, the final girls in these movies are menaced, tormented and have to rise up against mostly straight white men. Interesting conclusions drawn decades apart. That is really interesting.
There was a critic, Richard Dyer, who said something similar. Garland's work and life tells the story of survival and of someone trying to assert some form of control in a world that was set up to destroy her, which.
Sounds similar to what you're just detailing. Yeah. Future screenwriting icon William Goldman wrote a problematic profile on Judy and Esquire that makes liberal use of the hard a f before expanding on the notion that Garland was one of the first stars to have their dirty laundry air in such a public fashion. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering, and so does Garland. She's been through the fire and lived, all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone, brothers and sisters. She knows phrasing William. Judy predictably didn't give a damn about any of these theories. When a reporter asked how she felt about it having a large gay following, Garland replied, I couldn't care less. I sing to people. I sing to people. I sing to people. I couldn't care less I sing to people. I sing, I sing. Ultimately, depending on what part of the day that you caught her, that might have been a surprise to her.
Ah, I sing to people, what do you think about Judy Garland. It's as a performer or as a figure? No, no answer, however you're going to no.
I mean, it's it's a nightmare, dude. It's oh yeah, it's one of the worst, you know, it's And it's so sad that one of the things I find most hypocritical about it is that, like in you know, there's been this kind of reappraisal of how horribly the press treated Brittany right in the early amy and yes, and any generally vulnerable young woman who is seen to have any kind of person perceived as having a personal flaw related to men or drugs or drink anyway. And it's so funny to me that by that time the entertainment industry would have been suffused with the very generation of gay men who grew up worshiping Judy Garland and afforded absolutely none of the same sympathy to her modern spiritual daughters. You know, it's a nightmare business, dude. It's awful. It's a terrible, terrible place. And she was one of the first visible people to get really showed up by it. But apparently, you know, we have a short memory because we do this to women on every five years in pop culture.
You know, I feel as though, and maybe it's because it's the first time in like fifteen years that I'm kind of out of the closet the game, out of the pop culture journalism game, really, but I feel like we've gotten better at that because I've started in two thousand and nine in the height of the Amy White House, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton stuff I.
Like to think, so I like to think, so, you know, I don't know. Yeah, it sort of depends how you feel about paparazzi because like that stuff, that stuff is as bad as it's ever been, you know. But and privacy, invasion of privacy is as bad as it's ever been because fan culture has morphed into from I like what you do with your voice too, Like I own you and your.
And I've found you because of this photo you post on social media. I've not tracked you down.
Yes you owe me this, Yeah, so yeah, I would. It might be a little bit of a one two step forward, one step back situation with that, but you know, one of those steps is committed by quote unquote fans, and one of them is committed by the industry, you know, cannibalizing itself. And so I don't know which one's worse. Movie magic, but zooland voice. Why the Wizard of Oz?
Why is the Wizard of Oz such a touchstone for gay culture?
Well, theories have abound, as they're wont to do. What else abounds of? Even theories? It's like what else gets rumors? Rumors abound, rumors abound. It's like what else gets monged other than fish rumors in war?
They are the only conceptual things I can't think of, like literal things that abound, Well, cheese gets mongered, Oh, rumor mongering, I see, okay, fish. But things that are abound, I guess Germs are germs abound, germs abound, troubles abound.
