3. The Movie - Production and Crew
3.1. Who was the director?
3.2. Who did the music? The sound effects? The costumes? The make-up? The sets? The...
3.3. How did the Munchkin voices get so high?
3.4. What kinds of sound effects were used?
3.5. What were the costumes made from?
3.6. Is it true that the Wizard's coat originally belonged to L. Frank Baum?
3.7. What was the Cowardly Lion's costume made from?
3.8. What were the Ruby Slippers made from?
3.9. What unusual make-up techniques were used on this film?
3.10. Where were the sets, and how were they built?
3.11. Was the Witch's castle a real castle?
3.12. Was there any location filming done for The Wizard of Oz?
3.13. How did they do the special effects?
3.14. How did the Lion's tail move?
3.15. Was The Movie originally made in color or black and white?
3.16. Was The Movie the first film made in color?
3.17. Why were the Kansas scenes done in black and white?
3.18. What's this I hear about a dance number called "The Jitterbug"?
3.19. Were there any problems in making The Movie?
3.20. Is it true that you can see a man hanging himself in The Movie?
The director initially assigned to Oz was Norman Taurog, but before shooting began he was replaced by Richard Thorpe. Thorpe worked on The Movie for only ten days, however, before LeRoy fired him, dissatisfied with the rushes to that point. George Cukor took over, but didn't shoot any film. He did redesign some of the sets, costumes, and make-up, especially for Judy Garland (Thorpe had put her in heavy baby-doll make-up and a long blond wig). Once Cukor was done with Oz (he began directing Gone with the Wind only a few weeks later), Victor Fleming came on board. Although known as a "man's film" director who worked on many pictures with his close friend Clark Gable, Fleming also had a reputation for saving troubled pictures, and he had two young daughters he wanted to make a movie for. Fleming did most of the work on the film -- Cukor's changes meant scrapping the Thorpe footage, so Fleming started from scratch -- until Clark Gable and David O. Selznick asked that he come work on Gone with the Wind, which was also running into trouble. King Vidor came in to finish Oz, and his work included the Kansas scenes. Fleming, who at one point was directing Wind during the day and supervising the editing of Oz at night, was given final screen credit (Vidor was offered co-directing credit, but turned it down, claiming Fleming had done all the real work).
Whoa, all right, I get the idea. Who were the creative folks behind the camera, and what did they do, right? Okay, here we go:
Vocal arranger Ken Darby used the then-unusual technique of speeding up the recordings (actually, slowing the tape down during recording and playing it back at normal speed) to get the high pitched voices for the Munchkins. Most of the actors playing Munchkins were not singers, and some had thick accents, so they did not perform their own singing or dialogue. Instead, Darby hired other singers, and the Munchkin actors would lip synch to the prerecorded words. A similar technique was used for the Winkies, the Witch's guards, to lower their voices. This time, however, the tape was speeded up during recording, making the voices lower when played back at normal speed.
The Sound people had quite a challenge, putting in up to twelve tracks of sound in some scenes at a time when most movies had three. At one point they went to Catalina Island and recorded thousands of birdcalls, then played them at different speeds and backwards to achieve the spooky sounds of the Witch's haunted forest. Other special sound effects included the rustle of the Scarecrow's straw, the Tin Woodman's metallic clanks, the Lion's roars, and Toto's growls and barks.
Unlike most other films made by MGM, costumes for The Wizard of Oz had to be made almost entirely in house by hand. Among the materials used were real straw for the Scarecrow, buckram and silver-painted leather for the Tin Woodman, two real lionskins for the Cowardly Lion and yards and yards of felt for the Munchkins. Five women in the Wardrobe Department spent several days doing nothing but dying clothes and material green for the people of the Emerald City to wear.
No, but you're close. For the Kansas scenes, made towards the end of the film's shooting schedule, a shabby old coat that had once been quite elegant was found at a local thrift shop for Frank Morgan to wear as Professor Marvel. While idly examining the coat one day Morgan found the name "L. Frank Baum" stitched into a pocket. The discovery caused quite a stir on the set, and Baum's widow and the Chicago tailor who had made it later confirmed that it had belonged to Frank (the Baum's had moved to Hollywood in 1911, and Maud Baum still lived there). At the end of filming LeRoy presented the coat to Mrs. Baum.
Lahr's costume was made of two real lionskins, weighed over fifty pounds, and was extremely hot and uncomfortable to work in. He claimed it was like "working inside a mattress." When Lahr was on the set, the lights would be turned off and the soundstage doors opened for fresh air every half hour so he wouldn't suffocate.
