In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is carried from the Deadly Poppy Field to safety by the Scarecrow and Tin Man; the Cowardly Lion is hoisted from the flowers on a cart pulled by hundreds of field mice. For practical purposes, the mice were supplanted in the 1902 stage musical by the Witch of the North, who summons a snow shower to quell the poppies’ poison and revive the travelers. For Turner Entertainment Co.’s film, Dorothy and her friends are once again rescued by the Good Witch with a refreshing snowfall in a bit borrowed from the play.
There is a misconception that The Wizard of Oz was among the earliest—if not the first—Technicolor films. As with any fledgling technology, Technicolor hadn’t yet been perfected in 1938, but its use in Hollywood filmmaking dates to the early 1920s. It was, though, cumbersome, tedious, and expensive, and the results were criticized by some as vulgar and eye-straining. But in the end all obstacles were overcome, and even journalist Paul Harrison, a premature dissenter, became a convert by February 1939, saying, “If the customers have been worrying about what the movies are doing to The Wizard of Oz, I can assure them that the story is well in hand—and in very sympathetic and capable hands, too.”
The technicians, artisans, and craftspeople who brought the Land of Oz vividly to life were skilled experts adept in their respective trades. The sets in The Wizard of Oz are stunning achievements when one appreciates that everything was constructed from the ground up to create the illusion of an otherworld realm, but with enough realism to be plausible. If Dorothy could be transported from her Kansas farm to experience a land of Lilliputians, travel the Yellow Brick Road, and skip through poppy fields, then so might we.
In the set still, note the track laid for the path of the camera to capture the action in the poppy field scenes.
THE EMERALD CITY
Dorothy and her companions are dazzled by their first glimpse of the Emerald City in a memorable scene from The Wizard of Oz.
L. FRANK BAUM’S MAGNIFICENT Emerald City was most likely inspired by the author’s visit to the Imperial White City, the core attraction at Chicago’s six-hundred-acre Columbian Exposition, in 1893. At night, the pristine buildings were illuminated by electric lights, which caused them to shimmer with effervescence, not unlike Baum’s fictional mecca. To those unaccustomed to electricity, it was an extraordinary sight to behold.
Baum’s Emerald City was not totally monochromatic throughout; before being admitted through its gates, Dorothy and her companions are obliged to put on spectacles with green lenses that cause everything to appear tinted to their eyes. (One can imagine the dazzling effect if Chicago’s White City were viewed through similar glasses.) Movie screenwriters dispensed with Baum’s spectacles in favor of portraying a literal Emerald City in which even the inhabitants’ clothing was shades of green.
The guardian of the gates (below) and the Emerald City coachman were two of five disguises Jack Dawn envisioned for Frank Morgan, who also portrayed the Wizard of Oz. The coachman was a design entirely of Dawn’s creation, with no references to the Wonderful Wizard of Oz book.
The weary travelers approach the fabulous Emerald City at the rainbow’s end in Jack Martin Smith’s preproduction conceptual painting, rendered in gouache, 1938. Smith’s artwork visualized William Horning’s ideas about the settings and architecture, all of which was supervised by art department head Cedric Gibbons. Gibbons directed Smith to paint with a muted palette to project an ethereal effect. Smith also contributed preproduction sketches to Gone with the Wind. Smith’s tenure at M-G-M ran from 1937-1956, when he joined Twentieth Century-Fox; he later won Oscars® for art direction for Cleopatra (1963), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and Hello, Dolly! (1969).
The motion picture’s Emerald City was peopled with several hundred extras, a few of whom had close-ups or a line or two on camera; but where movie extras were concerned, any notion of scene stealing was forbidden. Still, Dorothy Barrett, who played an attendant in the Emerald City salon, wished for foresight. She explained, “We didn’t think of [The Wizard of Oz] as a great lasting movie,” adding that if she had, she would have tried to appear more conspicuous to the camera. “But then, one could lose work that way because of being too obvious or creating continuity issues.” Meredythe Glass, also an Emerald City extra, concurred, saying, “You kept your place. The last thing I ever wanted to do was embarrass Mervyn [LeRoy].” (Glass was of Hollywood pedigree by relation; she got the acting gig on The Wizard of Oz because LeRoy was her mother’s cousin.)
