Click Your Heels Together, Producers!
(An open letter to American Film Producers)
Dear Powerful, Connected American Film Producers (you know who you are!):
I was reflecting on the Henry Darger article and it got me thinking about L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I read them all– My family inherited my great-grandmother’s original hardbounds, and they were the first full-sized books I ever read. Producers, I’m throwing out this challenge: produce the Oz Books as a movie series! Here are a few reasons why:
• They are imaginative as hell. Modern digital effects should serve to finally produce the sights, creatures and characters of the Land of Oz as they were envisioned by L. Frank Baum and his primary illustrator John Neill. (The first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was illustrated by W. W. Denslow. Not as good.)
• They are surprisingly psychologically complex. Dark themes of estrangement, abandonment, sexual identity and general malevolence run strongly behind the fairy-land front stories. L. Frank Baum was a sick man (ill health forced him to live in Coronado, CA towards the end of his life) with a traumatic childhood (all of his brothers died as children), and his work reflects it to some degree.
The Marvelous Land of Oz, the sequel to the first book, has one of the oddest endings in children’s literature. The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the seventh novel, sets a path of redemption for the protagonist (Ojo the “unlucky”) which makes Dorothy Gale’s look like a casual stroll.
Contemporary author Gregory Maguire penned several revisions to the Oz universe (Wicked, Son of a Witch and the upcoming The Cowardly War), in tones more mature than the originals, but just as imaginative and compelling. So it can be done.
• Oz books are short. I estimate a condensation of the second book The Marvelous Land of Oz would probably play out in 90 minutes.
• They don’t have to be musicals. The 1939 MGM production is a towering classic, but if you break it down maybe half of the credit for it’s greatness is in the source material: the remainder is a combination of Golden Age Hollywood production values and stellar song writing.
And even then, the technology was simply not available to show half the interesting stuff from the book. Even the effect techniques available for Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985) were not quite up to snuff.
• A fantasy-cinema Boston tea party. Harry Potter: British. Lord of the Rings: British. Narnia: Really, really British (have you ever tried Turkish Delight? It’s like eating a gel insole soaked in Hi Karate aftershave). I think it’s everyone’s assumption these days that when a CG-created creature shows up in an epic fantasy pic is it will open it’s computer-generated mouth and say “What’s all this, then? Blimey!” Dorothy Gale is from Kansas, for corn’s sake.
I’ll admit not all the books will translate well to film: Some are episodic road trips. The fifth book The Land of Oz is not much more than Dorothy and some of her friends gallivanting through the outskirts of Oz en route to Ozma’s birthday party. Nonetheless, L. Frank Baum wrote some of the books with production on stage or the silent screen in mind.
What is needed is the stewardship of a Peter Jackson-like filmmaker with the talent and vision to bring the Oz universe to vivid life. Jackson showed a well-crafted fantasy film cycle can wildly exceed all expectations for success.
And finally: I believe all the Oz books are public-domain. So get going!
–Skot C.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Didn’t Walter Murch try this in the eighties? I believe it was deemed too creepy.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Uh, I believe I mentioned Return to Oz in the fourth bullet. And yeah, it was creepy and dark.
But who’s fault was that? First-time director Walter Murch? Disney, for hacking up two Oz books (Ozma of Oz and The Land of Oz) to make one weird movie? Or was it the GHOSTBUSTERS-era state-of-the-art mechanical effects used to bring the non-human characters to life?
As I said, a visionary– somebody with respect for the original material, who can translate the stories to the big screen in an appealing way– can pull it off just as Peter Jackson did with Tolkien’s work.
July 25th, 2007 at 6:43 am
I am currently collaborrating on adapting the Oz books into screenplays with another fan. We are far from being professional writers, but it seems we may have something here…
July 25th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Well, Jared, as something of a scriptsmith myself one of these days I’d love to read what you come up with. Or even better, see it on the big screen.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:00 am
[...] A few weeks ago I posted an article asking studio heads to consider L. Frank Baum’s Oz books as a new fantasy-film project on the lines of Lord of the Rings. [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 4:39 am
[...] A few months ago I bemoaned the fact that all the fantasy epics seem to be of British pedigree. Compass was most likely greenlighted because studio heads believed it hewed to the successful paradigm: English fantasy novel + Lots of Effects = Box Office. But seriously, is Phillip Pullman (who wrote the book the big ol’ bomb was based on) anywhere near the recognition level as J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, or even C. S. Lewis? Nope. [...]