offtopic trivia........
i've now read a few versions:
this one sounds plausible to me....but who knows is right. <g>
e n j o y...
9.10. Wasn't Shirley Temple originally cast to play Dorothy?
Not really, although this story has been around for years. From the beginning, the picture was meant by Freed and LeRoy to be a vehicle for Judy Garland. Garland (whose real name was Frances Gumm) had been on contract at MGM for about four years, and the movie-going public was beginning to notice her. She'd already been a big success in some quick MGM pictures, and Oz seemed an ideal vehicle to show off her talent and really launch her into stardom. The executives in New York, however, realizing the scope and expense Oz would require, wanted a big name star to ensure box office success, and so 20th Century Fox was approached -- after Oz and Garland's casting had already been announced to the press -- about loaning Temple to MGM for Oz. (One story claims that MGM offered to loan Jean Harlow and Clark Gable to Fox for the filming of In Old Chicago as compensation, but this is probably not true as Harlow died in 1937, before work ever began on Oz.) Fox didn't want to loan the biggest box-office attraction in America out to anyone, however, and LeRoy and Freed weren't too impressed with her abilities. There are some stories that MGM also tried to borrow Deanna Durbin from Universal and Bonita Granville from Warner Bros., but if true neither of these happened, and so the executives settled on Garland. But the earliest press releases, from when the project was first announced, all listed Garland in the cast, so there is no truth to the story that she was the studio's second choice, winning the part by default. (Fox would later star Temple in their own big-budget Technicolor fantasy, The Blue Bird, in answer to similar projects from the other studios, but it didn't do nearly as well as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or The Wizard of Oz.)
eskimo.com |
