The Wizard Of Oz,

In 1937, MGM gave songwriter and aspiring producer Arthur Freed the green light to make a movie he had always dreamed of bringing to the silver screen. It was a fantasy based on the popular storybooks by L. Frank Baum about a girl from Kansas who is transported to a magical land called Oz. For decades Baum's books had been translated into stage productions, radio shows and even film, but nothing would come close to the spectacular that MGM would create using a brand-new invention: Technicolor®. Freed had another motivation for making The Wizard of Oz. He wanted a vehicle to promote the talents of an up-and-coming ingenue named Judy Garland.

MGM would spend an unprecedented $2.77 million making The Wizard of Oz -- almost three times the cost of an average film at the time. (That year, only the epic Gone With the Wind exceeded Oz's budget at $4 million.) Although the film would perform modestly at the box office when it was first released in June, 1939, it would prove its staying power a decade later when MGM re-released the film and more than recouped its investment. By that time, Arthur Freed had become a major producer of some of MGM's biggest musicals and had succeeded in propelling young Judy Garland over the rainbow into super-stardom.


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