Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (50 page)

I hope this book will make you as happy as making the picture has made me.

Love and kisses from Judy Garland

“Dorothy”

The impulse for MGM to make
The Wizard of Oz
predated Walt Disney’s entrance into Technicolor animated features with
Snow White
and
the Seven Dwarfs
(1937). But
Snow White
’s success revived operetta traditions (such as background choruses) that had been going out of style and gave instant Hollywood heat to musical fantasies. Disney’s mixture of innovative animation with an integrated score and story, and even specific numbers such as “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” exerted a tremendous influence. But in
The Wizard of Oz,
the lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and the composer Harold Arlen revive operetta
and
slap it silly.

Louis B. Mayer was eager to launch this pleasurable assault on family audiences in the wake of Disney’s smash. But Nicholas Schenck applied pressure on Mayer to provide star power for a lavish enterprise that ended up costing $2.777 million. So Mayer at least made a show of trying to borrow Shirley Temple from Fox for Dorothy, probably aware that Fox would refuse. When Fox did the expected, there was no new move to acquire Temple even after the production was delayed and Fleming replaced the first director.

Mervyn LeRoy, Hollywood’s “boy wonder” before Orson Welles claimed that title, was a versatile director of hits ranging from the gritty
Little Caesar
and
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
to the opulent
Anthony Adverse.
He pushed for
Oz
to be his first super-production after Mayer wooed him from Warner Bros. in 1937 (he started at MGM in early 1938). He had long been a fan of the Oz books, starting with the first one, originally published as
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
“I’d wanted to make the picture since I was a kid,” he told a journalist in 1973.

The announcement that he wasn’t directing it confirmed to industry journalists that Mayer wanted LeRoy to help fill the gaps left by Thalberg’s death the year before, and by the departure of Selznick from MGM to form his own company in 1935. LeRoy first named Norman Taurog to direct because of the understanding of a child’s mentality he displayed in
Skippy
(for which he won an Oscar) and
Boys Town
(which earned him a nomination). MGM even briefly attached Taurog to
The Yearling
when Fleming went on to
Oz.

The studio, though, reassigned Taurog to
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
And LeRoy hired Richard Thorpe—a decision that dumbfounded Arthur Freed, the songwriter making his first foray into producing as an uncredited associate producer on
Oz.
(Freed had been pushing Mayer to make
Oz
as a musical for Garland even before LeRoy came to the studio.) Thorpe had done yeoman work on
Tarzan Escapes
(1936), as he would years later on
Ivanhoe
(1952), but those are vastly
different
fantasies. Thorpe’s footage was flat. “Not his fault,” LeRoy said. “He just didn’t have the feeling of
The Wizard of Oz.
” So LeRoy canned him, scrapped all his scenes, and went after George Cukor. (Thorpe was the one who ended up making
Huckleberry Finn.
)

On October 26, MGM announced that Thorpe was fighting the flu and that Cukor, “whose work is often rich in imaginative qualities,” would probably become the director. “But he wasn’t happy in what he was doing,” said LeRoy, and Cukor had been committed for years to
Gone With the Wind,
which was finally revving up on the Selznick lot. He stayed on
Oz
briefly and adjusted the look of several characters, including Margaret Hamilton’s Witch, Bolger’s Scarecrow, and, most drastically, Garland’s Dorothy, making everything from her skin tone to her hair color less glamourized and more natural.

Thorpe and the MGM makeup guru Jack Dawn had supplied Garland with a blond wig. Cukor turned to the hair specialist Sydney Guilaroff. “Parting her hair in the middle,” wrote Guilaroff, “I pulled it back from her face and shaped it into soft curls hanging down her back. It was a pretty but youthful style.” But if Guilaroff and Cukor made Garland look like Dorothy, Fleming made her
act
like Dorothy.

Freed said he eventually focused on Fleming because “that man was a poet. Probably one of the great unsung men of this business . . . I knew he was the right man, from having coffee in the morning and feeling out his mind and the kind of things that he liked.” LeRoy agreed and would later say he was “instrumental” in hiring Fleming. “I wish I was as good as he was,” LeRoy told George Stevens Jr. “He was a kid at heart.”

