The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, beloved by children and adults alike, holds a special place in cinema history.
It takes no more than a few bars of the movie’s score to be transported down the famous yellow brick road. The award-winning movie is based on an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The adaptation of the book into a movie script involved nearly a dozen writers. Herman J. Mankiewicz was the first hired by MGM Pictures to adapt Baum’s book into a film. Although never formally credited for his work on The Wizard of Oz, Mankiewicz was responsible for establishing the opening Kansas scenes of the movie in black and white. Writers Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf ultimately received recognition for the finished script, with their names appearing in the film’s credits.
Learn more in the Wizard of Oz Scripts at UW’s American Heritage Center.
For more information, visit the American Heritage Center site.