“The Dorothy Paintings” and More in South Yarmouth

The Cultural Center of Cape Cod is hosting a summer celebration of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The executive director of the institution, Molly Demeulenaere, says: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more than just a story; it's a timeless exploration of what it means to find and appreciate the complex emotions around the concept of home. Dorothy’s journey, alongside her wonderfully loyal and caring friends, mirrors the universal quest for belonging and self-discovery, making it a story that truly resonates across generations.”

Its description of the event says:

At the beating heart of this enchanting exhibition is Christina Schlesinger’s “The Dorothy Paintings.” This compelling collection of thirteen mural-sized canvases reimagines Dorothy’s adventures with a freshness of perspective that aptly portrays her as the symbol of youthful resilience and independence. Schlesinger’s work demands attention while simultaneously depicting a delicateness and vulnerability rarely seen successfully in combination.

Some of Schlesinger’s paintings can be seen here. The Cape Cod Times offers additional photographs of the space, showing how there are hands-on activities for families, inside and out.

This exhibit will be at the center’s Flagship Bass River Campus, 307 Old Main Street in South Yarmouth. The gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to 5, and Saturday from 10 to 3. The show will run through 7 September.

“Dorothy the Conqueror” Now Online

Back in 2005, the International Wizard of Oz Club’s journal, The Baum Bugle, published my article “Dorothy the Conqueror.”

It discussed the character of Dorothy Gale as L. Frank Baum developed her, from a little girl who called herself “small and meek” into a bold adventurer. That boldness had always been part of her character, but after her first trip to Oz she knew it. By the end of Baum’s series, she was happy to set out for unknown parts of Oz because “all excitement is fun.”

The article also points out ways that the MGM movie’s treatment of Dorothy doesn’t reflect that character, especially in her baffling speeches at the end.

The Oz Club has now made the text of “Dorothy the Conqueror” available for anyone to read through this webpage. It even comes with citations in both Chicago and MLA style.

Mid-Century Modern in the Emerald City

After the original publisher of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz went bankrupt, Bobbs-Merrill became the book’s one and only US publisher.

At first Bobbs-Merrill included W. W. Denslow’s illustrations, though not in the original ground-breaking multi-color design that integrated text and art. The company kept the book in print until the World War 2 paper shortages. As the war wound down, it looked for a way to reintroduce the title.

In 1944, Bobbs-Merrill commissioned entirely new art by Evelyn Copelman (1919-2003, also known as Evelyn Campbell and Evelyn Copelman Baker). She created black-and-white art on scratchboard and painted several color plates.

The title page of that new edition stated that Copelman’s art was “adapted from the famous pictures by W. W. Denslow.” Obviously those pictures weren’t the only source. Copelman’s Dorothy, Scarecrow, and Wizard are clearly designed like the characters in the 1939 MGM movie, and her Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion look like hybrids.

Bobbs-Merrill had asked Copelman to create an edition that matched the movie, but it didn’t have rights to the MGM designs. It did own the rights to Denslow’s art, however. The title page claim apparently provided legal cover.

In 1949 MGM re-released its movie into cinemas. Not coincidentally, Bobbs-Merrill gave the book a new push. Copelman reworked her line art and added more plates.

With the book still under copyright, Bobbs-Merrill was the exclusive producer of new copies of The Wizard of Oz. Thus, for over a decade in the middle of the century, Evelyn Copelman’s artwork introduced young readers to Oz.

Then the copyright lapsed in 1956. Reilly and Lee, the publisher of the rest of the Oz series, created an edition with black-and-white reproductions of Denslow’s art in a trim that matched its other titles. Other publishers commissioned their own illustrations. As the years passed, Copelman’s art disappeared from bookstore shelves.

Archive.org, working with the San Francisco and other public library systems, has made a digital copy of a Copelman edition available for borrowing. This is a 1994 Illustrated Junior Library edition, with cover artwork by Michael Zimmer but Copelman’s line art and five plates inside. It’s worth a virtual thumb-through, especially if that’s the edition you remember.

Julia Anne Young Reenvisioning Oz

Artist Julia Anne Young created this model as an exercise for an SCBWI New Jersey conference. Maria Middleton, Art Director for Random House Children’s Books, assigned the people in her illustrators’ intensive workshop to “put our own spin on any character from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, write an original story brief, and illustrate a story scene.”

Young imagined Dorothy Gale as “a camp counselor for The Flying Monkey Scouts,” rescuing one of her charges from a whirlpool. (She also implicitly reimagined Dorothy from the blonde girl that John R. Neill drew while retaining the blue checks and red shoes from the movie.) We can see Young’s whole process here at 24 Carrot Writing.

