THE WIZ: Blu-ray (Universal/Motown Productions, 1978) Universal Home Video
The Wiz marked the 8th feature produced by Motown –
a division of Berry Gordy's popularized record label, with Gordy keenly shadowing
Broadway’s Stephanie Mills to reprise her role as Dorothy. Indeed, Gordy’s
abilities as ‘star maker’ would have been better served had Mills taken up the
challenge. For in her acceptance, Gordy would have been assured the participation
of director, John Badham, hardly an experienced maker of musical merriment,
although, in hindsight, an infinitely more effective choice to helm this
project. At the outset, 2oth Century-Fox – not Universal – held the option to
make the movie. Alas, at this juncture, Diana Ross pressured Gordy to play the
part of Dorothy Gale. And although Gordy initially turned Ross down, the singer/actress
then, and rather deviously, went to executive producer, Rob Cohen at Universal
Pictures, eager to make the movie, but with the stipulation she be cast as the
lead. Owing to her cache, a deal was thus struck, and the fate of the movie
hermetically sealed by Ross’ inability to step into the character’s shoes –
remade from ruby red to slinky silver. Aside: actually, Baum’s books account
for silver slippers too. It’s only MGM’s 1939 effort that has ruby-red shoes –
a concession, as they photographed ‘better’ in vintage Technicolor. So, Badham
bowed out, citing, “Diana Ross is a wonderful singer… a terrific actress and
a great dancer. But she's not the little six-year-old… in The Wizard of Oz!”
The mounting changes caused the powers at Fox to reconsider their option, pawning
The Wiz off on Cohen and Universal, initially, so giddy with the
prospect of having a massive hit show on their hands, no ‘official’ budget was
set to kick start the movie.
Alas, fate was conspiring overtime to derail the
big-screen adaptation of The Wiz into an expensive, existential lump of coal,
rather insincerely reconstituted by Joel Schumacher's lumbering screenplay, heavily
influenced by the teachings of Werner Erhard. Hence, the fable-esque quality of
the cinematic Wiz began to buckle under the weight of its est-ian buzzwords.
Cohen intensely disliked what Schumacher had done, but proved powerless to
redirect the project back to its Broadway roots, leaving it instead with a very
heavy-handed ‘believe in yourself’ philosophy that jettisoned virtually all of Broadway
play’s situations and dialogue in favor of Schumacher’s rewrite. Worse, Sidney
Lumet made it something of his personal mantra to defy any and all references
to MGM’s glowing masterpiece from 1939, adding in an interview, “There is
nothing to be gained from The Wizard of Oz other than to make certain we
didn't use anything from it. They made a brilliant movie, and even though our
concept is different – they're Kansas, we're New York; they're white, we're
black, and the score and the books are totally different – we wanted to
make sure that we never overlapped in any area.” This too, might have
proved a valiant departure and new beginning – if not for the epic miscasting
of Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.
Sidney Lumet had wanted Jimmie Walker, then a huge
star on TV’s Good Times. Gordy, however, thought the project might bring
Michael, and the Jackson 5, back into his fold. The brothers Jackson had left
Motown for Epic Records in 1977. But Lumet protested, suggesting, “Michael
Jackson’s a Vegas act. The Jackson 5’s a Vegas act.” Initially, Quincy
Jones, hired to orchestrate the score, was as skeptical of Michael’s
participation. However, eventually
impressed with the 19-yr.-old’s professionalism and immersion in the role,
Jones offered to produce Michael’s as yet ‘in the works’ album, Off The Wall
(1979), a collaboration so successful, Jones would go on to work with Jackson
on 2 more solo albums - Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). For the
rest, Ted Ross and Mabel King, alumni from the Broadway show, were called to
reprise their roles as ‘the lion’ and Evillene – the sweat shop ‘wicked witch’
with Nipsey Russell stepping into the Tin Man’s shoes, Lena Horne,
mother-in-law to Lumet, as Glinda, the Good Witch, and Richard Pryor, hired as
the cowering and silly Wiz. Much of The Wiz was shot at New York’s famed
Astoria Studios – a massive and all-inclusive picture-making facility built by
Famous Players-Lasky in the early 1920’s. For ‘authenticity’, production moved
to the crumbling New York State Pavilion as a black-lit, glow-in-the-dark Munchkinland.