The Emerald City interior was said to be the most expansive of all the sets in terms of size and layout. After paying a visit, columnist Milton Barker noted, “[It] covers a stage three hundred feet square and is the most beautiful set your reporter ever has seen. There is every shade of green imaginable and the floor glistens like a mirror. After every shot a dozen men with huge mops go over it carefully to remove every fleck of dust.”
Inside Emerald City, the travelers are given a tour of the town in a carriage drawn by the Horse of a Different Color (the carriage was a rental from Overland Stables). BELOW: During a pause in shooting, doubles for Judy Garland and Ray Bolger chat with each other. The first stop on the tour is the Wash & Brush Up Company, where the group can “tidy up a bit.” Bit player Albert Morin (who was an extra in Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta Bazaar scene) is one of the Scarecrow’s attendants. • For the “Merry Old Land of Oz” number, Mervyn LeRoy explained, “We figured the picture has to be more than just a fairy tale, so we are treating it like a Ziegfeld show—having the characters sing and dance.”
Three hundred extras attired as Emerald City peasants parade through the streets in a musical scene cut from The Wizard of Oz. Note that each townsman has a uniquely painted hairline—indicative of the motion picture’s attention to detail. Some of the men complained that the regular use of bald caps made their hair fall out.
An extra poses for an early makeup test as an Emerald City townsman’s wife, October 8, 1938.
The Wizard of Oz’s inner sanctum and throne room. Illuminated fabric was designed to look like columns of light.
Richard Thorpe shot footage of Dorothy’s three friends scaling the cliff.
Afterward, they are apprehended by three Winkies. The heroes overwhelm the guards and don their uniforms to infiltrate the Wicked Witch’s castle in disguise. Sharp-eyed viewers will note Buddy Ebsen, Bert Lahr, and the top of Ray Bolger’s fur headdress, in addition to a prop man.
Dorothy’s rescue from the Wicked Witch’s tower room was originally filmed on this set by director Richard Thorpe, October 19, 1938. Note Judy Garland’s T-shaped positioning mark in front of the slate, and the hamper used to hold Toto hostage. The characters then reunited (below) after the Tin Man, here portrayed by Buddy Ebsen, used his ax to rend the barricade, freeing Dorothy.
A set reference still from the M-G-M Property Department documents the tower room of the Witch’s castle on the third day of Richard Thorpe’s direction, October 15, 1938. Typed notations on the back of the photo indicate rented accoutrements: “2 small hand bellows,” “1 brass sundial globe of world,” “1 silver chalice with lizard top,” and “1 jeweled box with snake and eagle top.”
The entrance hall to the Witch’s castle as arranged under Richard Thorpe’s directorship (above). Scenes were reshot on the entrance hall set after Victor Fleming’s appointment as director (below).
Tests document the set’s chandelier and cleat.
PART 2 - WE’RE OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD: THE GREAT WIZARD OF OZ REVEALED
ACCORDING TO FILM Daily, the average feature film took twenty-two days to shoot in 1938. The Wizard of Oz, however, far exceeded all projected deadlines. In particular, Judy Garland’s schedule would be tied up beyond expectation. When she was cast as Dorothy in February 1938, she was also slated for the films Wonder Child and M-G-M producer Harry Rapf’s Circus Days; but her unavailability led to the abandonment of both projects. The production time for The Wizard of Oz lasted a total of twenty months: eight months of prep time p
rior to filming (from the point of acquisition); six months before the cameras; and an additional six months in postproduction. Garland was fifteen when she was cast as Dorothy and began wig and makeup tests; she was sixteen throughout the majority of filming; and she would have been seventeen on June 30, 1939, when the assistant director log for Babes in Arms, her project after The Wizard of Oz, noted, “Judy Garland working on [The] Wizard of Oz retakes.”
During the film’s lengthy shooting schedule, tidbits about the production and its players were trickled to the press to fuel public appetite for M-G-M’s forthcoming Technicolor epic. The smallest bit of gossip was considered newsworthy: Garland’s case of the sniffles set Metro back five days of shooting at $30,000 a day. Jack Haley joked about needing to carry a can opener in case he should tip over in his Tin Man costume. Garland was visited on the set by former silent-screen star Colleen Moore. The sound of Ray Bolger’s clicking pocket change spoiled a take during his scarecrow dance. Garland was compiling a keepsake album of stills from her time on the film. Bert Lahr brought a crate of avocados to the set from his ranch and distributed them to cast and crew.
