The Wizard of OZ

미국 사람들이 가장 많이 본 영화 중에 하나가 "Wizard of OZ"이다.

The path to a shiny future: The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

 

이 영화의 주제가 "Somewhere over the rainbow"도 가장 사랑받는 노래 중에 하나다.

오늘 다음 텔레그래프 기사를 읽고나서 왜 법대 교수등이 이 영화를 가장 많이 언급하는지 그래서 로스쿨 법대생들은 특히 이 영화를 잘 아는지 그 이유를 알게 되었다. 

What carries it is the audience's faith in Dorothy. "It wasn't a dream," she cries on her return to Kansas. "It was a place. A real, truly live place. Doesn't anyone believe me?" We do, Dorothy, we do.

"The Whites," he wrote in a newspaper editorial, "by law of conquest, by justice, of civilisation, are masters of the American continent. And the best safety of the frontier settlers will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5S4ncU3Dw 

If I only Had A Brain

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/classic-movies/8025216/Wizard-of-Oz-Why-is-Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-setting-out-on-the-Yellow-Brick-Road.html

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Wizard of Oz: Why is Andrew Lloyd Webber setting out on the Yellow Brick Road?

William Langley explores the perennial appeal of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz.

The path to a shiny future: The Wizard of Oz (1939) Photo: Everett Collection/Rex Features

6:35PM BST 25 Sep 2010

 

Looked at closely enough, even the greatest showbusiness masterpieces have their flaws. But happily, most of them are nothing the good Lord Lloyd-Webber can't fix.

"The fact is that The Wizard of Oz has never really worked in the theatre," declares the West End maestro. "The film has one or two holes where you really need a song. For instance, there's nothing for either of the two witches to sing."

Next year, therefore, Lloyd Webber's souped-up, enhanced-witch-deployment version will hit the stage – starring Michael Crawford, it was announced last week, alongside 18‑year-old Danielle Hope, winner of the BBC talent show Over The Rainbow.

But will it be better? Worse? Or just different? For more than 70 years, the original film version of L Frank Baum's children's story has stood as such a monument to wholesomeness and innocence that hardly anyone remembers what a nightmare it was to make, or the toll it took on its participants.

Judy Garland, barely 16 when she landed the role of Dorothy, went on to a life of scarcely relieved hell, marrying five times, sinking into debt and depression, and dying, aged 47, from an overdose of barbiturates. Popular song-and-dance man Buddy Ebsen, originally cast as the Tin Man, nearly died after inhaling aluminium powder from his costume and woke up in hospital to be handed a bunch of flowers by producer Mervyn LeRoy and told: "By the way, you're fired." on Palm Sunday in 1962, Clara Blandick, who played lovely Auntie Em, returned home alone from church, laid out the awards, mementos and photographs from her career in her bedroom, put a gold blanket over her shoulders, and tied a plastic bag around her head. Even Toto the dog had a nervous breakdown.

 

And it wasn't as if the film was an immediate success. The reviews were mostly lukewarm and the box office disappointing. Contrary to Lloyd Webber's analysis, most critics thought it had worked better as a stage musical (the 1903 Broadway version having run for 293 sold-out performances), and deplored Hollywood's need to mess around with perfectly good entertainment.

What turned The Wizard of Oz into something special in the hearts of millions – "a secular sacrament" as the film writer Mick LaSalle has called it – was yet another medium: television. In 1956, the film was shown for the first time on American network TV, and so enthusiastic was the reception that, for the next 40 years, it was screened annually – usually on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Thus it came to assume the stature of a national ritual its own right. Families would gather to watch it, bask in its warmth and reassurance, and, consciously or otherwise, upon its meaning in the great American scheme of things.

But what is that meaning? Baum, born in 1856, was an authentic oddball, so given to childhood daydreaming that at the age of 12 his wealthy father sent him to be toughened up at a military academy – an ordeal from which he never recovered. He went on to try his hand at a variety of mostly unsuccessful enterprises, including chicken breeding, oil trading, journalism and, briefly, store management, at which he proved so inept that his only employee committed suicide.

What sustained him was an adoration of the American frontier spirit – and in the vast, empty prairies he spotted a canvas to paint upon. If the emptiness of the prairies had something to do with the fact that most of the Indians who previously lived on them had been slaughtered, it didn't bother Baum. "The Whites," he wrote in a newspaper editorial, "by law of conquest, by justice, of civilisation, are masters of the American continent. And the best safety of the frontier settlers will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

Beyond an enthusiasm for genocide, Baum seems to have been a model liberal, supporting women's suffrage and the Left-leaning Populist Party. But his interest was increasingly concentrated on writing, and in 1900 he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the story of a 12-year-old Kansas farm girl swept up in a tornado and carried off to the magical land of Oz. It was an immediate hit, quickly turned into a musical, and Baum went on to write a lengthy series of sequels.

The 1939 movie is estimated to be the most watched in the history of cinema, and Judy's showstopper Over the Rainbow regularly tops polls as the most beloved song in film. Yet it was only as the movie worked its way into the world's consciousness that serious thought was given to what it might be about. one school sees it as a political allegory, woven around the depression of the late 19th century, which hit the US farming sector with particular force. According to this analysis, the Emerald City represents the mighty "greenback" – the US dollar – before which the Munchkins – the ordinary citizens – are helpless, until Dorothy, symbolising the American Everyman, arrives.

Or it could just be a story – and one that Lord Lloyd-Webber is not alone in seeing further potential in. At least two big-budget remakes are under way in Hollywood; one touted as the first faithful rendition of the original, the other, provisionally titled Oz, having Dorothy's granddaughter returning to the Emerald City. According to The Los Angeles Times, the studios have in mind a lucrative Harry Potter-style franchise that could eventually span the dozen or so Oz books that Baum wrote.

It's hard to disagree that the original has imperfections. It burbles and meanders, and for half an hour it stops being a musical entirely. What carries it is the audience's faith in Dorothy. "It wasn't a dream," she cries on her return to Kansas. "It was a place. A real, truly live place. Doesn't anyone believe me?" We do, Dorothy, we do.