Coney Island’s dingy and decaying Astroland, in the shadow of The Cyclone
roller coaster, served as the Tin Man’s abode, while One World Trade Center and
its chrome and cement plaza was transformed into a rather moodily glowing Emerald
City, comprised of 650 dancers, for which Tony Walton enlisted Manhattan’s crème
de la crème fashionistas, Oscar de la Renta and Norma Kamali to obtain exotic
costumes and fabrics. In the eleventh hour, matte artist, Albert Whitlock was
also called in to create a fictional edifice joining together the Twin Towers
with a vast electronic eye that caused the inhabitants of Emerald City to trade
in their sparkling green duds for deep yellow plumage, and then, mesmeric red
draperies of fringe.
Curiously, much of The Wiz takes place at night,
unlike its 1939 counterpart, where the only dimly lit sequence is in the
haunted forest, for contrast, as Dorothy and her friends are on route to the wicked
witch’s castle. It is, in fact, rather sad to see what Lumet and company have
done to this ‘super-soulful’, 7-time Tony Award-winning musical. In lieu of a
bright-eyed teenager, we get Ross as an already defeated 26-yr.-old school
teacher, utterly neurotic and fearful of life. Schumacher’s screenplay reconstitutes
the show’s magical properties, like poppies (remade herein as heroin-pushing poppy
girls), winged monkeys (a biker’s gang), and impromptu ‘snow’ tornadoes that
propel our heroine as a heat-seeking projectile through the air, and from the
relative safety of the Harlem abode, shared with a loving aunt and uncle, into a
seemingly abandoned pavilion overrun by Day-glow munchkins. Energetic and fun? Hardly. Instead of a being
a repository for our collective ‘beyond the moon/behind the rain’ daydreams,
this Oz is the very antithesis of our desire to escape reality – a total
nightmare, with bizarre dangers lurk around every corner, momentarily deflated
in song as Dorothy eases down the road while still toting her Winnebago of
socially repressed anxieties, until their penultimate liberation from a
bug-eyed and orgasmic Glinda, belting out ‘Believe in Yourself’.
Lumet’s first misfire is to anchor the timeless
quality of our story to an official date: November 25th, 1977 - a
crowded Thanksgiving dinner inside the cramped Harlem flat Dorothy shares with
her ebullient, Aunt Shelby (Theresa Merritt) and jovial, Uncle Henry (Stanley
Greene). Given Dorothy as a painful introvert, it is rather cruel for Shelby to
tease her as never having ventured south of 125th Street. I mean,
clearly, the girl has issues. After all the guests have gone home, Dorothy
cleans up. Alas, Toto has other ideas, escaping out the back kitchen door and
venturing into the vicious snow storm beyond. Rescuing her dog, Dorothy is
whisked in a magical funnel (a truly horrendous special effect), the
conspiratorial work of Glinda, the good witch of the South (Lena Horne) and
propelled through the electric sign of Oz, falling to the earth and crushing Evermean,
the fascistic ruler of Munchkinland. The newly liberated Munchkins, transformed
into graffiti by Evermean, now rejoice. Dorothy is introduced to Miss One
(Thelma Carpenter), the ‘numbers runner’ who bequeaths Evermean's charmed
silver slippers to Dorothy for her protection on the long journey to the
Emerald City. Dorothy makes her pilgrimage, first to a rundown dump where
humanoid crows are teasing a Scarecrow made from garbage; then, in the
Scarecrow’s company, to Coney Island where they liberate the Tin Man from his
decaying amusement park, and finally, to the New York public library, where an
effete jive lion named Fleetwood Coupe DeVille is awaiting a reason to exercise
his testament in courage.
