The First Oz Films

March 24, 1910 was the release date of the first ever screen version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and we were surprised to note a gap thereupon in our Oz chronicles. Our dozens of Oz related posts have included dedicated posts on such keystone topics as Baum himself, the 1903 Broadway play, the 1925 Larry Semon screen adaptation,the 1939 MGM classic, and a deep dive into the Oz franchise’s interaction with vaudeville, fairs, medicine shows, and such like. Time to plug the hole! But first…

To digress briefly, March 24 was also the birthday of Baum’s important mother-in-law, feminist, abolitionist, free-thinker and Native American rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898). She’ll conceivably get a post of her own here sometime. The obvious occasion for that would be the upcoming bicentennial. Now to today’s topic.

Baum’s first cinematic foray came as scenic elements for his spectacle The Fairy-Logue and Radio Plays (1908) a multi-media spectacle that bridged his path from live theatre to movies. The show was adapted from the first few Oz books. Baum stood at podium and gave a “lecture”, while behind him onstage were live actors in costumes, as well as projections of magic lantern slides and hand tinted movies, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company. The show only played for two months, but then Baum went on to work with Selig on new films.

At this stage, Baum actually moved to Los Angeles and made movies for the remaining decade of life, even as he was churning out children’s books at a prodigious rate. The first Oz Films came out in 1910: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz , The Land of Oz , John Dough and the Cherub . The first film survives. You can see it on Youtube. It’s about 13 minutes long. It seems to be closer to the 1902 musical that it is to either the original book or the movie they used in The Fairlogue and Radio Plays. Cast members for these films included Bebe Daniels, Hobart Bosworth, Winifred Greenwood, Robert Leonard, Marcia Moore, Lillian Leighton, and Eugenie Besserer (the mother from The Jazz Singer). They were also produced by Selig Polyscope, the first studio to move its operations to Hollywood full time.

In 1914, Baum formed theOz Film Manufacturing Company, along with composer Louis Gottschalk, with whom he had developed a working relationship in the theatre. They produced three Oz films that year: The Patchwork Girl of Oz,The Magic Cloak of Oz, and His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz. All are roughly what was considered feature length for the time, just short of an hour. They were shot mostly on the grounds of the San Diego Worlds Fair, which hadn’t yet opened. The first one didn’t do too well, so the other two couldn’t find distribution for several years. You can watch them on Youtube and you can see why they don’t do well. They are extremely imaginative, which is wonderful, but they are badly told. Nothing is done to orient you so you can get your bearings. You are just immediately assaulted by bizarre, grotesque characters in a strange landscape carrying out magical plot points. Every element is disorienting. It reminds me of the David Lynch version of Dune. 

One of the more interesting aspects of Patchwork Girl of Oz (from a historical and performative standpoint) is that the titular character resembles and moves like a blackface minstrel. We don’t approve of the practice, but it is an interesting, and instructive, choice for the producers to have made, reflective of the times. The director, J. Farrell MacDonald, had been a singer in minstrel shows and was later one of Preston Sturges’s stock company. The cast also included Frank Moore from the previous Oz film, Violet MacMillan, Juanita Hansen, animal impressionist Fred Woodward, Mildred Harris (Charlie Chaplin’s first wife), and believe it or not a young Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd!

Anyway, Baum’s death soon after this precluded more movies with the creator’s own involvement, although his son L. Frank Baum Jr was involved with the next screen version, the unpopular Larry Semon adaptation a decade later.

For more on show business history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,and for more on silent film read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.