Tag Archives: The Conversation (film)

HW2

Haskell Wexler and the Making of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

            After Francis Ford Coppola fired him from The Conversation and replaced him with Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler was devastated. He would not have agreed to shoot his next feature, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had he known he would once again be fired and replaced with Bill Butler.

            From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Wexler was active in the anti-war and hippie movements, and he knew Cuckoo’s Nest co-producer Saul Zaentz from attending demonstrations in Berkeley and San Francisco. At the time, Zaentz was co-owner of Fantasy Records, based in Berkeley. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest would be his first film with another novice producer, the actor Michael Douglas. Douglas had acquired the rights to Ken Kesey’s highly acclaimed novel, published in 1962, from his father, Kirk, and had asked Zaentz to collaborate with him in making it into a film.

            The screenplay, by Larry Hauben and Bo Goldman, concerns R.P. McMurphy, a patient who’s been sent for evaluation to Oregon State Mental Hospital, where he shakes things up. McMurphy (like Wexler) questions rules and conventions, and challenges authority.  His nemesis, Nurse Ratched is a rigid, sadistic disciplinarian who, under the guise of helping her charges, irreparably harms them.

HW featured

Jack Nicholson, whom Wexler had known since they’d worked together on Studs Lonigan in 1960, would play McMurphy. Louise Fletcher would play Nurse Ratched and Milos Forman would direct. Forman had directed The Firemen’s Ball and Loves of a Blonde, both Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, in his native Czechoslovakia. The small film Taking Off (1971) had been his first American movie.

When the producers suggested Wexler as cinematographer, Forman was concerned that, since Wexler had directed a film, he might try to encroach on Forman’s job. Nevertheless, he admired Wexler’s work, so he had dinner with him to see how they’d get along. Forman wrote in his memoir: “He struck me as the gentle, quiet type. He was very enthusiastic about Kesey’s book and the screenplay, which Larry Hauben and Bo Goldman had written. I wanted a sort of a raw, realistic look for the film, but not so tawdry that it would pull attention away from the story. Wexler said he knew exactly how to give me this look, so I offered him the job.”

Wexler can be extremely congenial, and he believes it’s his job to stay on schedule and on budget, make the leading lady look good (when the script calls for it), enhance the story’s interest with lighting, framing and emphasis, and help the director. And while often cooperative, he is also extremely independent. Unlike most other directors of photography, Wexler owned his own equipment and rented it to the production company. He said that studios discourage this because they relinquish some control. “It has to do with studios wanting to hire below-the-line workers, and they don’t want you to be loan-out companies or little entrepreneurs on your own,” he said. That view is shortsighted, he thinks, because cameramen who buy their equipment maintain it well and are accustomed to it, enabling them to do their job better than if they use rentals they need to get used to.

After Wexler was hired, Paul Sylbert, who won an Oscar a few years later for Heaven Can Wait, signed on as production designer. By January, 1975, the production company had been in Salem for a few months assembling a cast and preparing. They were shooting the film in an unused ward at Oregon State Mental Hospital in Salem, where the book is set. The hospital’s director, Dr. Dean R. Brooks, would play the head of the institution, and other patients and staff had small roles.

One day, about a week into rehearsals, Sylbert was in the production office trying to get some money for his crew, who had not been paid because the production had temporarily run out of money. Dr. Brooks came in with two women — the head psychiatrist and the head nurse– and told Sylbert he wanted to go to the ward where the actors were rehearsing, and where they would film. Sylbert said he’d accompany him. When they arrived, they walked to the front of the ward where the actors were rehearsing the pill distribution scene early in the film, where a nurse and orderlies give the patients medication. Sylbert recalled that he and Dr. Brooks were shocked to see that “It was bedlam. Milos was having them drag these patients to the pills, it was just like they were doing a 19th century madhouse.” Some of the patients were forced out of their wheelchairs and hauled across the floor.

Sylbert had had an intimation that Forman might want to portray an antiquated and inhumane mental hospital because the only research he’d given the production designer to guide him in devising the sets was a Life magazine article from the 1940s on institutions of the period. The story had pictures of patients in long smocks, walking like zombies and being treated horribly. Also, Forman had screened Frederick Wiseman’s 1966 documentary Titicut Follies for the cast and crew. That film, set in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, chronicles brutal guards bullying, taunting and humiliating inmates, who are confined, naked, in barren cells.

