You might not know his name. But, he was a Hollywood pioneer whose half-century career spanned silent films to talkies.
The longtime Central Coast resident directed one of the most iconic movie scenes in history.
King Vidor directed the black and white sequences in the Wizard of Oz, including Judy Garland’s performance of Somewhere Over The Rainbow.
He signed with MGM, and made their biggest early hit, The Big Parade, which was a look at World War I through the eyes of an American soldier. It was the studio’s top film at the box office until The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind were released.
The San Luis Obispo Film International Film Festival is now keeping his name alive, with an award presented every year for excellence in filmmaking.
Skye McLennan is Executive Director of the San Luis Obispo festival. “We named it after King because because he was a local resident…it seemed like the perfect fit,” said McLennan.
Some of the past honorees include Josh Brolin, Jeff Bridges, Morgan Freeman, and Ann-Margaret.
Everybody rejoice! After a whirlwind national tour, the revival of The Wiz, the all-Black retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, celebrated its opening night at the Marquis Theatre on April 17.
The show stars Nichelle Lewis as Dorothy, Deborah Cox as Glinda, Melody A. Betts as Aunt Em/Evillene, Kyle Ramar Freeman as the Lion, Phillip Johnson Richardson as the Tinman, Avery Wilson as the Scarecrow and Wayne Brady as The Wiz. Schele Williams directs, with choreography by JaQuel Knight and additional material by Tony Award nominee Amber Ruffin. Music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements are by Tony nominee Joseph Joubert.
Members of the cast, the creative team and some very special guests—including cast members from the original Broadway production—eased on down the road to Broadway.com’s glittering Emerald City-themed portrait booth. Check out the highlight below and head to the gallery for more.
One of the more notable public parks in the Chicago area is Oz Park. Oz Park is named for Lyman Frank Baum, a children’s author and creator of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” who was a Chicago resident in the 1890s.
As the 13-acre park has evolved over the years it has taken on a Wizard of Oz theme to honor Baum and thrill generations of Wizard of Oz fans. It all started with fans celebrating the book, movie, and its famous author by holding an Oz Festival in the park every year. Eventually, the park was named Oz Park by the Chicago Park District, and the park’s advisory council raised money to put sculptures of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, Dorothy, and Toto in the park.
As the park updates this spring, they will add a life-size face wall. It’s renderings of Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion with cutouts so visitors can take photos of themselves as the movie characters.
They’re also re-doing Dorothy’s Playlot. Much of the original playlot contained wood structures, that at this point are starting to rot. Plans for the new playground have been in the works for three years, and the same company that designed the original playlot will build the new one, which will be similar to the original with modern upgrades such as bouncy bridges, twisty slides, a rock climbing wall, and other attractions, according to Block Club Chicago.
There’s another problem, one of the largest rat beds in Chicago is under Dorothy’s playlot. As construction commences on rebuilding Dorothy’s playlot construction crews first will be ridding the park of its rodents. I’m not sure anyone who enjoys hanging out at the park has a problem with that.
The Oz Park Advisory Council President told Block Club Chicago they expect Oz Park improvements to be complete by July.
If you’d like to visit Oz Park on your next trip to Chicago, the park is located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the north side of the City. Its address is 2021 North Burling Street, at the corner of Lincoln and Webster Avenues, just south of the Lincoln, Halsted, and Fullerton intersection. You can learn more about the park on the Chicago Park District website.
In the program, Amber Ruffin, who neatly revised last season’s Some Like It Hot with Matthew Lopez, is announced as having added material. How much? According to supplied info, she’s boldly, not to say brazenly, reworked 50 percent of it. In one interview, she has vouched of her contributions, “We made a choice to not modernize it, but to make it so it could always go up at any time—I honestly feel like this version could go up 30 years from now and you don’t have to change a word, and it is fine.”
Not so fast. What’s on view right now isn’t even “fine” for 2024. That includes just about the entire second act, which gets going at Emerald City with a green-tinged production number. In Ruffin’s revise the Wizard is seen even before the Wicked Witch does any menacing — a Wicked Witch called Evillene and played by Melody A. Betts, who’s also an adoring Aunt Em.
