Oz films 1914-1925

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) was the first theatrical version of Oz, based on the namesake book, seventh in the series, from 1913.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914) predates The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), the ninth  book in the series.

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914) is based on Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), an unofficial entry in the series.

The Wizard of Oz (1925) is a fanciful, loose adaptation of the first book, and unlike the three previous films has no involvement from L. Frank Baum, who died five years prior. Its biggest claim to fame is featuring a pre-Laurel & Hardy Oliver Hardy.

It’s interesting to watch this early Oz. They’re all silent films, of course, and rely heavily on slapstick of one kind or another, and capture none of the hilarious dialogue the books feature so generously. Baum was a theater man before Oz, and it’s evident from how showy his film versions are. The books are more about social satire, but that’s hard to convey, much less emphasize, in the early film format. 

Watching them is an object lesson in the elasticity of storytelling between formats, and a lucid tour of early Oz history.

My Year in Oz

This one still needs to be written up even though things didn’t work out as planned. So: My year in Oz.

This is the third year I’ve ended up spending unplanned amounts of time on a single literary topic. One year I read multiple variations on The Iliad. Then I spent another immersed in Don Quixote. 2020 with Oz ended up being a little more deliberate, and maybe even the most appropriate way to characterize a very, very strange year.

Now, again, A Squire’s History of Oz, and “Falling Toward Oz,” is a dead project. It will become an artifact topic here on the blog, sort of fictional, unavailable for consumption in the real world. It was a nonfiction work, an attempt at a unified look at L. Frank Baum’s original books and the famous and most visible, and even most recent, projects that were inspired by them. 

The funny thing is, I found myself writing about things I had never actually experienced. Losing the manuscript probably spurred me on to doing so. I finally watched The Wiz, read Wicked. I enjoyed Diana Ross in Wiz. I see there was controversy surrounding her casting, that the movie itself sort of caused a massive backlash. I don’t really see why. I think she was a good fit. And I loved discovering, at last, that moment in Michael Jackson’s career where he sort of became himself. I did not really enjoy Wicked. I found it pretentious, indulgent.

Early in the year I read a work of fiction I found at the airport, concerning Baum’s widow and how her life eventually led to a wish-fulfillment (on the part of the author) of someone actually being there to give Judy Garland some support on the set of the famous movie, the one that for most people has become the only legitimate Oz experience. Later I finally read a young adult version of Oz I found at Walmart a few years ago, that was as generically a young adult version of Oz as it could possibly get. 

I rewatched Tin Man, the TV miniseries, for the first time since watching its original broadcast.

And I wrote George & Gracie. This became “Falling Toward Oz” redux for me, most of the elements revisited, in a new form (once I managed to remember a few of them!). This was a story I had wanted to write for a few years, and finally wrote because I lost all that other material. 

It still feels weird to talk about George & Gracie at all, as it happens to be the title piece of this year’s Christmas collection, a phenomenon that is otherwise strictly a family thing. The collection is packed, otherwise, with family elements, somewhat impenetrable to outsiders, and deliberately so: it was absolutely written for them. Even “George & Gracie” itself means more in family context, getting all the references. 

But it feels good to know it’s out there, and is probably more valuable than the project it replaced, and is going to be a wonderful reminder of a most peculiar year, one spent in Oz, in more ways than one.

A Journal of the Pandemic #21

Hey, you may have heard of something called COVID-19? Kind of a thing that’s been happening this year?

I haven’t written an entry in this series since September. As I write this one, we’ve become entangled in the winter surge, that thing that was looming nebulously all year, and now it’s arrived. Or as HBO might have put it, “winter is coming.”

Obviously plenty has happened since September. Biden won the election. As a result, we’re scheduled for a shutdown early next year. I’m kind of looking forward to it. At work it seems as if in order to get any real response done management needs for someone else to make a decision about how seriously to take the pandemic.

And let me explain that. We lost a couple staff members mysteriously this week. Nobody knew what was happening. By the end of the week we learned unofficially that they of course were tangled up with COVID-19. Nothing was done except replacements brought in as necessary. And they were staff members who absolutely intersected with the whole facility. We had a whole class quarantine for two weeks without signage being hung explaining why. Measures were subsequently put in place to prevent cross-room contamination in playground areas...after it was totally ignored that the one class had absolutely interacted with other classes in playground areas before its quarantine.