Julia Anne Young’s story doesn’t exist (yet). From the workshop she took home ways to improve this picture further. So we might yet see future versions of this adventure.

“It was gingham, with checks of white and blue”

Yesterday Bonhams sold a dress for $1,565,000. It was made for a Kansas farmgirl in the early 20th century.

Now that sum’s only about half of the price of the Cowardly Lion costume Bonhams sold last year, but it’s still high enough to place this outfit fourth on this list of most expensive Hollywood costumes.

Two other garments on that list are also dresses made for Dorothy Gale, one used for only a couple of weeks of filming before the director was replaced.

This dress had an excellent provenance, starting with labels inside that identify its wearer as “Judy Garland” rather than a stand-in. As for after it left the studio, “This blouse and pinafore were retained by Kent Warner, the costume collector employed by David Weisz Co. to help organize the 1970 MGM Auction who subsequently cherry-picked many of the best pieces for himself.” It was last sold at a Christie’s New York auction in 1981.

Breakfast in Oz

Perhaps L. Frank Baum’s biggest strength (and occasional weakness) as a writer was in how he exhibited all of his characters’ different outlooks and habits—usually without judgment.

For example, here’s a moment from The Lost Princess of Oz, as Scraps the Patchwork Girl, who doesn’t have to sleep, explains what she’s found in the night, and other characters eat their morning meals:

“The Sawhorse and I made a journey in the dark, while you were all asleep, and we found over there a bigger city than Thi. . . . It isn’t far to the city. We can reach it in two hours after you’ve had your breakfasts.”

Trot went back and, finding the other girls now awake, told them what Scraps had said. So they hurriedly ate some fruit—there were plenty of plums and fijoas in this part of the orchard—and then they mounted the animals and set out upon the journey to the strange city. Hank the Mule had breakfasted on grass and the Lion had stolen away and found a breakfast to his liking; he never told what it was, but Dorothy hoped the little rabbits and the field mice had kept out of his way. She warned Toto not to chase birds and gave the dog some apple, with which he was quite content. The Woozy was as fond of fruit as of any other food, except honey, and the Sawhorse never ate at all.

It all sounds very pleasant, except for those little rabbits and field mice Dorothy is worried about. But nobody says nothing.

Believe in Yourself

Over the years I’ve read several stories from actresses (and novelists) who were inspired by seeing some version of Dorothy Gale at a young age. But I hadn’t seen a remark like this:

Watching Stephanie Mills in “The Wiz,” I thought, “I want to play that part” — which, obviously, being white and male, was not going to happen very easily.

That’s from actor Evan Handler, telling the New York Times about how he got interested in acting.

IMDB.com says Handler shares a birthday with Ray Bolger, but of course his closest brush with Oz stardom was his memorable experience with the Return to Oz Nome King.

Personally, I think Handler might do a good job as a well-written Wizard.

A Vision of Dorothy and the Emerald City

ArtBoy Gallery in Australia launched an online “FanBoy vs ArtBoy” exhibit of work inspired by The Wizard of Oz. For most contributors that meant the MGM movie, but some created original visions. This stylized portrait of Dorothy and the Emerald City is by “Jubly-Oomph,” and is available for sale (presumably in Australian dollars).

Parsing the Class Status of Toto and Duke

Dorothy and Toto made a curious cameo appearance in The New Yorker dated 4 February. In a review of books about Richard Nixon, Thomas Mallon judges Kevin Mattson to be looking too hard for reasons to criticize that President in a study of the Checkers speech titled Just Plain Dick. Specifically:

When it comes to Checkers himself, Mattson makes a pronouncement as startling as its grammar is shaky:

By 1952, owning a dog constituted a democratic rite of passage, no longer the exclusive possession of America’s wealthy aristocrats, who were known to prance around with their purebreds in places like the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Who knew that, decades earlier, Penrod and Dorothy Gale had been putting on such airs when they took Duke and Toto out for a walk down the small-town lanes of Indiana and Kansas?

In fact, there is a whiff of aristocracy in naming a dog Toto, as I documented back here—but by 1900 that name was verging on cliché.

Similarly, the name Duke obviously has aristocratic roots, but there’s nothing fancy about Penrod Schofield and even less about Duke:

The dog’s name was undescriptive of his person, which was obviously the result of a singular series of mesalliances. He wore a grizzled moustache and indefinite whiskers; he was small and shabby, and looked like an old postman.

Now that is some fine canine characterization.

Finally an Explanation for Dorothy’s Strange Dream

Caleb Crain alerted me to the existence of this public safety poster from the Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Health Department:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor, and a roof, which made one room. One day after returning from the outhouse, Aunt Em forgot to wash her hands, which caused a bacterial infection to spread among the whole family, including the dog. In addition to severe stomach cramps and a dreadful fever, Dorothy started to have some really strange dreams.

