Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 4, 2013

When I was a college student in the late 1970s, spending 3 to 4 nights per week in a darkened movie theater, no film critic made more sense that Roger Ebert. Because I was a movie person, and not a TV person, Sneak Previews with Siskel & Ebert was just about the only show on TV that mattered.

Ebert had his finger on the pulse of what mattered to a lover of popular culture and the kind of genre fiction that grew out of the pulps and cheap paperback original novels — he gave thumbs up to science fiction movies, noir detective thrillers and Westerns. While Ebert was good on artsy films too, what I liked about Ebert is that he saw the value in over-the-top exploitation films and a lot of pure schlock.

Not that he gave good reviews to trash. For a thumbs up, it had to be good, creative schlock. But Siskel never "got" those films, and therefore he couldn't be trusted; while he was endearing — he bought John Travolta's white suit from Saturday Night Fever for his personal collection, for instance — he just didn't have his finger on the pulse of pop culture in the movies. Ebert loved Taxi Driver, while Siskel looked upon it with suspicion. Leonard Maltin trashed Taxi Driver too, in his film guide — he and Siskel just didn't "get" it.

Roger Ebert was reliable. Some have called him a populist critic. I'm not sure if that is his appeal or not. All I know is that I came to trust him to recommend more great movies to me. His book series "The Great Movies" is something of a bible. I was thrilled to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in there. So I took his advice and rented Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which I had never seen before buying his book. I'm still working through the books to find the indispensable films I missed the first time around.

Ebert's legend will grow. Pulitzer Prize winner. Film critic who actually once wrote a screenplay for a film. Cancer survivor who didn't let a truly devastating cancer surgery outcome get him down, despite the loss of his jaw and his speech. I don't know if they have screenings in Heaven or not, but I sure hope so for Roger's sake. After all, he's used to taking in 500 films per year, since 1967.  

In which Dr. D. watches the 1910s Oz Films (with Video)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 2, 2013​

Editor’s Note: Last week we took a look at the earliest films based on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. This week we continue with a roundup of the films of the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, Baum’s own company.

One reason the Oz Film Manufacturing Company’s films are of historical significance stems from Baum’s association with Louis F. Gottschalk, the composer (not to be confused with the famous Louis Moreau Gottschalk, to whom he was related). Baum and Gottschalk collaborated on a stage play The Tik-Tok Man of Oz in 1913, for which Gottschalk contributed the music.

The show played well in Los Angeles, but it was deemed too expensive to take to Broadway.  After that, and with a desire to get into the movies (feature length films had been around since 1906), Baum and Gottschalk collaborated on the Oz Film Company with Baum serving as President and Gottschalk as vice president. Gottschalk contributed film scores, and consequently the Oz films had the earliest original feature film scores. Music had always been in the movies—the Lumiere Brothers had a pianist at their first exhibitions of films in 1895 — but the standard was to use cue sheets rather than full, written-out scores.  

In contrast, the Oz Company sent out scores with their films for the house musicians to use in accompanying the movie.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)

Running about an hour, this 1914 film is a hybrid of material from the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and new material which Baum later used as the basis for his 1915 entry The Scarecrow of Oz. It is fun to see a scene from the first book that didn’t make it into the 1939 movie — the scene where the Scarecrow’s raft pole gets stuck in the mud in the river and he ends up clinging to a pole out in the middle of the water. In the book, Dorothy persuades a stork to fly out and lift the Scarecrow to safety. In the movie, however, a giant crow does the job.  They don’t hit it off at first, one being a crow and the other being a scarecrow, but after a short tussle, they end up doing a little dance together, which is actually a very funny bit.

Other than rehashing scenes from the beloved 1900 book to draw in the audience for the new material, Dorothy doesn’t have much to do in this movie. The central plot revolves around a bad king who is unhappy that his daughter has fallen in love with a low-born gardener’s boy. The king enlists the help of a witch to freeze his daughter’s heart so that she will be immune to love. The witch does the deed for money, and she furthers the job by turning the princess’s suitor into a kangaroo.