Some accounts have LeRoy and Mayer calling on Fleming at the director’s Balboa beach house. Others have LeRoy taking Fleming to Mayer’s home in Santa Monica—which, given Fleming’s intransigence, would have been like the Mahatma going to the mountain. On November 1, the news went forth that Fleming was hired. “We got along like a couple of kids,” LeRoy told the critic and filmmaker John Gallagher.

It was hardly Fleming’s biggest payday; he had been paid $63,333.34 for
Treasure Island
and (in his last year at Paramount) $72,000 for
The Virginian.
For his compressed, intense three-and-a-half-month stint on
Oz,
the studio paid Fleming what had become his usual rate—$3,000 a week—and the director followed his normal process. Fleming’s first move was to sign up Mahin for rewrites. They
immediately
struck a pricklier and more dramatic tone for the movie. Under Thorpe,
Oz
was to open with a limp, coquettish mid-American pastoral featuring a smiling Dorothy gamboling on a pony and chattering to a scarecrow, as if she were blasé over villainous Miss Gulch’s threat to Toto. Mahin replaced it with Dorothy scrambling home to tell Uncle Henry (Charley Grapewin) and Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) that because Toto went after Miss Gulch’s cat, Miss Gulch “hit Toto right over the back with a rake”—and Toto bit her. (This tale foreshadows Toto’s ill-timed capering in the climax: he leaps from the Wizard’s balloon and chases an Emerald City feline, causing Dorothy to scramble out after
him
and miss the flight back to Kansas.)

Mahin and Fleming provided Uncle Henry and Auntie Em with a reason for ignoring Dorothy—they’re busy trying to fix a faltering five-hundred-chick incubator—and also added a farmhand named Zeke for Bert Lahr to play. With two other hands already in place, Ray Bolger’s Hunk and Jack Haley’s Hickory, each of Dorothy’s Oz friends now had a counterpart in Kansas.

Thorpe, according to LeRoy, had developed such an affection for Toto (the cairn terrier’s real name was Terry) that he threw the whole movie to the animal. Fleming decided to treat the dog more casually and shrewdly. Toto is a catalyst of disaster, and his scruffy flashes of spontaneity ground the action. He never stops being a dog, not a fake sidekick. When he enters into the choreography, whether in “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” or in the Tin Man’s first woozy steps after derusting, the effect is euphoric and funny.

Fleming also demanded changes of focus and design in both Oz and Kansas. (King Vidor shot the Kansas scenes after Fleming and Mahin reconceived them.) Thorpe’s Yellow Brick Road was made of ovals. Fleming remade them to resemble proper rectangular (albeit brightly hued) paving bricks, and also had the Yellow Brick Road curbed, turning it into something more like a Yellow Brick Street, such as those in the Los Angeles of his youth. (Before the automobile age, cities generally used paving bricks—often yellowish beige—instead of concrete and asphalt surfacing.) The curbing may have been a way of keeping the yellow color from bleeding into the rest of the scenery, or, in Fleming’s realistic logic, paving bricks meant a street, and a street had to have a curb.

Without Fleming there would have been no Yellow Brick Road song, either. Three weeks before the scheduled wrap of the Munchkin
scenes
on December 30, Fleming decided there should be more musical punch to Dorothy’s farewell to Munchkinland. He commanded Harburg and Arlen to send Dorothy off to the Emerald City with a bang—and with their usual panache, they delivered “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” (Freed may have suggested they make the song “a directive,” but it was Fleming who saw the need for it and gave the order.) Aljean Harmetz, author of the groundbreaking and essential
The Making of
“
The Wizard of Oz
” (1977), writes, “The primer provided by Harburg’s lyrics must have been something of a relief to Victor Fleming . . . a man with a rough-hewn masculine effect and little musical delicacy.” Evidently, these lyrics were “a relief” because Fleming, who had the musical delicacy to request them, saw how effective they could be in the hands of an alert director.

Fleming knew something about how a struggling farm should feel; he told an assistant director to toss away Auntie Em’s costume-department apron and buy a cheaper one at Woolworth. And throughout the film, he revamped decor so he could position the actors more dramatically, both simplifying it and spooking it up. He made the Wicked Witch’s giant crystal central to her throne room, then turned her throne around so that a stone buzzard adorning it dominated the scene.