(Here I’ll include a parenthetical update on my baby room. As I reviewed what was happening when last I wrote we had just gotten our first two new babies! We ended up getting two more regulars, although it was three until one went on reserve status, their dad sort of permanently out of work because pandemic time has made it difficult for him to be a barber. Three young wiggly babies making strides at tangible mobility, one older baby making strides to standing! Walking! Independently! For all the occasional hiccups, it’s, for me, an inexpressibly irresistibly magical age.)

And I get that the bottom line is always money, that it would be inconvenient to have made any other decisions than have been made.

But.

Here I will once again clarify that I never believed for a moment that draconian methods were ever necessary, but once the decision was made, nearly everywhere, globally, it became irresponsible for anyone to deliberately skirt them without justification, without a clear, honest, transparent method behind the reasoning. Which I’m certain I am not alone in experiencing.

Because of the heavy political polarization at least here in the States, we tend to assume that skirting mandates equates a conservative agenda. That’s the kind of useless simplistic reasoning that absolutely needs to end. I guarantee it isn’t that black and white, and never was. 

My private life continues apace. I published a collection of short stories a few weeks back, collecting material that had previously been earmarked for a friend’s anthology they decided against pursuing in favor of a movie website. (I still have no idea why they couldn’t do both, but apparently some people can’t multitask; I’ve been dwelling recently on the amount of blogging I used to do, and still trying to rationalize how none of it really made an impact so it’s just as well to not continue in that fashion.)

I also published my Christmas collection and sent it out to family. The past few years I was circulating it only to my niece, but figured this year of all years I could expand back outward.

Working on those two publications was a necessary culmination for the year I’ve been having. They were, in their finished forms, a response to the death of my previous computer. I had to totally rewrite the Christmas collection, but in a weird sort of way it was a good thing, therapeutic, as part of it allowed me to simultaneously resurrect the best of the lost Squire’s History of Oz material, the short story I’d written, now reworked as an original story, one I had been planning to write for a while.

I’ve also been plugging away at Space Corps, including replacing ideas that were eaten by the previous computer, which again turned out to be okay. One book I’ve been outlining I had the chance to completely rethink again, and plans for two more had chances for fresh perspectives as well, including the last one in the whole cycle, which took on a drastic new shape inspired in part by some genealogy work I did a few months ago, trying to figure out where exactly my roots lie.

I’ve been staying mostly home. No huge change from any other year, just more so, some by necessity (libraries here are only just beginning, cautiously, to reopen, so my weekends remain home bound, a stark contrast to what was happening a year ago). I did shop on Black Friday, at a comic book store, where I seemed to spend the bulk of my time away from where everyone else was, catching up with recent comics and seeing what I could find in the used collections (where I scored a copy of Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird). Ironically, the generous back issue sale that enticed others I had already decided to stay away from, having read, perhaps, enough random old comics this year.

This week I kept being reminded how much I miss my niece. Last Sunday was a good call with dad, who hasn’t gotten to see his two Maine-based grandsons since March, partly because my brother has decided he can do without him. We had a rare phone conversation about that a few months back. I tried to make a case for dad, but it obviously left little enough impression. I wonder how many families are losing shape because of the pandemic, and how long, if mended at all, these altered states will endure.

Edgar Wright watched a lot of art movies. I watched a lot of movies, too, but not a lot of overlap there. Kenny Omega just made history. So things are interesting.

And maybe they’re going to be interesting in a positive way.

The Computer Ate My Homework

 Well, it’s official. My computer ate my homework. Which is to say, my computer died and took my files with it.

Three weeks ago I got stuck in the rain, and I happened to have my tablet with me. It was a horrendous downpour. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t get it to a shop until the end of the week, or if it died more or less instantly, but the end result was, because it was such a compact instrument, it was a complicated business just to answer whether or not my files were retrievable even before the diagnosis, and certainly out of the question after.