Dorothy and her compatriots pass through a subway overseen
by a crazy peddler (Clyde J. Barrett) who holds dominion over some evil marionettes.
Other deadly creatures stir, and, in tandem, try to murder Dot and her friends
by crushing them between the tiled pillars. Next, the troop encounter the Poppy
Girls – heroin-pushing prostitutes who conspire to put Dorothy, Toto and the
Lion into an eternal sleep. Aside: is Lumet deliberately trying to prove to
Dorothy, Harlem either wasn’t so bad, or that her first inclination, to remain
hidden from the world in her bedroom was the right one all along? But I
digress. Reaching Emerald City, Dorothy and her friends gain access to the posh
chrome abode of ‘the Wiz’ whose fire-breathing metallic head orders them to
destroy Evillene (Mabel King), the sweatshop owner in command of ‘the Flying
Monkeys’ biker’s club from her bunker beneath the city. Aware of the plot to
destroy her, Evillene sends the ‘monkeys’ to intercept Dorothy and her
compatriots. In short order, the evil queen dismembers the Scarecrow, flattens
the Tin Man and dangles the lion by his tail, all in an attempt to get Dorothy
to relinquish her late sister’s silver slippers. Dorothy nearly surrenders to
Evillene until the Scarecrow directs her to activate the fire sprinklers. The
water melts Evillene, who is, naturally, made of ice. Liberated from her
terrible spell, the Winkies shed their oppressive work clothes, heralding Dorothy
as their liberator. Now, the Flying Monkeys triumphantly escort her back to the
Emerald City.
Alas, upon their arrival they discover the most
horrible trick of all: the Wiz is just a fraud – just plain ole Herman Smith, a
failed politico from Atlantic City who came to this darkly purposed and gaudy
metropolis by way of a terrible wind storm directing his balloon. The Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion are, at
first, chagrined and depressed over having lost their only opportunity to receive
a brain, a heart and courage respectively. But Dorothy makes each of them
realize these intangibles they already possessed long before their journey
began. However, just as Dorothy begins to lament the fact, she will likely
never get home, Glinda materializes with the only words of wisdom necessary to
make Dorothy’s dreams a reality – “believe in yourself as I believe in you.”
Tearful, but homesick, Dorothy bids her friends a final farewell, taking Glinda’s
advice to heart. She clicks her heels and suddenly discovers she has been magically
teleported back into the snow storm, just beyond Aunt Shelby and Uncle Henry’s
brownstone. With a gentle nod to a new
and brighter future ahead of her, Dorothy confidently whispers to Toto, “There's
no place like home!”
The Wiz cries out for our suspension of disbelief, but rather
pitilessly, never attains its ferocious virtuosity to successfully earn this
honor. We are never involved in the plight of these characters. And Lumet and
Schumacher have made an even graver miscalculation in their artful milieu by fruitlessly
endeavoring to straddle the impossible chasm between uber-sophistication and
that universally compelling, childlike majesty in Baum’s books, squarely aimed at
pure escapism. The results repeatedly prove more contrived and mechanical than frothy
and spontaneous. The performances are irregularly piquant at best, though never
do any of these characters manage to reach all the way to the back of the house,
much less, burrow even superficially inside our hearts, to capture and fire our
imaginations. We can empathize with Ross’ Dorothy only in the penultimate
moment when Lena Horne’s weirdly demonstrative diva, serenades against a
backdrop of suspended cherub-esque babies, twinkling in the boundless, midnight
firmament, Ross – tears-streaming down her cheeks and begging to be loved by
the audience – even more pathetic by the sudden realization it is high time her
fictional ingenue outgrew this twenty-something stunted adolescence to get on
with the artful practice of living life on her own terms. Transposing the setting from an antiseptic Kansas
cornfield to contemporary New York, then in its perilous state of urban blight
and decay, devastates The Wiz’s source material. We aren’t elevated by
the experience, rather, repeatedly hobbled in our inability to retreat from it.