Harburg and the South African–born screenwriter Noel Langley, who received final script credit along with Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf (once a vaudeville sketch writer for Morgan), locked in many concepts before Fleming took charge. But the director let in the requisite fresh air. Just as he used sound unself-consciously and freely in
The Virginian,
he made the gigantic Technicolor camera pirouette in
The Wizard of Oz—
his first color film—though then it was a novelty on the scale of the Emerald City’s buffing machine.

The film overflows with visual and staging coups. Several Munchkins hide in gardens and flower beds, then seem to sprout from them. The five Sleepy Heads awaken from broken-eggshell beds in what looks like a bird’s nest with an ominous saltshaker next to them. In the wake of the Wicked Witch, Munchkinland officials and citizens seek shelter from her fire and brimstone in a whirl, as if, like Dorothy, they were caught in a cyclone. And the Emerald City offers a tough kid’s view of divine decadence—its citizens are like pampered, overgrown children devoted to novelty and pleasure. The one big “Merry Old Land of Oz” number is ripe and jolly enough to do the metropolis
justice.
(Even in the surviving stills, a deleted march of triumph through the city after Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West looks uninspired and cluttered.)

The decision to contrast the pewter and white Sepiatone in the Kansas scenes with the Technicolor in Oz came before any script. LeRoy took credit for the idea. (A sweet, silly
Wizard of Oz
cartoon had the same idea in 1933, but the short went unreleased because of legal problems with Technicolor.) Still, the psychological slant Fleming espoused to the
MGM Studio News
sounds like him and not a publicist, and turns the transition from sepia to color into a gimmick of genius. In the 1946
A Matter of Life and Death,
which strongly resembles Fleming’s 1943
A Guy Named Joe,
the director Michael Powell depicts earth in Technicolor and heaven in black and white. (In 1942, Powell paid MGM $200 for use of an
Oz
song line, “Because of the wonderful things he does,” in
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
released the next year; in his memoirs, he praises Fleming as first among directors who made Mayer and Selznick look good.)

An awkward 1925
Wizard of Oz
film also had farmhands doubling as a teenage Dorothy’s friends, but the cyclone simply whisked these fellow Kansans away to Oz with her—and once there they donned disguises as the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion to hide from Oz’s evil ruler. (Oliver Hardy, as the Tin Man, was wasted.) That version had a dream framework, too, but the whole movie was a mess, aimed mostly at showcasing the slapstick talents of the star-director-writer, Larry Semon, as the Scarecrow.

The screenwriter Langley said
his
jumping-off point was a nightmare in the magical 1917 Mary Pickford comedy-drama
The Poor Little Rich Girl,
directed by Maurice Tourneur. In that film, the heroine’s drug-induced bad dream puts various family service providers in fantasy guises that reveal their true natures. And there are other parallels to
Oz,
such as the way the child takes cliché metaphors literally, so that a two-faced woman actually bears two faces in Pickford’s dream, just as the Emerald City’s Horse of a Different Color changes into six different colors.

The Wizard of Oz
has only one child in it, and she’s played by an adolescent. The sixteen-year-old Garland is bound and corseted to appear all of twelve—well, maybe fourteen. Yet Garland, like Pickford in the earlier film, is wonderful at creating a poetic intensification of childhood. On its own rousing musical-comedy terms,
Oz
connects
directly
to a child’s underlying fears and desires, and to an adult’s childlike ones. In 101 minutes, it packs as much unruly humor and adventure, and indefinable sensuality, as a full year (or several) of childhood. It reassures kids about their own burgeoning feelings and reminds adults of youth’s odd blends of melancholy and elation.

Fleming removed any taint of kiddie-matinee pandering. This is the opposite of fantasies that try to hook preteen audiences with heroes and heroines just like them. It’s a plus that Garland’s pressed-down bosom doesn’t adequately disguise her age. Her teen fervor helps make Dorothy seem as ripe for risky exploits as J. M. Barrie’s Wendy in
Peter Pan.
And for today’s young viewers, it gives her unexplained orphan status poignancy akin to Harry Potter’s. Dorothy’s unhappiness on her guardians’ farm conveys desperation akin to Harry’s, too. Oz is Dorothy’s Hogwarts School, even though her aunt and uncle, unlike Harry’s, love her. In Baum’s original book, Dorothy carries a mark on her forehead—the circle of a good witch’s kiss. Harry carries a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead from his duel with Voldemort.