The Wiz (Motown Productions, Universal Pictures, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 19) Turner Classic Movies did a whole day of Black-themed movies for the “Juneteenth” mezzo-holiday, including one I’d never seen before: The Wiz, co-produced by Berry Gordy’s Motown Productions and Universal in 1978 and based on a stage musical by Charlie Smalls (music and lyrics) and William F. Brown (book) from 1974 that in turn derived from Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’d long been morbidly curious about The Wiz even though, when the announcements came out that Diana Ross would star as a 33-year-old Dorothy Gale (a Harlem kindergarten teacher instead of a Kansas farm girl), still bitter over the fiasco of her film Lady Sings the Blues, I grimly joked, “Not content to trash the legacy of Billie Holiday, she’s going to trash the legacy of Judy Garland as well.” The TCM showing of The Wiz was hosted by two African-Americans, Jacqueline Stewart (the usual “Silent Sunday Showcase” host) and rapper Cliff “Method Man” Smith, and in their outro both made a veiled comment to the effect that the film’s box-office failure had been due to racism. How about maybe, just maybe, The Wiz bombed at the box office because it’s a lousy movie? And it’s a lousy movie despite a major talent roster both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Sidney Lumet, the writer was Joel Schumacher (who’d go on to be a director himself), the cinematographer was Oswald Morris, the editor was Dede Allen, both the costumes and sets were designed by Tony Walton (Julie Andrews’s first husband), and the stars were Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne.

Ross’s Dorothy is a kindergarten teacher in Harlem who boasts that she’s never been south of 125th Street (i.e., she’s never been to any part of New York City other than Harlem), which becomes significant later on when just about all of “Oz” looks incredibly like those parts of New York which Dorothy has never visited. She’s blown to Oz by a storm that’s controlled by Glinda, the Good Witch of the South (Lena Horne), though we don’t see enough of her at this stage of the movie to recognize her, and instead of being enclosed inside a house that lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy takes her out by landing on the circular Oz logo which in turn lands on the witch. One good thing this script does that the classic 1939 The Wizard of Oz film didn’t is it clearly distinguishes between the good witches of the North (“Miss One,” Thelma Carpenter, who sang with Count Basie’s band in the 1940’s) and the South (Glinda, played stunningly by Lena Horne) as Baum did in the original book. It was the writers for the 1939 film, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, who combined the two good witches into the single character played by Billie Burke. There are also some charming gags along the way to the Yellow Brick Road, including yellow checkered taxis that suddenly go out of service whenever our intrepid questers go near them and a long scene in a subway in which the Scarecrow (Michael Jackson in what turned out to be his only feature film) is menaced by man-eating trash cans. I also liked the gimmick that the Scarecrow’s chest was stuffed with shreds from old books, which he pulls out of himself and reads like fortune cookies and thereby displays an impressive intellect even though he insists he doesn’t have any brains.

But those bits of cleverness don’t take away from a surprisingly leaden, lugubrious movie that fails to hook much of the original story’s (or the 1939 movie’s) sense of wonder and whimsy. Charlie Smalls’s musical score doesn’t help, even when it was bolstered on film (as it was on stage, too) by other major Black musical figures including Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones. The score is strongest when it remains rooted in the pop-soul and disco stuff Ross did best; when she’s obliged to sing a big Broadway-style ballad she’s as hopeless as she was in trying and dismally failing to duplicate Billie Holiday’s singing style in Lady Sings the Blues. Smalls seems to have been willing to draw on just about any musical tradition he could think of as long as it had some roots in the Black community; Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man is introduced with a song called “What Could I Do If I Could Feel?” that is, of all things, a pastiche of 1920’s Dixieland jazz. (There’s a good gag in which his backup singers are three black faces sculpted into a wall who stay attached and whose faces only come to life when they’re obliged to sing. I couldn’t help but think that’s what Diana Ross would have wanted to do with the other members of The Supremes.) Indeed, by far the best song in the show is the opening quasi-gospel number, “The Feeling That We Have,” performed at the Thanksgiving dinner the Gale family is having in the opening pre-Oz framing sequence, and movingly sung by Theresa Merritt as Aunt Em. It’s hardly in the same league as “Over the Rainbow” (and later in the movie, Diana Ross is made to sing a song that almost inevitably contains the word “rainbow” in its lyrics), but it gets the movie off to a nice, homey start. Also, aside from the Cowardly Lion (Ted Ross), who looks as convincing as Bert Lahr did in 1939, the character makeups aren’t as good as they were in the old classic. Neither are the dance numbers, especially Michael Jackson’s; it doesn’t help that he’s obliged to sing his big song, “You Can’t Win, You Can’t Break Even,” while he’s still stuck on the scarecrow pole before Dorothy gets him out and sets him free.

