The Extras - Celebrating the Legacy of Judy Garland and "The Wizard of Oz"

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

Judy Garland fans and experts George Feltenstein from Warner Bros and author John Fricke join the podcast for a celebration of Judy's centennial. Together they share insights from their careers writing books, producing documentaries, and releasing Judy's films on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K.  And then we dive into a discussion of "The Wizard of Oz" and the impact the film has had on American popular culture and film history.John Fricke is regarded as the preeminent Judy Garland and "The Wizard of Oz" historian.  George Feltenstein has been the steward of the MGM/Turner/Warner Bros and now Warner Archive releases of the majority of Judy Garland's films.  Their friendship began with their collaboration on the VHS release of the 50th Anniversary of "The Wizard of Oz" and has continued over the last 33 years due to their mutual love and admiration for the talent of Judy Garland.Buy The Wizard of Oz 4KOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  www.otakumedia.tvThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. Today, I have two very special guests to help us celebrate the life and career of Judy Garland

in what would have been her 100th birthday this June 10th of 2022. Film historian and home entertainment veteran George Feltenstein has spent a career spanning four decades marketing and distributing Judy Garland films and music for MGM Turner and Warner Brothers. He's the primary force behind the highly acclaimed Warner Archive, which has released most of the Judy Garland film catalog on DVD and Blu-ray.

And Mr. Feltenstein, along with our other guests, produced the Emmy Award-winning documentary Judy Garland by Myself for the American Masters series on PBS. And joining him is John Fricke, widely regarded as the world's preeminent Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland author, authority, and lecturer. Mr. Fricke has written eight books on Judy and the Wizard of Oz with over a quarter million copies in print. He is a two-time Emmy Award winner for documentaries on Judy Garland that aired on the PBS and A&E networks. He is a Grammy Award nominee for the liner notes on the Judy Garland 25th Anniversary Retrospective for Capitol Records.

for Capitol Records. And in his collaboration with George Feldstein, he has recorded audio commentaries for seven Garland Home Entertainment releases and is on four Wizard of Oz releases over the years. Mr. Fricke also appears regularly on the Turner Classic Movies Network and is a highly sought out lecturer and host. Well, George and John, thanks for coming on the show today to celebrate one of your favorite Hollywood stars, Judy Garland. She is not one of my favorite Hollywood stars. She is the Hollywood star. You got to get that straight right at the beginning. So true for you, John. And I know that you're obviously an acknowledged expert on Judy Garland, But when did your love and interest in Judy begin for you? Well, November 3rd, 1956, I was five years old in Wisconsin. And that was the night The Wizard of Oz was first shown on network television. And I loved music and I loved television musicals.

And my parents encouraged this. My dad was the quintessential high school and college job, but he loved movies and he loved songs. My mom loved that kind of stuff too. They were elementary school teachers. So they encouraged this. And when I was rhapsodic about The Wizard of Oz for the next three weeks after I saw the movie, they bought me for my sixth birthday, The Wizard of Oz soundtrack album that had just come out concurrent with that TV screening and Judy Garland's capital album for 1956 and a Wizard of Oz storybook. So I had, you know, like the starter kit. And as I've always jokingly said, I was the only first grader in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who wasn't singing, I'm a little teapot. I was listening to Judy Garland and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra

in her 1956 album. And I was singing, I'm going to love you like nobody's loved you, come rain or come shine. But she gets under your skin. You don't choose these things, they choose you. And I was very fortunate because from then on, I found out she had other albums. I found out that there were 40 Oz books in the original series. My parents were set for birthdays, Christmases, Easter. So were grandparents and aunts and uncles. They had stuff to buy me. And my parents used to put me to bed in 1956, 57, 58, 59 at 738, 830, whatever my bedtime would have been as a little boy. But if there was a Judy Garland movie on the late show in Milwaukee,

they would set an alarm clock in my room for 1030 and let me get up because they thought what harm can come to anybody from seeing Meet Me in St. Louis or Easter Parade or Andy Hardy. So I was steeped in this. And then when I was 10, she did the Carnegie Hall album and tour and Judgment at Nuremberg and the top rated TV special in CBS history. And she was the biggest star in the world in the early 60s, her great adult comeback. And that sealed it. And then the TV series after that, as a 14-year-old and 16-year-old, I went from Milwaukee down to Chicago to see three of her concerts. I met her at 2.30 in the morning in the pump room restaurant of the Ambassador East Hotel when I was 16. Nothing could have ever changed how I felt about her. I got teased a lot,

you know, in the era of the Beatles in the 60s and the Rolling Stones. She wasn't exactly what most teenagers were listening to, but she was omnipresent in show business. So they all knew who she was. And of course, Wizard of Oz kept that up for decades ever since. And the wonderful thing is that the more years I aged and hopefully developed even more critical facilities, one thing I found is that she, unlike virtually anybody else, could turn me immediately back into an audience. I would watch her and it was like everything I saw was true and real and exactly how a song should be sung, a scene should be played,

a comedy line should be written. She was so natural and herself in whatever she did. One thing I think that it's important to say is, of course, she was born and brought up in vaudeville as a preteen where you went out and hit the audience over the head with your talent and your personality at that first matinee, because if you didn't, you didn't last out the week. There was all of this genius ability and instinctive ability about Judy Garland. Gordon Jenkins, one of her great arranger orchestrators said the talent of Judy Garland could never be learned. It was that intrinsic. And she has never let go of me. And I have never wanted to quit her because nobody else gives me that sensation. And I'm certainly not alone in that. I've never been in the theater anywhere.

