Today it's hard to imagine "Wizard of Oz" protagonist Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland) any other way than with brown hair in braids and minimal makeup. But early on, the movie's production staff put Garland in a long blonde wig and heavy makeup, with defined eyebrows and lots of blush and lipstick.
Where the Dress From ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Was Found After 50 Years
Is Sophia really Dorothy's mother?
At the time, Dorothy was recently divorced from her ex-husband Stanley. She, her mother Sophia Petrillo (played by Estelle Getty), and housemate Rose Nylund (Betty White) all rent rooms in the Miami house of their friend Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan).
According to various critics, the color blue is symbolic in the context of Dorothy's dress. In the original book, the Munchkins assume Dorothy is a friendly witch because, according to them, only witches and sorcerers wear white, while Munchkins themselves wear blue.
Rome School of Music, Drama, and Art at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. The dress, considered lost for decades, was rediscovered last year in a shoebox at the university's drama department. It had been gifted in the 1970s to the university's then head-of drama, Rev.
In the original book by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy's magic slippers are silver; for the Technicolor movie, costumers created ruby red shoes to show up more vividly against the yellow-brick road.
The red shoes' whereabouts remained a mystery for 13 years. Then, in 2018, an insurance company reported someone attempting to extort money for information about the missing slippers. The FBI conducted a sting operation and recovered the missing pair, though nobody was arrested at the time.
Trivia. Despite Toto being a male dog, he was portrayed in the 1939 film by a female dog named Terry (1933 - 1945). She was born on November 17, 1933, and died on September 1, 1945 at age 11, two months and sixteen days before her twelfth birthday.
The dress eventually disappeared, apparently passed from Gilbert Hartke to Thomas Donahue, a now-retired drama professor, who left it for lecturer Matt Ripa. It got stashed atop a row of faculty mailboxes, and Ripa happened to discover it last year.
The Wizard of Oz was filmed entirely on stages at MGM's Culver City studio at 10202 Washington Boulevard. The studio still stands today and offers visitors a look behind the curtains to see where the magic happened, as part of the Sony Pictures Studio Tour.
Since she was sixteen years old at the time of filming, Garland's maturing figure was bound into a figure-hiding corset. Since fantasy films generally were unsuccessful at that time, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer portrayed Oz as a head-trauma-induced delirium, instead of a real place.
Dorothy's weaknesses include the fact that she is gullible and not too smart, but she doesn't let these things hold her back. Her strengths include always being kind to others and helping others no matter her problems.
“Though we didn't completely take blue out of the village, Belle is distinct within the town as the only one who wears a column of blue,” says Durran. “She stands out as different than her environment.” And therein lies the essence of the blue dress.
The Wizard of Oz made utilising Technicolor's 3-strip color process. The 3-strip color process wasn't a type of color film; instead, it was a process in which a specially modified motion picture camera recorded the same scene through colored filters on three different strips of film.
from Chapter 23 - Glinda The Good Witch Grants Dorothy's Wish. Glinda the Good stepped down from her ruby throne to give the little girl a good-bye kiss, and Dorothy thanked her for all the kindness she had shown to her friends and herself.
The “Wizard of Oz” props were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., in 2005 and were recovered 13 years later. A man has now been charged in the crime.
The Wicked Witch of the East was featured in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which she is the sister of the Wicked Witch of the West. As in the book, she is killed when Dorothy's house falls on her.
