LANGLEY’S SCREENPLAY FOR WIZARD OF OZ SEQUEL DISCOVERED
by Michael Gessel
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 42, no. 1 (Spring 1998), pgs. 14–17
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Gessel, Michael. “Langley’s Screenplay for Wizard of Oz Sequel Discovered.” Baum Bugle 42, no. 1 (1998): 14–17.
MLA 9th ed.:
Gessel, Michael. “Langley’s Screenplay for Wizard of Oz Sequel Discovered.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 42, no. 1, 2020, pp. 14–17.
If MGM produced a blockbuster like The Wizard of Oz today, it would inevitably be followed by a sequel or two or three. After all, there were enough books in the series for dozens of new Oz movies. But in 1939, sequels were rarer than today. Besides, with World War II immediately following the release of the picture, the studio wouldn’t risk another expensive production without the possibility of international markets. In late 1940, there were rumors that MGM was planning a sequel for I 941 as a vehicle for Shirley Temple.[1] However, there is no evidence that the idea got beyond the talking stage. A screenplay attributed to Noel Langley for L.Frank Baum’s second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, does exist in the collections of the Library of Congress. Though nothing is known about its origins, it is fascinating to conjecture that this was the long-lost MGM abandoned sequel.
The 1939 MGM film version of The Wizard was written by a team of almost a dozen screenwriters. Langley wrote an early treatment and the first complete screenplay for the film. His first draft contains many bizarre plot twists that he and other writers changed in later versions. However, a number of his ideas were ultimately incorporated into the film. He proposed introducing Glinda in a bubble and making Dorothy’s visit to Oz a dream. Also, it was his idea to have the Kansas characters reappear in the Land of Oz. Langley received a screen credit as the co-author of the screenplay along with Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf.
Langley’s screenplay for Land generally follows Baum’s book, though Langley added scenes that take place in America. The story opens on a poor neighborhood in Chicago on the day of Halloween, 1904. Tippie, a ten-year-old girl, lives in an orphanage run by the Matron. The sponsor of the orphanage is the evil Mrs. Hockenheimer who threatens to send Tippie to the poor farm. Mrs. Hockenheimer has a son, Elmer.
Tippie would like to be a boy and have rich parents who would find her in the orphanage. She runs away, falls into a river, and is rescued by Officer Boone. She is treated by the good Dr. Phlebbins and his wife, a nurse. She is also helped by Dr. Tinner, a medical specialist. When she is returned to the orphanage, she declares she will run away to a place where she can be a boy and where no one could find her.
The scene shifts to Mother Mombi’s cottage in the Gillikin country of Oz. The description of the area is similar to Baum’s account, including Mombi’s four-horned cow. Mother Mombi is Mrs. Hockenheimer from the Chicago scene. Tippie is her adopted son who is forced to do chores all day long.
General Jinjur, who is played by the Matron from the orphanage, leads ten village women into a cottage where they are turned into witches. Tippie escapes from an attic window and watches the witches casting spells in a clearing in the woods.
Mombi announces that ten years earlier, the Wizard left Oz. Now she is ready to take the Scarecrow’s throne and install Jinjur as ruler. Tippie realizes he has to warn the Scarecrow, who is now the ruler of Oz, but Tippie is discovered and the witches send cats to attack him. He is rescued and given the Powder of Life by Glinda, played by the nurse from Chicago. Tippie sprinkles the powder on a carved pumpkin who comes to life. Vines and leaves grow out of the pumpkin taking the shape of a body—none other than Officer Boone.
Tippie puts more of the Powder of Life on Pumpkin, but some spills on a sawhorse, which comes to life. Here the dialogue closely follows Baum’s account of the wakening of the Sawhorse. Baum’s color scheme is also followed as they go from the purple land of the Gillikins toward the Emerald City. The group sings a marching song, each with a verse. When they reach the yellow brick road, the countryside is emerald green. Meanwhile, the witches call up hundreds of cats and Mombi turns them into women soldiers.
Tippie and his friends meet the Scarecrow at his Emerald City palace. The encounter between the Scarecrow and Pumpkin is similar to the scene in the book when an interpreter is called to translate their conversation. The interpreter is played by the wicked son of the Chicago scenes, Elmer Hockenheimer, who is in league with Mombi, and he grabs the Scarecrow. Jinjur’s soldiers crash through the gates of the Emerald City, meeting little resistance.
Tippie, Scarecrow, Pumpkin, and the Sawhorse escape through an underground river just as the soldiers come upon them. The soldiers don’t follow because they are afraid they will get their feet wet and ruin their hair. A whirlpool pulls down the adventurers. In the next scene, Tippie is in bed. The boy Tippie’s face dissolves and the girl orphan Tippie’s face fades in. She has a high fever. She cries out for Pumpkin and Glinda to save her from the Wicked Witch. The scene shifts back to the banks of the whirlpool.
The group heads to the palace of Tin Man in the land of the Winkies. They go from yellow country to red country as they enter the land of the Winkies. (The Land of the Winkies is yellow in the Baum book.) Tin Man is played by Dr. Tinner. Scarecrow, Tin Man, Tippie, and the Sawhorse return to the Emerald City to recapture the throne.
On their way, sunflowers block their path. Tin Man swings his axe but the flowers turn to girls. Another mishap occurs when Sawhorse breaks his foot in a rabbit hole. They meet H.M. Wogglebug, TEITCA (thoroughly educated in the Civilized Arts) who proposes using Pumpkin’s leg for the Sawhorse.