I live a block from Times Square in New York, third-he Broadway theaters in the general vicinity, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center. All the people I've seen on stage in a play, a musical, a concert, I've never been anywhere where there was the joy that you got from being in the same room with Judy Garland. She got a hold of you and never let go. And I am profoundly grateful. I said this in the acknowledgments of the very first of the three books on Judy I've done. I said, I am so grateful to have been chosen to be a Judy Garland fan. End of sermon. Wow. Well, George, you also were a fan of Judy Garland very early on before you worked professionally in home entertainment.

How far back does that go? Yeah, it was, I mean, my earliest memory of her is watching Wizard of Oz on CBS from a very early age. And I didn't have to hide behind the sofa when The Witch came out. I mean, it became an annual thing. There were movies and television specials that you looked forward to every year, long before the age of video, you know, where you could own it forever and watch it wherever you want it, whenever you want it. And there were these very special things, things like Mary Martin's Peter Pan or Christian McGrew's Christmas Carol. And then later on, Charlie Brown Christmas and so forth.

But Oz was like a huge event. And when I couldn't see The Wizard of Oz in the year in between, I would listen to the MGM record soundtrack, which brilliantly condensed the 103 minute movie or 101. I always get the running time a little mixed up, whether it's 101, 103, John would know. Okay, 101. But I had the 1960s version, which is the black MGM Lion label, the original soundtrack that came out in 1956, which is really quite groundbreaking at the time because it was the first time the studio went back and released older

recordings. And they did it in conjunction with the CBS television premiere in 56, which was incredibly highly rated and a big television event. But the record kept selling. As a matter of fact, we don't really know how many millions of copies it sold because of the amount of turnover there's been in the record companies. Because MGM's record company was sold, but they still had the rights to distribute for 10 years. And it goes on and on and on. But to be honest, it clearly sold millions and millions of copies. And every kid I knew had one. My copy had a gatefold jacket in white.

That was the re-release and had pictures inside. And so I was fascinated by who is this Judy Garland? And when I was about four, she had a TV show on CBS. And my parents would watch Bonanza in the foyer of our small apartment. And I'd go into their bedroom and watch her variety show on CBS. And they thought I was crazy. Oh, she can't sing anymore. Oh, she's got problems. You know, I would just hear all this negativity. And I would say my interest in her was somewhat casual as I grew older. But as I headed towards adolescence, it became more serious. And then when she passed away, it was like, I remember that like a family

member passing away. It was a devastating event of my childhood. Now, I was a little advanced for my age in some ways and a little bit immature for my age in some ways. But that was one way that I was particularly sensitive about. You know, when famous people died, it was a really disturbing thing, especially if I liked what they did. And that started me actually going after buying her records. I didn't have her Judy Carnegie Hall record. I didn't even know anything about it. I was a kid, you know, but I found out about all these things that happened, you know, really'd be exploring Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Sinatra. And, you know, the panoply of the kind of music that I'm

interested in and the kind of films that I'm interested in is so wide that I spent my teen years going to revival houses and seeing older films. But particularly, I was very interested in Judy Garland's work. And as I remember being in college, there was one film of hers that I had never seen properly. Her last film called I Could Go On Singing, which is one of the few we don't own. And I had only seen it on the 430 movie where it was cut by about a half hour. And I didn't think it was particularly interesting film. And my friend in college said, you need to see it the whole thing. And we went to see it at a revival theater and I said, oh my God, she's incredible in this movie. Why don't people know about it? So years later, when I was working

at MGM UA, we did a letterbox laser disc of it and we restored the sound. But that was after having dug my teeth into the MGM library and the classic MGM movies. And I would say my childhood obsession with the history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer kind of coincided with learning more about Judy, learning that was happening at the same time that MGM was being destroyed by its new owner of the time. And the props were being auctioned off and the back lot was being knocked down. And, you know, then That's Entertainment came out and a whole generation of people got a week into the MGM musical. generation of people got awakened to the MGM musical. So with me, it was a constant growth of learning and discovery. You know, had I met John when I was much, much younger, I would have learned a lot more. But there was only one book about Judy Garland when I was a kid. And I think it was probably written right before she

died. The only book about her that she ever saw. It came out just before she died. Because the last sentence was, don't write her off yet. There's another triumph left in Judy Garland. Something like that? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. It's a great ending because even though she died a month later, she has done nothing but come back ever since, just as she did in real life. That was one of the great things about Judy's career for me is that because she started in vaudeville and started with the old timers on the screen like Sophie Tucker and Fanny Bryce and on the radio with Jolson and Jessel and all of those people. And then she worked with the greats at MGM responsible for bringing to MGM Gene Kelly and for bringing Fred Astaire out of retirement. And then on TV with Streisand and Vic Damone and Lena Horne and Count Basie and Tony Bennett. It was an absolute crash course in the best of 20th century entertainment. All those MGM pictures and the TV shows,

you got to know everybody because everybody wanted to work with her, and everybody did on one level or another. I'm sorry, George, I didn't mean to Shanghai that. You didn't. And so, you know, fast forward, the first group of MGM movies to come out on home video in Video on videocassette, VHS and beta in 1980, October of 1980 to be exact. And it was catalog number one. And from that point, several years later, I was hired by MGM to really unleash their catalog because they had been acquiring movies like Hospital Massacre instead of releasing the classics in their own library. And that's what they hired me to do.