HW4

Sylbert continued, “Brooks was standing next to me, and he was a big guy, bigger than I am, anyway, and I could feel the heat rising in him. And all of a sudden, he let out a bellow and he said, ‘This has got to stop!’ And he charged toward Milos with the two women on his trail, saying, ‘This has got to stop! You have been here for weeks, months, don’t you have any idea how an institution is run?’ He chewed Milos’s ass up one side and down the other. And this is in front of everybody,” in the cast and crew.

Dr. Brooks was understandably concerned that an inhumane and inaccurate depiction of his hospital could damage its reputation and mislead audiences about treatment of mental patients in general. Additionally, portraying the hospital as chaotic at the beginning of the movie would undercut the drama and destroy the premise. Sylbert explained, “What you wanted was a calm, tranquilized, literally – that’s what a pill scene is, a tranquilized environment – in which somebody throws a rock. And that’s Randall McMurphy; he comes splashing into the institution. But if it’s not quiet and calm and tranquil to begin with, you don’t have a place to go.”

`           Two days later, Sylbert had dinner at the steakhouse at his hotel in downtown Salem with William Redfield, who plays the patient Harding in Cuckoo’s Nest. At the time, the two men had been close friends for more than 20 years. Redfield told Sylbert, “Jack has taken over directing the actors.” Redfield said that every night a group of key actors who played poker in the film met in Nicholson’s room and rehearsed the following day’s scenes. According to Redfield, Nicholson’s confidence in Forman had been utterly destroyed when Dr. Brooks bawled him out, and Nicholson was directing the movie and refusing to speak to Forman. Years later, Sylbert confirmed Redfield’s account when he worked on Biloxi Blues with Wexler’s eventual replacement on Cuckoo’s Nest, cinematographer Bill Butler. Sylbert told Butler he’d heard that the actors met in Nicholson’s room each night to rehearse and that Nicholson refused to speak to the director. When Sylbert asked if that was true, Butler told him, “Yes. He never talked to Milos at all, he only talked to me.”

Unwilling to speak to the director, Nicholson turned to Wexler for guidance. After a take, he would sometimes look at Wexler to see how he responded to the performance. As well as making suggestions that Nicholson followed, Wexler also changed some dialogue. For example, after Big Chief says his first words, and takes another piece of gum from McMurphy, in the script he says, “Oh, gum.” Wexler suggested, “What if he says, ‘Juicy Fruit?’” Forman shot Wexler a dubious look but Nicholson piped up, “Yeah! Say ‘Juicy Fruit!’”  So he did.

When the inmates were waiting in line in front of the glass booth for their medication, Wexler told Nicholson that he remembered at summer camp kids had spread the rumor that counselors were giving them saltpeter. So Nicholson added the line, “I don’t want to be slipped saltpeter.”

In another scene in the glass booth, Wexler wanted Nurse Ratched to look more sympathetic than in other shots. In some scenes he filmed her to make her look as if she were wearing a shiny white mask, since her habitually placid expression conceals the rage, frustration and hatred roiling beneath the surface. Louise Fletcher was in the booth and Wexler and his gaffer, Gary Holt, were 20 or 30 feet away setting up the shot. Wexler recalled, “I said, ‘Gary, what the fuck are we going to do about her face? It’s so flat. I’ve got to give her some kind of look.’ So, I don’t know what we worked out, but anyway, the next day she said to me, ‘Oh, Haskell, you don’t like my fucking flat face?’ So I thought, ‘Well, Gary Holt spilled the beans.’ That’s not the kind of thing you say to an actress. So I said, ‘Where did you hear that?’ and she said, ‘I read your lips.’” Fletcher’s parents were deaf so she read lips, and when she won the Oscar for Best Actress for Cuckoo’s Nest, she translated her acceptance speech into sign language.

HW1

The hallway lighting caused another problem for Wexler. Guided by an image of Nurse Ratched as a fiendish mother hen smothering the eggs in her nest with her so-called love, Paul Sylbert had the hospital ward’s walls painted the shades of brown eggs; a brown dado with off-white above. Wexler installed fluorescent lights in the hall, but in those days no fluorescent lights were made specifically to be filmed. In an early scene Nurse Ratched walked down the hall, Wexler observed, “And really looked green. I mean a really bad green.” Apparently the paint had an undercoat of green that the fluorescents picked up. So, at night, Wexler had the standby painter repaint the hall to eliminate the green.  Michael Douglas, Wexler recalled, was furious that he hadn’t discussed this beforehand with Sylbert, since this was the production designer’s purview.

