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mask131 · 6 months ago

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What Oz could have been: the 1939 movie

Last time I talked about what Disney's "Oz: The Great and Powerful" would have originally looked like, based on the first version of the script. But today I want to talk about THE big Oz movie, THE classic: the 1939 MGM movie.

Everybody knows this picture, it became iconic and cult, and is such a big part of culture today... Yet, you might be surprised to learn that the movie could have ended up looking VERY different from the one we know today.

Indeed, the "Wizard of Oz" script kept being written and re-written and re-re-written by a dozen of different authors and co-authors, to the point that when it came time to credit who was behind the script problems arose to find an exact name to put on there... If you want to know the detail: a first draft was by William H. Cannon, Mervyn LeRoy's assistant, before the contracts were set and when everything was just beginning. Once the project started, the first full scenario was written by Irving Brecher, but he was then overtaken by another project and replaced by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who worked for one month over the script until a co-author arrived in the form of Ogden Nash. Then a third author joined the team: Noel Langley (he was the one who had the idea of changing the Silver Slippers in Ruby Slippers, and he brought the idea that the three Oz companions would have counterparts as farm helpers in Kansas). HOWEVER Mankiewicz ended up quitting the team. He was replaced by Herbert Fields, who only stayed for three days and didn't change anything, before being also replaced by Samuel Hoffenstein, who also only stayed for a few days without modifying much (or anything). FINALLY Noel Langley gave back the final product of the writers' team... Which of course was edited, rewriten and modified by a second team, formed of Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf. They were then brutally moved to another movie, and the script returned into the hands of Noel Langley to be again rewriten and adapted. One month before the movie started Noel Langley was given another co-author, Jack Mintz, and the second "final" scenario was delivered... Before being corrected and modified by a new author recently brought by Victor Fleming, John Lee Mahin. And THEN it was done!

Of the fourteen different authors that worked on the script, only three ended up being given credit in the final picture: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf.

The result was a project that varied wildly in production. In fact, while the final movie is still vaguely faithful though a bit loose adaptation of the original novel - the very first drafts of the movie had NOTHING to do with the original novel. The "faithfulness" to Baum's Wizard of Oz can be considered almost an accident as each rewrite got closer to Baum's story, only in an effort to get away from the older script... Anyway, here are some highlights and best-offs of the Oz movie we could have had:

The MGM movie has a lot of deleted scenes and songs, that were recorded but not included in the movie. Hopefully a lot of them were released online and can be easily found on Youtube, or elsewhere on the Internet. Most of them were cool reprises that were cut short for time: for example the song "The Wicked Witch is Dead" had a reprise after the death of the Witch of the West, sung first by the Winkies Guards and then morphing into the song being sung by the Emerald City denizens (fragments of this reprise were still used in trailers for the movie). There is also the very famous "Over the Rainbow" reprise that a scared, crying Dorothy was to sing while trapped in the Witch of the West's castle, before the Witch taunted her with an image of Aunt Em in the crystal ball. The reprise is REALLY touching and Judy Garland really put her best in there. There are also alternate takes which reveal a lot about what the movie was intended to be - for example we have alternate records of the "Lollypop Guild" which shows that the high-pitched voice of the final movie was actually an intent to create a "little boys" voice, to match the little girls of the Lullaby League.

The most famous of all these deleted songs is without a doubt the "Jitterbug" song. It was only cut at the last minute, and this brutal removal leaves bizarre remnants in the final movie (for example the Witch says she "sent a bug" to take care of Dorothy and her friends ; and when the Flying Monkey arrive they look sweating and exhausted). This was because originally the Wicked Witch of the West was supposed to send to the heroic party a magical bug (the titular "Jitterbug") that would have forced them to dance until exhaustion, so the Winged Monkeys could easily pick them up. This was however removed out of fear this would date the movie, and they were very much right... Because the entire pun on which the scene relies does not work anymore today: the "Jitterbug" being a specific style of dance very popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but that stopped existing beyond the 1960s. However the "Jitterbug song" earned enough of a fame to get included into the recent "Tom and Jerry" animated movie of "The Wizard of Oz".

Originally, a child-actress was envisioned for Dorothy, and the first choice was Shirley Temple. She declined (but she would later play the role of Tip/Ozma in a Marvelous Land of Oz production). When Judy Garland was cast, there were attempts at giving her a makeup that would make her look more like a child - but everybody pointed out it made her into a ridiculous "baby doll". The first plans were also to have Dorothy be blond, as she was in later Oz books.

Everybody knows the iconic, creepy look of the Wicked Witch of the West, but did you know she was supposed to be... beautiful? One of the main and biggest inspirations for the MGM movie was the huge success of Disney's Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since they attempt to recreate it, their original plan for the Wicked Witch of the West was to have her be a beautiful villainess evoking the Evil Queen of Disney. The original actres cast for this "glamorous witch" was Gale Sondergaar, and we still have shots of her in costume. However it was later decided to make the witch into an uglier, more grotesque character evoking a traditional fairytale hag. Mervy LeRoy was the one who wanted to have the "glamorous, sexy" witch but many (among which Arthur Freed) defended the idea that the witch had to be like Disney's old crone, not evil queen... So they decided to recast the role - leading to the arrival of the one of a kind Margaret Hamilton.

