SCARY, BIZARRE, WEIRD, AND WONDERFUL!

Matthew Arnold Talks Emerald City and Bringing Baum’s Oz to a New Generation

by Sarah Crotzer

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 61, no. 2 (Autumn 2017), pgs. 29–34

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Crotzer, Sarah. “Scary, Bizarre, Weird, and Wonderful! Matthew Arnold Talks Emerald City—and about Bringing Baum’s Oz to a New Generation.” Baum Bugle 61, no. 2 (2017): 29–34.

MLA 9th ed.:

Crotzer, Sarah. “Scary, Bizarre, Weird, and Wonderful! Matthew Arnold Talks Emerald City—and about Bringing Baum’s Oz to a New Generation.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 61, no. 2, 2017, pp. 29–34.

At the start of 2013, you probably wouldn’t have recognized Matthew Arnold’s name. His first mainstream credits came that year: first as the writer-director of the horror film Shadow People, starring The Walking Dead’s Dallas Roberts, and then as the creator and showrunner of Siberia, a limited series broadcast on NBC during summer. Even if you managed to miss both of those projects, however, our own Baum Bugle would have clued you into Arnold’s next creative endeavor. During a roundup of potential TV projects, the Winter 2013 Bugle reported that NBC was “looking down the Yellow Brick Road with Matthew Arnold’s Emerald City, a ‘dark reimagining of the classic tale of Oz in the vein of “Game of Thrones,” drawing upon stories from Baum’s original 14 books.’”

Wedged between news of a CBS “medical soap” called Dorothy and a Lifetime series called Red Brick Road, there was no indication that Emerald City deserved any special attention or would even be filmed. (Indeed, an entirely separate NBC pilot called Emerald City—which seems to have been inspired by The Devil Wears Prada—was reported in the Spring 2011 issue.) Yet it quickly became apparent that Arnold’s Emerald City had gained more traction than most Oz-related pitches. While the Autumn 2014 Bugle followed Variety’s lead in reporting that NBC had “dropped its plans to run the show in late 2014 or 2015,” we noted that “Universal Television [was] expected to shop it to other potential outlets,” and by the Winter 2015 issue, we were reporting the “long-delayed” Emerald City as ready for broadcast in 2016, with details of its length, director, and stars. When the series finally debuted in January 2017, most news outlets were quick to credit Matthew Arnold with its creation, but his association appeared to stop there. While he enthusiastically promoted the show each week from his Twitter feed, Arnold wasn’t part of NBC’s publicity machine, leaving it all too easy for fans to wonder: what was the version of Emerald City he sold to NBC, and why did it take more than three years to get the series to our TV screens?

Fortunately, Matthew Arnold is more than enthusiastic to talk about Emerald City. I’m speaking to him by telephone, and it’s clear that he’s used to the Hollywood environment. He talks fast – so fast that, later, I’ll slow down the recording to hear the transitions when he jumps from one topic to another. His voice is upbeat and enthusiastic, and his responses are punctuated with a laugh that encourages you to join in. It’s easy to see how he grabs and keeps someone’s attention. In fact, attention-grabbing seems to be his specialty: Siberia was constructed and promoted as if it were a typical reality show, forcing contestants to survive in the Siberian wilderness, but at the end of the first episode, one contestant “died” in a bloody, off-camera accident. Over the course of ten more episodes, viewers realized that Siberia was a carefully scripted drama that played with their expectations. To Arnold, that element was a major part of the project’s appeal – and it appealed to NBC, too.

“In the course of making Shadow People, I worked with a producer named Michael Ohoven,” says Arnold. “We discussed the idea of doing a television series at that time, but neither of us had an inkling how to get into the TV business. It seemed like a very closed place, and you couldn’t just make your own TV show and get in; you had to work within the system. [. . .] Eventually, I hit upon this idea to . . . do a show which purported to be a reality show but was in fact a drama, almost a hoax in the way that Blair Witch was a hoax or the Orson Welles War of the Worlds was a hoax. [. . .] We knew it was potent because televisions shows are expensive to make, and we had heard talk that networks were looking for ways to reduce their cost.”

Through careful use of resources and contacts within the industry, Arnold and Ohoven managed to independently finance twelve episodes, which they planned to sell to a distributor after their completion. However, the pilot episode leaked to NBC while they were still shooting the finale. “They were actually buying our show off our trailer and a pilot,” Arnold says. “That was a big rollercoaster, getting a network show, when we were complete outsiders and independently financed. [. . .] On the heels of that, as the show was being released, I got new agents . . . and they encouraged me to go and pitch a new show. One that was at the top of my mind was this idea about The Wizard of Oz. I realized I wanted to tell a story that had been in me for a long time.”