Mombi sends a wall of fire to stop the adventurers. However, they tie two sofas together with a moose head, palm leaves, and a mop to make a Gump which flies over the fire. Mombi confuses them by moving south to east and west to north.
Mombi confesses to Jinjur that the real king of Oz was King Pastoria the 291st. Mombi earlier had dispatched the king and hid his daughter Ozma. Tippie was somehow connected with this, so Mombi wants to kill Tippie.
Meanwhile, the gump is flying all night in the wrong direction and crashes in the mountain nest of giant Jackdaws. Scarecrow is stuffed with dollar bills found in the nest and the Gump is repaired. Cut to the orphanage. Mrs. Hockenheimer wants Tippie taken out of the orphanage and the heat for her room turned off.
Dissolve to the Jackdaw’s nest. The gump is repaired and Glinda gives Tippie a compass that can’t be deceived by Mombi. Glinda tells them of Ozma and gives Tin Man a box only to open in an emergency.
When they return to the Emerald City, Mombi is prepared. She has a gallows to hang Tippie, a hose to rust Tin Man, a stove to burn Scarecrow, a giant fly swatter for the Wogglebug, and a pie dish for Pumpkin.
As the noose is placed around Tippie’s neck, Mombi gloats that she.turned Ozma into Tippie. Tin Man opens Glinda’s box and hundreds of mice come out, scaring the soldiers off. They turn back into cats and chase the mice away.
Glinda appears and with a wave of her arm turns Mombi into stone and Tippie back into Ozma. With another wave of her arm she sends Jinjur home. Scarecrow is made Secretary of Public Welfare. Ozma is made Queen and coronated.
Dissolve to the orphanage. Tippie has survived the life-threatening fever. Tippie is adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Phlebbins. The screenplay ends with the three driving their carriage out of the orphanage as the other children wave goodby.
Many elements of Langley’s Land are similar to The Wizard. Tippie’s lament in the orphanage after she runs away is similar to Judy Garland’s wistful dreaming in “Over the Rainbow.” Tippie and Pumpkin’s marching song is reminiscent of the song in The Wizard, “Off to See the Wizard.” The use of American characters in Oz and the explanation that the whole story is a dream are both devices Langley used in his script for The Wizard.
Like Langley’s screenplays for The Wizard of Oz, his version of Land is confusing and spends too much time set in the United States instead of Oz. It would have needed considerable reworking to turn into a viable film.
Langley goes overboard with the use of Chicago characters in the Oz scenes. Perhaps this is expected, since the device was one of Langley’s major contributions to the screenplay of The Wizard and he used it too much in his original script. In Langley’s screenplay for The Wizard, there are several strange Kansas characters who show up as Oz people who were eliminated in later drafts because they were unnecessary to the story. One pair is Mrs. [sic] Gulch’s son Walter, who appears in Oz as Bulbo, the son of the Wicked Witch of the West. In the sequel, Langley restores a similar pair by having the stuffy son of the evil Mrs. Hockenheimer of Chicago reappear as the son of the Oz witch Mombi.
It is surprising that Langley had enough interest to write a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Born in South Africa, Langley did not grow up with the Oz series.[2] After The Wizard was released, he said he loathed it and thought that it “missed the boat all the way around.” Later, however, he softened his stand saying it was “not a bad picture.”[3]
Yet the screenplay pays homage to Baum in many subtle ways. Many of the Oz scenes in Land closely follow Baum’s details. Langley demonstrates a knowledge of Baum by placing the American scenes in Chicago, which is where Baum lived when he wrote The Wizard and Land. Also, the story takes place in 1904, the year Baum wrote the book. The name Pastoria for the former king of Oz was not mentioned until a later Oz book (though it was the name used in the 1903 stage version of The Wizard). It is curious that Langley used the full, original title of The Marvelous Land of Oz, a title which had not been used since the original printing many decades earlier and which was later shortened to The Land of Oz.
When and why Langley wrote the script is a mystery. The script is undated, but was written before 1968 when it was acquired by the Library of Congress. The only clue to its date is the use of the phrase “unidentified flying object,” which was coined by the Air Force in the mid-1950s. Langley’s last screen credit was Snow White and the Three Stooges released in 1961. He wrote little in the following twenty years before his death in 1980. It is possible he wrote The Marvelous Land of Oz in the late 1950s or early 1960s while he was still writing screenplays.
Though Langley’s screenplay was never produced, the second Oz book was used for several Wizard sequels. The Land of Oz was turned into an hour-long film by Shirley Temple in 1960 for NBC television’s The Shirley Temple Show. In 1974, Filmation Associates released Journey Back to Oz, loosely based on Land, using the voices of Judy Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, as Dorothy, and Margaret Hamilton as Aunt Em. In 1985, Disney released Return to Oz based on Land and the third book in the Oz series, Ozma of Oz. The Disney film was the only one of the Oz sequels to receive widespread distribution by a major studio and none achieved the popularity of its predecessor.
Perhaps Langley’s first draft—if sufficiently polished–could have become the basis of a successful sequel to The Wizard of Oz. But, more likely, it would have required more of the original magic that went into producing The Wizard than just Langley’s touch to make another film classic.
[1] John Fricke, Jay Scarfone, William Stillman, The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History. New York: Warner Books, 1989, p. 232.
[2] Michael Patrick Hearn, introduction to The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay, New York: Dell Publishing, 1989, p. 10.
[3] Roland Turner, editor, The Annual Obituary 1980. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1980. p. 665.
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