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Oz series review12/28/2022 George Cukor subbed in for a week, long enough to get Judy Garland out of a blonde wig. The Wizard of Oz went through four directors, starting with Richard Thorpe, who left a month into filming. Judy Garland would regale audiences with tales of the shoot for years, but the shadow of Oz was something Garland was never able to shake. Add in a cast of little people that liked to party and a young star already being pushed past her limits, and the land of Oz was hardly magical. Buddy Ebsen was initially cast as the Tin Man before the make up sent him to the hospital for weeks, and Margaret Hamilton was seriously burned by pyrotechnics during the Wicked Witch of the West's fiery exit from Munchkinland. Heavy costumes and uncomfortable make up were a bane for everyone. The three-strip technicolor shooting process meant the lighting had to be incredibly bright, and temperatures in the studio soared to 100 degrees. Though the rumor that a Munchkin committed suicide on the set is a just an urban myth, it was a grueling and painful shoot. It took a while, and a big risk, for Oz to take flight. But those first movie attempts were actually flops, and he ended up selling the rights to the story when he hit financial troubles. He rode the success of the book and its many sequels as far as they would take him, even into early motion pictures. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was Baum's own escape from a series of failed endeavors and false starts. Frank Baum, whose own character is likely best represented by the Wizard himself (or maybe Professor Miracle). The original Oz story was created by a traveling salesman named L. Their subtext in the images of dirty farm hands, missing parents, and barren Kansas landscapes lurk around the edges of the world Dorothy wants to escape. War was brewing, and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl droughts were still current events. Things in America, and the world, were fraught in 1939. More than anything, The Wizard of Oz represents an escape, a grand dream of something magical that could take audiences, well, over the rainbow from their not-so-fairytale lives. ![]() Since we're looking at iconic movies, there's no better film we could start with than The Wizard of Oz. ![]() This series will explore the classics of 1939 with 80 years of perspective how they came to be, their influence on media, and what they still have to say. ![]() Eighty years later, the films of 1939 still matter, not just because of what they achieved at the time, but how they influenced and continue to impact culture to this day. And an astonishing amount of iconic films debuted in the year 1939: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Women, Ninotchka, Mr. How we see movies nowadays is so different from how they were viewed in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, but the films of that era still loom large over our cultural landscape.Ĭlassic films exist as a shared iconography, their influence extending so deep into our imaginations that we may not even know how important they were until we take a deeper look. With so much media all around us, it's easy to forget a time when television didn't even exist and movies were an event as exciting as a Broadway show, and sometimes just as hard to see. We live in a world with more movies and television available than we could ever hope to consume. In this inaugural entry: Jessica Mason takes a whirlwind twister ride and revisits The Wizard of Oz.) ( Welcome to 1939: Revisited, a column dedicated to taking a look back at some of the films of one of the most highly-praised years in film history and explaining why they still matter today.
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