And that was the beginning of my career in the film, in the home video industry, and really finding the right way to release the films of all great artists, not just Judy Garland. That's really the focus of what I do and what I've dedicated my career to doing and have taken some detours while doing it. As in 2004, John was involved along with myself and we both have Emmy Awards on our mantles from working on a documentary with American Masters and Susan Lacey called Judy Garland by myself. And we both wanted to see a portrayal of Judy that focused on her greatness and her talent and not a salacious piece that focused on the personal problems she had, many of which were lies and overblown. And we wanted to focus on the genius and the talent. And the show did just that.

It unfortunately can't be distributed because of lapsed licenses, but the show remains something that I'm sure I could speak for John. We're both very, very proud of. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers Catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. And is that where the two of you kind of first met and you both are huge Judy Garland fans? You get together on that. Is that is that where it all happened? No, I was wished on George by a friend from here in New York.

He was running the Metropolitan Opera Ball in 1988 or maybe it was going to be in 1989. And he arranged with MGM UA Home Video to donate a whole number of MGM VHS tapes of operetta movies, Jeanette Nelson, all of that kind of stuff. And he flew out to California to meet with them. Now, I was already in California researching the 50th anniversary Wizard of Oz coffee table book, which I was under contract to do with two other Oz fans. And when Rick Skye came to LA, he said, I'm going to MGM. was under contract to do with two other Oz fans. And when Rick Skye came to LA, he said, I'm going to MGM. Do you want to come with me? Now, MGM was an office building across the street from the lot. It wasn't on the lot anymore. And I said, all right. And he said, no, no, they're going to give me a tour of the lot. Somebody there will walk us over around

MGM. And I thought, well, I've never had that privilege. I would like that. Now, meanwhile, they had Shanghai or Hornswoggle, poor George. You used to get this all the time. You were the designated tour guide. So make a long story short, when Ted Turner bought MGM and then had to sell MGM, he kept the library, but he sold the lot to Lorimar and he sold the name and the Lion logo to Kirk Corian. And that's why United Artists became MGM and now it's owned by Amazon. But the Ted Turner Library, Turner Entertainment Company, he owned for 10 years. And then when Turner Broadcasting was bought by Time Warner, Warner Brothers became the owner of the MGM Library up through April of 1986. But I digress. I was working at post-Turner Transaction MGM in the Filmland building, as it was called, across from the lot that is now Sony, that at the time was Lorimar. And people used to ask me for tours of the MGM lot because

I knew where everything was. And I didn't particularly like it, but I would do it to be nice. particularly like it, but I would do it to be nice. And the Lorimar people just let us come on the lot. And so it was like no big deal. And so I got a call from the receptionist. They said, a bunch of people are here from New York. They're really big Judy Garland fans. They'd love to get a tour of the lot. And I said, okay. And I said, I'll be my businessman's best. And I was wearing my suit and doing the whole corporate thing. And it was about an hour from one part of the lot to the other. And by the end of that hour, I think John and I had become best friends and have been so ever since. Absolutely different spirits.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And it just so happens that I was working on preparing the 50th anniversary video cassette and Laserdisc release of Oz. And nobody had done anniversary releases on home video products up until then. That's why I say it's something like a blessing and a curse because the concept got way overblown over the years. But we were working on both Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind at that time. And as soon as I met John and knew he was working on his book, we got him to write the booklet. And he helped guide us to put special features on a video cassette. We had a recreation of the Jitterbug

number, which was cut out of The Wizard of Oz. And we had stock footage of how they did the tornado. And people weren't doing that on video cassettes then. I was excited because George said we have 15 minutes. In my research for the book, I found out that there was the original soundtrack of The Jitterbug still existed and Buddy Ebsen's track of If I Only Had a Heart before he was recast in the part of the Tin Man and that there was a trailer and a newsreel

and all of this stuff. And Judy getting her Academy Award from Mickey Rooney. George knew about some of this, but not all of it. And they said, well, we can't do more than 120 minutes. And the movie runs 101. And there's going to be a Downey softener commercial, fabric softener commercial at the beginning because they're our sponsors. But we had 15 minutes to add all of this stuff.

And between that and they said, write a booklet with a little booklet attached to the cover was 35 pages long. It wasn't a little booklet at all. But that's how we started to work together almost instantly. Wizard of Oz had already been on video at that point for nine years. And the price had gotten lowered from $59.98 to $29.98. This was going to be $24.98 with a coupon where you could cash your check from the Bank of Oz. That was not my idea. That was the marketing lady's idea.

That was Rick Skye. When we were first talking that afternoon, when we went back to your office with the Downey people, and they said it would be a Downey fabric softener, $5 rebate. Buy the movie for $25. It'll be a Downy Fabric Softener, $5 rebate. Buy the movie for $25. But if you send this in, in the package, you will get $5 back. Well, Rick Skye said, make the coupon so attractive, you know, the Bank of Oz and do it in color and show Oz characters and Oz scenes. He said, nobody's going to send that back.

You're never going to have to pay those $5 out because all the collectors are going to want that coupon. And that's how it worked out. Do you remember that, George? I didn't. And you've just corrected me. And I thank you for that. I think one thing we can say about that 50th anniversary Oz VHS tape is that George had mentioned earlier, Oz had already been on the market for nine years in 1989. The thinking was, I remember George passed this along to me because we were working together. He said, well, I think we can maybe sell another two or 300,000 copies. Well, they put that VHS tape out with the extras in the booklet and they sold 3 million more copies of The Wizard of Oz. And it was such a proof positive that these anniversary issues with extras were viable, very marketable things for major movies. Wouldn't you say? 3.1 million. 3.1 million units.