Speaking of the Wicked Wich: One of the original plans for the character was to have her be the Oz counterpart of... Aunt Em. Indeed, no Miss Gulch of any kind. Early on, Aunt Em was considered to be a meaner and colder caretaker to Dorothy, and the one who wanted to get rid of Toto - which explains why she became the Wicked Witch of Oz. (This idea was by Langley, the one who also had the idea of making Dorothy's companions into the farm-helps of Kansas) The Wicked Witch also had a son, Bulbo, an ugly and dim-witted man she wanted to make King of Oz, and who was... the counterpart of Uncle Henry. Later, when the character of Miss Gulch was created, she was given a son named Walter to match Bulbo, before the character was scrapped altogether.

The Jitterbug scene was actually a left-over of a much earlier version of the movie which would have put a strong emphasis on the "musical aspect". This version wanted Oz to be under the tyranny of a spoiled brat of a princess that would have outlawed all forms of music that were not classical music and opera ; young and hip Dorothy, however, would have brought the swing and the jazz from the 1930s USA and used it to win over the princess in a singing duel, and becoming a hero in Oz. Who would have played the princess? I had conflicting reports: some say Deanna Durbin (one of the early candidates for playing Dorothy, alongside Shirley Temple) was considered for the role ; others said it would have been Betty Jaynes playing a certan "Princess Betty".

The earliest version of the script we have (created by William H. Cannon) was heavily inspired by the 1925's Wizard of Oz movie (because yes, there were Wizard of Oz movies before the MGM one), and wanted to remove all forms of magic and supernatural from the story. The brainless scarecrow would have been a man so dumb the only job he could find was to scare crows in fields ; the Tin Man was supposed to be a heartless criminal that the law had forced to wear a suit of tin as a punishment, punishment which did encourage him to learn kindness...

Oh yes, everybody noted in the final movie how Dorothy favorizes the Scarecrow above the other companions. This is a remnant of the scenario drafts wher the final scene of the movie would have been the teary farewell of Dorothy to Hunk, as he leaves for agricultural college and she promises him to write him every day - implying a romance between the two...

People might note a bizarre editing during the scene of the companions freeing Dorothy - such as the door being axed down not corresponding to the door the group escapes from. This is due to yet another cut sequence: the door the companions axed down was to be a trap by the Wicked Witch, who was to imitate Dorothy's voice and song to lure the companions. Once she had captured the three friends, she would have used them as baits, forcing them to call out for Dorothy and to encourag her to take a magical "rainbow bridge" that appeared out of nowhere... Except said bridge would have been created by the Wicked Witch's magic, and while the rainbow was solid enough to walk onto for a certan distance, at one point it returned to being just light. The Witch hoped to kill Dorothy by doing this - but didn't count on the Ruby Slippers' magic actually preventing Dorothy from falling through the rainbow.

Before it was decided to have Glinda send snow to kill the cursed poppies, the original concept was that the Tin Man's tears would have awakened Dorothy (an idea that, as people pointed out, was reused in "The Wiz").

There was at one point plans for the Cowardly Lion to actually be just a... a regular lion that tagged along as a sort of pet with the team, and had dubbed lines, to be revealed as "Prince Florizel", a Prince Charming-type of character that had been cursed under the shape of a lion, and would in the end have married his lover, princess Sylvia (this version was one of Noel Langley's, and very influenced by traditional fairytales). This version most notably pushed Dorothy into being a secondary character: it was the Prince/Lion who was to kill the Witch, by somehow cutting her broom so it would fall into pieces while in the air. There was also a dragon the prince was supposed to fight. This version, being Langley's, was the one that included the Witch having a son (see above). In the older versions of this story, the Witch's plan to make Bulbo king of Oz was to have him marry princess Sylvia, heir to the Ozian throne (hence why Florizel's feud with the Witch is personal) ; later it was changed to the Witch planning to attack the Emerald City and dethrone the Wizard with an army of men, wolves and winged monkeys.

When the MGM learned that Disney was working on their own adaptation of the Wizard of Oz back then, there were brief talks of the two studios uniting their efforts to make a half-live-action, half-animated movie.

During the scene where the Wicked Witch threatens the companions at the cottage in the forest, the Witch was supposed to threaten the Tin Man by briefly turning him into a "beehive", aka filling him with bees, and after crushing one of the insects the Tin Man would have cried, causing his jaw to rust and be blocked.

Early on, there were plans to keep Oz as an actual magical place that truly existed - but the movie-makers of the time considered fantasy was not "sophisticated" and "serious" enough for the audiences, and so they added the entire idea of Oz being shown as a dream-world so adults could "buy" the movie.

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