It has been one of the biggest marketing campaigns in Hollywood history, starting as far back as the Super Bowl in February.
And the two main stars of Wicked have certainly played their part, gushing, sighing and crying on cue to sell a movie that already looks certain to be a holiday-season blockbuster.
Wicked – based on the Broadway show, which itself spins off the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film – celebrates female empowerment, naturally, and the importance of not judging by appearances like skin color. Especially when it’s green.
On the accompanying press tour, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo – who respectively play Glinda (the Good Witch of the South) and Elphaba (Wicked Witch of the West) – have rarely been seen apart, lovingly holding hands and parroting each other’s sentences.
Just a shared glance in interviews has sometimes been enough to send the tears flowing.
Making the highly anticipated movie, they concur, has been a dream come true.
If only the same could be said of the iconic film that spawned it all.
Celebrated for its pioneering use of technicolor, The Wizard of Oz was the most expensive movie ever made on its release – and, according to the US Library of Congress, it is the most-seen film of all time.
On the accompanying press tour, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, who respectively play Glinda and Elphaba, have rarely been seen apart, lovingly holding hands and parroting each other’s sentences.
Celebrated for its pioneering use of technicolor, The Wizard of Oz was the most expensive movie ever made on its release and, according to the US Library of Congress, it is the most-seen film of all time.
And yet, just like the wizard himself – eventually exposed as an ordinary man hiding behind a curtain and madly working levers – the making of the film was anything but magical.
In fact, The Wizard of Oz was so notorious for production disasters and controversies that some have mirthlessly observed the green-hued Wicked Witch of the West must have cursed it – before, that is, Dorothy doused her with a bucket of water and she melted.
Dorothy was memorably played by a teenaged Judy Garland, for whom making the movie involved anything but sexual empowerment.
Molested both by studio bosses and the Munchkins – natives of Oz – and forced to accept an oppressive regime to keep her weight down and look younger, her already shaky mental health never recovered as she descended into drug and alcohol abuse.
Her tragically premature death at only 47 – from an apparently accidental overdose of barbiturates while she was in London in 1969 – is widely blamed on the film’s toxic legacy.
Garland had signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) production company at the tender age of 13, although her pushy mother had started giving her pills for energy, and to help her sleep, when Garland was just ten.
That insidious trend accelerated once she got into the clutches of a ruthless, slave-driving Hollywood studio.
MGM chiefs fretted continually about her weight and would deprive her of food, leaving her perpetually hungry.
One studio executive told her: ‘You look like a hunchback. We love you but you’re so fat you look like a monster.’
Another called her a ‘fat little pig with pigtails’.
MGM’s callous behavior left Garland with a life-long insecurity about her figure. She was seeing psychiatrists by the age of 18.
The studio even pushed drugs on the teenager (the fate of numerous other young stars) encouraging her to take amphetamines, known in the business as ‘pep pills’, to keep her slim and energetic through a relentless filming schedule. MGM also gave Garland sleeping pills to calm her down at night.
Dorothy was memorably played by a teenaged Judy Garland, for whom making the movie involved anything but sexual empowerment.
MGM’s callous behavior left Garland with a life-long insecurity about her figure. She was seeing psychiatrists by the age of 18. (She is pictured here in 1954, aged 32).
‘Speed her up, slow her down,’ said a studio insider who boasted Garland was ‘run like a clock’.
The studio’s concern over her appearance increased when she was given the role of Dorothy, who is meant to be 12. Garland, who was 16 when she got the part and a year older by the time filming was over, was told she needed to lose 12 pounds.
Quite aside from a strict diet of chicken soup, black coffee, 80 (appetite-suppressing) cigarettes per day, diet pills and more amphetamines, Garland had to wear a bizarre corset on-set which not only pulled in her stomach but held down her breasts.
Garland claimed – surely not seriously – that the contraption was made of iron.
Around the time she started making the movie, studio execs began molesting the actress, groping and endlessly propositioning her for sex.
MGM chief Louis Mayer liked to show that he thought she sang from the heart by putting his hand on the teenager’s left breast.
‘I often thought I was lucky that I didn’t sing with another part of my anatomy,’ Garland later recalled.
‘Having sex with the female help was regarded as a perk of power and few women escaped the demands of Mayer and his underlings,’ Garland’s biographer Gerald Clarke observed.
Victor Fleming, one of five directors brought in to make the movie over five months of shooting, once tired of Garland’s failure to stop laughing while shooting a scene and slapped her in the face. He, at least, was ashamed of his behavior and told the crew to punch him in the face in return, only for Garland to kiss him instead.
The diminutive actors hired to play the munchkins could not have reached her face to slap it, but they could, and allegedly did, put their hands up her skirts.
According to Garland, the adult thespians, who mainly suffered from dwarfism, were hardly the sweet and innocent race of ‘Ozians’ they portrayed on camera.
‘They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress,’ wrote Sid Luft, her former husband, in a 2017 posthumous memoir. ‘The men were 40 or more years old. They thought they could get away with anything because they were so small.’
Although some have insisted they assaulted Garland, the munchkin actors have become mired in other notoriety over the years for their wild behavior.
After shooting finished, for instance, producer Mervyn LeRoy recalled how, ‘they had orgies in the hotel and we had to have police on about every floor’.
