An Afterword on “Going Hollywood”

While we think of The Wizard of Oz as the great iconic movie of 1939 starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Margaret Hamilton and Billie Burke, it in fact went through a some of the toughest growing pains in Hollywood history.  It began as a response to Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the original cast was meant to include Shirley Temple as Dorothy, Gale Sonengard as Glinda the Good Witch, and Buddy Ebsen, first as the Scarecrow, then the Tin Man.  The movie had 11 different screenwriters at one time or another.  It also went through four directors, had two producers, and ran 15 minutes longer in its first showing than the movie we now know and love.  Wildest of all, Louis Mayer, the head of MGM at the time, decided to cut the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” after watching the first preview – until the director and others convinced him otherwise.

When I first conceived of writing a play set during the making of The Wizard of Oz, my instinct was, and remained, to write a comedy in homage to the screwball film comedies of the 1930s and 40s.  The “screwball comedies” were a group of 35-40 films produced from about 1934 to 1947 which together form one of the greatest film genres of all time.  They started out as a response to the Great Depression and often address the wide disparity between the haves and have-nots.  In My Man Godfrey, William Powell is a “forgotten man” who lives in an shanty town, while the woman who falls in love with him, Carole Lombard, is a glamorous society eccentric with a good heart.  There is also a Cinderella quality to many of the films, with the hero and heroine finding true love in the arms of someone from the opposite end of the social spectrum.  In Easy Living, Jean Arthur is a shop girl and Ray Milland is the reluctant heir to a fortune.

Also characteristic of the screwball comedies is fast, witty dialogue,  physical comedy (lots of pratfalls and chases), an ironic viewpoint, wild plots and crazy, loveable, eccentric characters.  The heroines are usually plucky, witty and full of life, while their male counterparts, though equally witty, are often more stressed by the pressures exerted by their nutty female counterparts.  The best of the genre include Bringing Up Baby, where Katherine Hepburn adds a live (tame) leopard to Cary Grant’s quiet life; To Be Or Not To Be, where Carole Lombard and Jack Benny head an acting troupe who must flee Nazi Germany; His Girl Friday, where Rosalind Russell is a ballsy newspaper reporter working for her wily ex-husband, Cary Grant; and It Happened One Night, where Clark Gable is a newspaper reporter getting a story about Claudette Colbert, an heiress who just jumped off a boat to flee an unwanted marriage.  The greatest screwball comedy of them all appeared ten years after the rest:  Some Like It Hot, where two musicians, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, dress up as women to flee the mob, all the while pursuing Marilyn Monroe, who falls for a tycoon who reminds us of Cary Grant.

While most of the films that make up the genre take great advantage of the film medium, the roots of these remarkable pictures lie much deeper.  Indeed, they begin with Shakespeare’s three greatest stage comedies, the “high comedies,” Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.  It was in these three plays that comedy in the Western tradition was born and bred; and even if screenwriters like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges didn’t know their Shakespeare (though I’ll bet they did), they were certainly influenced by the traditions of comedy that Shakespeare put in motion. 

In particular, the screwball comedies owe their deepest debt to Much Ado About Nothing.  Much Ado, in addition to being the most sure-fire laugh-getter in all of Shakespeare, revolves around a convention that Shakespeare created out of whole cloth: the witty, warring couple who argue their way through most of the play, then end up in each other’s arms by the curtain.  

After Shakespeare, this convention was used again and again by all the major comic playwrights in the English language:  from William Congreve in The Way of the World to George Farquhar in The Beaux’ Stratagem; from Oliver Goldsmith in She Stoops to Conquer to William Brindsley Sheridan in The School for Scandal; from George Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man to Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest.  Obviously this convention speaks to something deeply rooted in our DNA.  Lovers love, but they also fight; and this friction is often the stuff of comedy.  In our own day, we often see it in the best television comedies, like Cheers and Friends.

The other Shakespearean influence on the screwball comedy is the plucky heroine who is full of wit.  The greatest of these in Shakespeare’s plays is usually said to be Rosalind in As You Like It.  But Beatrice in Much Ado is certainly no slouch in the formidable female department; nor is Olivia in Twelfth Night, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew nor Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  To watch Rosalind Russell march through His Girl Friday, or Katherine Hepburn sashay through Bringing Up Baby, is like watching Rosalind prance through the Forest of Arden in As You Like It.  The ladies in the films are in black and white, and they use modern slang and dress like models, but the character type is virtually identical, and their surprising language has the same echo.   There is a strong, invigorating line of feminism in these wonderful characters, and the line from Shakespeare to the screwball comedies is unmistakable. 

Is it too much to say that the MGM lot in 1939 with its extravagant actresses, child stars and loony producers is a lot like Forest of Arden, where lovers and eccentrics forever abound?  I certainly hope not.