Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer spent $2.7 million on The Wizard of Oz, more than it had ever put into a picture, and did not see a profit on the film until a 1949 re-release. That is the fact underneath everything else worth saying about it. The 1939 musical fantasy, directed primarily by Victor Fleming, opened to critical praise, landed five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and still lost money for a decade. What it did not do was disappear.
Trailer, via Warner On Demand.
A farm in Kansas, a sheriff’s order, and a dog named Toto
The film begins on the farm where Dorothy Gale lives with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. Her dog Toto is seized by neighbor Almira Gulch, who has a sheriff’s order after being bitten. Toto escapes and returns. Dorothy runs away to protect him.
She meets Professor Marvel, a charlatan fortune teller, who leads her to believe Aunt Em is sick with heartbreak. She goes home just as a tornado reaches the farm. The storm cellar is locked. She takes cover in the farmhouse, and a blown-out window knocks her unconscious.
That is the hinge. Everything after it is the movie people remember.
A house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East
Dorothy seemingly wakes to find the house moving through the air with her and Toto inside. Various figures float past, among them Gulch, who morphs into a witch. The house comes down in an unknown land: Munchkinland, in the Land of Oz.
Glinda, the good witch, arrives in a bubble and tells Dorothy the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and killed her. The Munchkins celebrate. Then the dead witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, appears. She wants the ruby slippers. Glinda transports them onto Dorothy’s feet and tells her to keep them on.
The Wicked Witch leaves, swearing vengeance on Dorothy and Toto. Glinda tells Dorothy that the Wizard in the Emerald City may be able to help her get home, then vanishes in another bubble. Dorothy sets out down the yellow brick road.
A brain, a heart, and courage on the yellow brick road
She picks up three companions along the way. The Scarecrow wants a brain. The Tin Man wants a heart. The Cowardly Lion wants courage. All three hope the Wizard will help them too.
The cast is the reason the film holds. Ray Bolger plays the Scarecrow and Hunk. Jack Haley plays the Tin Man and Hickory. Bert Lahr plays the Cowardly Lion and Zeke. Frank Morgan plays Professor Marvel and the Wizard, plus the Gatekeeper, the Carriage Driver, and the Wizard’s Guard. Margaret Hamilton plays Almira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West. Billie Burke is Glinda. Clara Blandick is Aunt Em, Charley Grapewin is Uncle Henry, Pat Walshe is Nikko, leader of the Winged Monkeys, and Terry is Toto.
Judy Garland is Dorothy. She was not the obvious choice.
Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, and the part Ray Bolger wanted
Several actresses were reportedly considered for Dorothy. Shirley Temple, then the most prominent child star at the time, was one. Deanna Durbin, a relative newcomer with a recognized operatic voice, was another. Garland was the most experienced of the three. Officially, the decision to cast her was attributed to contractual issues.
The role shuffling did not stop there. Bolger was originally cast as the Tin Man and Buddy Ebsen as the Scarecrow. Bolger wanted the Scarecrow, the part his childhood idol Fred Stone had done on stage in 1902 — the performance that inspired Bolger to become a vaudevillian. He reportedly said, “I’m not a tin performer; I’m fluid,” and convinced producer Mervyn LeRoy to recast him. Ebsen did not object. He walked Bolger through the Scarecrow’s distinctive gait, recorded all his songs, rehearsed as the Tin Man, and began filming before the change.
W. C. Fields was originally chosen for the Wizard after Ed Wynn turned it down, considering the part “too small.” The studio could not meet Fields’ fee. Wallace Beery lobbied for the role, but the studio refused to spare him during the long shooting schedule. Frank Morgan, another contract player, was cast on September 22.
Three-strip Technicolor and a Cinematography snub
The film is celebrated for three-strip Technicolor, its fantasy storytelling, its musical score, and its characters. Harold Arlen composed the music, Herbert Stothart adapted it, and Edgar “Yip” Harburg wrote the lyrics. “Over the Rainbow” won Best Original Song. Stothart won Best Original Score. Garland received an Academy Juvenile Award.
The cinematography is the strange omission. The film appeared on a preliminary list of studio submissions for an Academy Award for Cinematography (Color) and was not nominated. That is a real gap in the record, and it is hard to defend. The Kansas sequences and the Oz sequences are doing different work, and the transition between them is the film’s clearest argument for its own craft.
Fleming directed primarily, then left production to take over the troubled Gone with the Wind. The screenplay is credited to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, with contributions from other writers. That is a lot of hands on one script, and the seams do not show.
$3 million against a $2.7 million budget
The film was sufficiently popular at the box office. It earned $3 million on a $2.7 million budget. It did not make a profit until its 1949 re-release. For years, the most expensive production MGM had made was also one of its least rewarding.
Then television changed the math. The 1956 broadcast premiere on CBS reintroduced the film to the public. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, it is the most seen film in cinema history.
That arc is worth naming in order:
- A $2.7 million production that became MGM’s most expensive at the time.
- A $3 million gross that left it without a profit until 1949.
- Five Academy Award nominations, two wins, and a Juvenile Award for Garland.
- A 1956 CBS broadcast that put it in front of a new audience.
- A Library of Congress designation as the most seen film in cinema history.
The order matters because it shows what the industry got wrong. MGM measured the film by its ledger. The audience measured it by whether they wanted to see it again. Only one of those measurements held.
Ruby slippers and a witch with a real grievance
The ruby slippers are the smartest thing in the script. Glinda puts them on Dorothy’s feet and tells her to keep them on, and the Wicked Witch spends the rest of the film trying to take them. That is a clean engine for a chase, and it costs the movie nothing but a pair of shoes.
The companions are the second-smartest thing. A brain, a heart, and courage are the three things the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion believe they lack, and the film lets them demonstrate all three on the road to ask for them. That is not subtle. It is efficient, and it works on children and adults at once.
The Wicked Witch is the third. Hamilton plays her without a shred of camp, and the film gives her a genuine grievance — her sister is dead under Dorothy’s house. She is not wrong to be angry. She is wrong about what to do with it.
Garland is the center. She was the most experienced of the three finalists for the part, and she carries the film’s emotional weight without pushing it. “Over the Rainbow” is the proof. The song is a wish for somewhere else, sung by a girl who has no power to get there, and Garland plays it as a plain statement rather than a plea. That is why it survived the decades of parody and cover versions.
The Wizard of Oz is a 9.2 out of 10. It is not a perfect film. The Kansas opening is slow, the transition effects have aged, and the Academy’s failure to nominate the color cinematography looks worse every year. But the structure is close to faultless: a girl wants to go home, a pair of shoes gives her a reason to run, three friends give her a reason to stay, and a wizard who turns out to be a fraud gives her the only answer that was ever true.
What makes it endure is not nostalgia. It is that the film was made by people who were told it was too expensive and would not pay off, and they built it anyway. The 1956 broadcast and the Library of Congress designation are the receipts. MGM spent $2.7 million and waited ten years for a profit. The audience has been paying attention for far longer than that.
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