Tag: the wizard of oz

Calendar: August 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of August

Behind Door One

August 15, 1939 marks the Hollywood premier of the film “The Wizard of Oz”.

In January 1938, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the rights to L. Frank Baum’s novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” from Samuel Goldwyn, who had toyed with the idea of making the film as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor who would play the Scarecrow. The final draft of the script was completed on October 8, 1938, following numerous rewrites from many screenwriters; Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf received the film credits.

In his book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, Frank Baum describes Kansas as being “in shades of gray”.  Effectively, the use of monochrome sepia tones for the Kansas sequences was a stylistic choice that evoked the dull and gray countryside. Much attention was given to the use of color in the production, with the MGM production crew favoring some hues over others. Consequently, it took the studio’s art department almost a week to settle on the final shade of yellow used for the yellow brick road.

Though Judy Garland was set for the part, Nicholas Schenck, head of Loew’s Inc., MGM’s controlling parent company, felt box-office security in the person of Shirley Temple was needed to ensure a financial return against Oz‘s big budget. At an unofficial audition, MGM musical mainstay Roger Edens listened to Temple sing and reported that she lacked the robust vocal chops required for the extravaganza being prepared. So, the part of Dorothy remained Judy Garland’s, as intended.

Gale Sondergaard, a recent Academy Award winner, was originally cast as the Wicked Witch; however, she  became unhappy when the witch’s persona shifted from sly and glamorous into the familiar “ugly hag”. She turned down the role and was replaced on October 10, 1938, just three days before filming started, by MGM contract player Margaret Hamilton. After the filming of “The Wizard of Oz”, both Hamilton and Garland started filming  the Busby Berkeley musical “Babes in Arms” with Hamilton playing a role similar to the Wicked Witch.

An extensive talent search produced over a hundred little people to play Munchkins. They were each paid over 125 dollars a week, equivalent to 2200 dollars today. The MGM costume and wardrobe department, under the direction of costume designer Adrian Greenberg, had to design over 100 costumes for the Munchkin sequences. They then had to photograph and catalog each Munchkin in his or her costume so that they could correctly apply the same costume and makeup each day of production.

The Hollywood premiere was on August 15, 1939 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. While the earnings for the film were considerable, the high production cost, in association with various distribution and other costs, meant the movie initially recorded a loss of over one million dollars for  the studio. It did not show what MGM considered a profit until a 1949 re-release earned an additional $1.5 million. The film has been inducted into National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and is listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Calendar: March 21

Year: Day to Day Men: March 21

Cool and Refreshed

The twenty-first of March in 1867 marks the birth date of Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. who was an American Broadway impresario. 

Born in the Illinois city of Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was the son of Roselie de Hez, the Belgian grandniece to General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard, and German-born Florenz Ziegfeld, son of the mayor of Jever, the capital city of the Friesland district, Germany. The father founded Roosevelt University’s Chicago Academy of Music 1n 1867 and later opened the Trocadero nightclub to profit from the 1893 World’s Fair. 

During a trip to London in 1896, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. met the Polish-French singer Anna Held and brought her to the United States as his common-law wife. Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway including the 1901 “Little Duchess” and 1906 “A Parisian Model”. One of Broadway’s celebrated leading ladies, she became both a well-known and wealthy woman. It was Held who presented the idea of an American version of the Parisian Folies Bergère to Ziegfeld. 

Ziegfeld’s stage spectaculars, which became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began with ‘Follies of 1907’ which opened in July of that year and continued annually until 1931. These productions with their elaborate costumes and sets featured beautiful women, the Ziegfeld Girls, chosen personally by Ziegfeld. The extravaganzas were choreographed to the works of such popular composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. The Follies featured many well-known theatrical performers including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Ann Pennington.

In 1927, the sixteen-hundred seat Ziegfeld Theater opened on the west side of  Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Designed by architects Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, the Art Deco theater’s auditorium was egg-shaped with the stage at the narrow end. A large medieval-styled mural by Lillian Gaertner, “The Joy of Life”, covered the walls and ceiling. To finance the construction cost of of 2.5 million dollars, Ziegfeld borrowed money from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who took control of the theater after Ziegfeld’s death.

The Ziegfeld Theater’s opening production in February was Ziegfeld’s “Rio Rita” which ran for almost five hundred performances. The second production, “Show Boat” with stage sets by Urban and a score by Jerome Kern, was a success with a run of five hundred seventy-two performances. This musical continues to be revived on Broadway and has won multiple Tony Awards. In May of 1932 during the Depression, Ziegfeld staged a revival of “Show Boat” that ran for six months. In the same year, a production with the Follies’ theatrical stars entitled “The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air” was broadcast on CBS Radio.  

Anna Held divorced Florenz Ziegfeld in January of 1913. In April of 1914, he married stage and screen actress Billie Burke; they had one child, Patricia Burke Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld family lived at their New York estate in Hastings-on-Hudson and their residence in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1932 after spending a period in a New Mexico sanitarium, Florenz Ziegfeld traveled to Los Angeles, California. A few days later, he died in Hollywood from an existing lung infection, pleurisy, on the twenty-second of July in 1932.

Ziegfeld’s death left Billie Burke with substantial debts, one of the reasons that she steered her career toward film acting. She moved to Beverly Hills and returned to a successful career as an actress with such films as George Cukor’s “Dinner at Eight”, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1937 “Topper”, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, and William Keighley’s 1942 “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. In the late 1950s, failing memory led to Burke’s retirement from show business; she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five in May of 1970. Burke is interred beside Ziegfeld at Kensico Cemetery in Valhall, New York.