Everything you need to know about Wicked and the legacy of The Wizard of Oz

WhatsApp IconJoin WhatsApp Channel
Telegram IconJoin Telegram Channel

More than a cult film, The Wizard of Oz has become a myth of American heritage. As Wicked, the film adaptation of the musical prequel, approaches, director Jon M. Chu explores with us the meaning and legacy of the Land of Oz.

Promised, Wicked is not a blockbuster like any other. This is the adaptation of one of the biggest hits of the American musical (premiered on stage in 2003), which contains two of the biggest hits in Broadway history – as spectacular as they areOver the Rainbow sung by Judy Garland in 1939.

Search YouTube Defying Gravity Or Popular and you will quickly understand what we are talking about: two hits composed by the great Stephen Schwartz, to whom we owe, among other things, a DreamWorks masterpiece (The Prince of Egypt), a very big Disney (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and two early Broadway hits 70s (Godspell And Pippinon Jesus and the son of Charlemagne, respectively).

This musical also allowed Idina Menzel to land her first real big role on stage, ten years before putting Let it go in every brain on the planet. A huge thing, therefore, but which has not necessarily crossed the Atlantic or the Channel. In France, as we know, Anglo-Saxon musicals are politely ignored and the adaptation of this monument of American popular culture will therefore have the taste of a discovery for the French public. But what are we really talking about?

The film adapts a musical, itself taken from a novel published in 1995, which was a prequel revisiting the origins of Wizard of Oz original by L. Frank Baum, a classic of American literature that became a classic of cinema in 1939. This film is therefore a origin story which tells of the birth of an evil character, the “Wicked Witch of the West”, the character of Dorothy faces in The Wizard of Oz.

In the original novel (and the 1939 film), she had no name. And that’s where novelist Gregory Maguire comes in. At the beginning of the 90s, Maguire decided to write his youth, and called it Elphaba (or “LFB” the initials of the author ofOZ) She is a simple green-skinned young woman who studies magic at Shiz University where the professors are talking animals.

Hate towards animals (and everything that is different) begins to contaminate the kind land of Oz. This hatred is orchestrated by the Magician, who lives deep in his citadel of Emerald City…

Universal Pictures

From dream to American nightmare

Met by Zoom, director Jon M. Chu is still having trouble landing. “This is the first “crystallization” of musical never made. It's actually incredible that the film wasn't started sooner. Even in cartoons. There was no recording on stage, except pirated versions, of course! »

Chu knows what he's talking about. The music, the musical : that knows him. If he established himself in Hollywood thanks to his hit, Crazy Rich Asians, before that, he had dabbled in musical comedy with two films in the franchise Sexy Dance, but above all In the Heightsadapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda's first show.

We also owe him two recordings of Justin Bieber concerts, Never say never And Believe, produced for next to nothing and which were huge successes in theaters. Yet, Wicked takes it to a completely different register. Loaded with special effects, cut into two parts for a total of five hours of footage and a budget of 300 million dollars, it can hardly be compared to the double Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame.

If, according to Chu, this film is the “crystallization of musical in its purest form, it is above all the crystallization of his own obsession with this show. Chu saw Wicked on stage fourteen times in all, and his first was before the show even premiered on Broadway, when the show was on pre-tour in San Francisco.

Stephen Schwartz (center) during the 15th anniversary of the musical Wicked, in London

ABACA

Stephen Schwartz (center) during the 15th anniversary of the musical Wicked, in London

For me, it was the most cinematic of musical never done. I was 100% sure they would make a movie out of it very quickly. It was 2003… Responsible twenty years later for filming what could therefore be theAvengers musicals, Chu says everyone on set was a fan of Wicked and of Wizard of Oz. Shooting this film was therefore a sacred mission.

We were all there to achieve something bigger than ourselves: to make cinema on the largest canvas ever imagined. By spending as much money as possible, laughs Chu, who mainly talks about a film designed for posterity. “One day, one of our great-great-grandchildren will say: 'My great-great-grandparent made this film..'”

Behind the joke of inheritance, there is above all a very personal story. Wicked resonated in a very intimate way. Because according to him, The Wizard of Oz remains the quintessential American tale, a perfect expression of the American dream.

It's the story of my immigrant family, who arrive in America, therefore in Oz, in Emerald City. The new perspective offered by Wicked precisely reverses this pattern and poses numerous questions that put this model into perspective. The film is there to question us about all these presuppositions: what is beauty? What is a heroine? And how should a story be told? Is the yellow road really the right path to take? Is the Magician a good person?, he enumerates with passion.