Wexler was also challenged shooting the group therapy scenes. Forman wanted to have one camera constantly roving from actor to actor, so they would always give their best performances. Wexler operated the A camera, and had two other cameras moving among the actors, documentary style. However, as Forman noted, shooting this way prevented Wexler from lighting each actor as carefully as he could if the camera were more stationary. Forman later said, “It was not easy on the cameraman, the director of photography, because he had to light a space – practically 180 degrees of the space had to be lit – so it would be usable in the film for the wandering camera. And because when you are shooting in a real location you don’t have the height of a studio where you can hide and hang however many lights and lamps you wish, we had a low ceiling. So the whole job of lighting the scenes was very elaborate and very cleverly done by the cameraman I worked with, Haskell Wexler.”

Shooting on location also irked Wexler. Forman, on his DVD commentary over a group therapy scene, said, “These kinds of situations, when you are shooting on location, are driving the directors of photography crazy. You can see the windows, you can see that it is pretty bright on the outside. But you shoot this whole scene, this whole scene, it took a day or two to shoot  and if you watch really carefully you see how difficult it is to control the same kind of mood behind the windows because the weather changes during the day. For a while it’s sunny, it becomes cloudy, it’s raining, but in the film you have to feel it’s the same all the time or you have to do it in a way that nobody notices these changes, which I think was accomplished by the cinematographer.”

Since most of the movie takes place inside, Wexler thought they should film in a warehouse or soundstage. He recalled, “Of course being the kind of person I am, I let everybody know it would be much better to just get a nice, big, huge set and we wouldn’t have to have all the problems we were going to have.” To simulate sunlight, they put arc lights outside the windows. But the carbon rods inside the arc lights burn down and must be replaced from time to time, and sometimes they had to put gel filters over the lights to simulate a different time of day.

Additionally, Wexler thought an American director would have been better suited to tell the story, and that a Czech might not fully understand the World Series or a Native American character such as Big Chief. Wexler felt that Forman needed help, but to others the cinematographer’s efforts amounted to meddling.

Indirectly and inadvertently, Wexler also spooked the producers. The FBI came snooping around the production offices, housed in a motel, asking questions about Wexler. He’d been under FBI surveillance intermittently since eighth grade, when he’d belonged to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group that supported Spanish Republicans fighting Franco and the Spanish Nationalists in their civil war. Now, agents were looking into his association with the Weathermen, a radical left group that bombed government buildings and banks. In January of 1975 they bombed the U.S. State Department, to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War. Wexler was friends of two of the group’s leaders, Bernardine Dohrn and Billy Ayers; he agreed with many of their ideas but deplored their methods. He explained, “This is an obvious case where all the good things they were for – being against racism, thinking about poor people – all the things which I very much agree with, go down the sewer by their choosing a path of violence.”

The same year as Cuckoo’s Nest, Wexler shot a film of the Weathermen, Underground, when the FBI was searching for them because of the State Department bombing and they were fugitives. Wexler remembered that contacting them was a cloak-and-dagger affair. First, the director Emile de Antonio called and asked Wexler if he would like to be considered to shoot “some secret stuff.” De Antonio told him that his name had been presented to the fugitives as someone who might be trustworthy. Knowing that de Antonio had directed Point of Order, a documentary about the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Wexler agreed. Then, Wexler said, he was given elaborate instructions to shake a potential tail. He was told to drive down Highland Avenue to Wilshire Boulevard, and go into a Bob’s Big Boy there. He was to wait at the restaurant before going to a nearby phone booth and dialing a number. Then, he walked to Los Angeles High School Memorial Park, where a man wearing a fake beard was sitting on a bench. The fellow said, “Hello, Haskell,” and questioned him about where he’d been, what he’d seen.

They continued to vet him, intermittently, until one night they blindfolded him with a bandana and put him on the floor of a car. He was taken to a house that he concluded was near the beach because he could smell the ocean. Some of the Weathermen wore ski masks over their faces. Wexler shot the backs of their heads through cheesecloth as they talked. While he was filming them, Wexler remembered, “I said, ‘What a waste of dedicated, bright young people to have their lives chopped off because of their stupid decision to be violent.’ I said as much, diplomatically, but it was cut out of the film.”

