The Wizard of OZ
Harold Rosson, ASC

Several attempts were made during the silent film era to put L. Frank Baum's Oz stories on the big screen, including several produced by Baum himself, but all failed to please the public. It was not until 1939, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presented The Wizard of Oz as a spectacular Technicolor fantasy with music, that the idea achieved its potential. With five months of principal photography and a negative cost of $2,777,000, it was the most expensive picture since 1930's Hell's Angels, but producer Mervyn LeRoy, director Victor Fleming and a gigantic production staff gave MGM its money's worth. Audiences loved the performers, as well as the three-strip Technicolor photography, which was a strong selling point at that time because all but a few pictures were shot in black-and-white. MGM assigned one of its top directors of photography, Harold (Hal) Rosson to the project. Rosson had been working in the movies since 1908 and became a first cameraman in 1915. He had worked with Technicolor before, most notably on the elegant 1936 picture The Garden of Allah. Allen Davey, ASC, Rosson's Technicolor associate, had worked on MGM's first three-color feature, Sweethearts, which was still in production when Wizard was in preparation.

The Kansas scenes in Wizard, including visual effects maestro Arnold Gillespie's celebrated tornado, were filmed in black-and-white. In the original release prints, these sequences were processed in MGM's exclusive Sepia Platinum process. Transitional frames were hand-colored to ease the abrupt change to the gloriously colorful Oz.

Photographing Oz in color was unusually difficult, due to the vastness of the sets and the heavy concentration of strong colors. Rosson said it would not have been possible but for the new and much faster Technicolor film, which today would have an ASA rating of about 50.

Photographing The Wizard of Oz was a big order, and Hal Rosson filled it perfectly. (For complete coverage of the film and its recent restoration, see AC Dec. '98.)

—G.T.

© 1999 ASC