These themes resonate in my personal journey… I went to Hollywood, my Emerald City, I was discovered by Spielberg, my very own Magician… and then, very quickly, I experienced disillusionment. A break. “What story are we telling here, in fact? What is my responsibility in all these stories?

Chu explains that, after the pandemic, the figure of the narrator in fiction has been totally devalued, demystified.

The Magician is the ultimate narrator, and he is put to the test in Wicked… The question we ask is simple: how far are we prepared to go in the name of entertainment? Violence, action, hatred… all these excite people, but is this really the way we should entertain the public?

To add weight to this whole story of a theatrical narrator hidden behind fabric, we note that Jon M. Chu answers our questions seated in front of black curtains, closed, thick and mysterious.

John Chu on the set of Wicked

Universal Pictures

John Chu on the set of Wicked

The Magic of Oz

And this is where personal obsession and collective obsession come together. Because Chu is not part of a minority of Oz-obsessed people. On the contrary. We go well beyond a small sect. And it would even be all of America that could be on their side. This is the theory outlined by the beautiful documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe, Lynch/Oz (2022), which analyzes the entire work of David Lynch (full of curtains, parallel worlds and monsters) through the prism of the 1939 film, and takes the opportunity to autopsy American cinema's fascination with The Wizard of Oz.

“When we look at American storytelling on a large scale, in this strange, fractured, mixed country, it's almost impossible to find a story that would make us all agree, analyzes Amy Nicholson, film critic, in the first chapter of this documentary. Before citing two films “almost similar” on which all of America could precisely agree. Life is beautiful by Frank Capra and The Wizard of Oz, two failures in theaters upon release and two successes on post-war US TV, rebroadcast every Christmas, like a national ritual.

If The Wizard of Oz isn't THE quintessential American fairy tale, so I don't know what it is.” summarizes Nicholson. “It is the first film that we show to children, to welcome them to the world of films. We raise the curtain, and we show them the cinema.

An amusing theory claims that three out of four American films are more or less disguised remakes of the film (the fourth is an imitation ofA star is born, according to another theory). Chu approves, smiling, still in front of his curtains:

“Of course! My own film, Elusive 2, takes a lot of inspiration fromOz, with its magicians, its tricks, and a guy behind the curtain… The influence of this film is immense, especially among storytellers. This is why this story has never disappeared.”

Jonathan Bailey in Wicked

Universal Pictures

Curtain up

Make a list of films influenced directly or indirectly by The Wizard of Oz in American cinema would be tedious, but the game is fun and endless. The TV series OZ and its experimental prison called Emerald City? Obvious. Burton's cinema? Totally Oz-obsessed. James Cameron? He discovered the film as a child and never got over it (watch again Avatar).

We can also talk about recent Megalopolis by Coppola and Horizon of Costner which are dystopian/utopian variations ofOZ. Projects self-financed by their megalomaniac authors/puppeteer magicians who are themselves Ozs in themselves, trompe-l'oeil cinema countries, destined to fall.

barbie by Greta Gerwig? A Wizard of Oz inverted, where the toys enter our world. La La Land, produced by Marc Platt (also producer of Wicked on stage and on screen) is also a variation on the classic: when Emma Stone passes her final audition, the casting director asks her to tell a story: “You're a storyteller, right?” Implied: a bit like everyone else.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

MGM

It is therefore easy and tempting to see each American film as a reflection of Wizard of Oz, by aligning their commonalities rather than their differences. But to estimate that the majority of American storytellers were influenced, to one degree or another, by this film remains more than credible.

The idea (very libertarian) which makes the American nation a sum of individuals masters of their destinies, or of storytellers creators and initiators of their personal stories, is not new but, rather than the ultimate avatar of the“American dreams”is it that The Wizard of Oz would not be that of the “American experiment“, as Lin-Manuel Miranda sings in the musical Hamilton ?

Chu agrees. “I read somewhere that The Wizard of Oz was made from 'pieces of America'. The heart, the brain, the courage, the home… We have all lost these things. How to find them? Wicked was produced shortly after 9/11, when the USA was entering a new war; it was a period of anguish, of loss of innocence… and today we are diving into a similar era“, sighs the director, before concluding: “History repeats itself. The curtain can rise again.

Besides, what about those curtains behind him? “Oh, it was just to hide the light from outside, Chu tells us, before half-opening the fabric into a blinding ray of sunlight.

Wicked: Part Iin cinemas on December 4



Source

Leave a Comment