So, although the FBI didn’t suspect Wexler of bombing any buildings, agents were keeping an eye on him, and their presence exacerbated the friction he was causing on the set. Forman later maintained that Wexler’s complaints jeopardized the picture: a few actors “told me that Wexler had been expressing his doubts as to whether I was competent enough to make this particular movie. Before long, the producers heard the same mutterings. They weren’t about to let the situation simmer; they had the most to lose if morale started to suffer.”

Wexler is sufficiently honest and self-aware to admit he was interfering: “I was my usual smartass, let’s put it that way. In areas and places where people shouldn’t be told, ‘Dummy, you’re doing it the wrong way.’”  Sylbert observed of Wexler, “It’s his feeling that he’s better than anybody he’s working with, in any area.”

Wexler’s hubris doomed him. Forman had his big opportunity to film an acclaimed book with a star actor. But he was threatened when Nicholson stopped talking to him and started communicating to him through Wexler, an aggressive, opinionated cameraman who was also a respected director. Sylbert thought that with Wexler’s “attitude toward directors, thinking he was better than they are – when you’ve got a director, when you’ve got blood in the water and you’ve got a shark like Wexler – Milos must have felt he was going to be killed.”

Instead, Forman survived and Michael Douglas fired Wexler, when he had nearly finished shooting the movie. The producers hired Bill Butler to film the final scenes —the party and its aftermath. The production then went over schedule, Butler had to leave for another commitment, and William Fraker shot the fishing expedition.

Wexler said he was crushed over being fired from his second Hollywood film in a row: “I wanted to commit suicide. I was so depressed. I was so hit by this kind of firing. I mean, I’m not exaggerating, I was just wiped out.”

Douglas has always said he fired Wexler because of creative differences, not his cinematography. Wexler was on schedule and he said everybody patted each other on the back when they saw his dailies. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest for Best Cinematography. The nomination went to Bill Butler as well as Wexler, because Butler is credited with “additional photography” on the film. The award went to John Alcott for Barry Lyndon instead. But Cuckoo’s Nest was the first film since It Happened One Night in 1934 to sweep the top five Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Oz 4

The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of: “Return to Oz” (1985)

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

Oz 1

For decades, The Wizard of Oz, MGM’s 1939 adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s classic fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was one of two films that stuck in the craws of the suits running Walt Disney Pictures as a movie “we should’ve made.” (The original 1977 Star Wars was the other one. Of course, Disney now owns the Star Wars franchise.) Ironically, MGM was inspired to make The Wizard of Oz when Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), became the highest-grossing movie to date. The Wizard of Oz did respectable business at the box office, but because of its gargantuan budget (it was Hollywood’s most expensive film at the time), it needed to be a megahit to make a profit. (It wasn’t until The Wizard of Oz started being broadcast on television that the film finally went into the black.) Eventually, it seemed as though MGM had the ultimate laugh at Disney’s expense in that The Wizard of Oz became a much bigger cultural icon among subsequent generations (beginning with the baby boomers) than Snow White, and also that Disney’s attempt at doing their own Oz movie, Return to Oz, was a major financial flop in 1985, particularly due to critics and audiences’ unfavorable comparisons with the MGM film. Still, the day may yet come when Disney has the last laugh after all because Return to Oz has built up a loyal following in the almost three decades since its release and has been increasingly acknowledged as the screen’s most faithful adaptation of Baum’s work.

Make no mistake; MGM’s The Wizard of Oz was a remarkable achievement, albeit one that’s gotten too much credit for what it isn’t and not enough credit for what it is. In the latter category, although the honor was usually misattributed for half a century (mainly by theater snobs) to Rogers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, The Wizard of Oz was the first “integrated musical.” Practically all of the songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg serve to move the story forward, even the Cowardly Lion’s solo comic number “If I Was King of the Forest.” (The only exception is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which is one reason it almost got cut before the film’s release.)

While The Wizard of Oz is a great musical comedy, it is, however, neither a great fantasy film nor a faithful rendition of Baum’s literary vision. Despite the innovative use of Technicolor, Victor Fleming’s bland, pedestrian direction was too heavy-handed and literal to capture the sheer wonderment of such genuinely inspired cinematic flights of fancy as Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924), James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946). Return to Oz, on the other hand, is the great live-action fantasy film that Disney always wanted to make, but could never quite pull off.