Okay, good. We were a little bit, you know, everybody was shocked. The goal was, I think, seven or eight hundred thousand. And the fact that we were able to do that because it was also unprecedented with the booklet that you wrote, John. Yes. And the consumer got such a value from that. That was 30 plus years ago. What followed four years later set the tone as a Laserdisc box for things that, you know, it was hugely expensive. We did a thing called the Ultimate Oz. When we did the 50th anniversary edition, we found a Technicolor print in the basement of CBS. And it meant that we could get the colors right. So we were really, really happy about that.

But we didn't realize that we could do even better because a Technicolor print is not an ideal source to use for mastering. The colors were right, but the image was a little bit soft. And Turner had started making interpositives from the original camera negatives of their color films, starting with Gone with the Wind back in 88, because they found that the color reversal internegatives that had been made for preservation had color breathing. They just didn't look good. And so for Oz, a new interpositive was made.

That was the source for the transfer of the ultimate Oz, which was a VHS box set with two tapes. One was the feature with all the goodies looking better than ever. And the other was the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the making of a movie classic, Jack Kelly Jr.'s TV special that John worked very closely on the creation of and is credited as such. And I had made a deal with Jack because we didn't have home video rights to that special. I had made a deal with Jack for inclusion in that set, which cost $100. The Laserdisc version of that went totally bonkers over the moon because we put all of the Oz pre-recordings. We were able to put nine hours of all the scoring sessions so people could hear Judy cough and them joke with each other in between the tracks. And people had never heard that before. And we had a booklet and a guide and we had a script reproduction and that sold incredibly well.

And then fast forward to six years later, the movie is at Warner Home Video and all of that material fit on one DVD. It was a single DVD that had all the scoring sessions, all the special material. And we kept improving the DVDs and eventually the Blu-ray and the 3D Blu-ray. And now 30 plus years later, since that first anniversary edition, we have the 4K, which came out in 2019, which looks unbelievable. which came out in 2019, which looks unbelievable. And four years earlier, we had done a test of 4K Wizard of Oz where Dorothy had a beard like Bluto in the Popeye cartoons. It looked awful. And I thought, we'll never be able to put old films out in 4K.

Well, the technology grew, the ability to work with the technology grew. And as a result, I went and saw the tests and was just blown away by how beautiful it was. So that film is still leading the way as the technology changes. It still leads the way, the technology changes, it still leads the way. It's still available. And for those who aren't high tech, they can buy a copy even on DVD for a very low amount of money. And the film is available. It's always streaming on HBO Max. And that's the beautiful new master that they have. Max, and that's the beautiful new master that they have. It's accessible to everyone now. I could not have dreamed as a kid of being able to see The Wizard of Oz whenever I wanted. So I always think about what would it have been like if I had been born into the technology of this generation? Because I used to have to cut school and get on a train from suburban New York,

go into the city, go to the Museum of Modern Art to see a film because it's so hard to see. Now, almost everything is accessible to the consumer, which is a wonderful thing. And we need to make sure, from my point of view, that physical media continues along with digital media. Because physical media, you can hold in your hand and you know it's there and you know that you won't be subjected to some contract expiring with a provider or it's no longer there. If you have the disc in your hand, it's yours forever. Meanwhile, as we talk about Judy Garland, I'm very happy to say that Warner Brothers Home Entertainment is carrying the torch for Judy with The Wizard of Oz and Easter Parade. And all of her other films, either on DVD or Blu-ray, are available from Warner Archive. That comes from our library. So that takes you from the short La Fiesta de Santa Barbara all the way to A Star is Born. So Judy's Star is Born, which obviously I'm a little biased.

I happen to love the newest one, but I think Judy's is without a doubt the very best of them all. An amazing film that I find new things to discover in each time I see it. John, I did want to ask about The Wizard of Oz and the importance of that in film history. Where does it rank? I think you look at the formal polls, the American Film Institute, for example.

The Wizard of Oz is number 10 on its list of all-time greatest films. It's number three, I believe, on the list of fantasies. No, I'm sorry. It's number one on the list of fantasies and number three on the list of musicals. Over the Rainbow is the number one motion picture song of all time. These are in the polls they've done. And Judy Garland is the eighth greatest female star of films. And she's the only one in the top 10 whose body of work is really in musicals. I mean, Marilyn Monroe is there as well, of course, and Audrey Hepburn is there who did a

couple, but only one of which she used her own voice. So again, the idea that a musical comedy performer is ranked that high, because again, she was so much more than a musical comedy performer. ranked that high because, again, she was so much more than a musical comedy performer. You go back to Over the Rainbow being the number one film song. Also in 2000, when we changed centuries or were about to, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts did a poll of the greatest songs of the 20th century. And Over the Rainbow was number one in that as well. You look at the value to Wizard of Oz surviving costumes and props, and they have not stopped selling. The ruby slippers that were sold at the MGM auction in 1970 brought $15,000, which was an outrageous sum. The only thing that sold for that much, and it was equally $15,000