Okay, there are less appealing Oz stories than Dorothy Return to Oz.

This poster was part of an award-winning public health campaign. There are also germ-driven versions of Treasure Island; Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; and other classics.

Open Heart Surgery on the Yellow Brick Road?

This portrayal of the companions from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is by Sabrina Alberghetti, an artist in Vancouver, via deviantArt. She also shared her sketches for this piece and some other sketches of a hip-hop Scarecrow.

I’m not at all sure what’s going on in this scene, but the characters have a lot of character.

Uncle Henry’s Mortgage Crisis

The second chapter of The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s fifth and, he thought, final Oz novel, starts with an echo of the first:

Dorothy Gale lived on a farm in Kansas, with her Aunt Em and her Uncle Henry. It was not a big farm, nor a very good one, because sometimes the rain did not come when the crops needed it, and then everything withered and dried up. Once a cyclone had carried away Uncle Henry’s house, so that he was obliged to build another; and as he was a poor man he had to mortgage his farm to get the money to pay for the new house. Then his health became bad and he was too feeble to work. The doctor ordered him to take a sea voyage and he went to Australia and took Dorothy with him. That cost a lot of money, too.

Uncle Henry grew poorer every year, and the crops raised on the farm only bought food for the family. Therefore the mortgage could not be paid. At last the banker who had loaned him the money said that if he did not pay on a certain day, his farm would be taken away from him.

This was, of course, before American society decided that it was both heartless and wasteful to let medical costs force people into bankruptcy. Now, of course, we’ve progressed to... Never mind.

In this book, published in 1910, Dorothy comes up with a solution to the family’s financial straits: occupy the Emerald City! Or at least move there. Baum explains that Oz under Princess Ozma has a very different economic system, as I quoted back here, which means there are no poor people.

A View of Oz from Oz

The honored Australian illustrator Robert R. Ingpen created this watercolor for an edition of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz commissioned by Palazzo Editions and published this spring by Templar Editions in the UK and Sterling in the US.

Melaleuca Galleries of Australia offers a page of Ingpen’s artwork for this book, including:

• Nick Chopper morphing into the Tin Woodman.
• Looking down on the China Country.
• Dorothy’s return home.

The image above comes via Melaleuca.

“Follow the Yellow Brick Road” as an Earworm

Conversations at the recent Winkie Convention made me resolve to post something Ozzy on every Tuesday, at least, in order to justify this blog’s name.

So this is a detail from a Malaysian advertisement for Penguin audiobooks, featured at Ads of the World and elsewhere.

The artist got the characters of Dorothy’s companions quite right, though they’re marching toward the Gale farmhouse rather than away. Dorothy looks more like Alice than usual.

As for what this version’s road of yellow brick is made of, I don’t want to think about it. (Simren Deogun saw another part of the human anatomy in this campaign.)

Out Coming Out

And speaking of Oz books for adults, the Boston Globe let loose with some details about Gregory Maguire’s next novel:

Concord writer Gregory Maguire has announced that he’ll release a book this fall that draws the curtain on his highly popular “Wicked [Years]” series. “Out of Oz,” which hits shelves Nov. 1, was mostly written at Maguire’s home in Concord, where he lives with his husband, painter Andy Newman, and their three kids.

The book weighs in at 550 pages and will contain three maps of Maguire’s Oz universe. The author told us today that he kept this last book under wraps during much of the writing process, just in case it didn’t work out—or he changed his mind. He also told us that he named the book before writing it, and that the title is a nod to “Out of Africa,” as well as an announcement of the end of the series, which spawned 1995’s “Wicked,” 2005’s “Son of a Witch,” and 2008’s “A Lion Among Men.”

“Look folks,” Maguire told us, with a laugh, “I’m out of here. I’m done.” He promises that the last book will keep Oz as it has been in his other novels—a gritty, political, sexual place where magic is possible. “People actually go to the bathroom,” he said, of his Oz. “There is sexual dysfunction.” He added that “Out of Oz” is as close to “Gone With the Wind” as a “Wicked” book can get.

Maguire dropped a couple of details in April 2010 to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but the novel could have evolved greatly since then.

Other sources have told me that Out of Oz focuses on the Wicked Years version of Dorothy Gale. Tonight I heard that she’s quite unpopular among fans who identify with Elphaba, even though Wicked followed the MGM movie’s portrayal of her as wetting the witch accidentally rather than out of anger.

“They looked down and saw a strange sight.”