The witch is not unlike W.W. Denslow’s illustration.  To me, she looks like a bag lady with an eyepatch using her umbrella as a walking stick.  After having her heart frozen, the princess wanders around in a daze for most of the movie.  In this version, the Wizard of Oz actually performs real magic, although he isn’t found in any Emerald City. He seems to be an itinerant wizard, wandering the countryside in a wagon pulled by another of Baum’s endearing creations, the Saw-horse, who is some animated logs that function as a horse.  The Wizard amusingly cans the witch in a large can labeled “Preserved Sandwitches,” then blacks out parts of the label until it says “Preserved Witch,” then shrinks the can.  Dorothy and her companions storm the bad king’s castle and somehow emerge victorious, probably because the Scarecrow, while shot full of arrows, does not have a vulnerability to arrows. The bad king is ousted, the scarecrow is crowned king, the Wizard (in exchange for releasing the witch from her can) convinces the witch to release her spell on the princess and change the gardener’s boy back to a human, and the ending is fairy-tale happy.

While Baum was a true storyteller for children, and his new books were annual Christmas presents to a generation of them, this film strikes me as rather intense for young children. There is a scene where the witch sets upon the helpless Scarecrow and savagely plucks out all his straw, leaving him limp and lifeless. The way his head flops around when he is just an empty fabric is gut-wrenching to see after such a violent attack.  Dorothy and the others get him stuffed again in short order, and pretty soon he is reanimated to his usual jovial, loose-limbed self.  In another scene, the tin woodsman decapitates the witch with his axe. She is left sitting on his castle steps desperately proving the empty space above her neck with her hands. Again, the situation is resolved when she finds her head and sticks it back on. I suspect Baum’s intent was to make the film cut across age barriers and appeal to adults and children. What success he had achieved with his stage shows had been on the part of adult ticket buyers and attendees, so not a bad thought. The concept of a family picture hadn’t developed yet in 1914, so unfortunately Baum was a few decades too early to enjoy the success in film that would later come to Walt Disney.

One last tidbit of information that took a little digging to discover: the character of Button-Bright in this film (a little girl with amnesia for her past who Dorothy’s entourage discovers sitting in the road playing jacks) was played by one Mildred Harris, who married the 29 year-old Charlie Chaplin when she was 17. She left that relationship and embarked on an affair with the Prince of Wales. She is the one who introduced Edward, Prince of Wales, to Wallis Simpson, and the rest is history. I find it interesting that Ms. Harris assisted in overthrowing one king in the fantasy-land of Oz, and then later contributed to events that led to the abdication of the throne by a king of the real world.

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914)

This charming fairy tale is only peripherally an Oz story, as it takes place in the lands of Noland and Ix, which are part of the greater fairyland universe of countries neighboring Oz in L. Frank Baum’s novels. The basis for the story is Baum’s 1905 novel Queen Zixi of Ix, which was a personal favorite of the author among his works. Queen Zixi was not originally an Oz story, but sometime between 1905 and the 5th Oz book (The Road to Oz, 1909), Baum figured out that Noland and Ix are neighboring countries, along with the Forest of Burzee (which figures in Queen Zixi and Baum’s 1902 novel, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.)