Oz 2

In addition to negative comparisons to MGM’s film in reviews of Return to Oz, the other main complaint was that the movie was “too dark” to be suitable entertainment for children. These complaints only proved that most of the critics had never actually read any of Baum’s original Oz novels. (And apparently they’d forgotten that The Wizard of Oz was considered pretty frightening for a children’s movie as well. Flying monkeys, anyone?) Indeed, the most nightmarish elements of Return to Oz (the Wheelers, the hall of living disembodied heads, the deadly desert, the Nome King’s underground world) were taken directly from the film’s main source, Baum’s third Oz book Ozma of Oz. (There were also some elements borrowed from the second Oz novel The Marvelous Land of Oz.)

Return to Oz remains the only movie directed by award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. In a 2000 interview with Film Freak Central’s Bill Chambers, Murch recounted how he’d inadvertently initiated the project: “I had been approached by Disney in 1980—they had pulled my name from a shortlist of people who were doing interesting things in film and might someday direct. I went down to LA for an interview with Tom Wilhite—it was just a fishing expedition on both of our parts. But one of the questions he asked was, ‘What are you interested in that you think we might also be interested in?’ and I said, ‘Another Oz story.’ I had grown up with the specific books on which Return is based, The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz—in fact they were the first ‘real’ books I ever read on my own. And Tom sort of straightened up in his chair, because it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that Disney owned the rights to all of the Oz stories. And they were particularly interested in doing something with them because the copyright was going to run out in the next five years. So, we went through the usual developmental phases: I wrote a treatment with Gill Dennis, they liked it, I wrote a script with Gill and they liked that, and eventually, much to my amazement, I was in England on a soundstage saying ‘Action!’ with all of these Oz creatures around me.” (At one point, when the filming was falling behind schedule and over-budget, Disney fired Murch off the project, but his friend George Lucas went to bat for him, praising the footage shot so far and convincing the suits to rehire Murch.)

The unenviable task of playing Dorothy Gale, a role forever inexorably linked with Judy Garland in the minds of most filmgoers, was given to a young 11-year-old actress making her film debut, Fairuza Balk. (At least, Falk was closer to the age of her literary counterpart than the then-16-year-old Garland, who famously had to have her breasts bound for the part.) In that same interview, Murch detailed the difficulties Balk faced: “There were 114 days of shooting, which is a lot, and the character of Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk, is in almost every shot. She was absolutely great, a fantastic ally in the making of the film, but there are laws in England and the United States that limit the amount of time you can shoot with a child actor, so it put great strains on how much we could do each day. Add on top of that all of the creatures she was with—puppets and claymation and animals… All of the claymation was done in post-production, so when Fairuza had to act with the nomes, she was just looking at a piece of tape on a wall, having to imagine it as something else.” (In addition, Balk did all of her own stunts.)

Joining Balk in the cast were veteran character actors Piper Laurie (as Aunt Em), Matt Clark (as Uncle Henry), Jean Marsh (as Nurse Wilson and Mombi the Witch), and Nicol Williamson (as Dr. Worley and the Nome King). (Since the film was made in the UK, mainly at Elstree Studios, the other roles were played by lesser-known British actors, or in several cases, physically played by expert stunt performers and dubbed by voice actors.) As the dual roles indicate, Return to Oz did borrow some motifs from the MGM film. Disney even paid MGM for the right to use the “ruby slippers” as Dorothy’s magical shoes, as opposed to the “silver slippers” that appeared in Baum’s original novel.

The technical team recruited by Murch was particularly impressive. The film’s executive producer was Gary Kurtz, best known as the producer of the first two Star Wars movies. (By most accounts, Kurtz’s hands-on supervision of the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, was responsible of it being the gem of the series.) Production design was by Norman Reynolds, art direction was by Charles Bishop and Fred Hole, the costumes were designed by Raymond Hughes, and, per Murch’s instructions, they closely modeled their work on the original illustrations by John R. Neill, the definitive Oz artist. (Neill’s contributions to the Oz books continued even after Baum’s death and Ruth Plumly Thompson took over as the official chronicler of the Oz adventures.) The cinematography was by David Watkin with uncredited assistance from Freddie Francis. (Unlike MGM’s film, which was filmed entirely on studio soundstages, all of the exteriors for Return to Oz where filmed on outdoor UK locations, with Wiltshire’s Salisbury Plain standing in for Kansas.)