Artist Feg Murray’s “It’s True!” cartoon panel was along the lines of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” and featured tidbits about The Wizard of Oz to whet public interest for the forthcoming picture.
The Film Daily Yearbook for 1939 was published in late 1938, and featured a section promoting the forthcoming production of The Wizard of Oz.
After setbacks, delays, and much troubleshooting, The Wizard of Oz was at last prepared to move into its postproduction phase in March 1939. And M-G-M’s publicity machine was soon pressed into action in order to generate excitement and anticipation for The Wizard of Oz, its most expensive, complex, and glorious production to date.
POSTPRODUCTION
“ALL THE SCENES FOR THE WIZARD OF OZ HAVE BEEN ‘IN THE CAN,’ AS THEY SAY, FOR A COUPLE MONTHS. BUT THE SOUND EXPERTS ARE STILL WORKING FULL BLAST . . . THEY’RE BOOMING AND BUZZING, CLANKING AND SWISHING, HOWLING AND THUNDERING. THEY’RE MAKING NOISE THAT NOBODY EVER HEARD BEFORE . . .”
–JOURNALIST PAUL HARRISON, MAY 8, 1939
WITH PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY completed, April to July 1939 news briefs about The Wizard of Oz focused on its postproduction—dubbing, background scoring, and the synchronization of an estimated two hundred thousand sound effects. “Ever since The Wizard of Oz finished shooting in March,” wrote journalist Paul Harrison, “sounds have been in the process of creation at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and the man who has to be the testing ground for them is producer Mervyn LeRoy.” M-G-M’s technicians conducted ingenious experiments to create the sounds heard in The Wizard of Oz. While the Scarecrow’s rustling swishes and the Tin Man’s clinks and clanks were elementary, other noises—from weird bird calls in the Haunted Forest to the strange speech of the Winkies and Munchkins—had no precedent.
Dozens of real rockets, for example, were set off and recorded to create the swoosh sound as the Wicked Witch flew on her broomstick. Then there was the unearthly whine of the jitterbug, an entomologic bit of cinematic license that paralleled the Wicked Witch’s swarm of bee-slaves in the Baum book. In the film, the mosquito-like critter incited “The Jitterbug,” a (deleted) song-and-dance precursor to the Winged Monkey attack. The jitterbug music was full of eerie effects, such as a man beating a xylophone contraption born of a small upright piano with retrofitted strings; the hum of the bug itself was the amplified zing of bullet slugs ricocheting off an ax blade.
The film’s fantasy sound effects were likely to be accepted by audiences as otherworldly without question. But the cyclone’s mighty roar required total authenticity to be believed. Its noise was stringently researched even before filming began: in the August 27, 1938, edition of Boxoffice magazine, it was reported that O. O. Ceccarini, a sound designer for the film and a mathematician whom Albert Einstein had pronounced a genius, was conducting mathematical experiments having to do with pressure, velocity, air density, and electrical characteristics in order to replicate the volume and pitch of cyclones.
Getting the sound—and other postproduction effects—just right further contributed to delays in the film’s release date. Journalist Jimmie Fidler quipped, “The Wizard of Oz . . . has been in production so long that only Hollywood veterans remember the starting date.” Like every other studio, M-G-M closely guarded most of its technical secrets and only revealed enough to generate mystique. Fidler wanted the studio to reveal all of its secrets, including how the special effects team made Winged Monkeys fly and melted the Witch. “I think too much secrecy is a mistake,” he opined, “for the average fan would enjoy the picture more if he realized the magic—and the headaches—involved in its making.” (M-G-M was not forthcoming.) In the interim, a steady stream of publicity bits and “coming soon” teaser ads served to entice moviegoers prior to the picture’s unveiling.
MOVIE-MAKING WIZARDRY
“IT SEEMED IMPRACTICAL TO SEND A CREW TO A FARM IN KANSAS TO AWAIT A TORNADO. AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT SEEMED ADVISABLE TO BE ABLE TO CONTROL OUR TORNADO.”
