It was a humble filing cabinet that came to author L Frank Baum’s rescue. Legend has it that having already settled for ‘wizard’ as part of his title for a book about a young girl from Kansas who is transported to an enchanted land by a cyclone, Baum’s eyes strayed to a filing cabinet marked O-Z. The rest, as they say, is history.

Probably the most watched feature film of all time, it was 70 years ago last week that MGM’s adaptation of The Wizard of Oz hit theatres. The studio that boasted of ‘more stars than there are in heaven’ was run by the legendary Louis Burt Mayer, then the highest-paid executive in the US. The undisputed ringmaster of Hollywood’s iconic studio system, Mayer’s MGM was one of the Big Five studios that had come to dominate Hollywood, with a formidable army of artists and technicians hired on long-term contract.

If MGM epitomised the studio system, The Wizard of Oz, its most ambitious project, represented the Golden Age of Hollywood in all its glory. The Hollywood movie factories had been perfected by the mid-30s. The Great Depression was being beaten back and America hadn’t yet entered the war. At $2.77 million, the film’s budget was almost three times the average budget of movies at the time, trumped only by MGM’s own Gone With The Wind ($4 million) at the end of the year.

Seventeen-year-old Judy Garland—the little girl with the great big voice—played the vulnerable and lonely orphan Dorothy while Bert Lahr played the cowardly lion, Jack Haley the Tin Man (after Buddy Ebsen, the first choice for the role, nearly died of aluminium poisoning from his tin armour) and Ray Bolger the scarecrow. Margaret Hamilton was cast as the wicked witch of the West and Frank Morgan the legendary wizard who is the shining light at the end of the yellow brick road. Terry, a cairn terrier, played Dorothy’s beloved Toto and was paid $125 a week, probably as compensation for regularly being blown off the set by the powerful wind machines. Though Victor Fleming directed most of the movie, George Cukor (My Fair Lady, The Philadelphia Story) was the first to sit in the director’s chair. Fleming then took over from him until he was called to the sets of Gone with the Wind to replace none other than Cukor and it was King Vidor who wrapped up Oz.

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