When this supposedly contemporized Wizard begins wizzing, he’s no longer exposed as a benevolent aging fellow but is depicted as a tough galoot supposedly protecting his Emerald City citizens from some curse or other that needs lifting. Evillene, when she finally makes an appearance, is menacing but hardly as throttling as spectators expect. More specifics will not be itemized because they’d only confirm that this new shuffle – intended to address racism in a politicized gaze at the classic? — packs nowhere near the delightfully timeless horror that audiences have long known and still love.
Addaperle (Allyson Kaye Daniel) makes jokes at her late sister’s expense: “She flat. Flat as she can be. I mean, this woman is so flat that instead of a coffin, we are gonna use a manila envelope.” Enter Glinda (Deborah Cox): “Wow, you look like an angel.” “Thanks, I moisturize.” Amber Ruffin is credited with “additional material for this production,” but after her sharp work on Some Like It Hot’s book I am loath to ascribe any of these groaners to her. Wanting to go home, Dorothy is pointed in the Wiz’s direction but must assume the corpse’s silver slippers to “Ease On Down the Road.” Yet it’s not a road at all, just a cadre of drum majors in yellow capes and big black hats. Couldn’t anyone come up with something yellow on the floor for the characters to walk on?
Dorothy encounters the usual suspects, but what do you know, the Wicked Witch was responsible for everyone’s woes: stealing the heart of the Scarecrow (Avery Wilson), rusting the Tinman (Phillip Johnson Richardson); and scaring the guts out of the Lion (Kyle Ramar Freeman). Turns out the Wiz (Wayne Brady, bland and underused) and the Emerald City generally have similarly been cursed, for no one may leave its gates. So Dorothy’s tracking down Evillene (Betts again) is actually pointedly motivated, and rendered pretty easy, too, what with the Witch telegraphing her Achilles heel (“What is a bucket of water doing up here? Guards, take it away!”).
Comedian Joe Lycett has admitted he was behind a Wizard of Oz-themed artwork in Birmingham that was compared to works by Banksy – one of several fake news stories he planted in the media in recent weeks.
Speculation about the authorship of the piece – which appeared to mimic Banksy’s style of integrating their artwork into the surrounding environment – even forced the artist’s spokesperson to issue a blunt denial they were responsible.
Lycett revealed his trickery on his new series of Late Night Lycett on Channel 4 on Friday night.
He said he planted the Banksy story, as well as three other fake new stories, to take up space in the media that would otherwise have been used to ‘spread hate, misery and pictures of Amanda Holden‘.
“Wicked” author Gregory Maguire, who now lives in the Boston area, has been re-imagining the story of “The Wizard of Oz” since he was a child.
“I was the middle kid, for one thing. But I was also the idea man,” he told GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel. “So when little kids had to be babysat, I was young enough to be forced to do it. And I was old enough to have ideas for what to do next.”
He would wrangle his siblings into his own productions of “The Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum’s fish-out-of-water tale of adventure and friendship. And after a while, he started to remix the story. He tried gender-bending his casting and inserting characters from other stories, like Peter Pan’s Captain Hook.
“You add just one new element to what you already knew, and the story cannot end the way that it used to,” he said.
The preview opening of the new exhibit Meet the Stars: 100 Years of MGM Studios and the Golden Age of Hollywood on Thursday night was a crowded, buzzing affair. Held at the Hollywood Heritage Museum in the historic Lasky DeMille Barn across from the Hollywood Bowl, the event showcased the items of over 20 movie collectors. Memorabilia hunters, dressed in fedoras and flirty ’40s dresses, gabbed about their latest finds with others who have a similar passion.
The highlight of the night was when the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to former MGM child star Cora Sue Collins (who played a little Greta Garbo in 1933’s Queen Christina), the last surviving MGM contract player from the 1930s. Sitting at a tableau that recreated a party thrown for her by MGM in 1935, Collins elegantly thanked everyone for their well wishes. Actor George Chakiris was also in attendance, and he posed next to a costume he wore in the 1954 film Brigadoon.
The exhibit, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through June, is a chance for collectors to show off their most treasured finds. “We thought it would be fun to actually go out to collectors and ask them what they’ve got,” said co-curator Darin Barnes, who collects Norma Shearer artifacts. “They never have an opportunity to get to display their stuff. So, we went out to about 20 collectors, and this is the result of it.”