at the MGM auction in 1970, was the full-size showboat that was in the lot lake. There is all of that. There's the fact that you can show a photograph of the four Oz principles, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion. And they are immediately recognizable, probably more so than any motion picture characters across all surviving generations right now. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, I don't know, the Teletubbies, whatever you want to look at, the Ninja Turtles, they all have their niche, but Oz is just the movie that speaks to more people more consistently. And that the kids like George and I, who grew up with it in the fifties and sixties, many of that, my generation, our generation, they have grandkids who are watching it and still watching it. I think there is a loss. I don't mean to throw a dampener on this, but I think there is a certain

loss in the fact that Oz is only on cable now and only on home video and streaming because when it was on one of the networks and only available that way, well, even when it was available on home video and still on the networks, anybody could see it. Anybody who had a television could turn The Wizard of Oz on and watch it just by dint of having a set. But if they're not getting it now at three and four and five on TV at home, they're getting it at friends' homes. I have friends who fell in love with it in preschool because it was one of the few movies the teachers could pull out and get dead silence because the kids were so intrigued by it. And as we said in our earlier podcast, when we were talking about Judy's ability to communicate in all of her films,

Wizard of Oz, she's that first frame of the film, running home with Toto, and she's a little girl who's worried about her dog. Well, immediately, every kid watching that film can identify with this child. She's 16 playing 12, but with the emotions of a vulnerable child, even younger, a child worried about her pet. It doesn't matter that she's a little girl. It could be a little boy. They have so many kids have that identification. The same thing with the idea that, oh, she's in trouble with her school teacher. There isn't a kid who hasn't worried about that. Then the dog is taken away from her. Then the dog comes back and she runs away from home. Then she is fighting to get back home and she gets hijacked by a storm. Well, that's the first 16 minutes of The Wizard of Oz. It's still in black and white or sepia.

Haven't even gotten to color yet. And every kid watching is so involved because Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, was a great entertainer. MGM in 1939 was the preeminent movie entertainer. And Judy Garland, as the posters used to say in the 60s, was the world's greatest entertainer. And the composite of those three things pulls people into that story to this day. And you don't watch the movie. You don't read the book. You jump into the screen, you jump into the page and you go along on the journey. And by the time it's done, you're sold. Long before it's done, you're sold, actually. I think then too,

you may grow away from it a little bit as a teenager, especially in this day and age. But you watch it again a little later and you come to realize that all those fears in that film, Dorothy's fear of not being able to get home, the scarecrow wondering if he's intelligent, the tin man wondering if he is loving and capable of being loved, and the lion being afraid of being afraid. Those are the emotions that everybody goes through all of their lives. And the Wizard of Oz tells you at the end that we all have those things. You have to look in them and manifest them and you have to bring them to the surface and use them yourself. But they are there to use. Ray Bolger said, those are the gifts that God gives to people on earth. And if you use them properly, you reach home. Now, Oz has taken a bad rap for the there's no place like home theme at the end and all.

Well, she can't go back and live in Kansas forever. They're missing the point. Home to Dorothy at that point is the people she loves who love her. And as you're older, that becomes somebody else. It becomes a husband, a wife, whatever. Becomes the people you choose as your family. And that's your home. And Oz has all of those subliminal things going on, but they never, ever, ever get in

the way of the fact that it was produced and written and performed as pure musical comedy entertainment and the very best kind of musical comedy entertainment. I know that's a long answer, but Oz deserves the, I think, the psychological placement, the recognition placement. It was also, to go back on recognition, one of the first 25 films placed on the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. One of the first 25 of the tens of thousands of movies made. And three of Judy's other films are on that registry as well. Love Finds Andy Hardy, Meet Me in St. Louis. And as George said, a star is born because they are preeminent films that have to be preserved, that have something to do with the American way of life, the American

way of entertainment, what our country has produced of its very best. Judy Garland is a huge part of that. You look at the other accomplishments, you look at the fact that she was the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for Judy at Carnegie Hall, a year which also saw that album win for her best female vocal performance, best engineering, best album cover, and best artist and repertoire producer. It's in the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Over the Rainbow recording is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Wizard of Oz soundtrack album that MGM Records put out in 1956 is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Judy has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys.

Michael Feinstein debuted his Judy Garland Centennial Concert. It's a two-part concert here at Feinstein's, his club in New York in December. And he said, it's appropriate that we're doing this across the December holidays because Judy Garland is indeed the gift that keeps on giving. That's a very acute summation. No matter how many times I see that film, I am amazed what MGM was able to achieve in 1939, the degree of the craftsmanship when there were no computer special effects and Technicolor was in its infancy and that they were able to achieve that and the brilliance of every aspect of it from the costumes to the hairstyles

to the underscore not to mention the costumes to the hairstyles to the underscore, not to mention the performances and the songs. It is astounding. And to me, it represents, ironically, in another way, so does Gone with the Wind, both mostly directed by the same person. These films represented Hollywood at its apex. And especially Oz represented the MGM, the Dream Factory, because it opened a few weeks before the beginning of World War II in Europe. And that would cast a pall over the future. And after World War II, Hollywood was never the same. The world was never the same. And yet that film has retained a timelessness that my experience of it as a child was, I didn't know I was looking at an old movie.