Ill will abounds. If you were a loved one abound, if you were a loved one abound, Please treeted us using mashtag abound. It's been said that Dorothy's journey from Kansas to Oz was an allegory from any gay men who yearned to escape the grayness of their small minded hometowns and relocate to a big, colorful city. Where they could have adventures with a group of lovable outcasts who take them into their midst and support them as part of their chosen family. But don't take our word for it. Seriously, don't. As Brian Bromberger wrote in the Bay Area Reporter for his twenty nineteen piece why Judy Garland Still Matters, many now see Garland's iconic portrayal of Dorothy Gale in the nineteen thirty nine classic Oz as a queer journey, an escape from the puritanical, morally rigid, black and white small town life to technicolor city existence with fabulous friends. In the two thousand documentary Memories of Oz, no less an authority than John Waters spoke about seeing the Wizard of Oz as a little boy. I was the only child in the audience that always wondered why Dorothy ever wanted to go back to Kansas. Why would she want to go back to Kansas in this dreary black and white farm with an aunt who dressed badly and seemed mean to me, when she could live with magic shoes, winged monkeys and gay lions. I never understood it. John. So, according to lore, the cowardly lion is meant to be a gay man, since he identifies himself in song as a sissy and exhibits certain effeminate mannerisms. In the film, Dorothy is portrayed of as accepting anyone who is different, including the cowardly Lion who's allegedly a coded gay man. What is the scarecrow? Then? What does the tin man represent that? I don't know. I guess I didn't go super super super super deep on this, but okay, yeah, I don't. I'm not sure. The popularity of the Wizard of Oz within the LGBT community supposedly helped inspire the adoption of the Rainbow flag in honor of Over the Rainbow. The song has been described by writer Stephen Frank in his two thousand and seven piece What Does It Take to Be a Gay icon Today as the sound of the closet speaking to gay men whose image quote they presented in their own public lives was often at odds with a truer sense of self that mainstream society would not condone.
So in light of all this, the whole friend of Dorothy euphemism begins to make a whole lot more sense. Dorothy was accepting of everyone, no matter how different they were, you were a friend of Dorothy, ergo you are different.
When did the film start getting broadcasts?
Nineteen fifty We talk about it later, I want to say, nineteen fifty six.
Yeah, okay, yeah, So that scans chronologically that like gay men of John Waters' environcea would have been seeing this via their parents and seeing it on TV via the broadcast. But not. I mean, he said he saw in the theater, So what am I talking about?
But I think I got a re release in nineteen forty nine, so that probably would have run around when he saw it.
I think.
Okay, But this phrase a friend Dorothy the origins of the source of speculation.
Some believe that the.
Term derived way back in nineteen oh nine, which I kind of find hard to believe.
After L.
Frank Baum published another OZ sequel, The Road to Oz. The book introduces readers to Polychrome, who, upon meeting Dorothy's traveling companions, exclaims, you have some queer friends, Dorothy, to which Dorothy replies, the queerness doesn't matter so long as they're friends.
Oh yeah.
I always believe that it's much more straightforward. Excuse the pun reference to the Wizard of Oz movie from nineteen thirty nine. On the flip side, there's a theory that the whole friend of Dorothy euphemism is it connected to the Wizard of Oz at all. But the Dorothy in question actually refers to Dorothy Parker, the humorous critic and per her Wikipedia defender of human and civil rights, whose social circle in the twenties and thirties included gay men. And she would throw lavish parties, and this would be the phrase that guests, most of whom were gay men, would use to gain entry. We are friends of Dorothy so and.
She was so caddy? Was she Dorothy Parker? Yes, she's like a famous one of those like barbed tongue ladies.
Also, her uncle drowned on the Titanic. Well, there's that. I got that one in.
She's the one who wrote they might as Well Live poem. I believe it is attributed to I don't know if I know that. I hate almost all rich people, but I think i'd be darling at it. It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes. I can't stand messes. Oh, this is another classic one. Why she doesn't answer emails? Too busy and vice versa. Dorothy Parker supposedly emails now any letters, Oh I see wit has truth in it. Wise, cracking is simply calisthenics with words. Wow, that's great. I like that. To me. The most beautiful word in the English language is sell her door, isn't it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are check and enclosed. It's good. Yeah, she has a funny broad I think she's the one who also sent the She would send telegrams to people after a morning or a night of heavy drinking that just simply read can you ever forgive me? Ah? Wow?
Her original name is Rothshaw. Well, I wonder probably not not those rothchilds.
No, apparently, what fresh hell can this be? Is a Dorothy Parker original? What? Oh wow? That's awesome.