A dazzling array of costumes worn by Golden Age stars were the event’s focal point. In one case alone, there was a tux worn by Cary Grant in Indiscreet, a William Powell suit and a Gary Cooper tuxedo (all surprisingly small). There are costumes, dresses, suits and personal items from the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Greer Garson, Mary Astor, Shirley Temple, Hedy Lamarr, Margaret O’Brien and Mae West. Perhaps the most titillating artifact of all was Johnny Weissmuller’s original Tarzan loin cloth.
A mystery piece of artwork that appeared overnight in Birmingham’s Gay Village is not by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy, it has been confirmed. The mural, depicting Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz reaching for a pair of ruby slippers which are hanging from a nearby cable, is said to have appeared overnight on April 3 in Kent Street.
The appearance of the art, on the wall of Sidewalk bar, has drawn speculation that it could have been the latest work of the famous anonymous Bristol street artist. Phil Oldershaw, the bar’s director, told BirminghamLive he was planning to protect it with Perspex.
He said: “I’m going to protect it whether it’s Banksy or not. It would be a great thing for Birmingham, and it makes Southside look great too.” On his Instagram page, he said there has been a “media frenzy” ever since the mural was painted.
A woman with ties to an organized retail theft ring has told federal investigators that Jerry Hal Saliterman, the second man accused of stealing ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” had the famous shoes buried in his backyard for at least seven years. The unnamed woman, who is described as a “cooperating defendant,” saw the slippers in a grocery bag, according to court documents. Instead of anonymously returning them — like she said she asked — they were put in a clear plastic container with a white lid and buried near a shed on the south side of Saliterman’s lawn in Crystal. They were treated in an ultraviolet sanitizer cabinet, the woman told authorities, to remove traces of DNA.
The Land of Oz theme park, located on Beech Mountain, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, has announced its plans to host the 2024 Autumn at Oz Festival. The event will celebrate the 85th anniversary of the classic MGM film, “The Wizard of Oz,” and is scheduled to take place over three weekends in September: 6th-8th, 13th-15th, and 20th-22nd. The festival, known as the largest “Wizard of Oz” festival, promises to offer visitors an immersive experience in the world of Oz.
Pico Play and Village Roadshow’s Warner Bros. Movie World have collaborated for the first time on this pioneering project in Australia’s Gold Coast. The project includes two new roller coasters, unique ride themes, and immersive visitor experiences.
Darren McLean, executive director of Pico Play, describes the company’s innovative approach to the project, which includes impressive facades, sculptures, projections, and audio: “We want to offer guests more than just a rollercoaster ride. The experience is more than the ride itself. There’s a story, there are characters and there’s excitement, anticipation and entertainment leading up to the rides.”
The new area is themed around the movie’s beloved locations and characters, with sets which pay homage to key scenes. The immersive experience will transport visitors from Dorothy’s house in Kansas to the famous Yellow Brick Road.
McLean describes the project: “The load station for Flight of the Wicked Witch, a suspended family coaster soaring 19 metres high, mirrors the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle complete with flying monkeys, vultures and haunted trees.
“Guests will load and unload for the Kansas Twister, a family boomerang racer rollercoaster with dual tracks, amid a re-creation of Dorothy’s Kansas farm as the tornado comes through and whisks her off to the land of Oz.
“The stories and the characters are so rich and perfect to recreate for a theme park environment.”
The design replicates the original film’s innovative use of colour. Sepia tones are reflected in the Kansas sequences, while the Witch’s Wasteland evokes the movie’s monochrome palette. The land of Oz then dazzles with bright colours, from Munchkin Land to the Emerald City and the Poppy Fields.
McLean says: “We are also crafting sculptures of Dorothy and Toto, Tin Man, the Lion and Scarecrow, strategically placed for guests to link arms with them for a photo opportunity, recreating the iconic image of the characters, poised to embark on their journey down the Yellow Brick Road to the magical land of Oz.
“Scenes from the movie will also be projected in queueing areas and we are recreating the original soundtrack with a local sound studio to be played in different areas.”
Gray Side of the Moon (Poem)
This poem smashes together San Francisco with The Wizard of Oz, highlighting urban grit, meth, gangs, guns ,Oz-ian urban legends, and more.
The Way of Oz (Book)
The Way of Oz: A Guide to Wisdom, Heart, and Courage is centered on the original Wizard of Oz stories and the life of their creator, L. Frank Baum.
The Daily Ozmapolitan 