There is much to like here, but the movie disappoints, because you wish it had been made later in time with more modern technology. Especially regrettable are the animal scenes with people dressed up in animal costumes. One of the main characters is a donkey, and he is kind of endearing. In fact, the donkey could well be a prototype of the Eddie Murphy character in the Shrek movies. But while the rest of the movie is a romantic fairy tale that works well for adults, the animals in The Magic Cloak seem like they are targeted at a preschool audience, as if they are refugees from a storytime puppet show. The story involves a magic cloak that is woven by the fairies and grants each bearer one wish, only not if it is stolen. Queen Zixi is over 600 years old and has been the victim of a spell which keeps her perpetually 16, but she is forced to carry a mirror that reveals her true age.  This bothers her, presumably because she is so vain that she would like to look at herself in the mirror to see how pretty she is, but she can’t, because all she ever sees is an ancient hag. She conspires to obtain the magic cloak so that she can wish away the spell of the mirror, but when she finally steals it, it doesn’t work because it has been stolen.  She discards the cloak, and a scavenging woman picks it up and commences to sell a piece of it to a sailor who wants it for a tie. When the kingdom is threatened, and the cloak is needed to make wishes upon to repel the invaders, it has to be found and reassembled. Finally, the fairies take it back because they have discovered that ordinary mortals don’t use the magic wisely. But such a summary does not do justice to the story — there is a lot more in the book, and even in the movie.

The movie is a simplified version of the book, which is (based on a reading of the plot summary) quite an epic fantasy for a fairy tale.  There are many scenes in the silent film that beg for a modern remake. The scene of the fairies weaving the cloak. A scene where the witches take off flying on their brooms. The scenes where the Rolly Rogues (think malevolent mountain-top beach-ball-shaped people) roll down the hills to conquer the city of Noland and then roll back up the hills when they finally get chased out of town.

There are many whimsical moments in this story, but many of them are buried by the primitive filmmaking technology and the fact that it was still 15 years before talking films. L. Frank Baum’s vision was clearly beyond his capabilities at the time. Like so much of his work in the theater and cinema, he was ahead of his time.

I long for a modern filmmaker, someone who is sensitive to the concept of fantasy in the movies, to revisit Queen Zixi of Ix.  Done right, retaining the comic elements of the story, treating it with the same respect as a Grimm or an Andersen fairy story, this could be a huge hit.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

This was the first of the Oz Film Manufacturing Company’s productions. It fared poorly on initial release, so the other films ran into distribution problems, which contributed to the demise of the company. To my taste, The Patchwork Girl of Oz is the least successful of the three 1914 Oz films. The original screenplay by L. Frank Baum was turned into his novel of the same name, however, and the material works much better as a book. The book is charming, and the first edition is a wonderful piece of art. The John R. Neill illustrations make Baum’s whimsical ideas jump off the page.  The film suffers from black and white. The book, by contrast, revels in color.

The film is marred by an overbearing grotesqueness. Every clever idea in the story becomes grotesque on screen. All the characters are either falling all over the place or wobbly kneed or just hideous. The central plot involves a magician who invents a “powder of life” which animates a life-sized ragdoll girl, while at the same time another of his magical concoctions turns three of the characters into lifeless statues. The magician and a Munchkin boy named Ojo set out to find the ingredients for a potion to turn the statue people back to life. Those ingredients include the water from a mysterious Dark Well, three hairs from a creature called the Woozy, and a six-leaved clover.  Various complications ensue, not the least of which is that it is illegal in Oz to pick a six-leafed clover, so all the characters are hauled before Ozma, the Queen, for judgement.

The Woozy is a weird geometrical animal whose modern equivalent is probably Nickelodeon’s Wubbzy (is it any coincidence the names are so similar?). The Woozy is a clever invention and looks in the movie just about how John R. Neill draws him in the book.  There are also some nice stop-motion animation sequences, such as the auto-assembly of The Patchwork Girl and the table that sets itself in The Magic House.

But aside from the Woozy and some clever effects, the other fantastical elements in the film fall flat. While Baum’s odd fantasy societies work in the book, they come off as scary and grotesque in the movie. The Hoppers in the book each have one leg, but in the movie they look like people with both legs tied together.  When the Magician and the Patchwork Girl encounter them, they set out to cut off one of the Magician’s legs because only one-legged hoppers are allowed in their land.  The Patchwork Girl persuades them to cut one of her legs off instead, so we watch aghast while they hold her down and amputate.  The story makes it lighter than it sounds by having the Magician forthwith reattach her leg while out of sight of the Hoppers.  But the whole amputation motif comes off as disturbing.