This is no idle claim. Although Arnold considers the famous MGM film to be “iconic,” his inspiration for a new TV series came from his vivid childhood memories of the original Baum Oz books. “It occurred to me that very few people read the books, especially all the books, like I had. I’d read all fourteen of them. I thought they were scary, bizarre, weird and wonderful!” Arnold laughs. “But no one talks about them, so my original idea was to find a way to tell the complete story—everything Baum had wanted to get out of those books. I realized that there was a big, big world here, that no one knew about it and that it had been forgotten.”

Arnold was particularly interested in the character of Dorothy and how she could develop into a character with agency and self-determination. “[I thought] Dorothy could be a much deeper, richer character,” he says. “In the books she’s often portrayed as a babe in the woods who walks from adventure to adventure; she gives her opinions but is rarely involved. I wanted her to really take ownership . . . to have her own mission to find out something about her own life that would propel her to continue to delve deeper into Oz. Through her involvement and discovery of who she is, she ends up putting this bizarre world back together again and setting it back to rights.

“I’m quite happy [with] how Dorothy was ultimately played by the actress Adria Arjona, who really did a phenomenal job,” Arnold is quick to concede. “My original depiction had her a little tougher throughout the series, though – more of an outcast in Kansas who is able to come into her own and find a place in Oz as she learns more and more about her own history. I also was going to build more mystery about her heritage, and slowly unpack that over seasons. She would grow in prominence and power among the denizens of Oz, who see her first a curiosity and then as a savior and crusader.

“What’s central was this main idea that I couldn’t get away from,” Arnold explains. “In none of the books does Baum ever really fully address why Dorothy is living with her aunt and uncle and not her parents. Who are her parents? What happened to them? It seems like this central mystery that’s never really addressed or wrapped up. Once I had that, I realized I had the building blocks for a really great drama: something that could compel and interest people and . . . re-contextualize [Oz] for a modern audience.”

While Dorothy’s quest was crucial to Emerald City, it wasn’t the only focus. A key aspect of Arnold’s idea was that other Baum characters would provide other perspectives. “The original pilot had Dorothy’s storyline, Ozma’s storyline, and the Nome King’s storyline,” Arnold confirms, and his plan was to expand outward across “multiple stories and multiple seasons.” “I wanted to bring all the strands of the different stories into a Game of Thrones-style telling,” he says. “The inspiration came from the fact that when you read the books, there’s not a linear story, per se, that builds out from Dorothy. There are so many other characters that have their own agenda; Dorothy’s part of it, but when you go back and read it all as one piece, it’s hard to wrap your head around as a linear narrative. Game of Thrones had success telling stories within their world from multiple points of view and perspectives. You ask me who the lead of Game of Thrones is, that’s really hard to pin down, right? I know Dorothy is very beloved, but she’s not the only character. I thought Ozma’s character was incredibly interesting, and the Nome King and his objectives were, too, and I wanted to bring all those to bear.”

Ultimately, Emerald City was just one of several concepts Arnold pitched to several different networks. “I went to Universal, which is the studio that is co-owned with NBC. I pitched them a few ideas, and one that they really latched on to was Emerald City. They liked the way that I was going about the material, and the fact that I was going to use all fourteen books, with the storylines coming together.”

Arnold continued to develop Emerald City with Universal. During pitch season, he took it to NBC, who bought it and put it in development. “That still didn’t mean we were going to go to air,” Arnold explains. “There were probably fifty other pilots in development at that time. Toward December of that year . . . I finished the pilot, turned it in to them, and then we got the call from the president of Universal saying we were doing a direct-to-series order, which is a big deal. Typically, a network will shoot a pilot, and then based on the strength of the pilot, will do the series. They decided, based on the script that I had turned in, that they were just going to . . . do all 10 episodes. It was pretty mind-blowing and a huge deal for them to do that. [. . .] I think it just hit the sweet spot that NBC was cultivating – breaking out, trying something different, willing to spend a lot of money on a piece of intellectual property they knew was beloved and which they were willing to give the royal treatment.”

That was only the beginning of the long process to get Emerald City made. The series was greenlit by NBC in January, and a different writer-producer, Josh Friedman—best known for writing the screenplays of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and The Black Dahlia, and for creating Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles—was brought in as day-to-day showrunner. “Josh took the show in a direction different from where I had wanted it to go,” Arnold says regretfully. “It just veered off the tracks, so much so that NBC said it was unrecognizable from what I had pitched them . . . which ended up resulting in [their] not wanting to go forward.”

