EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wiz was on the CBS Late Movie on October 5, 1984.

As discussed in the article on this site about Return of Oz, nearly every Oz movie has been a failure until Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful. While we traditionally believe that the 1939 version was a success, it wasn’t a financial success until it was re-released in 1949 and then became beloved when it was on TV.

The Wiz lost $10 million nearly forty years after.

The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” premiered in Baltimore in 1974 and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Ted Ross and Mabel King would reprise their roles as The Lion and Evillene, but when Motown made this movie, Stephanie Mills was out as Dorothy and Diana Ross was in. First, she was turned down by Barry Gordy and then she got Rob Cohen of Universal Pictures to finance The Wiz if she were to play the lead role. Other roles would include Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, Lena Horne as Glinda, Thelma Carpenter as Miss One (instead of Addapearle as in the stage play, but writer Joel Schumacher didn’t use any of the original book by William F. Brown) and Richard Pryor as the Wizard.

Saturday Night Fever director John Badham was to direct, but he couldn’t see Ross as Dorothy, so he left and Sidney Lumet (known for movies like Dog Day Afternoon and Network) was hired. He’d never made a musical and little if any comedy.

Back to that script. Schumacher was influenced super into Werner Erhard and the Erhard Seminars Training movement, as was Diana Ross. While some say that EST is used to “transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself,” others charge that it was mind control or an attempt at creating a “totalitarian army.”

Cohen said, “Before I knew it, the movie was becoming an est-ian fable full of est buzzwords about knowing who you are and sharing and all that. I hated the script a lot. But it was hard to argue with Ross because she was recognizing in this script all of this stuff that she had worked out in est seminars.” A lot of what Glinda says at the end of the movie is L. Frank Baum filtered through EST — “Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.” — as is the song “Believe In Yourself” — “If you believe / Within your heart, you’ll know / That no one can change / The path that you must go. Believe what you feel / And know you’re right, because / The time will come around / When you’ll say it’s yours.”

If there’s anything positive from this film, it’s the fact that both Michael and LaToya Jackson were able to move into a Manhattan apartment, all on their own for the first time in their life. Michael got to go to Studio 54; he impressed Quincy Jones with his work ethic so much that Jones agreed to produce Off the Wall. He would also produced Thriller and Bad. Jones compared Jackson to Sammy Davis Jr.

However, the film was a commercial failure and may have even hurt all black films for some years to come, as Hollywood kept pointing to how this movie bombed. It cost $24 million, made $13.6 in theaters and CBS paid $10 million to air it, but it still was seen as a loss. Michael came out as a star, but this was the end of Diana Ross as a movie star.

I’ll never understand why Dorothy was 24 years old in this instead of a child, but that’s what Ross wanted and that’s what she got. Yet there are things that really work in this for me, like the urban scapes that make up Oz — critics hated that and well, they were wrong — and the four crows are fun villains.

The CBS version cuts a lot of footage so that it fit into a three hour running time. I can’t even imagine how long the commercials were for this when it was on the CBS Late Movie.