There is another society call the Tottenhots, who look like a group of African tribesmen living like a prairie dog town. The movie does not do anything with the Tottenhots, just hits us with this brief, creepy image.  Worse yet is a society called the Horners who look like a bunch of middle aged guys in robes with their hair tied up in huge spiked horns.  They hold their bellies, which look like they all have baby bumps, while they laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I had to look in the book to see that they are “The Joking Horners,” which set my mind at ease a bit, because they just seem demented in the movie. In the book, the joke is that the Horners’ jokes aren’t very funny. The Horners acknowledge that it spoils a joke to have to explain it, but then they proceed to explain their jokes. A talking picture might have helped to make the Horner funnier, because this movie just makes them look sinister and demented.   

The movie ends with the Scarecrow hooking up with the Patchwork Girl. It is intended as a touching scene, these two floppy misfits finding mutual love. If they weren’t so grotesque, like most everything else in this movie, maybe their love could have saved this mess. Alas, it doesn’t work out that way. Paramount dropped their distribution of the Oz films based on the poor performance of this one. With different distribution, they got a little play in 1917 with some modest success, but it was still almost 25 years before Hollywood would get behind Oz and give it the A-list treatment.

Enter the 'Storyverse': Q & A with Small Demons

By Alex Dalenberg

March 29, 2013

In my other life as a business and tech writer, I spend a lot of time talking to, networking with and thinking about startups. Lately I’ve been pondering how the humanities and social sciences can harness the entrepreneurial energy coming out of the startup scene.

It’s going to be a heavy lift. A lot of ink-and-paper creatives and old school academy types are code-phobic. And then there is the not so small matter of getting paid.

But I was excited to see this Los Angeles-based literature startup: Small Demons, a literary search engine that allows users to discover new books through common themes, characters, locations and other elements. Small Demons calls these interconnecting links the "Storyverse". 

Think of it as a kind of Pandora for readers in that its algorithms attempt to help you discover new reads to fit your tastes.

Small Demons is starting out small. Founder Valla Vakili told The New York Times in February that the site’s revenue is negligible. But the company has inked content deals with five of the big six publishers, including Penguin.

What you’re seeing here is a fairly classic startup strategy: build up as big a user base as possible and hope it scales. In this case, my guess is that would be through a mix of ads and commissions on referrals from the site. 

At any rate, we caught up with Small Demons founder Valla Vakili via email. Here’s what he had to say.

How does Small Demons differ from book recommendations generated by Amazon and other ecommerce platforms?

Amazon and other ecommerce platforms typically draw recommendations from behavior— what you and other users like you have bought, what you've rated, your past viewing history, things like that. On Small Demons, context drives discovery. Whether a user is a fan of a book or author, or comes to the site via another interest point, we use that starting point—your favorite book, author, city, band, or more — to show you all the books connected to it. The data we draw on at Small Demons comes from the book itself — mining the text for references to other cultural products, and making those easily accessible to users.

Where does all the data come from? Is It just a matter of searching the text?

We index the full text of books to search for references for interesting people, places and things (ex., music, movies, fashion, food). We use the context that the reference appears in to surface the person, place or thing on our site — you'll see for every reference mentioned in a book, we have a snippet of text associated with it to provide its context. We've done a lot of fine tuning to improve the accuracy of the indexing based on the categories that matter to us (for ex., media topics in things).

How much data about books actually is digital?

Tons of data about books is digital and tons more are becoming so. There are many efforts here — publishers converting their print books to ebooks; libraries digitizing their collections (worldwide), Google's scanning projects. So in a lot of ways the texts of books are becoming more and more digital. What lags is the metadata — good, consistent metadata that describes a book and its context. There are a lot of companies that focus on the first part of that—basic metadata that describes a book (author, title, year of publication, publisher). There are fewer who've made serious progress on the context side, and that's really our focus at Small Demons.

