Book & Film Versions of The Wizard of Oz
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L. Frank Baum created a magical place in his book The Wizard of Oz and in the many subsequent books he wrote about this fantastic land to which the Kansas farm girl, Dorothy, was transported by a tornado, and the film version of the book, made in 1939, offered a visualization of the creations of Baum in a colorful and appealing form. The film is different from the book in a number of ways, not only in terms of changes in the plot, but in terms of the accent placed on various ideas and in the way elements are dramatized. For one thing, of course, the movie is part musical, something never considered by Baum. Baum would likely have been favorably disposed to the movie given that he himself had written, produced, and directed several Oz films during the silent era. Baum wrote 13 Oz books, and the books were carried on after his death by others so that another 19 books were added in the 19 years after Baum's death (Harmetz 292). Lyman Frank Baum was 43 years old when he wrote the first Oz book. In 1899 he wrote a book then titled The Emerald City, and he took it to the George M. Hill Publishing Co. in Chicago, Illinois. He had spent a year inventing the Emerald City before he started writing, first creating it as a bedtime story for his four sons. Baum had by this time been a failure in several professions, as an actor, playwright, and a salesman of axle-lubricant. In truth, he was a poor businessman, and while the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (as the title
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ready possess (Harmetz 294-295).
Roger Sale notes that the adult who rereads The Wizard of Oz after seeing the movie will have a strange experience:
Book and movie each begin wonderfully and in different ways; the movie has its spectacular cyclone and shift form brown-and-white to color, and Baum's matter-of-factness about Kansas, cyclones, and the Munchkins is winning. From then on, though, the advantages seem to belong to the movie. Baum's admirers may complain about having the whole thing be a dream, but the movie makes the dream create its own kind of sense. . . (Sale 237).
The beginning and the ending of the book link the story more directly with a real world, while the movie links the central story to an imagined Kansas. The book returns Dorothy to Kansas where she tells Aunt Em where she has been, while the movie returns her so that she discovers all the companions she has known on the trip through Oz exist in the real world as men who work on the farm. Her trip is not real but a dream, and so the film offers a certain reassurance in filmic terms, a return to normalcy after an experience affecting, harrowing, funny, and musical.
Other changes from the book appear in the movie as well, though the appeal of the movie s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1580
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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