So I lost material. I lost the whole Oz affair. I lost Squire’s History of Oz, the greater nonfiction work, and “Falling Toward Oz,” which for me was far more valuable. I talked about this stuff here. It was actually some of the last material I actively talked about here. If COVID-10 hadn’t hit, this would not have even been an issue. I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. I travel to get it. This was far easier pre-pandemic, and even beyond that, when everything closed, it was more or less around the time I was completing this work. I’d’ve self-published it months ago. 

But now it’s been eaten. If I wanted, I could reconstruct the book itself and even tackle the story again. I’m not feeling especially motivated to do that at the moment. I’m not grieving. I kind of figured this was going to be the result, and so I made peace with it the day I turned the tablet into the shop.

I lost the manuscript I carved out of In the Land of Pangaea, something I didn’t really talk about here, something I did earlier in the summer and submitted to a contest. All the work on that is lost unless by some miracle it has legs in the contest. Again, I could be okay with that. I loved working on that thing. It was if nothing else an excellent exercise in revision. 

I lost this year’s Christmas poem package for my niece! I wrote it ridiculously early as it was, so I can always rewrite that well before the end of the year. I know the bones of what I wrote. I can either attempt to replicate or do something new. It’s okay.

I lost some plotting for Space Corps! I didn’t lose the major Space Corps material. I have the Seven Thunders manuscript, and notes in an actual notebook for most of what I had been working on, and copies attached to emails for other things. There’s so much already quite unwritten about Space Corps anyway, it’s difficult to say what can be lost in such a manner as this. Having Seven Thunders as it is, and in the revised form as I’ve worked on it, is the main thing, and what would’ve been the big loss in a previous computer loss.

That’s not everything, but those are the highlights. I have email copies of stories I wrote this year. I will have to revert to backups for additional poetry collections, whenever I get around to that project again, losing whatever work I had done in that regard. (I think it eats what would’ve been the next release, in the state I left it, which again would not have been a problem pre-shutdown, because I would have published it well before this happened).

Last week I bought a school-sized (rather than pocket-sized) notebook, with the intention to perhaps work on stories and/or notes there. This would not be a guarantee against loss, either, but it would offer a different level of control. I have some really old notes! Stuff dating back to probably 1996 at least, a lot of old Space Corps material. That’s how I always did it before. Then at some point I started doing it on a computer, and when I had a printer handy would carefully print it out (another backup model!). Technically I have a printer now but have no idea if it actually works. I inherited from my sister. Has been sitting on a desk I don’t work at (I find desks hard to work at for extended periods, unless they’re big, and this one isn’t).

And at some point I will buy a new computer of some extraction. And be very, very careful, especially as it comes to file preservation!

A Journal of the Pandemic #6

Finished writing “Falling Toward Oz” last week. It happened on another day when I thought I was again going to not work on it at all, stuck in a pandemic rut, and then that evening just went to work on it and buckled down. It ended up clocking in at 8,000 words, exactly, which had become my target, but it felt weird, typing the last few and seeing the total. I reached the climax and thought maybe I’d rushed toward it too quickly, but kept on writing and, I think, ended up with something better than I had previously been thinking. Anyway, it’s always a nice feeling, as a writer, to finish something and feel pleasantly surprised at the results. I posted about it on Facebook. Some people were like, Oh, you’re still writing? This, despite the fact that I’ve literally linked four flash fictions I’ve done this year alone. Well, what can you say? My Colorado writing buddy was among them, and suggested we collaborate on one last anthology. I told him I’d think about it. Thinking, at the moment, the results of the serialized story I’m currently blogging (the one about the pandemic), which doesn’t currently have enough vampire for Pat (hi, Pat!) but will circle back to them in a few days.

Still at home. Starting to feel weird. Again, I’ve spent long periods of time more or less in this mode before, but never with so few options outside the home. As noted above, began to feel stuck in a rut, but then began to challenge that. Late last week I finally went out and sat in a park (my oldest sister has been sending pictures of her family at a lake they just discovered in their backyard) to do some reading. The book I’m reading now, it had a bad start (more common than you’d think) so I was concerned it was actually a bad read overall, but the park proved otherwise, so I’ll be diving back in eagerly after I finish up blogging this morning. Anyone who knows me knows I read a lot, and probably most people just assume I’ve been doing a lot of reading during this time, but they’d be slightly less right than they’d guess.