But enough about the cultural legacy of marginalized groups. Let's talk about the cold, hard cash generated by Dorothy and company. Writing, a Variety critic John C. Flynn predicted that the Wizard of Oz was quote likely to perform some record breaking feats of box office magic. However, this was apparently not the case, according to MGM records and corroborated by reputable sites like Time and NBC Dot com The Wizard of Oz earned three million and seventeen thousand dollars in the US and abroad during its initial release, but factoring in the high production cost, marketing, distribution, and other overheads, Oz resulted in a million dollar loss for MGM.
I've seen other.
Reports that the film basically broke even, but those sites don't really seem as trustworthy, so I'm gonna go with a million time loss. Honestly, it's a better story. One factor was that the target demo for this movie was kids, whose theater tickets were cheaper than adults, and also the movie was released about a week before the outbreak of WW two, the Big One in Europe, which obviously cut into overseas revenue quite a bit. The Wizard of Oz apparently didn't turn to profit until its tenth anniversary release in nineteen forty nine, when it added an additional one point five million or about fifteen million today.
To its total box office gross.
But the real boost in the film's popularity came and it became a staple on television. The Wizard of Oz received its television debut on November third, nineteen fifty six, after CBS paid two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars or nearly two million dollars today for broadcast rights. To give you a sense of how innovative it was, this was the first MGM film to be televised on a national network, which is weird, so movies on TV this was a very new thing. It was broadcast in color, despite the fact that only a handful of people actually owned color TVs in nineteen fifty six, and reportedly it would be well into the seventies before the majority of yours who saw this on TV saw it in color. The broadcast was a massive rating success, drawing in fifty three percent of audiences.
That's an insane share.
It was repeated on December thirteenth, nineteen fifty nine, and gainned an even larger television audience, a share of fifty eight percent. From that point onward, the broadcast became an annual tradition, with families showing it to the next generation. The fact that it was essentially free, at least to anyone with access to a TV helped it transcend socio economic barriers, and by nineteen sixty nine, Time magazine proclaimed The Wizard of Oz quote the most popular single film property in the history of US television and Judy Garland quote a national legend. None of this would have been possible without these repeated television airings. In fact, in all likelihood, the film would have probably been lumped in with a host of other somewhat obscure technicolor of musical extravaganzas from the Golden Age of Hollywood or is it Silver Age?
I never know, I don't know colors.
Ray Bolger the Scarecrow, had a poignant, if somewhat pointed comment on the film's reputation towards the end of his life. We don't get any residuals, but we have something better, a kind of immortality, but not really, because he died in nineteen eighty seven. Given it's slow burned success, it makes sense that Hollywood was hot to capitalize on the Wizard of Oz. Surprisingly give it the tepid box office results upon US initial release, MGM reportedly wanted to make a sequel right away. The project was reportedly scrapped after resistance from Wicked Witch star Margaret Hamilton, who you'll recall was nearly burnt alive during the making of the original.
Also, how would they have brought her back I guess the same way they do in Wicked, where did they say she faked her death?
But okay, spoilers, Well, never mind. And there are also concerns from MGM executives that Judy Starr was too big and they could no longer afford her, which now that I say, that doesn't even make any sense because she was under contract.
So yeah, I don't know.
While a genuine Wizard of Oz sequel never materialized with the OG cast, audiences have had plenty of spinoffs to keep them entertained over the years. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor started in nineteen seventy eight. Motown musical Whiz Disney made return to OZ in nineteen eighty five, starring Perusa balk As Dorothy.
That movie is genuinely terrifying. Yeah, I remember. I think several people have said that to me. That is a version of OZ that like that you like, yes it is, but I mean it's like it's so it is so wild. It must have been in their sort of era where the where they were like, well let's just fu try anything. Yeah, yeah, I think they were. Were they directly what years.
Labyrin eighty six I want to say, oh, yeah, so they.
Actually might have rushed this to get it out before Labyrinth.
But Dark Crystal it was in that era of like truly, it was like mid eighties, the scariest era of kids movies. Yes, yeah, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal. This that weird movie legends.
Yeah, this whole Return to Oz literally opens with Auntie m and Uncle Henry taking her to get ect electroconvulsive therapy.