The New York Public Library has sent me (and several thousand others) an email about its “Celebrating 100 Years” exhibit, due to open on 19 May. Among other treasures to be shown in the system’s century-old main building are “The Wizard of Oz pen and ink illustrations by W.W. Denslow.”

I couldn’t find out which pieces of artwork will be displayed, but I hope they include this image of Dorothy and Toto peering at the China Country, viewable through the Library of Congress’s website.

In the large version (click on the thumbnail) one can see how Denslow originally penciled Toto and the Cowardly Lion peering at the china people from the lower right corner. (There are other penciled figures on the left, but they’re hard to make out.)

Denslow eventually chose to draw Dorothy and Toto alone at a larger scale with a thicker line and hatching, to emphasize how she’s much bigger than the china people. And I like how he sat Toto on the internal frame of the picture itself.

To Ozopolis and Back

Ozopolis is a new Oz comic, written and published by Kirk Kushin and illustrated in black and white by Gonzalo Martinez. It’s firmly based in the Oz that L. Frank Baum left us, without severe reinventions for the sake of novelty or shock.

I also discern the influence of Eric Shanower’s older Oz comics, lately collected in Adventures in Oz. Martinez’s characterization of Dorothy, for example, looks a lot like Shanower’s, with strong chin, blonde hair, and dark Ann-Margret eyebrows. As in Shanower’s drawings (and John R. Neill’s before him), Dorothy dresses in contemporary style. Unlike in Adventures in Oz, however, Ozma has also updated her fashion, making her look a little more like General Jinjur.

If you understood that allusion, then you’re well positioned to appreciate the story in Ozopolis, #1. It really requires having read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz (the series’ first three volumes), and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (the 1913 relaunch). Fortunately, those are among Baum’s most enjoyable and widely available titles.

On the other hand, if you don’t know that the Woozy can shoot fire from his eyes, and what prompts him to do that, then the end of this episode will seem like a Woozy ex machina. Along with that cubical creature, the story’s stars are Tik-Tok, the Sawhorse, and the Glass Cat, with appearances from several more favorites. The result is a funny, action-filled adventure with the promise of a big conflict to come.

Ozopolis is available by mail through its website, which also offers a few preview pages. (I picked up one panel back here.) Delivery was swift, and I hope there will be more issues to come.

How to Play Dorothy for a Whole Week

Here’s a detail from the Mixed-Up Files interview with author Kirby Larson:

I remember vividly the first moment I realized the power of story. In second grade, the thing at recess – at least for the girls – was to play Wizard of Oz. And of course, every girl wanted to be Dorothy. I managed to milk an entire week of playing that coveted role by letting it slip on the playground that my mother was in the hospital. Boy, did that get me the sympathy vote!

When the other girls discovered that the reason Mom was in the hospital was to deliver my baby brother, I quickly got demoted from Dorothy. But that incident stuck with me. And the fact that stories had a huge pull on me in my formative years contributed to my becoming a writer.

I also enjoyed Larson’s story about how her grandmother inspired her novel of the prairies, Hattie Big Sky, which won a Newbery Honor in 2007.

New Wizard of Oz Musical, Sort of

Today I read a newspaper item about open auditions for the part of Dorothy Gale in a new musical. I tracked down the website behind it all, and this turns out to be publicity (and casting) for a show with the unfortunate name of WiZaRD. And this being America in 2010, there’s also a reality-show component, with audiences choosing who will get the role.

Although the poster has an Oz theme (MGM movie strand), and this open audition focuses on Dorothy, the show itself appears to be a one-set “jukebox musical,” suitable for national tours:

WiZaRD is a musical production centered on the hits of Oscar-winning composer Harold Arlen. The show unfolds in the mythical radio studios of WiZaRD whose set design combines the nostalgic feel of yesteryears studios with the high-tech studios of today. This collection of vignettes, based on Arlen’s most nostalgic songs, includes a Wizard of Oz scene, taken from the imagination of Frank Baum on the eve of the creation of his Oz characters.

Audiences are taken on a journey from the Cotton Club years, through the golden age of Hollywood, to the Broadway stage ...And to the land of OZ!

The new DOROTHY makes her debut alongside The THREE CROONERS, in this heartwarming family-friendly stage production slated to open at Jazz At Lincoln Center, December 2010.

Not that there’s anything wrong with hearing more Harold Arlen.

Wonderful

Here is artist A. G. Ford’s image of Dorothy Gale and Toto. Page down at Seven Imps for a couple more Ozzy paintings. One also graces the header of Ford’s blog, where he discusses and shows its development. In another posting Ford highlights his character designs, which are clearly inspired by the MGM movie.

Ford has already illustrated Jonah Winter’s Barack and Mina Javaherbin’s Goal! We’ll undoubtedly see more richly illustrated picture books from him.