This is more or less the point I’m starting to wonder how little others think about me. I’ve had to initiate every communication during the lockdown (except this one lady who periodically contacts me so she can vent about personal problems, though I think perhaps I may have put a dent in that last week talking about pandemic things). I know I’m ordinarily a fairly private person anyway, an introvert who spends his free time alone by choice anyway, never developed routine relationships with regular conversation, but...Am I really so disposable? Does everyone really just assume I will happily continue like this? I realize I began my pandemic journals lamenting about family, but it’s...not even just that. It’s everyone. If I’m rattled by anything in this whole thing, it’s that. And yeah, it increasingly sucks that everyone else, in just family terms, has other people living with them, and so when they want to, for instance, initiate a family game night over the internet, they have that instant leverage. I usually do best in those circumstances playing off of someone else. Well, I don’t have someone else, and so I can’t participate. This is partially a complaint of my own making, I understand. But it also emphasizes what I lost last year above and beyond my niece...

Of course I used up a little more of my financial wiggle room last week, and panicked a little, because again, I’m also increasingly worried about what follows this lockdown, if I’m setting myself up for another financial hole, which I’m lucky enough to not be experiencing now, but many others are, and it’s still weird to think, that for many people the pandemic isn’t minor complaints but real ones, and I have no practical experience with that side of it, and that’s a large part of why it doesn’t seem real to me, despite the pandemic being a worldwide experience. Knowing, and even having a small fraction of the impact on my life, that this is happening, it’s tough to reconcile. It feels very much like the kinds of privileges and disparities I didn’t previously apply to my life, and that’s kind of inexplicable and humbling at the same time.

We’re at the point where arguments are being made to lift restrictions, but realizing that even when we reach that point things will still be different. The workplace sent a memo detailing what that might look like there, and it actually feels more intimidating in that sense than it did when we were merely consolidating for lack of children. Then, at least, it was still business as usual if limited and altered by scope. Now there looks to be entire procedures, and perhaps even those mandated masks people keep arguing over, which are increasingly common as I poke my head out every now and again...

To top it off, there was a network TV special on the weekend. Lady Gaga, at least, seemed to have totally forgotten the recent context of the song “Smile” (as employed by the film Joker). Maybe she’s right. Maybe this is all a hard reboot. If so, I hope we use it wisely.

Oh, and hey! Here’s some fun trivia for you! I have always, always eaten breakfast. For the first time in nearly forty years, lockdown life had changed that. For at least the past week (see? I can’t even remember when it started now) I have been skipping it, and just headed straight through the morning to a noon lunch. I know this’ll revert back once I’m working again, but it’s tangible proof that I have fundamentally altered at least one aspect of my ordinary life because of the pandemic. No breakfast! Not even brunch! Madness.

A Journal of the Pandemic #5

Last week, no work at all. Finally, at the end, we got word that yes, we’re still being paid, and yes, we’re going to have to do some things. I know a lot of people have been working from home (never mind the people working every day in the ongoing essential services), and a lot of them with kids at home, and those kids being expected to do various permutations of schoolwork, and some of those people are going crazy...For me last week was a really long week, not even like a vacation (I’ve done that, “staycation”), but the longer it went the more I had to remind myself, this was only the first week of this for me! And some people have been doing this far longer. And a lot of them have been a far better job of actually staying inside all day every day...

I went out on shopping errands far more often than it might have seemed. Once was to get another bookcase, even though I started out spending far less time reading than I might have previously thought, or done. But I’ve been getting better at that. I’ve also been getting far better at being productive, writing. Like I’ve been doing for a decade, I decided to tackle the A to Z Challenge again, but unofficially, unlisted on the official site, but at this point I wonder how much that matters. The whole month has gotten progressively less social over the years. Anyway, talking about movies again, at the movie blog. Got some fun subjects lined up for some of the trickier letters. Pat (hi, Pat!) wasn’t amused that on the first day I used “A” for movies that literally began with “A” like A Christmas Carol (though none of the dozens of takes on it were in my selections), because that’s how I categorize my movies, and there are lots of movies with titles like that...

