If the Creator of Oz Isn’t an American Master, Who Is?

A documentary about the creator of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum, is being shown on PBS affiliates as part of the long-running “American Experience.” The documentary, “American Oz,” surely belongs in this series, but perhaps an even more fitting home would be public television’s companion “American Masters.”For Baum surely is an American Master on the same level as Joe Papp, Alvin Ailey, Roberta Flack, Brian Wilson, Saul Bellow, or any of the other high achievers profiled for the series in recent seasons. This very show more than proves as much.In creating Oz, Baum (1856-1919) gave us not only the first American fairyland, but literally launched the idea of the fantasy franchise — thus meaning that everybody from J.K. Rowling to Walt Disney to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas owes him a major debt. More importantly, Baum’s Oz stories, and the films and shows, sequels and prequels (not to mention she-quels and he-quels) that followed, comprise an important part of everybody’s childhood, and therefore are a key influence on the way all of us perceive the world and each other even as adults.This latest documentary does an excellent job of illuminating the cultural context around Baum in his time: industrialization, urbanization, the rise of new technologies. It spends most of its two hours on Baum’s early adulthood, between roughly the time he made his first efforts at writing professionally around 1880 — don’t laugh, his first articles, eventually collected into a book, were essentially a manual on how to raise chickens — and the moment of his greatest triumph, when “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was first published and became the hit of the Christmas season of 1900.Tracy Heather Strain and Randall MacLowry’s film is especially good at showing how the young Baum had his heart in the theater and storytelling all along, but tried numerous occupations before he arrived at the idea of writing children’s books. As we see, his failures — as playwright, retailer, newspaper publisher — multiplied in almost direct proportion to the increasing size of his family (four sons in all). Baum’s father had himself tried his hand at many different trades, but unlike his son was essentially successful at all of them.The documentary also doesn’t hold back about discussing Baum’s failings, the most notable of which were revealed in an unfortunate editorial he wrote and published in his own newspaper; his views on the state of Native American affairs were highly intolerant even in 1891, but are positively horrific today. At the same time, it’s to Baum’s credit that he was a major supporter of gender rights. As the son-in-law of the pioneering feminist Maude Gage, he continually advocated for female suffrage. Thus, in different areas, Baum was on both the wrong and the right sides of history.“American Oz” features a diverse panoply of wise words from well-chosen talking heads, including the author of the 2009 “Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story,” biographer Evan I. Schwartz. Also seen is everybody’s favorite cinema historian, Jeanine Basinger, and writer Gregory Maguire, who wisely observes that “one of the things that Baum contributed to our understanding of how the imagination works in storytelling, but perhaps also in the industrializing world in which he was working, is that he taught us to take the scraps, and bits, and shards and assemble them into something new.”This documentary stresses Oz’s role in American culture; another film might stress the place of Oz in the wider world, as reflected in the Soviet Oz “subfranchise” launched by a Moscow author, Alexander Volkov, which itself inspired a series of Russian-produced films and TV shows, as recently as the 2017 animated feature “Fantastic Journey to Oz.” While “American Oz” stresses the importance of Baum’s collaboration with a cartoonist and illustrator of the first Oz book, W.W. Denslow, it’s strange that the man who illustrated virtually all the others, John R. Neil, isn’t mentioned. Correctly, the film shows us how the story and the characters — especially as depicted in the classic 1939 movie version — continue to resonate through the decades, being reinterpreted across the generations, as in the 1975 Broadway musical “The Wiz” (and its 1978 film adaptation). Mr. Maguire’s 1995 novel, “Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” — which launched both a new four-novel subfranchise of its own as well as a musical adaptation that just celebrated its 20th anniversary — is the most successful of many contemporary takes on “Oz.”Oz is such an important part of who we are, as citizens of America and residents of the world, that it’s hard to believe they weren’t always there — that it took one remarkable man to give them to us. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, unless it’s back to the Emerald City.

If the Creator of Oz Isn’t an American Master, Who Is?

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