NBC’s decision was reported by Variety on August 22, 2014. “That was really disheartening,” Arnold sighs. “I was shocked and horribly disappointed. I really can’t wrap my head around how that could have gone that way. I still get comments from executives about how much they loved my pilot script. I had a direction that was a lot more what people, and the network, wanted to see: dark, complex, grounded and mysterious—without being alienating—and with more depth of character.”

Arnold’s association with Emerald City ended at this point, but as it turned out, the journey wasn’t over for NBC. By April 2015, the production was back up and running – this time, with The Event producer David Schulner replacing Josh Friedman. “At the time, I was signed on to do one show at Legendary and another at Warner Brothers,” says Arnold. “I was exclusive to those and couldn’t work on a new version, but I thought it was dead anyway; I wasn’t expecting it to come back.” And how did he feel about the news? “I felt like it was a really good sign that [NBC was] committed to the show and reinvigorated it. Some of what I had originally put together was still there . . . so that was a good feeling. Not entirely the show I would have done – but I was still really pleased that NBC and Universal took the original version and had a show with multiple points of view, and an older, more sophisticated Dorothy.”

Now that the dust has settled, we know that NBC won’t be continuing Emerald City beyond its initial 10 episodes. Still, Arnold insists we shouldn’t view that as a “cancelation.” “Early on, I knew that NBC wasn’t planning on doing it as a continuing series,” he explains. “I think if they had gangbusters numbers, they probably would have found a way to continue it on, but I wasn’t under any illusion that they were going to do multiple seasons.” His original pitch, on the other hand, was more expansive. “There was a lot planned,” he says, “and my hope for it was that it would have many seasons. I had sketched out a way to continue to . . . build this world, and to get into many of the different cities and kingdoms and see much more of the story. I think that would have been a beautiful series to watch, and I think people would have really embraced it.

“Dorothy would have been our window into meeting a lot of characters,” he explains, “and who they were and their relationships would have been more grounded in Baum’s books in the first place—they wouldn’t have veered so far. I would have continued that strategy throughout the show as we met more and more characters, so we could fall in love with Baum’s world all over again.”

What, if anything, remains of his work? “I think the pilot and the first two episodes are a lot of what I would have done, and then most of it after that was strained from what I put in there, but not really the way I would have executed it.” Any examples? “Well, Ozma would’ve been a much more interesting, exciting character: this deposed princess who should rightly be the heir to the throne. I saw her having a trajectory whereby she would come to reclaim the throne back, and ultimately – with the help of Dorothy and others – would discover her heritage over the course of some period of time. She’d join the All-Girl Army of Revolt who, in my version, would have been a rebellion army that believed that their rightful leader, a woman, was taken out of power and replaced by this man, the Wizard.”

Eagle-eyed readers will hardly fail to notice that Arnold has already namechecked another famous Baum character. Blink—or don’t read the cast credits—and you would have missed him in the actual broadcast episodes, but a certain Metal Monarch played a central role in Arnold’s original plans. “The Nome King was tunneling under Oz trying to take it back,” he says. “He had been screwed over by the Wizard, who used a lot of his gems to build the Emerald City, so the Nome King was out for revenge.

“I think the Nome King’s a really fascinating character!” Arnold enthuses, suggesting that the plotline was probably removed from the broadcast version of Emerald City to focus on the storylines of Dorothy and Tip. “There was probably some thought that they would bring it up in a later season,” he says, “but I thought you could have [. . .] launched all three of those storylines at once and watched them come to a head toward the end of season one.”

And what, exactly, was cut? “The original pilot had scenes of the Nome King, Roquat, touring the tunnel that his soldiers were ceaselessly digging. Guph is sent by Roquat to try to unite the armies beyond the Deadly Desert; the Nome King needs them to join forces against the Wizard – which they would ultimately do, only to later double-cross him at a crucial moment. Meanwhile, Ozma runs away with Jack – I had him as a red-headed boy, whom his friends nicknamed “Pumpkinhead” – having adventures along the way, until they are caught by the All-Girl Army of Revolt and their leader General Jinjur, who recognizes a birthmark on Ozma that reveals her to be the true princess of Oz. They would teach her to fight and lead the army to victory against the Wizard, who deposed and murdered her father, King Pastoria.”