Sidney Lumet may have considered this
his loving valentine to the city, but it remains a guileless and obscured view
from the cheap seats only a die-hard New Yorker sprinkled in poppy dust could
embrace.
Overproduced at a staggering $24 million (of which
only $13.6 was recouped), ambitiously conceived, fundamentally flawed and abysmally
charm-free, The Wiz remains an unabashedly sentimental work-in-progress for
which no final product emerges. It took 1,672 performances on Broadway to
declare Ken Harper’s smash a masterpiece of the American black theater, but
less than three months shooting on the movie to virtually dismantle most of its
virtues on the big screen. For reasons only known to Sidney Lumet, his decision
to transpose the action to modern-day Manhattan has bludgeoned the blithe
spirit of the piece, rather heavy-handedly replaced by an embalmed cosmopolitan
quality, too chichi for its own good. Instead of an unassuming fable, tinged in
the homespun values of Frank L. Baum’s timeless children’s classic we get a philosophical
treatise on the art of self-discovery, reconstituted through a sort of Alice
in Wonderland meets Dale Carnegie Cole’s Notes edition of confidence-building
dreck. The movie’s one irrefutable asset is its electrifying score. Virtually
all of the Broadway show’s mega-tunes have made it into this translation, each superbly
orchestrated by maestro, conductor/arranger, Quincy Jones. The most exuberant moments
come too late to save the picture; Evillene’s ‘No Bad News’ – a rip-roaring
honky-tonk-esque declaration, immediately followed by the ebullient ‘Brand
New Day’ as the Winkies rejoice in their liberation from her tyranny.
What is most heartbreaking about the movie is how
successfully it dismantles all the virtues of the stage show, leaving behind
only the faint tinny afterglow of its faux fairytale to be repeated trounced
upon by Lumet’s leaden direction. The musical numbers stop the show, but not in
a good way. Indeed, one could easily edit these numbers together for a back-to-back
‘cast album’ version and still get the full effect it takes the movie another 90+
minutes to attend to with brutally bad dialogue interpolated throughout. And,
as striving and large-scale as her performance is, Diana Ross is lethally cast
herein. The Wiz ought to have starred Stephanie Mills – period. Though
nominated for 4 Academy Awards (let it never be said, AMPAS hasn’t unofficially
lost its mind to crass commercialism), The Wiz was universally savaged by
almost everyone who saw it. The production’s staggering cost, then the most
expensive movie musical of all time, and meteoric failure to reap even half of
it back in ticket sales, was only slightly offset when CBS paid $10 million for
the rights to broadcast it on television. Some movies mellow with time or have
their perceived vices reassessed as virtues, especially after the bloom and
flourish of media notoriety surrounding them has cooled. Alas, The Wiz
has not improved with age. If anything, its blunders have intensified.
Given the film’s limited appeal, Universal’s debut of The
Wiz on Blu-Ray - when so many more worthy contenders lay in wait from their
back catalogue - is curious. Visually, we are on very solid ground. This 1080p transfer
sports a visibly sharper, cleaner and brighter image harvest, with colors that,
while dated, lend an air to the ‘now’ time capsule quality of this turgid
adaptation. The embalming fluid Lumet has employed to set in rigor mortis
really shows in hi-def! Intermittent
edge enhancement is present, but not to egregious levels. Contrast could
scarcely be better, and fine detail pops as it should. We get a DTS 5.1 with
razor-precise fidelity during the musical sequences that really shows off
Quincy Jones’s orchestral arrangements and the powerful vocals to their very best
advantage. Alas, dialogue is very strident by direct comparison. Extras are
limited to a badly worn featurette in which Lumet and others discuss the
virtues of the stage show and how they sincerely hope to best them in the
movie. Were, this were so. We also get a badly worn original theatrical trailer.
Bottom line: The Wiz is an abysmal footnote to the stagecraft that
spawned it; all fizz, but no cola – Lumet’s desire to create a musical souffle,
instead resulting in a bizarre and very weighty latke.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
1.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
4.5
EXTRAS
1
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