Anyway, tackled a serialized pandemic story, don’t know how long it’ll be. Most chapters are turning out bite-sized, which is about what you’d expect from something being written on a phone. Wrote a few other things. Worked on Falling Toward Oz, and hopefully will finish that this week (though, again, doesn’t seem terribly pressing; work says we won’t reopen for about another month at least).

I kept waffling on doing a pandemic story, but a few days into A to Z it just seemed like a natural blogging companion project. That’s the only reason it happened, plus of course having the time, having time to come up with an idea, having time to get started right away with little excuses in the way, and actually coming up with an idea, although the early material makes it seem like a thinly-veiled pandemic journal (other than this one) (which of course it is).

I bought more things last week because I have financial wiggle room. Part of me has started worrying that what’s wiggle room now will be desperation, should this thing continue to draw out. Definitely. But at the same time, with so few options out there, and so much uncertainty, and no idea how much the world is going to change because of this, I keep thinking of it as bulwark for the world I hope to find on the other side.

Helped suggest another family chat for Easter yesterday, and by this point I’ve gotten over being the grump of a month back, upset at the budding disruptions, and was able to enjoy it. Starting to notice how it’s affecting other members of the family, in the opposite direction, which is unsettling. But realistically, this thing is having and is going to have a massive psychological toll, and that’s going to be something we as a global society will be dealing with for years to come. For every introvert like me, there are extroverts who were not at all prepared for a disaster party. (“Disaster Party” by Magic Giant is one of my pandemic songs, having been coincidentally performed on one of the morning shows a month or so back. “Crazy Train” is another; it’s the song the crazy kid was singing on a loop via karaoke when the cruise ships were being quarantined and I was talking with a coworker about that back in January).

So, yeah. To quote my sister-in-law on Facebook the other day, quoting Dumbledore: “Alas, earwax.”

A Journal of the Pandemic #3

This past week work finally made tangible concessions to COVID-19, insofar as everyone now works every other day (scheduled skip days are covered financially), as there are very few kids coming in, it was the first week effectively combining two of the three centers, with today marking all three sharing the same building. So now I have some of that free time the pandemic has been promising.

There are a lot of parents out there who aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs, and I’m not talking about the situation with my childcare center(s) specifically. They’re parents who don’t...really know how...to parent. I’m not talking about overt abuse, although neglect is emotional abuse, and it has obvious and at best unfortunate results all the same. Some of the kids coming in last week have behavioral issues stemming from parenting of this kind, and their parents have been the kind who don’t see all the new social restrictions as affecting the decisions they’re used to making. I truly hope that one effect of COVID-19 is to begin a process of awakening real responsibility in such parents, when they begin to run out of excuses to actually be present in the lives of their own children. On the one hand we suddenly don’t have to worry about school shootings, which to my mind is a direct result of this kind of systemic neglect, whether from parents boxed in by economic conditions or personal choice (I honestly can’t say which is worse). The thing about this situation is that summer vacation and other holidays are always sending kids home from school. The only real difference is that the parents have been sent home, too. Parenting is never easy. It demands an honest and complete surrender to someone else in ways that don’t exist in any other context, and if you choose to ignore this responsibility, the effects will resonate throughout many other lives, not just yours and theirs, but the many other lives that intersect over time...

Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m always thinking about anyway, regardless of pandemics causing massive disruptions to everyday life. Since I have no kids and rarely participate in social gatherings (the great irony in all this is that for some people, the few things they randomly had lined up in that regard were cancelled), my ordinary activities are much as they’ve always been. Since I don’t have internet at home outside of my phone, I used to go to the library on the weekend to catch up on blogging. Another of the ironies of this situation is that I had bumped up my data plan on the phone before the dominos started falling, and I’ve found out in recent days that...I have a lot of internet time available to me. I’m composing this post on my phone. I’d upgraded the data plan to ensure I could video chat with my niece undisrupted (heh), and here we are at the end of the month, and all the extra time I’ve had at home has seen me wasting time on the internet (nothing terribly new there), seeing how people are interpreting the pandemic, what Facebook has been up to (I’d say that chatter has been slowing; aside from the fact I myself stopped posting funny things, a lot of others have, too, perhaps because apparently you can only joke about toilet paper so many times, even on the internet, a phenomenon that culminated in toilet faces, which if you’re reading this in the future I apologize, because I am not going to elaborate).