Certainly not rubies! They were ordinary red shoes, with red silk sewn onto them, and red sequins sewn onto the silk. Should you be fortunate enough to see a real pair, you'll notice that the sequins are a darker color than seen in the film. This is because the color process of the time couldn't record true colors, so colors were adjusted so that they would appear onscreen as the actual desired color. Had the sequins on the Ruby Slippers actually been the same bright red as seen in The Movie, they would have looked orange on screen.
Because of the unusual nature of some of the characters, much of the make-up in Oz was groundbreaking, and many of the techniques developed are still being used today. In 1933 Paramount had released an all-star version of Alice in Wonderland, but most of the stars were unrecognizable behind the heavy, concealing masks used to create the characters. So to utilize the faces of The Movie's actors and make them more recognizable, Jack Dawn developed a way of using foam rubber prosthetics. A rubber bag, with holes cut out for eyes and mouth and textured to look like burlap, became the Scarecrow's head, and over one hundred of these were baked for the film. The Lion's make-up involved a number of different pieces, and the Wicked Witch and the Winkie guards had false noses and chins attached before green make-up was applied. (There is no truth to the story that Hamilton lost her false metal nose on Hollywood Boulevard, since it wasn't metal, and she wouldn't have been allowed to leave the studio with it anyway.) Jack Haley's Tin Woodman had a rubber strap placed across his chin, a false aluminum nose, and individual rubber "rivets" applied each day. And the Munchkins were made up in assembly line fashion in a rehearsal hall, MGM training dozens of people in make-up for it as there weren't enough people on staff or otherwise available. (There's a story that the make-up supervisor on Planet of the Apes (1968), when designing the apes' make-up, only had to pull out the sketches he'd used thirty years earlier when he was an assistant on Oz, as he'd worked on the Winged Monkeys.) While other materials are often used today, a similar technique is still being used for movies such as the Star Wars series, and TV programs such as the numerous Star Trek shows and Babylon 5.
The Wizard of Oz was made entirely in the studios of MGM, so all of the sets -- around sixty in all -- had to be built on soundstages. Every set had a backdrop that, if designed and lit properly, would look like the outdoors. In other cases, only a portion of the set would be created for the actors to appear on, and then the shot would be joined with a matte painting in post-production. The mattes were painted by Warren Newcombe.
The "Castle" was all done in the studio, and the special effects department. Much of what is seen in the finished film is a detailed matte painting, and a partial set that the actors could appear in would be combined with the painting in post-production to make it look as if the actors were on a much larger set. It is possible, however, that the paintings and set designs were based on a real castle.
No. The Technicolor process of the time was rather primitive by today's standards, and sets had to be very brightly lit to register on the film. As a result, The Movie had to be made entirely on soundstages, as there was no economical way to light any location so brightly at the time. (The Kansas scenes could perhaps have been done on location if the crew had wanted to, but location shooting was still unusual for a major studio feature at the time, and the MGM designers did just fine creating Kansas on a soundstage, anyway.) There is, however, one shot in The Movie that was filmed outdoors: The clouds behind the opening and closing credits.
Remember, The Movie was released in 1939. This was all long before the days of synchronized cameras, multi-film techniques, blue-screen effects, and computer animation so common today. Buddy Gillespie had several weeks and MGM's deep pockets to work with, however, and was encouraged to experiment. For the most part he was quite successful. The biggest problem proved to be the cyclone. The Kansas set was built in miniature, and a funnel-shaped tube of cloth was anchored to a dolly on the stage. The two ends could be rotated and moved around at different speeds. The first attempt used rubber, which didn't work well, so that was scrapped in favor of muslin, which did the trick. (Some of the tornado footage was recycled in another MGM movie four years later, Cabin in the Sky, and other productions.) Most of the flying monkeys were working models, with a few actors in costumes and harnesses. To melt, all Margaret Hamilton had to do was stand on a small elevator built into the set. Dorothy's window was a rear projection screen, and the Witch's crystal ball and the steam in the Wizard's throne room served as front projection screens. Glinda's bubble was a silver ball, and the camera tracked towards it while filming. The Witch's skywriting was actually a hypodermic needle spreading black ink across the bottom of a glass tank filled with tinted water. And the "smoke" coming from the Tin Woodman's hat was a result of compressed air and talcum powder.
Look carefully in some scenes, and you can see how it moved -- it was on a fishing line, and there was a man in the stage rafters with a fishing pole who would swish it around. Of course, Lahr would sometimes hold the tail, and those are the scenes where the line was let loose.
