Flying murder monkeys, angry trees, witches, wizards, and using the death of a dog as leverage
against a young farmgirl.
The Wizard of Oz is a classic and one that doesn't get any less nightmarish with age.
Since the movie was filmed way before concepts like workplace safety and sobriety were invented,
a lot of strange things went on during filming.
People got hurt.
Movie history was made.
Worth it?
Maybe!
Let's see!
One small voice
One of the tough things about The Wizard of Oz is separating fact from fiction, especially
when it comes to long-standing rumors about the film's massive mob of Munchkins.
According to the Munchkins themselves, there was no drunken carousing, no orgies, and no
need for them to be picked up with butterfly nets for shooting the next morning.
In fact, the stories make them sad, so cut it out.
The core group of Munchkins was made up of a troupe of European vaudeville actors called
the Singer Midgets, but Munchkin Mickey Carroll was born in St. Louis.
That meant he had something big going for him: he could speak English.
When it came time for filming, they needed people who could deliver what would become
some pretty iconic lines.
Carroll performed those lines, along with Munchkin coroner Meinhardt Raabe.
It was Carroll who provided voices for the Lollipop Guild and even said the iconic "Follow
the yellow brick road."
By the end of filming, he'd spent three weeks doing voice-over work, including Auntie Em's
panicked shouts when the tornado hits, when she couldn't yell loud enough.
"Dorothy!”
Carroll was one of the last surviving munchkins, dying in 2009 at 89 years old.
We hope he found his own happiness at the end of the rainbow.
The wizard of booze
Actor Frank Morgan played five different roles in Oz: Professor Marvel, the crying gatekeeper,
the driver behind the Horse of a Different Color, the Wizard's guard, and the Wizard
of Oz himself.
But it wasn't just acting chops that got him through such an arduous schedule.
The first day Morgan showed up on set, he had a briefcase, but carrying things like
papers and scripts was for amateurs.
His briefcase had a minibar in it.
Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow, said,
"No matter how many times he retreated to the black briefcase, he was never less than
a gentleman, although when he tried to stop drinking, he was often short-tempered and
irritable."
According to his wardrobe man, Morgan's drink of choice was champagne, and there was at
least one incident where director Victor Fleming confronted Morgan and told him to drink more
so he was tolerable on set.
"Silence!"
"Oh!
Jiminy crickets!"
Ah, the good old days.
King of the forest
If you always thought that the Cowardly Lion's costume looked incredibly realistic, that's
because, well, it was made from real lions.
The idea had been to make a couple of costumes so actor Burt Lahr would be able to swap them
out during filming.
But the unique patterns of the real lion hides made that impossible, since every costume
would look different.
Lahr ended up with one single costume that weighed about 60 pounds, which quickly filled
with sweat under the hot studio lights.
It became such a problem that the filmmakers needed to make a special purchase: an industrial
drying bin to help get the costume a little less wet for the next day.
Not included: Febreeze.
At least stunt doubles and stand-ins got to share a different sticky costume, which was
close enough to the original to stand in during far-away shots.
After filming, the costume was largely forgotten until it was rediscovered for a 1970 auction,
where it sold for $2,400.
It was later restored and went on to sell for $3.1 million, sweat included.
Wardrobe malfunctions
Jack Haley made the Tin Man everything we all know and love, but a weird series of events
put him there.
The original cast list featured Buddy Ebsen as the Scarecrow and Ray Bolger as the Tin
Man, but that's obviously not how things turned out.
The story goes that Bolger wanted to be the Scarecrow, since he was a dancer, and didn't
want to be trapped inside a tin suit.
He went to MGM honcho Mervyn LeRoy said he'd been cast in the wrong role.
They allowed Ebsen and Bolger to swap roles, and some of the movie was even filmed before
Ebsen was sent to the hospital with a major allergic reaction to the aluminum dust that
he was painted with.
According to Ebsen, no one believed he was sick, and he was ordered back to the set.
That is until, thankfully, medical personnel got involved.
Ebsen would go on to complain of breathing problems for the rest of his life — and
he didn't even get to be in the movie.
Jack Haley was hired, and the studio switched to using aluminum paste rather than dust.
And that quickly gave Haley a severe eye infection, so filming was delayed again.
Burn the witch
Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch, was the type to suffer for her craft.
And while there were a whole bunch of accidents during filming that would have today's stars
calling their lawyers, her on-set mishap ranks right at the top.
[Screams]
The first take of the Witch leaving Munchkinland went perfectly, but director Victor Fleming
wanted another take, just in case.
During take two, Hamilton's hat and coat caught on fire, burning layers of skin off her face
and hands.
That's pretty bad, right?
Well, it gets worse.
The only way to get the green paint off her burned skin was with alcohol.
She left the set for six weeks and returned before she had completely healed.
Since they couldn't re-apply the green paint, she wore gloves for the rest of filming.
Not surprisingly, she had lost a bit of faith in the special effects department and refused
to do any more fire-related scenes.
They still had that famous skywriting sequence to film, and that required an actress who
was willing to sit on a prop broomstick that spewed smoke.
Long story short, it was a pipe, it was filled with fire, and it exploded.
Hamilton's stunt double, Betty Danko, was hospitalized for 11 days.
Presumably she never worked with fire again either.
There was a huge amount of asbestos on set
It's obvious that back in the good ol' days, when doctors prescribed cocaine and cigarettes
to cure whatever ailed you, we didn't always know what we were doing when it came to science
and human bodies.
Which is why pure, uncut asbestos was used in just about everything, including the scene
in The Wizard of Oz where's Dorothy's gang falls asleep in the field and snow begins
to fall.
Obviously, that's not snow that's falling on them, but the choice of asbestos was perhaps
shortsighted.
The film's stars were all covered with asbestos fibers, and at the time, it wasn't that odd.
Asbestos was often used to simulate fake snow, even in department stores.
Do you know what else contained asbestos?
Everything that needed to be fireproofed, including the Wicked Witch's broom, and part
of the Scarecrow's costume.
That's right, Ray Bolger was dancing around in asbestos, under falling asbestos, not even
knowing he was giving cancer the big ol' middle finger… until his death from cancer in 1987.
The $80,000 jitterbug
By the end of filming, MGM decided that The Wizard of Oz was about 20 minutes too long.
The first thing that got the axe was a scene that had taken an entire five weeks to film
and cost a mind-blowing $80,000, or $1.4 million bucks in today's money.
The premise was pretty simple: the Wicked Witch sends a swarm of bugs, which were known
for giving their victims the "jitters," to distract Dorothy's group while her henchmen
swooped in.
But really, it played like an excuse to do a contemporary dance number in the middle
of the Haunted Forest.
Which was still a lot nicer than the Wicked Witch from L. Frank Baum's novels, who sent
out killer bees to sting the party to death instead.
There was more to the whole jitterbug plot, but with bits and pieces of story falling
off the original script, only one portion of it remained in the final film.
Too bad it made no sense without the whole dancing scene.
"They'll give you no trouble, I promise you that.
I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them."
The whole out-of-place reference to a modern dance fad was way too odd to keep.
And that's saying something for a movie that starred a robot and a living bunch of hay.
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