Arnold even had a different, season-long plan to bring Dorothy together with her famous friends (or, at least, their Emerald City counterparts). As it is, the foursome of Dorothy, Scarecrow (Lucas), Tin Woodman (Jack), and Lion (Eamonn) never actually appear together at the same time in the broadcast series. “I didn’t want them all to meet in the first episode,” Arnold admits. “I thought it was more fun to . . . meet Scarecrow in a very interesting way, then he and Dorothy team up. Then I would have had a story of the Tin Man – his own story – for a couple of episodes, and then Dorothy would have met up with him, and so forth. I was going to parcel that out by giving them all their backstories, which are just lost in the movie – you just meet the Scarecrow and he joins, and you meet the Cowardly Lion, and he gives you a couple of sentences about his life, and then he joins. Each one of those little backgrounds is its own complete story. All of these things would have eventually joined with Dorothy’s storyline . . . bringing this rag-tag group of people together, this cast of outcasts. And I think they would have been caught in the middle between the Nome King’s battle to take Oz for himself, the Wizard trying to maintain power, and Ozma trying to resume her rightful place.”

Despite the changes from his original idea, Arnold was happy to see Emerald City reach TV screens this past January. “I was quite pleased with it,” he confirms. “Again, it was a big risk for NBC to take. I think they did a really good job with a lot of the look of it, the feel of it – I think Tarsem Singh had a really visionary idea of what Oz could look like. Overall, I was pleased with that. In terms of some of the story elements, I would have done things differently, and I had ideas about how it could continue on in a longer form . . . but I thought [David Schulner and Shaun Cassidy] did a really tremendous job.”

And—in a purely hypothetical situation—if Universal called, would he be interested in continuing Emerald City, either on television or in another medium such as a graphic novel? Arnold takes a few moments to contemplate his response. “That’s an interesting question,” he admits. “There’s so much more of this world that I wanted to tell; there’s so much more of the story that needs to be told. Would I, if they called and asked me? Yeah, I probably would. I would want to see the rest of the story be told. But it’s got into different hands, and it’s found a direction that I wouldn’t have taken it in in the first place, so it feels strange – it’s sort of like wearing someone else’s clothes and trying to tailor them yourself; it’s not impossible, but it doesn’t feel right, necessarily. I think David and Shaun—I think it became their show, at the end of the day, but I still feel very much connected to it.” He laughs, struck by a thought. “I think the relationship that I have with the material is that I feel like I had a child, but he was adopted and raised by a really good family. I’m happy for my ‘son,’ but I didn’t really get to grow up with him.”

Emerald City has come in for its share of criticism, including here at the Bugle, but Arnold is clear in what he intended with his original vision. “It didn’t really end up this way, because again, Josh had a different idea about what he wanted to do with the show,” he explains, “but I wanted to tell the stories that are inherent in the full scope of the books. You know, you can look at The Dark Knight or the Batman TV show, and you can love [either one], but they’re functions of their time. It doesn’t make one better or worse than the other, it just says, ‘In this time period, this is what we liked and what we liked to see.’ But if you take Batman and you suddenly change him into an old woman who’s poor, with a dog sidekick, you’ve veered too much from the material, and you’re no longer being respectful of it. My goal was always to be respectful of the material, and I think you can see that in there. We modernized the concepts of Dorothy and the Wizard and tried to add some plausibility in the way that The Dark Knight did for Batman; we tried to ground the characters psychologically and get at who they are and how they came to power. Taking away a little bit of the veneer of what the movie was and the books were, because those were functions of their time, and a modern audience has to see it in a different light.”

Everything we see on TV is created by committee: particularly when it involves a major network, no one person is responsible for the final product and its success—or its failure. We don’t know all of the creative decisions that went into the final version of Emerald City, and we probably never will; sadly, the legacy of an unpopular TV show is to be swept aside quickly, leaving many questions unanswered. For Matthew Arnold, though, the opportunity most wasted is the one to bring a new audience into Baum’s world.  “Everyone knows what The Wizard of Oz is, but no one knows the entirety of the story,” he says. “This would have been a chance [to be] true to all of the books. That was an exciting mission for me: let’s not do our own version of The Wizard of Oz; let’s do Baum’s version and go back to all of his source materials. I wanted a new generation . . . to see that there are many colors and many facets to [Oz]. When they saw it on television, they’d look at it and think, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, that’s a neat idea!’ and then they’d realize, ‘This man wrote this almost 100 years ago!’ This was already in his head, this was the world that he created that we’ve forgotten.

“I hope you can see that there’s a definite love that I have for [Baum’s] work,” Arnold concludes. “It’s a very genuine love going back to my childhood. Baum was trying to leave behind, I think, an incredible legacy of this great and wonderful world that, unfortunately, very few people have read or seen, and my goal was to give them a chance to live in it. You can’t get that out of a film; you need a TV series to do that. I wanted to give the audience everything.”

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