This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette.
There is no question that the movie I have referred to in my lectures most often is The Wizard of Oz. It finds its way into my lectures on drugs, toxicity, dyes, materials science, misinformation, cosmetics and photography.
Let’s begin with the making of the film. The Wizard of Oz was a colour movie made before colour film existed. Special cameras were equipped with a prism that split the incoming light into red, green and blue. I doubt that the epic song Over the Rainbow was composed with this in mind, but it does make for an interesting connection.
The colours were beamed through special coloured filters onto three separate black and white film strips that ran through the camera simultaneously. The strips were then treated with dyes that were absorbed where an image had been created and the dyed images were transferred onto a single film strip in a complicated process. The large and noisy cameras required powerful studio lamps that radiated intense heat, making for a very uncomfortable situation for the actors wearing heavy costumes.
While Judy Garland’s costume, unlike those of the Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow and the Tin Man, was not heavy, she was made to wear a special corset to hide her developing figure since the producers wanted her to have a young, innocent image. As Garland later claimed, she was given amphetamines to keep up her energy and keep her slim during filming, and sedatives to help her relax between takes. This foreshadowed her later struggles with substance dependency that culminated in a fatal accidental overdose of barbiturates at age 47.
The original Tin Man had a bigger problem than dealing with the heat. Buddy Ebsen, an established dancer and musical-comedy performer, was hired for the role but ended up in hospital after inhaling the aluminum powder used to give his face a metallic appearance. To avert such problems, a paste in which aluminum powder was securely embedded was used to cover the face of Jack Haley, his replacement. There was a conceptual issue with The Tin Man as well. If he had really been made of tin, he would not have rusted and would not have required Dorothy to oil him to become animated. Unlike iron, tin does not rust.
The Wicked Witch, played by Margaret Hamilton, also had a makeup issue. The copper oxide used to give her face the stunning green colour is potentially toxic and to keep her from ingesting any of it, the actress had to have her lunch through a straw. The green horses of Emerald City had no such problem. They were coated with coloured gelatin powder that was so tasty the horses kept licking it off between takes. Copper oxide, though, wasn’t Margaret’s biggest problem. The scene in which she vanishes in Munchkinland used a hidden elevator and pyrotechnics to produce flames and smoke. During one take, the fire effect went off before she had descended below the stage and she was badly burned, but that is not the take that ended up in the final film.
Hamilton was off for six weeks following the accident but the scene in which The Wicked Witch of the West conjures up a poppy field to prevent Dorothy and her friends from entering the Emerald City had already been filmed. Incidentally, the Wicked Witch is not named in the original movie. Only 56 years later did Wicked author Gregory Maguire name her Elphaba to pay homage to the original book’s author L.F. Baum.
As Dorothy and the Lion meander through the poppy field, they mysteriously fall asleep, succumbing to the vapours released by the poppies. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow, not possessed of human biology, are unaffected. Poppies really can be associated with sleep, as evidenced by their Latin botanical name, Papaver somniferum, meaning “sleep-bringing poppy.” However, smelling poppies is not enough to bring on sleep, as the active components are not volatile. Ingestion or injection of opiates, the active ingredients, is required.
Putting reality aside, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, wakes Dorothy and the Lion from the poppy-induced sleep by causing snow to fall on them. Many accounts claim that in the film the “snow” was made from asbestos flakes but there seems to be no primary evidence for this. On the other hand, makeup artist Charles Schram, who worked on the film, maintained that the snow was actually crushed gypsum and even recalled having to pick particles out of Garland’s wig and Bert Lahr’s lion mane.
Still, it is well-documented that asbestos snowflakes were being manufactured in the 1920s and were widely sold for department store window displays and decorating home Christmas trees, so they were a natural for filmmakers.
While its use in Oz is questionable, there is good evidence that asbestos snow was used in 1941’s Citizen Kane. But when director Frank Capra was making It’s A Wonderful Life in 1946, he did not like the look of asbestos snow and had his special-effects technician develop an alternative. He came up with flakes that formed when a mixture of aluminum sulphate-based firefighting foam, soap, licorice extract, sugar and water was sprayed from pressurized equipment. These flakes were safe and could even be compressed to leave footprints. Technician Russell Shearman received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his safe snowflakes.
There are a number of other methods now used to create fake snow. Specially manufactured paper flakes blown by fans have been used and superabsorbent polymers made of sodium polyacrylate make for a very effective mimic. The polymer, also used in disposable diapers, absorbs hundreds of times its weight in water and expands into fluffy white powder that looks just like snow. Steven Spielberg used this technology in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers in 2001. These days, directors can forget about experimenting with chemistry to create fake snow. The flakes can be added to films digitally. No risk to the actors. Except that the actors can also be replaced digitally.
Any discussion of the Wizard of Oz is incomplete without a mention of the ruby slippers. In the original book, they were silver, but red looked better against the background of the Yellow Brick Road. Several pairs of the red-dyed silk slippers, with each shoe adorned with 2,400 sequins, were made. One pair can be seen in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington in a special, climate-controlled display case to prevent deterioration. Another pair, originally stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., and subsequently recovered by the FBI, was eventually sold at auction for $32.5 million, making the ruby slippers the most valuable piece of movie memorabilia ever sold.