I actually have been writing during all of this. I wrote “Just a Regular Joe,” which along with “If Sidekicks Never Existed” (a title based on a book I really wanted to like more) I was greatly looking forward to submitting to a comic book company whose submissions were supposed to open up again mid-month. But now comics have temporarily lost their main distributor, and most stores are either closing or desperately, gamely soldiering on, and I don’t think submissions are opening soon. So maybe I have a chance to write even more stories and have an even greater chance to get published. Unless the company changes its submission policy because of the pandemic, or actually ends up going out of business.

I also started work on “Falling Toward Oz.” I had a false start that didn’t feel right, so I started over again, and was immensely pleased with the results, and the words absolutely flowed, as they do when I’m truly engaged. I haven’t written, yet, during this extended weekend (see: first paragraph), but I swear I will a little later today.

Instead I’ve been catching up on my Obsolete Physical Media purchases, DVDs of TV shows, in this instance. I just watched the two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (great first season!) and the only season of Men with Brooms, the second-best Canadian sitcom I’ve watched recently, although it was always going to be tough competing with Letterkenny (suck it up, Pat; and yes, it was your garbage-fire review that made me interested). I watched the second season of Titans before those. Continues to be a great show, best when it’s focusing on particular elements of the plot, whether flashback material or the debut of Superboy. Deathstroke was handled particularly well. Really want to tackle reviews for some of the movies I watched earlier. I finally caught the Psycho remake. And of course I liked that, too. Still need to catch up on the final two episodes of Picard, which I had been avoiding before I got a better idea of what the new data plan could handle, or how plausible blogging on my phone was (maybe it works better on my new phone? because I tried this previously and was not at all satisfied).

This whole business is so curious. We’re locking everything down in order to limit the spread of a virus that kills in small numbers. People keep arguing that “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” are measures meant to limit the effect on limited medical facilities. That’s what they say in the States. But literally every country is getting around to this. You keep hearing meaningless sampling about countries that are handling it better, handling it worse. Another of the ironies is that when we talked about healthcare before the pandemic (antecovidian, perhaps), people would argue how barbaric and backwards the American system is compared to everyone else. The American pandemic statistics are beginning to take the world lead, but this is meaningless without considering population size and density (hardest hit is of course New York; there has been an argument for about the past month that Florida would be the next hotspot, given its prominent retirement population, and here we are headed into April and it hasn’t happened yet despite the rapid spread, which of course seems to contradict the rapid measures taken to combat the problem, with plenty of eagerness to suggest we somehow haven’t done enough soon enough; this is literally impossible in a truly unprecedented response).

I talked last time (or perhaps in the comments on someone else’s blog; my phone doesn’t like giving me the option to comment; please don’t be offended if I seem to be saying nothing, because I’m still reading) that I didn’t want to begin writing about the pandemic in my fiction. But you can be absolutely certain that in the years and decades to come that we’re going to see an endless flood of pandemic material. And it seems wrong to ignore it, other than these blog posts, in my own work. This shouldn’t become the only thing we care about (me, I’m still hoping, best case scenario, that this is what finally gives us The Snyder Cut), because life, or something like it, goes on, but it’s a thing, and it’s happening, and it may not be interesting (it’s very, very boring), but it’s impossible not to think about.

So I end this long entry with the hope that I can continue to use this time wisely. Or at least, with more refrigerator art. I don’t want to brag, but there was a kid on Friday who spontaneously drew my portrait.

Falling Toward Oz

Just a quick note:

This week I became glad I hadn't decided I was more or less done preparing A Squire's History of Oz, because it occurred to me that I could add one more thing to it: "Falling Toward Oz."

Which, by the way, I haven't written yet, but that's hardly a problem!  "Falling Toward Oz" will be my version of Oz, which for a book celebrating Baum's Oz and the many versions that have followed, seemed about right for someone who thinks of himself first as a writer of fiction.

So that's hopefully something I'm going to write, or start writing, this week, and hopefully tackle some other stuff as well.