Both, actually. The vast majority of The Movie was shot in color, of course. The Kansas scenes were filmed in black and white, but processed so that they appeared in sepia tones -- essentially brown-and-white. For a long time, the sepia tones were used only for The Movie's premiere engagement in 1939; after that, Kansas was black and white, and the only sepia in The Movie was Aunt Em's appearance in the Witch's crystal ball. For The Movie's fiftieth anniversary in 1989, the sepia was restored, and has been there ever since.
Not even close! There had been several experiments with color films in the silent era (L. Frank Baum was even involved with one of them, the hand-tinted films of his "Fairylogue and Radio-Plays" multimedia show. The first true color feature movie, however, shot in the same three-strip Technicolor process used on The Wizard of Oz, was Becky Sharp in 1935. After that, the studios gradually made more and more color pictures, although black and white was still the rule, and color used for more prestigious films. (One color film that pre-dates The Wizard of Oz and is still well-known today: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937.)
As a contrast to the bright colors of Oz, and also as a way to show on film a technique Baum and Denslow had created in the book, of using different colors in the pictures to show different locations. (It is not true at all that MGM ran out of money, and had to resort to black and white as a cost cutting measure. MGM was the biggest, richest movie studio of its day, they could easily afford to film Kansas in color if they chose to.)
When it was first previewed early in 1939, The Movie was nearly two hours in length, which was felt to be too long. So a number of scenes were shortened, and several dropped entirely, such as the return to the Emerald City after melting the Wicked Witch of the West (including a reprise of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead"), an extended version of Ray Bolger's dance during "If I Only Had a Brain" (which was recovered complete in the 1980s), and a scene where the wicked witch really does turn the Tin Woodman into a beehive, complete with animated bees. Also cut was "The Jitterbug," an elaborate song-and-dance number that came right before the Winged Monkeys captured Dorothy and her friends in the Haunted Forest. It's still referred to in The Movie when the witch tells the monkeys, "I've sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them!" No one is exactly sure why it was cut, since it took several weeks to choreograph, rehearse, and film, and cost quite a bit of money, but the best guess is that it was too lighthearted for the dramatic tension of the story at that point, and unlike the rest of the musical numbers, it was extraneous and didn't advance the plot. It was also felt that it would date the film, as "jitterbug" had already become slang for a hot dancer at that point, and the studio hoped the film would have lasting appeal, for at least ten years. (If only they'd known...) While the footage is now lost, Harold Arlen did take some home movies on the set during rehearsals, which have now been made available on both television (the Ripley's Believe It or Not show was its first public appearance of the entire film) and video. And numerous community theater productions have put "The Jitterbug" back into the story, either in its intended place in the Haunted Forest or as a replacement for the poppy field.
Many! The film took six months to shoot, used MGM's biggest sound stages, stretched the studio's resources tot their limits, and the bright lights needed for the color photography generated a lot of heat, so something was bound to go wrong. Besides the problems of Ebsen and Haley's make-up, here are a few things that went wrong:
It's true that you can see a shadowy figure fluttering in the background at the end of the scene in the Tin Woodman's forest, just as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman are marching offscreen to the strains of "We're Off to See the Wizard." And if you ever get a chance to see the film projected onto the big screen of a movie theater, you can quite clearly see that it is a stork flapping its wings. (Other exotic birds sharp-eyed viewers can also see in that forest are a toucan, a crane, and a peacock.) Let me say that again to make it perfectly clear to those who still believe it's a hanging man:
The problem is, most people today don't see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen, they watch it on television or videotape. And the scan lines that make a TV picture possible do the disservice of making the picture less clear than on a movie screen. The small size of most TV screens and the lack of clear prints before 1989 doesn't help, either. So on a television screen, the stork is not very clear. And for some reason this shadowy figure passed into urban legend as a hanging man (although some also thought it was a stagehand accidentally caught in the shot, or the Wicked Witch still lurking in the background) -- despite the fact that studio security was tighter than usual on Oz, and it's extremely unlikely that a major studio like MGM wouldn't notice such a macabre sight, or allow it to be included in one of its highest profile pictures. Besides, most of those trees were on a painted backdrop, and the rest were artificial, and thus too fragile to hang from. And towards the end of the scene, all three actors look directly at the object in question. If it was something that wasn't supposed to be there, especially something so macabre, doesn't it make sense that at least one of them would alert the crew and stop filming right then and there? Don't forget, there would be a lot of people on the set watching what was going on, with the director and his assistants, the cameramen, the lighting crew, and so forth. Would all of them not notice something suspicious?
Some amusing variants of this story have surfaced: