April 24: Think of the Children — Pick a movie that was controversial for how potentially damaging that it would be to the children who are our future.
In 1954, Walt Disney Productions bought the film rights to thirteen of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books — all of the remaining books other than The Wizard of Oz — for their TV series Disneyland. The Rainbow Road to Oz was planned and it would have featured many of the Mouseketeers, including Darlene Gillespie as Dorothy Gale, Annette Funicello as Princess Ozma, Bobby Burgess as the Scarecrow, Jimmie Dodd as the Cowardly Lion, Doreen Tracey as the Patchwork Girl, Tommy Kirk as the son of the Wicked Witch of the West and Kevin Corcoran.
The songs “Patches,””The Oz-Kan Hop” and “The Rainbow Road to Oz” were previewed on September 11, 1957 on the Disneyland show’s fourth anniversary. A few months later, the project was cancelled, either because Walt Disney was unhappy with it, the actors couldn’t carry a real movie or the budget had grown too large. The rest of the songs would finally be part of the 1969 Disneyland Records album The Cowardly Lion of Oz.
Roger Ebert called William Murch “the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema.” After working on the sound of movies such as THX-1138, The Godfather and American Graffiti, he edited The Conversation and Apocalypse Now (he also won an Oscar for the sound mix) before suggesting that Disney make their Oz movie in 1980. As they were about to lose the rights, Disney took him up on his offer and selected him to direct and write along with Gill Dennis.
It would be the only movie Murch ever directed (he did do one episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “The General”) as he would go back to editing, working on The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the restoration of Touch of Evil. He also won Oscars for sound and editing for The English Patient and editing for Julia, Cold Mountain, The Godfather Part III and Ghost.
Murch based this movie on the second and third Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, along with elements of the book and stage play of Tik-Tok of Oz. He also used parts of the book Wisconsin Death Trip — yes, this gets that dark — and went as far away from the original movie as he could. The main goal was to be more faithful to the books than the 1939 movie which is why this is a cult film and not a success.
It was not an easy film to make.
Filming was to be shot 75% on location but a switch in Disney leadership led to the budget — which had already gone from $20 to $28 million — pushed the movie to Elstree Studios and the Salisbury Plain, where temperatures were so cold that lead actress Fairuza Balk would cry from the cold but never complain.
At some point, original cameraman Freddie Francis quit, frustrated by working with Murch.
A few weeks later, Disney was unhappy with the footage they had seen and fired Murch, who said that he felt “…what the soul feels after it’s left the body after a car accident — pain but tremendous relief.”
Then his friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola spoke up for him and informed Disney that they wouldn’t be all that friendly with the studio if Murch couldn’t finish his movie. Lucas also promised that he would replace Murch if the director had any problems.
Dorothy Gale (Balk was picked from thousands of actresses and said even getting to audition for the movie was a huge deal) has been taken to a sanitarium by Aunt Em (Piper Laurie, yes, Carrie‘s mother was Auntie Em) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) because she won’t stop talking about Oz. If you had been to Oz and it was in color and you lived in black and white and had friends like a talking lion and fought winged monkeys, would you ever stop? But to stop her from her delusions — or reality, as it were — Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson, Merlin from Excalibur) and Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh, the co-creator of Upstairs, Downstairs) plan on sending Dorothy to electroshock therapy.
This movie already upset me as Toto runs out to join Dorothy as she’s taken away and she silently mouths the words “Go home. Please go home.” He howls in abject sadness.
Lightning takes out the power and a young girl helps Dorothy escape down a river, where Dorothy floats away on a chicken coop. She wakes up in Oz with a chicken named Billina (Mak Wilson, voiced by Denise Bryer) who can talk. They learn that the Yellow Brick Road has been destroyed and all her friends the Tin Man (Deep Roy!), the Cowardly Lion (Johann Kraus from Hellboy II: The Golden Army) have been transformed into stone. She’s attacked by The Wheelers, but saved by Tik-Tok (played by Michael Sundin and Tim Rose — who was Howard the Duck and Admiral Ackbar — as well as being voiced by Sean Barrett, whose voice is also in Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal) — a mechanical man — who told her that the King of Oz, the Scarecrow, had told him to wait for her.
They go to Princess Mombi (also Marsh), who collects peoples’ heads. They barely escape and discover that the Nome King (also Williamson) has taken the Scarecrow (Justin Case). As they ran through the Deadly Desert, they meet a new friend in Jack Pumpkinhead (played by Stewart Harvey-Wilson, voiced by Brian Henson) and the Gump (played by Stephen Norrington — the directed of Death Machine, Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — and voiced by Lyle Conway, who designed the Blob effects in The Blob), whose head is used to fly them to the mountain of the Nome King, where the big bad transforms everyone but Dorothy into ornaments. She saves everyone by guessing that they are all the green ornaments, then gets her ruby slippers back — MGM owned the rights to those and they aren’t in the original story, but Disney wanted them and paid huge for it — and wishes everyone back to Oz.
Everyone from Oz wants Dorothy to rule their world, but she wants to go home. She meets the rightful ruler, Princess Ozma (Emma Ridley), who was the girl who helped her to escape. As she goes back to Oz, Auntie Em tells her that the mental ward burned down and only Worley died while his nurse was jailed for their horrible operations on young women. When she gets to her room, she can see Ozma and Billina in her mirror.
Harlan Ellison said, ““It ain’t Judy Garland. It ain’t hip-hop. But it’s in the tradition of the original Oz books.”
Neil Gaiman, years before he wrote Sandman, reviewed the movie for Imagine magazine and said that it was “Terrifying and visionary, funny and exciting, Return to Oz is one of the very best fantasy films I’ve ever seen.”
Other critics — and audiences — were not as kind. It’s a movie that none were prepared for, thinking it would have the same wonder as the movie they had seen on TV so many times without knowing the original stories.
The film wasn’t a financial success. But it was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Academy Award but lost to Cocoon. The nomination was given to Claymation master Will Vinton, Ian Wingrove, Zoran Perisic and Michael Lloyd.
As for those books, they were created by L. Frank Baum and illustrator W. W. Denslow. Two years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, a stage play — The Wizard of Oz: Fred R. Hamlin’s Musical Extravaganza — was a big success. Baum wanted to make another play and wrote the book The Marvelous Land of Oz and a stage adaption, The Woggle-Bug. Actors David C. Montgomery and Fred Stone, who played the Tin Man and Scarecrow, had become big stars and didn’t want to appear in a new play while still in the original. They were not in the second play and critics thought that the author was ripping himself off. The play flopped before it even got to Broadway.
Baum and Denslow tried a new story with Dot and Tot of Merryland, which was not popular and caused the break-up of their partnership. Baum would work with John R. Neill after but never liked his artwork and was angry when the artist published The Oz Toy Book: Cut-outs for the Kiddies without asking.
Throughout his career, Baum would try to write new books — such as The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which was made into a special by Rankin-Bass and Queen Zixi of Ix, which was made as a movie by the Oz Film Manufacturing Company — fail and say that children demanded new Oz books. He also claimed that he had discovered an island in California where he was going to live and have a theme park, but after The Woggle-Bug was a bomb, he never spoke of it again.
Baum loved theater for his entire life and often threw money into it, losing big time. One of biggest failures would be The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, a combination film, slideshow, live play and spoken word travelogue of Oz by Baum. He lost so much money that he had to sell the royalties to many of his books to the M.A. Donahue Company, who in turn published cheap copies and took out ads saying that their books were better than his new ones. He declared bankruptcy but before that, he gave his wife most of property to his wife Maud, which saved much of their money.
He even started a film company, the aforementioned The Oz Film Manufacturing Company. They made four shorts — A Box of Bandits, The Country Circus, The Magic Bon Bons and In Dreamy Jungleland — and released four films, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, The Magic Cloak of Oz and His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz. and The Last Egyptian. One film was announced, The Gray Nun of Belgium, and may have never been released.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was a major failure as well. It poisoned the box office for any Oz films to follow and even caused The Oz Film Manufacturing Company to change its name to Dramatic Feature Films. One of the few good things is that it was where producer/director Hal Roach and comedian Harold Lloyd met, starting a team that would work together for many years.
It took until 1925 before anyone would try to make another Oz movie. Larry Semon directed, wrote, produced and starred as a farmhand and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. That movie is so different from the book that the Tin Man betrays Dorothy. It also starred Dorothy Dwan, Semon’s fiancee, as Dorothy, making it a vanity project. Sadly, it failed as well. Chadwick Pictures, who produced the movie, went bankrupt and its released handled by Monogram after. As for Semon, he never recovered and died three years later. Variety said of his take on The Wizard of Oz, “This screen disaster caused Mr. Semon no end of worry and repeated efforts to recoup only added to his discomfiture. Last March he filed a voluntary petition in bankruptcy, listing debts at nearly $500,000. Ceaseless worry undermined his health making him an easy victim of pneumonia.”
$500,000 in 1928 is $91 million today.
It’s crazy because we always think that The Wizard of Oz is such a major success, but the truth is that even the 1939 movie was a box office bomb. It earned $2,048,000 in the U.S. and $969,000 worldwide, which ended up losing MGM$1,145,000. It wasn’t a financial success until it was re-released in 1949.
The Wiz also lost $10 million nearly forty years later.
I tell you about all this failure to say that everyone who calls Return to Oz a bomb and a failure has to realize that it shares that legacy with nearly every other Oz movie. It was brave enough to be different and unexpected and therefore, paid the price of years of being a punchline.
I’d never watched it until now as a result and was so surprised by how much I loved it.
In 2013, Disney tried again and the Sam Raimi-directed Oz the Great and Powerful ended up being a success.
I’ll get around to watching that some day.
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