And I remember, you know, at the beginning of the movie, they had that little preface where it said for over 30 years, this story has enchanted. And I thought like CBS had put that on the TV. You know, I didn't know it was part of the original movie because I didn't know anything about the book or the play or anything. But the timelessness of it. And you can say this about a lot of films. It's true of Singing in the Rain. It's true of so many films that, especially if they're a period piece, they don't date if they're made well and made with intelligence. And I think that's remarkable. But the Wizard of Oz would not have been the Wizard of Oz that we know and love

if it hadn't been for Judy. She was the core of its greatness. And everybody around her made that into the classic that it is. John, I did have a question. How did Judy get cast in The Wizard of Oz? Because she was still fairly young. Well, she'd been at MGM. They started Wizard of Oz in October 1938. She had been at MGM for exactly three years at that point. And she had done six feature films in that time and been a regular on two radio series. MGM first put her on the radio because they wanted people to get used to the idea

that this was a 13, 14, 15-year-old girl who sounded like a 30-year-old woman, whether she was balloting or swinging. And she'd been on a couple of vaudeville tours under the studio's aegis. So she was very, very much an up-and-coming star. And that clicked in after two years, because in 1937, she sang Dear Mr. Gable, You Made Me Love You as a special piece of Roger Eden's material at his birthday party. And she was already cast in the film Broadway Melody of 1938. But then they took out a couple of her other songs from that film and put in Dear Mr. Gable. And it became her first hit record. It was her first public cross-generational public identification because Gable was such a huge star. And all the public

had to do was hear Judy Garland, and she was a star. Once you were exposed to her, you did not forget this little girl. And she was on the screen. And because of the success, her success in Broadway Melody of 1938, instantaneously in theaters in fall of 1937, she was, I think, eighth or ninth billed in that film on the screen and in the ads in the papers. But once it opened, MGM's publicity department created new press ads for the film that said, Broadway Melody of 1938, Robert Taylor, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland. And at that point, Arthur Freed, who had been at Metro for eight years writing the lyrics to Singing in the Rain, Broadway Rhythm, Broadway Melody, You Are My Lucky Star, wanted to segue from being a songwriter, lyricist, into producing musical films. And he hadn't, and Louis B. Mayer liked him, and Arthur cozied up to Louis B. Mayer every chance he got. And he said, I want to produce, boss. And Mayer said, all right, find a property.

And who will you use? And Mayer knew that the studio was not going to give him Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy or Eleanor Powell, who were the big musical stars. He said, I want to use the kid. Everybody loves Judy. As we said once before, when we were speaking, Freed later said, I made my bet on Judy and she helped me as much as I helped her. And he went out and found the Wizard of Oz property and bought it for MGM. There was a big bidding war going on for it because across the time Arthur was looking for a property, Disney opened Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which took musical fantasy right through the ceiling as a box office event. And Freed thought, well, we're going to do Wizard of Oz with live actors.

We can go one better than this. And Samuel Goldwyn had the rights to film Wizard of Oz, but he made a $35,000 profit by selling it to MGM for Judy Garland. Fox wanted it for Shirley Temple. Universal probably would have picked it up for Deanna Durbin. But MGM fought and won out and got the property. There was brief noise made by Lowe's Incorporated, which controlled MGM from New York. We love Judy. We know she's going to be a star, but we can't build this big million five musical on her. We shouldn't be doing a million five Technicolor musical anyway, but we need box office insurance. And so there was some behind closed doors, very private. Can we get Shirley Temple, number one box office from

Fox? And Fox said, no. And Roger Edens of MGM went over to hear Shirley sing live. Everybody had heard her on the screen, but he wanted to see what she really sang like in person. And he came back and told Arthur Freed, her vocal limitations are insurmountable. She's a great little package of talent, but she cannot sing Dorothy Gale the way we want Dorothy Gale to sing. So the scripts were written for Judy. Arlen and Harburg came in a couple months later. They were writing the songs for Judy. That's how it became Judy Garland's movie. Now, in the pre-production months and 15 writers and countless crazy scripts with new characters and a princess in Oz who sang opera so Judy could be an orphan from Kansas who sang jazz

and a prince who was going to be transformed into a cowardly lion and Dorothy and the wizard were going to escape in his balloon, but it was going to be destroyed by a wood pucker and they would fall to the ground and be rescued by the Munchkin fire department. I mean, this was all part of the early scripts of Oz. Luckily, all this time, it got them further back to bomb. They got better costumes. They got better makeup and hairstyles. But by the time they started shooting, the budget had gone up to two million plus. And then the process of having to restart the picture three times or twice, they started it three times, restarted it twice. Eventually, the budget jumped to $2.7 million, which was just unheard of. And then MGM spent another million dollars on promotion and

prints when it came out. There was this 16-year-old girl who had been elevated to star building at MGM during Wizard of Oz, but she was carrying on her shoulders a $3 million Technicolor musical. But that's how much the studio believed in her. That's how much faith they had in the fact that she could do this. And as has been said, she is in that movie for all but about five of the 101 minutes. The only time she's off camera is when they're photographing Miss Gulch on the bike and when the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion climb the mountain to go to rescue Dorothy from the Wicked Witch. Otherwise, it's all Judy all the time. And the fact that it's her sincerity

and her believability that sustains all of that. As George said, she is the film. And I go a step farther than that and say there was certainly nobody else in Hollywood at that time who could have played Dorothy as effectively. I don't think there's been a teenage star since who could have played Dorothy that effectively in terms of voice, dance, drama, comedy, communicative power. There was only one Judy Garland, and she proved that over and over and over in all the other films and the TV shows and the concerts. I didn't used to be this declarative about her. I always kind of said, well, one of the greats. I don't think anybody else comes close. Certainly people who are as revered and respected. But in terms of making that emotional contact with an audience and having the ability to uplift anybody who hears her or sees her or involve her, if the sad emotion is sad, she's making you sad or happy. Sorry, I ramble. I think that's wonderful. Thank you. I really think that's wonderful. I think that's