Oz 3

Return to Oz was made before the advent of CGI, utilizing practical effects instead, including animatronics and stop-action animation or “Claymation,” to be exact, with Will Vinton’s Studios providing the latter. As an example of the difficulties in depicting inhuman characters in those pre-CGI days, in order to enact the role of Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man, actor/contortionist Michael Sundin was forced to bend over to lock himself inside Tik-Tok’s circular torso and had to walk backwards while watching where he was going via a mini TV set. (Sean Barrett provided Tik-Tok’s voice.)

Music is crucial to fantastic films and Return to Oz’s symphonic score couldn’t have been in better hands than David Shire. Shire’s most notable previous works were his 40s jazz score for Dick Richards’ Farewell My Lovely (1975) and minimalist solo piano score for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). (Murch also worked on The Conversation, earning an Oscar nomination for sound montage editing.) For Return to Oz, Shire outdid himself and the resulting score remains his masterpiece. As Shire explained to David Kraft in a 1986 interview for CinemaScore, “I wanted the score to have a truly American flavor and, even though symphonic, to employ various interesting smaller combinations within that texture.” Taking his cue from the film’s setting in 1899, Shire utilized styles from that period. His theme for Oz, for instance, was a ragtime march. And for Tik-Tok’s theme, Shire used a brass quintet, “which related to Tik-Tok’s metallic rotundity,” as he put it.

As Return to Oz opens, Dorothy has been suffering from insomnia in the six months since her adventure in Oz and sits indoors all day rather than playing outside with her dog Toto. (Keeping with the continuity of the original books, the kingdom of Oz actually does exist, unlike the MGM film, where it was just a dream Dorothy had.) Needless to say, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are convinced that Dorothy’s tales of Oz are a delusion brought on by the traumatic experience of the cyclone that did severe damage their Kansas farmhouse. (Even Dorothy finding a metal key with an Oz glyph the morning after a shooting star appears over the farm fails to convince them.) Adding to the Gale family’s woes are a mortgage due and the inability of their hen Billina to lay eggs since the cyclone.

Finally, Em decides that Dorothy needs some professional help, so she takes her to the clinic of Dr. Worley. Despite the Doctor’s deceptively smooth bedside manner, it soon becomes clear that the treatment he’s recommending for Dorothy is a primitive version of electroshock therapy. Worley becomes even more insufferably patronizing after hearing Dorothy’s matter-of-fact account of the Tin Woodman’s rather gruesome origin (taken verbatim from Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). “Well, I think I know just the thing to cheer Dorothy up,” he heartily proclaims while showing off his device. “This electrical marvel will make it possible for you to sleep again and will also get rid of those bad, waking dreams that you’ve been telling me about.”

Left by Em to spend the night in the clinic (with the promise of bringing Toto with her when she returns in the morning), Dorothy is taken in hand by Nurse Wilson, a stern, unsmiling woman dressed entirely in black. While in the waiting room, Dorothy meets a mysterious young girl (Emma Ridley) who’s the same age she is. The girl hints that there is more to Worley’s clinic than meets the eye, a cryptic warning that is supported by the sounds of screams coming from another room. The girl then disappears and Nurse Wilson returns with a gurney and a couple of sinister orderlies. Dorothy is strapped down to the gurney and taken to the room where the therapy is to be applied.

Fortunately, before Worley’s machine can administer its electrical charge to Dorothy, a sudden thunderstorm knocks out the power. Wilson leaves the room to attend to screaming patients while Worley goes to check the generator. The mysterious girl reappears, unstraps Dorothy from the gurney, and the two of them flee the clinic in the midst of the raging storm, pursued by a furious Wilson. The girls fall into a river and are separated as the rushing waters sweep them away in its currents. A battered chicken coop passing by in the water provides Dorothy with a makeshift raft as she floats away into the night.

The next morning, Dorothy awakens to find the coop in an overgrown puddle surrounded by desert sands with a green, grassy meadow just a few yards away and an unusually voluble Bellina (voiced by Denise Bryer) clucking away next to her.

Dorothy: (waking up) “What’s that?”

Bellina: “Oh, I was just trying to lay my egg, that’s all.”

Dorothy: “Bellina?”

Bellina: “Who else?”