Although some have insisted they assaulted Garland, the munchkin actors have become mired in other notoriety over the years for their wild behavior.
After shooting finished, for instance, producer Mervyn LeRoy recalled how, ‘they had orgies in the hotel and we had to have police on about every floor’.
Speaking in 1967, Garland recalled: ‘They were little drunks. They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.’
She said she also once agreed to go on a date with one of them but brought her mother as a chaperone.
‘Fair enough, two broads for the price of one,’ quipped the munchkin.
Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, corroborated the grim tales, claimed: ‘Many munchkins made their living by panhandling, pimping and whoring. Midgets brandished knives and often had passions for larger personnel.’
It was said that a German munchkin who called himself The Count once had to been rescued from a toilet bowl.
‘We were all looking for him,’ said Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow. ‘Apparently, he drank his lunch, sat on the stool, fell into it and couldn’t get out. There he was with his head and legs stuck up.’
Garland was not the only female performer to be damaged by the movie – and for some the scars were literal.
The Wicked Witch of the West, for example, makes a memorable on-screen entrance amid billowing red smoke and flames. But in reality, the scene went horribly wrong for both Margaret Hamilton, the actress playing the witch, and her stunt double, Betty Danko.
One day, a member of the film crew fell through a trap door on to Danko, waiting to make her entrance below, and injured her shoulder.
Consequently, Hamilton had to finish the stunt herself, leaving the same way Danko had arrived – in an explosion of fire and smoke.
However, the flames came too soon and Hamilton, who was wearing flammable copper-based green make-up, caught fire, giving her second and third-degree burns.
The area around her right eye was particularly badly hit with the eyelid and eyebrow entirely burned off.
The Wicked Witch of the West makes a memorable on-screen entrance amid billowing red smoke and flames. But in reality, the scene went horribly wrong for both Margaret Hamilton, the actress playing the witch, and her stunt double, Betty Danko.
The flames came too soon and Hamilton, who was wearing flammable copper-based green make-up, caught fire, giving her second and third-degree burns.
Even when she returned to work six weeks later, Hamilton had to wear green gloves rather than make-up as the nerves in one charred hand had been left so exposed.
Hapless stuntwoman Danko later had to shoot another famous scene in which the broomstick-riding Wicked Witch writes ‘Surrender Dorothy’ in smoke in the sky.
For the smoke, a special pipe was attached beneath the broom – but it exploded under Danko, who sustained severe burns on her inner thighs and damaged her reproductive organs so badly that she had to have a hysterectomy.
They weren’t the only ones injured.
Two of the actors playing the evil winged monkeys ended up in hospital after flying accidents of their own in which the wires holding them broke, sending them crashing to the studio floor.
Today’s health and safety industry would have a collective heart attack at the primitive working conditions and technology on the set.
Just nine days into filming, Buddy Ebsen, who played the Tin Man, became extremely ill and had to be hospitalized.
To achieve his shiny skin effect, crew were painting his face white before powdering over it with real aluminum dust. Each time the make-up was applied or touched up, Ebsen was inhaling toxic fine grains of the metal which coated the inside of his lungs and stopped oxygen reaching his blood.
The actor was so ill he had to be replaced by comedian Jack Haley and only appears a handful of times in the finished movie.
The film makers responded by mixing the aluminum dust with white paint, creating a paste that Haley wouldn’t inhale. But in the end he was taken to hospital himself after the paste got in his eye.
Asbestos, now known at the time to be carcinogenic, was used to create the snow that falls on Dorothy and her friends after they fall asleep in a poppy field.
While there was no proven link with the filming, both Bert Lahr (the lion) and Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), later died of cancer.
The wardrobe department only added to the misery on set.
Each time the Tin Man’s make-up was applied or touched up, Ebsen was inhaling toxic fine grains of the metal which coated the inside of his lungs and stopped oxygen reaching his blood.
Asbestos, now known at the time to be carcinogenic, was used to create the snow that falls on Dorothy and her friends after they fall asleep in a poppy field.
While there was no proven link with the filming, both Bert Lahr (the lion) and Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), later died of cancer.
Many cast members, especially the Wicked Witch’s guards and her flying monkeys, had to wear heavy makeup and hugely cumbersome outfits.
Given the powerful lights that the early Technicolor process required, temperatures on the Hollywood set soared to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing some actors to faint. They were carried out.
The Cowardly Lion’s outfit was made of real lion skin and caused Lahr to sweat so heavily inside it that the costume had to be put into an industrial dryer each night.
For his part, Bolger claimed the rubber scarecrow mask he had to wear left him with facial scarring.
But few cast members escaped unscathed. Even Dorothy’s dog, Toto, played by a Cairn terrier named Terry, suffered a sprained foot after one of the witch’s guards stepped on it. He was temporarily replaced by a doggy double.
It would have been little consolation for Terry, but he was reportedly paid more for his role in the film than the Munchkins.
Skies might well be blue somewhere over the rainbow, as Dorothy so beautifully sings, and there’s certainly no sign of our love affair with The Wizard of Oz ending any time soon. But to borrow the catchline of today’s movie spin-off, Wicked: ‘You’re not being told the whole story!’
