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Gigantic Munchkins, Midget Politicos

By Ed Goldman

OOHS AND OZ—Lions and tigers and bears—and two thumbs down! A hailstorm of hatred is engulfing the perpetrators of a new, ginormous screening in Las Vegas of the beloved 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Apparently, to make the film work in its new mountain-range dimensions, A-I was deployed in a few spots to ensure that characters (and even the legs of some characters) that were no longer visible once the original format was aggrandized have now been restored.

Like most of you, I haven’t seen the newest incarnation of the film. But that doesn’t prevent me from being incensed, indignant and aesthetically violated by it. O, whence my smelling salts and fainting couch? No, never mind that: I’ll sue! I want to see the manager! 

By the same token, do you think that anything ever produced in Hollywood is or was an untouchable work of art? Ted Turner “colorized” the classic “Casablanca” in 1988, remaking Humphrey Bogart’s white dinner jacket into a shade of canary yellow that even Century 21 real estate people, who sported hideous gold blazers for decades, might consider a tad louche. 

And what happened? Why, nobody ever watched “Casablanca” in its original format ever again! That’s right. You didn’t know that, did you? It was consigned to the ash heap of cinematic history, correct?  

Of course not. In fact, while the colorized film drew a bunch of viewers (including me) when it was shown on TV, and home video sales were okay, people who loved the original black-and-white film (including me) continued to see, re-see and love it. I think I’ve watched “Casabanca” a minimum of 30 times since the first time I saw it, with my big brother Jerry, sitting on the carpet in his New York City apartment in the very humid summer of 1969, the air conditioner turned up to Arctic mode. I remember both of us roaring with laughter at this snippet of dialogue:

Captain Renault (Claude Rains): What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

Rick (Humphrey Bogart): My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert. 

Rick: I was misinformed.

By way of background, “colorization” is a technique that was introduced to lure younger viewers to older films, presumably because they wouldn’t watch anything that lacked the Crayola hues they first encountered when their parents took them to dinner and filled the little darlings’ high-chair trays with drawing supplies. It was meant to prevent the kids from becoming pint-size terrorists when they got bored—which usually started as the menus were delivered to the table and escalated as the waiter recited the daily specials. (It was a reaction I can still relate to.) 

Despite the French “auteur” theory of film—that the director is the “author” of everything we watch and hear—movies have always been a highly collaborative art and industry. And I don’t mean just the shooting and editing of them: they’re products that are researched, target-marketed, altered when poorly received in sneak previews and generally not utterly faithful to the directors’, writer’s, actors’ or editors’ initial “vision.” 

To recap, if your life won’t be complete until you see Toto look like a cast member of “Jurassic Park,” get thee to Vegas.