Dorothy: “What are you doing here? Have you been here all night, too?”

Bellina: (sneezes) “I’ve never been so wet in my whole life… How big is this whole pond anyway?”

Dorothy: “I don’t think it’s a pond, Bellina.” (standing up and looking around.) “Maybe it is a pond.”

Bellina: “Told you so.”

Dorothy: “Where did all of the rest of the water go?”

Bellina: “Where did Kansas go?” (looking around) “Some place for a chicken.”

Dorothy: “When did you learn to talk, anyway? I thought hens could only cluck and cackle.”

Bellina: “Strange, ain’t it? How’s my grammar?”

Dorothy: “If we were in the land of Oz, your talking wouldn’t seem strange after all.”

Bellina: (watching the last of the water dry up) “There goes the rest of the water. High and dry.”

Dorothy: (awestruck) “Oz!”

Bellina: “Hmmm?”

Dorothy: “Maybe this is Oz!”

Bellina’s about to jump down from the coop and hunt for some breakfast when Dorothy realizes that, if they are indeed in Oz, then the sands surrounding them are the “deadly desert” and that anything that set foot on it turns to sand itself. Luckily, there are enough rocks nearby to allow Dorothy to use them as stepping stones to the safety of the verdant area beyond. As Dorothy carries Bellina from rock to rock, we hear the first few solo piano notes of Shire’s Oz theme in addition to be introduced to the first example of Vinton’s Claymation in the form of a couple of those stepping stone sprouting eyes to spy on the newcomers.

For those who haven’t seen Return to Oz, I won’t spoil the subsequent adventures that Dorothy and Bellina embark upon during their stay in Oz. Suffice it to say that they encounter an impressive array of thoroughly loathsome enemies and steadfastly loyal companions who become their allies against the villains. The bad guys include a witch named Mombi, who, among her magical powers, is the ability to wear different heads like someone wears a different hat every day and keeps a supply of disembodied heads in glass cases in a hall in her palace; the Wheelers, a malevolent group of creatures who travel around on the wheels they have rather than hands and feet; and the Nome King, who has kidnapped several citizens of Oz (including the Scarecrow) and transformed them into trinkets for his underground lair while turning the remaining Oz denizens (including the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion) into stone statues. The more trinkets the Nome King acquires, the more he transforms from living rock to an increasingly humanoid form.

The good guys include the aforementioned Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man, a mechanical being made of burnished brass who serves as a one-man Royal Army of Oz; Jack Pumpkinhead (played physically by rail-thin “body popper” dancer Stewart Larange and voiced by Brian Henson), a boy with a Jack O’Lantern head and body consisting of wooden twigs made living by Mombi’s Powder of Life;  and the Gump (voiced by Lyle Conway and manipulated by puppeteer Steve Norrington), another creature animated by the Powder of Life consisting of two sofas tied together for a body, large palm tree fronds for wings, and a mounted moose’s head for its head. (Dorothy and Jack create the Gump as a way of escaping from Mombi’s palace after she makes them prisoners there.) Other familiar Oz regulars can be briefly glimpsed in the climatic celebratory sequence, including the Patchwork Girl, the Shaggy Man, and Prof. H.M. Wogglebug. We also learn the true identity of the young girl who befriended Dorothy at the clinic in this scene.

As mentioned before, the reputation of Return to Oz has grown over the years. Iconic fantasy writer Harlan Ellison singled the film out for especially effusive praise (and defense) in his book Harlan Ellison’s Watching: “Return to Oz is smashing! For those of us who are familiar with the Oz canon of L. Frank Baum and those who lovingly continued the history of that special wonderland—even though we adore the MGM classic, watch it again and again, and know a masterpiece when we (and posterity) see one—the Judy Garland musical was hardly the definitive interpretation… No, my readers, turn a deaf ear to the boos and catcalls of the trendy critics who refuse to judge this absolutely marvelous film on its own merits. Take your kids, let them scream, let your eyes drink in marvels. Return to Oz is everything we hoped for.”

Return to Oz was first released on DVD by Anchor Bay in 1999. That release is no longer available, but Disney Home Entertainment issued its own DVD of the movie in 2004. A reviewer on a site called DVD Dizzy offered this appraisal of the Disney version: “Disney’s DVD release is a step-up from Anchor Bay’s now out-of-print disc, and presents the film with high quality video and audio, and even a nice little helping of extras.”