There seems to be little doubt that the atmosphere of foreboding that permeates every frame of Oz - despite the choreographed jollity and uplifting songs - was a result of the fact that while the film was being made (1937-38), war was on the way, and Baum’s innocent utopian vision of home sweet home could no longer be taken for granted. It was interesting to consider that my own ambivalent attitude towards this film – both as a child and as an adult – wasn’t entirely subjective and unfounded. The Wizard of Oz was a yellow brick road movie which began and ended at home - which of course is where the American heart is. Not to mention the mannequin Baum constructed out of tin to function as an eye-catching attraction in the window of the department store he owned before the Great Depression bankrupted him.Įventually we got to MGM’s rich Technicolor jewel of a film. Then there was the story that while working as editor of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer he had become obsessed by a news story about a house that had been uprooted by a tornado and then landed, still intact, two miles away. For example, the idea that Baum ( pictured right ) got the name of his fantasy kingdom from glancing at the “O-to-Z” label on his filing cabinet, thus supporting Pasteur’s dictum that “chance favours the prepared mind”. However, what I found most fascinating wasn’t the grand overarching story of this generously moustachioed entrepreneur’s numerous and inventive attempts to make a living to support his family, but the little incidental details along the way which later contributed to the making of such an era-defining work of art as The Wizard of Oz. In fact, so unthinkably precocious was her character - in this era when it was still thought that a child should be seen but not heard - that the Oz books were banned by many public libraries. It wasn’t the fact that she was the first young girl to be placed at the centre of a narrative it was the fact that she was such a spirited, independent girl (due in part, it was said, to the influence Baum’s wife, mother and mother-in-law had - all of whom were involved in the suffragette movement). It turns out that Dorothy – the still centre of the Oz tornado of flying monkeys and evil witches – was at the time the book’s most controversial ingredient. But there can be no understanding of The Wizard of Oz’s position in our culture without some knowledge of the man who created this almost myth-like template for the American Dream, way back at the turn of the 20th century.īaum got the name of his fantasy kingdom from glancing at the 'O-to-Z label on his filing cabinet In fact he didn’t even start writing in earnest until a decline in his health during old age. This New York-born entrepreneur was a baseball player, a photographer, an inventor, a newspaper editor and department store owner. And that would have been a pity because Baum’s story, as told by his great grandson, great granddaughter and various literary and movie scholars, is an engrossingly eventful one.
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