The Untold Truth Of The Wizard Of Oz

There's no place like home, and there's no movie like The Wizard of Oz. From its delightful cast and eye-popping Technicolor to memorable songs like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," nearly everything in this film is perfect. Over 80 years later, many of the special effects still hold up. Sure, the vultures in the haunted forest may look like the kind of thing you'd see at a modern Spirit Halloween, but The Wizard of Oz will still make you believe a sock is a tornado and Ray Bolger is really made of straw. The comedy is razor-sharp, the dramatic moments can make grown men cry, and the script as a whole is the most quotable one ever written.

The classic story of a Kansas farm girl dropped off in the magical land of Oz is an inseparable part of American culture and the earliest memories of over four generations of children. Everything in The Wizard of Oz works so smoothly that it's hard to believe it had anything but an easy — possibly yellow brick — road to theaters. But the movie barely came together at all. Here are just a few of the strange stories from the The Wizard of Oz's difficult path to completion.

Baum's introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz says, "The time has come for a series of newer 'wonder tales' ... with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents ... eliminated." But it's debatable whether or not Baum succeeded in defanging his fairy tales. Oz and its sequels are so violent they're barely kid-friendly at all by modern standards, and as Baum let his surreal imagination loose, he came up with some truly blood-curdling nightmare fuel.

In the movie, it seems the Tin Man is just another of Oz's unexplained magical phenomena, but the novel gives him a gruesome origin story. He used to be a flesh-and-blood woodsman named Nick Chopper until he fell in love with the Wicked Witch of the East's daughter. The Witch didn't want her to leave home, so she enchanted Nick's ax to chop off his body parts one by one, and he replaced them with tin until none of his original self was left.

That brings up some disturbing existential questions that only get more horrifying in The Tin Woodsman of Oz. In Chapter 18, "The Tin Woodsman Talks to Himself," he returns to the tinsmith who rebuilt him and finds his own head in the cupboard. Even more disturbing, the Tin Woodsman meets Chopfyt, the tinsmith's assistant made of spare parts — stuck together with "meat glue" — from Nick and another character named Captain Fyter who met the same fate.

On the page, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was limited only by Baum and illustrator W.W. Denslow's imaginations. The movies, especially in that prehistoric age of special effects, created more challenges. One of the biggest ones was how to create a talking, singing Cowardly Lion. 

Historian John Fricke's audio commentary for The Wizard of Oz details some of the odder solutions that producer Mervyn LeRoy contemplated. Maybe LeRoy was anticipating the current era of CGI when he suggested dropping an all-animated lion into his live-action movie. He also suggested using a live lion and dubbing in dialogue over it. And in The Wizard of Oz, even the big cat had to be a star, as the plan was to use Leo, the lion who appears in the MGM logo.

Fortunately, the studio went with vaudeville comedian Bert Lahr in his lion suit instead. The idea of going to the real thing didn't quite go away, though — that suit is made from genuine lion skin.

The Wizard of Oz is so joyful you have to imagine that was the mood behind the scenes ... but it was just the opposite. If anything, it sounds like it was an ordeal. 

The Technicolor process required enormous incandescent lights that heated the studio hotter than the sun. And then there was a makeup mishap that led to an actor being replaced. According to The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History, former vaudeville and future TV star Buddy Ebsen was first in line for the Tin Man. The aluminum-dust based makeup coated his lungs and nearly killed him. As you'd imagine, he never wanted to do that again, so the role went to Jack Haley — with new, less deadly makeup.

Then, Margaret Hamilton's exit from Munchkinland as the Wicked Witch required her to descend in an elevator as smoke and flames shot out of the floor. But the elevator wasn't quite fast enough, and the copper-based makeup on her face and hands caught fire. Naturally, Hamilton wanted nothing to do with smoke or fire after that, so her stunt double covered for her when the Witch writes "surrender, Dorothy" in smoke in the sky. According to John Fricke's audio commentary, Hamilton was right to worry — the broom literally exploded under her stand-in. Then there are the flying monkeys ... two of them fell out of the air when their support wires snapped in mid-flight.

Everything in The Wizard of Oz was filmed inside the MGM studios, but the filmmakers did what they could to make their stage-bound sets look real. According to Fricke in his Wizard of Oz commentary, that included filling the forest where Dorothy meets the talking apple trees and the Tin Man with live birds on loan from nearby Los Angeles Zoo Park. One of them chilling out indistinctly in the background inspired persistent rumors that if you looked closely, you could see a suicidal starlet, or possibly a Munchkin, hanging from one of the trees.

That Hollywood legend was years away, but the birds caused some more immediate problems on the set. A crane spotted the straw hanging from Ray Bolger's Scarecrow costume and, thinking it looked like good eating, chased him around the studio. Once he got away, Bolger had to keep out of sight, and shooting stopped dead while the animal wranglers calmed the bird down.

MGM wanted an all-star cast, but they had trouble getting the big names they wanted for the small but pivotal role of the Wizard himself. Two of the biggest comedy stars of the time, W.C. Fields and Ed Wynn (Disney's Mad Hatter), turned it down because it was too small. Then the filmmakers hit on a solution — beef up the part with additional roles. That's how they got Frank Morgan to play the Wizard, along with the gatekeeper, the cabbie, the guard to the Wizard's inner sanctum, and Professor Marvel.

The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History quotes publicist Mary Mayer, who says, "For Professor Marvel's coat they wanted grandeur gone to seed. ... So the wardrobe department went down to an old second-hand store on Main Street and bought a whole rack of coats." Morgan sorted through them with the costume department and director Victor Fleming to pick just the right one. One day, Morgan noticed a name sewn into the pocket — L. Frank Baum, the Wizard's creator. 

This story was dismissed for years as a lie dreamed up for publicity, but since then, both cinematographer Hal Rosson and his niece, Helene Bowman, have come out to confirm it. We think historian John Fricke sums it up best: "If it isn't true, it ought to be."

It's strange to think now that it's become the most beloved movie of its time — maybe even all time — but The Wizard of Oz actually lost money on its initial release. True, by most standards, it was a huge success, ranking second in the year-end box office tallies. But the unprecedented cost of its making and marketing, as well as its appeal to children (who didn't pay full price for their tickets) put it in the red.

A classic like this was probably never going to be forgotten, but its afterlife on TV made it into a landmark. The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History records how, at first, MGM kept Oz and other prestigious properties out of the packages it sold to local TV stations. But in 1956, MGM finally caved and sold the rights to CBS, who went all out, filming a new introduction with the Cowardly Lion himself, Bert Lahr, and Judy Garland's little daughter and future musical superstar Liza Minnelli.

It was a huge success. While it was on, over half the TV viewers in America were tuned in. Soon, The Wizard of Oz became an annual event — even if many viewers didn't get what made going over the rainbow so special since they saw the whole thing in black and white. Still, it never got less than half the viewing audience throughout the '60s.