Oh god, yeah, oh Jesus, Okay, it was all muppets version of the Wizard of Oz in two thousand and five that I have no memory of, which would have made sense because I was seventeen.
But that's weird.
H James Franco starred in twenty thirteen's Oz The Great and Powerful Prequel, which I remember thinking seemed kind of scuzzy, but that just might have been the Franco of it all. Twenty fourteen's animated Legends of Oz Dorothy's Return featured the voice of Leah Michelle dan Ackroyd, James Belushi. Yum us have the Uh Blues Brothers Reion there and Kelsey Grammar And I think there's another OZ spin off, but I can't seem to think of it at the moment, so we'll just leave it there with Ackroyd and Frasier, considering it has been almost five hours of doing this.
Yes, you thought there wouldn't be enough. Wicked will be for another day, will it? I don't know. You seem to like it a lot more than me. Yeah, I guess if I did. If I did a music without doing lems, though, my mom would probably just me, uh yeah, it's phantom. Yeah, m we should write a musical for men. Hmm.
What is the most manly musical that exists?
Miss?
I've never actually seen it. I know some of the songs though, Rent No, hmm, okay, I mean the producers.
Yeah, that's okay, Chicago kind of Yeah, it's got dames. It does have dames, Heigel, let's see, uh Book of Mormon.
Oh, Jersey Boys, that's like that is that's like the musical for you, like your your racist uncle.
I've seen it many times. Don't come out me, Yeah no, but I mean it's just so funny that like you pick up. Of course, it's about a group of men who sing like women. Uh yeah, I'm gonna think about Jersey boys. Okay, all right, Jersey boys. Most dude dudes, rock move du musical. Okay, yeah, there you go. Take that New York mag Well.
Folks, before we go, I just want to thank everybody for the very kind notes and checking in with me after hearing.
About my pat with the live reviewed you had pneumonia.
Now I've got a lot of nice messages and that really is very touching. It it warms my heart not to one hundred and five degrees, but still warms it significantly.
So thank you very very much. It's very kind of you.
Oh also, sorry, before we sign out, I have to share this incredible fact. So in our last episode we were talking about Buddy Rich tapes.
The tapes from famed.
Big band drummer Buddy Rich losing it on his band in their tour bus, was recorded by one of his band members just to document the incredible verbal abuse they are regularly subjected to. Kind of a deep cut. Like I thought, it was kind of there just to amuse ourselves. But within hours of me publishing that episode, we heard from a friend of the pod, Casey, who said, I'm currently listening to the newest episode and just got to the part about the Buddy Rich tapes. My cousin Lee Musiker is the band member who made that recording. Blew my mind. I could not believe it. I kind of want to interview him now and hear all about that. That is shocking to me.
I just love that we are reaching the point of this podcast where we are degrees of separation from things. Yes, yes, that is nuts.
And Casey, by the way, runs an incredible bakery in Holmesdale, Pennsylvania, be Kind bake House. Find them on Instagram.
We sold out. You heard it here first.
Oh, I'll do anything for sweet trees. Come on, Oh my god, they look amazing, like absolutely incredible. There's a much of mochi cake on here, which made for Lunar New Year's There's a blueberry lavender cream pie and a chocolate expresso pie.
Believe slowly fade out on yourself reading these.
Oh my god, what else you got here? A savory French onion gallet. Okay, savory, but it looks good enough that I'll tolerate it. Chocolate tahini cake, Oh my god, yeah, no, folks, check this out.
Strawberry shortcake cookie.
I've never heard of a strawberry short cake cookie.
What a great idea.
Okay, yeah, this is amazing, So check it out. Be Kind bake House on Instagram looks amazing. If you're do the Homestale, Pennsylvania area, check it out.
And we've been Uh, we're back, baby, We're back, baby.
It's gonna be two in a row for the first time in quite some time.
Thanks for bearing with us.
Thank you for putting up with us for multiple reasons.
Yeah, for so many. My name is Alex Heigel and.
I'm Jordan Runtogg. Folks, we'll ktch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio. The show's executive.
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel.
With original music by Seth Applebaum. I'm a Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