Other Trips to Oz: Before MGM, There was Selig Polyscope and Cow-Sized Toto (W/Video)

​Still from the 1910 Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Via the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 28, 2013

The MGM movie musical version of The Wizard Oz is so firmly rooted in our popular culture as an incomparable movie classic that is difficult to conceive of other versions of the story on screen. But, in addition to recent entries such as Oz the Great and Powerful this year and 1985’s Return to Oz, there were actual several Oz films made before the iconic 1939 film.

With its publication in 1900, Oz had been in the public conscience for almost 40 years before the MGM musical. Oz has always had a life outside the children’s book that started the craze and its sequels. L. Frank Baum traded on his experience as an actor and playwright to produce an Oz drama very early after the 1900 publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  However, he had trouble finding anybody to stage the work. The show was finally picked up by Chicago director Julian Mitchell with the caveat that he could change the show as he saw fit.

Mitchell turned Oz into a musical extravaganza with a radically different, more adult plot than the book. It ran from 1902 to 1909 and made a fortune. It was on Broadway starting in 1903. The show made Baum rich, far beyond what he could make from the books alone.

The first Oz movies were Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio Plays, an unusual multimedia production combining live actors, hand tinted magic lantern slides and film, which ran in 1908.  Unfortunately, the production, in which Baum heavily invested and starred in himself as the Wizard and narrator, went bankrupt and closed before it could finish its projected run.  It was very popular wherever it went, but the production costs were too expensive to allow for a profit to be made. The films were done in conjunction with the Selig Polyscope Company, the first film studio in southern California, which made movies from 1896 to 1918, starting in Chicago and then moving to the Los Angeles area. The Selig Polyscope Company also made the earliest surviving Oz film, their 1910 film, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The 1910 movie seems to draw on the stage musical tradition more than being based on the book, because the characters keep breaking into dance and there are several scenes with chorus lines of dancing girls that add nothing to the story. It is not a very coherent fantasy story, because Dorothy actually finds the scarecrow in Kansas before they ever get to Oz, and he inexplicably comes to life while still in Kansas. They get blown to Oz, along with a couple people dressed in cow suits, taking refuge from the cyclone in a haystack.

Toto starts out looking a lot like the 1939 Toto, but Glinda the Good Witch changes him into a more efficient protector of Dorothy by magically making him almost as big as the lion, so Toto spends most of the movie not as a terrier, but as a person in a silly dog suit.

The Wizard is portrayed as being held prisoner in Oz and forced to serve as King by a character named Momba the Witch, and all he wants to do is return to Omaha in his balloon, which he finally does later in the movie.  

Dorothy destroys the Witch with a pail of water, just like the story we all know, except that instead of melting, she just sort of vaporizes — I guess it was an easier special effect to pull off.  Dorothy refuses the crown of Oz and it is given to the Scarecrow.

A 1933 Technicolor cartoon exists, this time retitled — like the movie The Wizard of Oz, with the “wonderful” left out. L. Frank Baum’s eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, had some involvement in the production of this animated short feature. The innovation of starting with the Kansas scenes in black and white and transforming to color when the characters arrive in Oz began with this film.

Unfortunately, since the film was produced without proper licensing from the Technicolor Corporation, a lawsuit blocked the release of the film in color. This animated short has the usual 1930’s animation preoccupations with silly antics performed by animals and sight gags in general.  It is only marginally related to the Wizard of Oz books. The cyclone in Kansas is depicted convincingly. Then, Dorothy and Toto fall out of the sky and land on the Scarecrow, bringing him to life. The Tin Man is reanimated with some oil. Toto is not very lovable, kind of a Disney-esque Pluto-like character. The Cowardly Lion is noticeably absent. The Wizard is rather macabre and malevolent-appearing, but all he really does when they catch up with him is perform a bunch of magic tricks, and then the film is over.