what people need to hear and people need to remember because time can be sometimes cruel and those who are unenlightened and uneducated might make a joke about Judy Garland being an icon for a certain group of people, but they don't have a clue what they're talking about. Precisely. And they don't realize the art. I'll quote the title of one of your books, The Art and Artistry of Judy Garland. I mean, that's lost on people. I mean, that's lost on people. And the art and artistry is on full display with this 16-year-old girl in that amazing film. And I also think it's a good opportunity as any to debunk the rumor, the false, stupid, it drives me crazy even talking about it. There is this untruth that was perpetuated by a bad author in the 1970s who wrote a book that said The Wizard of Oz was a failure in theaters.

And that's absolutely not true. The audiences were lined up in droves. The reviews were phenomenal. The audience response was phenomenal and half the world didn't get to see the movie until World War II was over because two weeks after the movie opened, half the world was engaged in war

and it wasn't until the middle of the late 40s that the rest of the world got to see the film. And it was beloved everywhere it was shown. It didn't make its money back in its original release. That is true. But it made its money back before it was sold to television. And the amount of money it's generated since then, I can't even imagine. But it's not about that. It's more about that movie belongs to America. And this is a very important point. Oz is a phenomenon of the United States of America. It is well regarded and well liked all over the world. But because of those CBS showings and because of the impact that it had in terms of the American values of home and family, regardless of where your home and who your family is, made it universal in its appeal. And that is why the film will live forever,

as will Dorothy, a dear colleague of mine who happens to be one of the people I report to here, her daughter is, I think, five and a half and is the most adorable Dorothy you've ever seen. And she dresses up in the gingham outfit and she loves the movie. She doesn't know that movie is older than her grandparents. She thinks that it's like the bee's knees. And she wants to be Dorothy. John, how many hundreds of little girls have you come across when you go to these Oz festivals that are dressed up like Dorothy? Thousands of them, I'm sure.

Well, that's just it. I started doing the Oz festivals in Frank Baum's hometown in Kansas, in Judy Garland's hometown. There were four major ones. And I was invited to emcee and then speak and presented all of them, some of the surviving munchkins. There'd be parades. And in 1989, when this all started and there were parades and literally tens of thousands of people came out to these Oz festivals to see the Munchkins ride by in a float. And when this happened, I remember thinking, gosh, I hope it goes on beyond this, but it can't get any bigger than it is now in 1989. And I go back every year. I go back to Chittanango, New York, to Baum's hometown in June of 2022. And there will be a parade in a village of 5,000 people.

And pending the weather, there will be 25,000 to 30,000 people watching that parade. And the little girls dressed in blue and white checks and red shoes now are the daughters of the ones I saw at the 50th anniversary parades before, or the granddaughters and the little boys dressed as the scarecrow, Tim and the lion, or a flying monkey, or it is just overwhelming. And it's not something that the kids put away. It's something to which they come back. And I can tell you anecdote after anecdote about adults whom I've known over the last 30 years, who have stories about seeing the movie, watching the movie, finding somebody who had a color set. You can only see it once a

year. And it was a national event. When Wizard of Oz was first shown on CBS, it attracted an audience of 45 million people. Now, today, if a first run network show gets 10, 12 million people, everybody gets a bonus. But 45 million, and it went up, got greater than that as the movie increased in popularity. God bless it. And God bless Judy Garland for carrying it to that kind of timelessness, because she does. She's the one who pulls you in. And as George Cukor, who was one of the interim directors of Oz, they went through five directors on that picture. He's the one who took the blonde wig off her and baby doll makeup and got her out of a party dress and made her look more like a girl from Kansas when they started filming the second time. And

all of the original footage was junked. He said, the joke, Judy, is that you are Dorothy Gale. You know, he didn't put it in this phrase, but it's true. She was a girl from the Midwest, from Minnesota. And forgive me, the tornado of her talent carried her into that magic land of Hollywood. And George Cukor said, you don't have to act. She had been directed in the first two weeks of filming kind of in a storybook, heroine, fancy schmancy sort of way to go with the wardrobe they'd given her and the look. And he said, no, you just be yourself. You just be real because then it makes everything around you so much more extraordinary. He didn't say, in effect,

you have to be the anchor, but that's what she became. And that's what she was in all of her pictures. You care about the Smith family in Meet Me in St. Louis having to leave St. Louis because, again, she is the anchor. She's the one. They're all upset for different reasons, but she's the one who sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and brings the denouement into happening. She's the one who carries the audience along. Star is Born, Easter Parade,

Let's Put on a Show with Mickey Rooney. She's the real person in all of that. The fireworks go off, Mickey is bouncing off walls, Fred Astaire is dancing, whatever. She's the reality. And again, that's why she deserves all of this recognition 50 some years after she's passed, because there has never been and there never will be another one like her. And there are very few people you can say that about. Exactly. And you can say that with confidence and reverence.