One surprise in this film is that Michael Jackson is actually the most convincing actor in it. He delivers his lines with a real sense of pathos and raw emotion that seems to elude just about everybody else in the cast. It’s a real pity that the much talked-about film version of Sir James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with Michael Jackson in the lead fell through and never got made, because judging from his performance here it could have been a really great movie. Aside from him, The Wiz pretty much just plods through all the old familiar plot points of the Baum classic and the 1939 film, and Richard Pryor’s exposure as a phony wizard has none of the moving power it did from Frank Morgan in 1939. Lena Horne is also barely in the film – though it doesn’t help that she gets to reprise Diana Ross’s big song as she’s about to leave Oz, “If You Believe in Yourself,” and totally outsings her on it. The Wicked Witch of the West, who here is called “Evillene” (in Baum’s novels and the films he produced from them in 1914 the Witch’s name was “Momba,” and in the recent film Wicked as well as the book and stage play it was based on, she was called “Elphaba”), runs a “sweat shop” in which sweat is actually the product they produce (a good gag from a film that doesn’t have that many of them) and she gets annihilated when Dorothy pulls the lever of a water sprinkler that dunks her. She doesn’t have a broomstick, which makes me wonder just how Dorothy and her crew can prove to the Wizard that they have indeed dispatched her. She’s also dressed in a hideous costume that makes me think Tony Walton’s inspiration was Carmen Miranda, though given all the horror stories about what Margaret Hamilton went through when her costume accidentally caught on fire and the crew had to pat her down carefully to put out the fire lest they inadvertently push the highly toxic copper-based green makeup into her body, with potentially lethal consequences, it’s understandable why Walton didn’t want to use that substance again.

It’s possible that the scenes in the subway were an inspiration for the Wachowski siblings when they made The Matrix and its various sequelae, as were the use of a motorcycle gang as the Winged Monkeys. Overall, though, The Wiz is a leaden, slow-moving film (Lumet and company take 134 minutes to tell a story Victor Fleming and his crew at MGM in 1939 managed in just 102 minutes). It wasn’t an intrinsically bad idea to do a version of The Wizard of Oz with Black people, but this wasn’t it, and it also doesn’t help that despite Oswald Morris’s incredible résumé (including the 1952 Moulin Rouge, Beat the Devil, Moby Dick, Look Back in Anger, The Guns of Navarone, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Fiddler on the Roof, and Sleuth), he shot all too much of this movie in the standard past-is-brown mode that, as I’ve noted before, is bad enough in a movie whose protagonists are white but is even worse when they’re Black. All too often the actors’ brown faces just blend into the brown background and it’s hard to see them. I wouldn’t call The Wiz a bad movie, really, but it’s such a bundle of missed opportunities it’s hard either to praise or damn it. It did at least give Michael Jackson the chance to work both with Diana Ross, who had discovered him (the first album on which Michael Jackson appeared was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5), and with Quincy Jones, who served as musical director on The Wiz and went on to produce the three pop-soul-dance masterpieces, Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987), on which his reputation as an adult performer will always rest.