After the magic tricks start, there is no resemblance to any Wizard of Oz plot-line. The film has a few clever sight gags, such as 1930’s animated films revel in, such as the moment when the scarecrow tips his hat and a flock of crows flies out.     

When the Broadway and traveling musical version of Oz ended at the end of the decade, L. Frank Baum found himself with a tighter money situation again around 1910.  He had been over-wintering at the Hotel del Coronado since about 1903, but in 1910 he settled in southern California in what became Hollywood.  Even though the Fairylogue and Radio Plays had lost him lots of money, he was determined to bring Oz to the movies.  Toward that end, he started the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, an independent film studio, in 1914.  The company made three Oz films but, while the films were critically well received, there were financial problems, and the company folded in 1915.

We’ll take a look at the Oz Film Manufacturing company’s films in our next post.

More Oz: The Charles Winthrope & Sons facsimiles are a treasure.

A couple pages from the 1st Edition of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as meticulously reproduced in a 2010 limited edition by Charles Winthrope & Sons, part of the Dalenberg Library’s L. Frank Baum collection.

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 27, 2013

Editor’s Note: Oz the Great and Powerful was strictly OK, but the source material is legendary and we've got a lot of it in the library. We’ll be taking a look at other Oz books and films over the next few weeks, including the lesser known pre-1939 films, starting with the original text: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Most people these days come to the Oz stories via the 1939 MGM musical. But there was a time before the movies when the annual Oz book was an obligatory child’s Christmas present.  This annual tradition continued many years after Baum’s death with his estate and his publisher designating a handful of authors as “Royal Historians” of Oz, officially approved to carry on the “canon” as it somewhat mock seriously came to be known. Eventually, there were 40 books admitted into the Oz canon. Therefore, something like two generations of children were weaned on Oz before the 1939 movie was even created. The Oz books dominated the children’s literature landscape until the advent of Dr. Seuss as a children’s book author in 1937.

After various reversals of fortune and unsuccessful business ventures, L. Frank Baum was already in the process of reinventing himself as a teller of childrens’ stories — with two modestly successful books under his belt — when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899.

I read the text of the book in my younger days, and I found it to be mildly amusing.  But I was more impressed with the second and third books, because of the way Baum expanded on his fantasy world and created an ever-widening canvas with each succeeding book. It was difficult for me to appreciate the attraction of that first book, or figure out what made it such a hit, until I handled the real book. Thankfully, it is possible nowadays to get your hands on the real thing without going broke buying a scarce antique. Charles Winthrope & Sons, specialty publishers, have gone to great lengths to reproduce every nuance of the original Baum editions in meticulous facsimile.

In some ways, this is even better than owning weathered, child-worn, antique editions, because owning these new facsimiles approximates what it was like to encounter the books anew starting in 1900.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a charming children’s novel, ahead of its time, incorporating seamless integration of drawings and text, and featuring a number of splashy color plates as well. Baum’s prose is simple and sparse and the pictures therefore take on a big role. You get the sense that he worked closely with his illustrator to craft the book, so that the pictures complement the text and vice versa. On many pages, the text is printed over an illustration in the background. On other pages, the text is wrapped around a picture.  The chapters have title pages that are picture pages. And the initial letter of each chapter’s opening paragraph is blown up and illuminated with a picture. And all of those features are in addition to the beautiful full-page color plates that are sprinkled throughout the book.

Baum and illustrator Denslow’s visual sense carries over to the 1939 movie with its famous transition from the black & white of the Kansas scenes to the Technicolor of the Oz scenes. The preliminary pages after the main title page, and opening chapter, are done with tan-brown illustrations and Baum uses the word “gray,” or some form of it like “grayer,” eight times (to my count) in the first chapter; but right away in Oz, he uses words like “green” and describes “gorgeous flowers” and birds of “brilliant plumage.”

This book begs to be read to a child who is sitting on your knee, because you both need to look at the page to comprehend the full story. It is a visual delight.