And the fan base is worldwide. And it knows no age boundaries. True, younger people are not as likely in numbers to embrace her the way they did in generations past. her the way they did in generations past. But there are always groups of young people who find her and explore her work, both as a performer and as a human being. Because what a lot of people don't know about her is she was actually a very funny person. And she was so beloved on a personal level by the people who were her dear friends and who knew her well. And of course, by her audiences. But don't believe the, there's a lot of horse frockings out there in opportunistic books that dwell on the negative and are filled with lies.

that dwell on the negative and are filled with lies. What to believe is what you see when you see her perform and what you hear when you hear her sing. Or if you're seeing her and hearing her at the same time, it's even better. And I think that's the best way to honor her on her 100th birthday. I'll throw this into the mix too. Not only are there bad books,

but social media has taken idiocy to new levels on every topic. But Judy Garland has fallen victim to that as well. Yet you look at all the clips of her on YouTube from age seven, which is the first footage we have of her with the Gump Sisters, up to a few months before she died. And there are always the naysayers and the gossip mongers among the comments, but over and over and over. Oh, I'm 16. I never knew there was anybody. Oh, she's so wonderful. Why isn't music like this today? Oh, I just, you know, she's so this, she's so that, and she'll always be rediscovered. And the fact that Warner has all of these DVDs and makes them available, they're going to be streaming all of her songs, as George has mentioned.

It's lovely to celebrate her centennial, but you could celebrate Judy Garland any day of the week, any month of the year, any year of the century, and she would be worth the heralding. Absolutely. And I think it reminds me of when we were in that six week rush to finish the documentary. I don't know exactly how it was going to be structured. We had found some really wonderful material from her television show, including a song that was never broadcast. And I thought that's how the show was going to end. But instead, John selected Judy Garland singing a Vincent Newman song called Through the Years.

called Through the Years. And there couldn't be a better piece of music to wrap up this whole story of this amazing talent than that song and that performance. And it had absolutely blown me away. Because when I got the final answer tape of what the show was going to be, Because when I got the final answer tape of what the show was going to be, I thought we were going to end differently. And John had this brilliant idea of a song that's not that well known. It's been in a couple of movies and it's part of the Great American Songbook. But the way she sings it, I think about that performance and it almost moves me to tears. It's really quite wonderful. She only performed it twice, once on a TV special and once on her series. And it was her avowed favorite song. That's how I knew about it before I ever heard her sing it. And again, the lyric by Edward Heyman is, through the night, I'll be a star to guide you,

Shining bright, though clouds may come and hide you, Through the years, till love is gone and time first disappears, I'll come to you, smiling through the years. Well, Judy Garland singing that into a camera with a Mort Lindsay orchestration is as good as it gets. They had talked about wanting to end the documentary with Smile or Over the Rainbow, but both of those clips had been shown and shown and shown and through the years never had been. And I was very grateful that they went along with that idea because it was just one of the suggestions tossed into the hopper. But Susan Lacey, the executive producer of American Masters, recognized immediately what that song was saying

and what her performance was saying. You bring us past that documentary of 2004 up to a couple years ago when Lorna Luft, Judy's daughter, who's a good friend, Michael Feinstein, a good friend and good friends with Liza Minnelli, Judy's other daughter. And me. Well, we're all friends, but they, Lorna and Michael called me separately and said, you know, we're moving mama from the cemetery in upstate New York to Hollywood forever, where we can all be together because there's no space for her around her at the cemetery in New York. And we're going to have a Judy Garland pavilion at Hollywood forever. And Lorna said to me, and then Michael called me and they both said, what do you think should go on the facing?

You know, Lorna said, it'll say Judy Garland, it'll be the dates, but it has to say something else. And it wasn't my suggestion alone. We all three had thought of the exact same thing. And I think we were feeling each other out to see what the general consensus would be. And that's why when you go to Hollywood forever, Judy Garland, the dates, and then below that, it says, I'll come to you smiling through the years. Perfect. To my way of thinking anyway. George is either crying or has gone out for a drink. I was going to say,

I can't think of a better way to end this discussion about Judy and Wizard of Oz and everything else that relates to her than what we've just come up with. Well, George, John, I can't thank you enough for coming on this podcast and sharing your memories, sharing your insights, your career. A lot of your career has, of course, been around Judy, but also just encapsulating, I think, for the fans, why she's so important to us. I haven't mentioned, but my mom's name was Dorothy. At my wedding, the song Over the Rainbow was the song we played. There are just so many ways I think that Judy, her movies have impacted our culture, our lives in small ways that we don't even think of, but it's there. And it's fabulous that you were able to come on and share with the fans

for her centennial, your knowledge and in your stories about Judy. So thank you. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, George. Thank you, both of you. This has been a really wonderful way to salute an amazing human being who graced this earth for far too short a period of time. And we're lucky that we have her films and her recordings to remember her forever. And that's what's important. Amen. Well, thanks again to George Feltenstein and John Fricke for coming on The Extras today to share their stories and to celebrate the life of Judy Garland. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and listen to our June 22 Warner Archive release podcast

where George and John discuss some of their earliest collaborations on Judy Garland projects. And we go into detail about three of Judy's films that are new to Blu-ray this month. The 1941 Ziegfeld Girl, 1942's For Me and My Gal, and 1945's The Clock.

For those of you interested in learning more about John Fricke and his books on Judy Garland and some of the movies we discussed in this podcast, you can find links on the website at www.theextras.tv. Also, follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheExtrasTV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv. Also follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at TheExtras.tv to stay up to date on the latest episodes and for exclusive images and behind the scenes information about the episodes and upcoming guests. And if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider.

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