The Oz Film Manufacturing Company
Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Film industry |
Founded | 1914 |
Founder | L. Frank Baum |
Defunct | 1915 |
Fate | Absorbed into Metro Pictures |
Successors | |
Headquarters | Los Angeles, CA |
Key people | Louis F. Gottschalk (vice president) Harry Marston Haldeman (secretary) Clarence R. Rundel (treasurer) |
The Oz Film Manufacturing Company was an
The company is best known for three of its films that survive today, albeit with missing footage:
Studio
The studio was located on
Stock company
J. Farrell MacDonald directed all of the film productions and acted in some of them. L. Frank Baum wrote all the scripts, and Louis F. Gottschalk wrote complete original scores that were sent out with the films, at time when improvising stock cues from the repertoire was common. James A. Crosby was the studio cinematographer, and Will H. White was the technical director. The records do not show who was responsible for film editing.
Among the major players at the company were
Distribution
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was accepted onto the Paramount distribution program, but when the picture fared poorly, Paramount refused to take on the additional productions.[8] The remaining films were finally accepted onto the Alliance program. The Magic Cloak of Oz was not released until 1917. The prints currently circulating are based on two two-reelers of a British release, known as The Magic Cloak and The Witch Queen, and are missing a reel of material.
Logo
The ident for the Oz Film Manufacturing Company showed a smiling
Features
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was released in early September, The Magic Cloak of Oz ready by late September, and His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz was screened in October but did not get distribution. The Alliance program released a fourth feature, The Last Egyptian, from an exotic orientalist adventure novel that Baum had written but declined authorship credit for commercial reasons, in early December. The studio claimed to be going strong well into the next year, but released only short subjects, and the held-up His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, retitled The New Wizard of Oz to capitalize on the popularity of the stage play well-remembered from the previous decade.
Short subjects
Lost from the company are a series of four short subjects titled Violet's Dreams, which starred Violet MacMillan and Fred Woodward. This was the whole of the company's new output in 1915 prior to the name change.
- A Box of Bandits (based on Baum's short story, "The Box of Robbers" from American Fairy Tales)
- The Country Circus
- The Magic Bon Bons (based on Baum's short story, "The Magic Bon-Bons" [punctuation sic], also from American Fairy Tales
- In Dreamy Jungleland (working title: "The Jungle") [Note: Alan Goble's International Film Index cites this title as In Dreamy Jungletown with MacMillan as director, though there seems little evidence for either claim.]
Each of these films depicted Violet's interaction with animals (played by Woodward), and magical opportunities to do things she is otherwise not allowed to do, such as visit a country circus prohibited to her because of her gender.
George Cochrane produced a film in 1917 based on these materials titled Like Babes in the Woods. This film should not be confused with The Babes in the Woods, an adaptation of the
Decline
The studio was rented out to others, and was eventually demolished. Unlike the case with The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908), Baum invested none of his own money in the venture and was not financially affected by the studio's failure, though it is probable it impacted his health, which took a turn for the worse not long after the failure.
Frank Joslyn Baum, Baum's eldest son and sometime attorney, who handled East Coast distribution from an office in Times Square, took over the company and renamed it Dramatic Feature Films, which made one feature and one short, probably from scripts by the younger Baum. Although ads announced the release of the feature film, The Gray Nun of Belgium, it does not appear to actually have been released. While some speculate that Baum would have allied himself with United Artists had he been able to sustain the company, there is no evidence for this, nor evidence that he had ever met UA's founding members, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, though Gottschalk went on to work with all of them. It is known that fairy tale/fantasy films were produced more frequently by 1917.
The four feature films were considered lost for many years. By the 1980s, all three fairy tale films were made available on home video. All of the feature films have been released on both DVD and VHS with the exception of The Last Egyptian.
In fiction
In L. Frank Baum's pseudonymous novel, Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West, the series' principals are introduced to a filmmaker named Otis Werner, who is clearly a send-up of Otis Turner, who made some earlier Oz films, mostly without Baum's input. The nieces decide to establish their own film company for children, and Uncle John name-drops "Hans Andersen, Frank Baum, and Lewis Carroll" as among those whose fairy tales had already been adapted to the screen. The novel was written during the midst of the company's existence and published before the company's fall, and ends before the girls actually do establish such a company.
See also
References
- ISBN 9781592404490.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ISBN 9780547055107.
- S2CID 144462702.
researchgate.net 236810887
- ^ "The Patchwork Girl Of Oz (1914)". AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A SCIENTIST!. Retrieved 22 June 2022.
- ISBN 978-0-393-04992-3. Retrieved 22 June 2022.
- ^ "HOW L. FRANK BAUM INVENTED THE FILM FRANCHISE: EXCERPT FROM THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA". Film Threat. 22 October 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2022.
- Newspapers.com
- ^ Dulac, Nicolas (2 April 2012). A Companion to Early Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell.
- ^ "Farnsworth Collective presents 'Wizard of Oz' trivia night". PenBay Pilot. January 2014. Retrieved 7 July 2018.
Bibliography
- "The Oz Film Manufacturing Company" (in three parts) by Richard Mills and David L. Greene. The Baum Bugle, 1971-1972.
- The Oz Scrapbook by David L. Greene and Dick Martin, 1976.
- The Annotated Wizard of Oz by Michael Patrick Hearn, 1971, 2000.
- The World of Oz by Allan Eyles, 1985.