–A. ARNOLD “BUDDY” GILLESPIE, M-G-M SPECIAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENT CHIEF
IT IS GENERALLY agreed that The Wizard of Oz was innovative for its time, particularly where its special effects are concerned. The fearsome cyclone was the result of much trial and error to create as realistic a screen illusion as possible. The most obvious solution would have been for M-G-M to repurpose amateur footage of a twister or film the real thing in progress themselves; but tornadoes in Los Angeles were a rarity, and it wouldn’t be until 1951 that the first live tornado was filmed in America. On October 8, 1938, then-director Richard Thorpe, assistant director Al Shenberg, and unit production assistant Joe Cook were said to be searching Southern California for suitable Kansas-like settings. Also on that date, The Hollywood Reporter noted that the Wizard of Oz company would travel to Kansas to shoot the “dramatic scenes.” There is evidence to suggest that M-G-M dispatched a camera crew to Kansas early on, primarily to scout locations that resembled an average Dust Bowl farm while anticipating the off chance that an authentic twister might materialize. (The trip was a “location expense” line item in M-G-M’s budget for the film.) But Mervyn LeRoy reported that no real Kansas tornado cooperated, so Buddy Gillespie was charged with devising the next best thing—a process he had already been experimenting with since the previous August.
Gillespie was a man known for his technical expertise and problem-solving capabilities, but at first the Kansas cyclone had him stumped. On August 20, 1938, Gillespie photographed a water vortex in a tank—a clever thought at the time, though impractical. This was followed by unsuccessful simulations using a large rubber cone (which lacked fluidity) before he hit upon the idea of a cloth “tube,” which was tested the following November 5. Additional tests were made in January 1939 before he successfully captured the proper effect on film between then and mid-February. Gillespie explained that the on-screen storm cloud was a thirty-five-foot elongated canvas sleeve shaped like the funnel of a real tornado (not a lady’s silk stocking, as has been misreported, though the concept was similar). A mechanized crane that traveled the length of the stage was hung from the bottom of the roof trusses. The crane supported the canvas cone, which was then rotated by a D.C. motor on a speed control dial. The motor assembly was also arranged to tip at an angle. The base of the canvas cone was attached to another car on the stage floor that would travel a predetermined course. When compressed earth and dust, wind fans, and cotton clouds attached to shifting glass panes were added to the setup, the effect of a Kansas cyclone was complete. This footage could then be projected onto a background screen while Judy Garland and the other actors fought against its “life-size” winds in the foreground for a single camera shot.
The Wizard of Oz initially appears as an enormous disembodied head towering over the throne. The billowing clouds of colored smoke for these scenes were devised by Anthony D. Paglia, formerly of New Castle, Pe
nnsylvania. A series of Technicolor tests of the monstrous Wizard of Oz (likely an anonymous actor and not Frank Morgan) were filmed against black velvet and shot in close-up, medium, and long shots to reproduce as double-exposure overlays on-screen.
Gillespie recalled that the first attempt by M-G-M’s cartoon department to make the Witch’s squadron of monkeys soar resulted in failure—it was too jarring when intercut with live-action footage of the actors. Finally, both miniature rubber monkeys and stuntmen dressed as monkeys were suspended by thin wires from the soundstage and flew on cue. The Wicked Witch’s gradual melting was a glorified version of the old magician’s ploy of a hidden trapdoor in the floor supplemented with dry-ice vapors for a steam effect.
The phantom Wizard of Oz’s head that looms menacingly above the Emerald City throne room was originally to be presented in two variations. In Paul Harrison’s March 8, 1939, summary of his visit to the film set, he related that in long shots, an oversize artificial head hanging from wires was used, but “where it must be shown talking, close-ups will be made of an identical rubber mask worn by a man.” The artificial head was found to be too static when intercut with footage of the talking head, so only shots of the actor were used (likely not Frank Morgan, though Morgan voiced the Wizard of Oz’s booming dialogue). The result was grotesque enough for director Victor Fleming to be “a little worried that [the head] may be a bit too terrible, especially since it will be able to grimace and mouth its words.”
The Wizard of Oz: The Official 75th Anniversary Companion Page 7
