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While Dixie Willson explored the re-creation of Munchkinland on the M-G-M sound stages, our fashion editor tracked down Adrian and arranged for this advanced showing of the brilliant costume designs reproduced here and described by Miss Walters on the opposite page
partment, where dreams are not only dreamed but come true; where cities, even whole countries are created for the asking.
"So they gave us a script," smiled handsome, brawny Art Director Cedric Gibbons, "in which a little girl from Kansas lives a great adventure in a country of her own imagination. But neither in the script nor in the original book was there any description to indicate along what lines her imagination might build such a country! Which left us, first of all, to do some imagining ourselves!
"Take one scene of the fifty, for instance, the country the book calls 'Munchkinland,' to be inhabited by 'very tiny people called Munchkins.' To fashion a 'Munchkinland' which a little girl from Kansas might have dreamed, we began with a premise that the smallest things she had ever seen were probably ants. And how do ants live? Under grass and tree roots. So with toadstools and anthills as our architectural pattern, we made proportionately larger grass and flowers, such as, for instance, hollyhocks twenty feet tall."
So much for a thumbnail bit of the "Oz" problems of the art department. And remaining a moment longer in "Munchkinland," what about Munchkins to people this delightful place?
During Producer Mervyn LeRoy's entire shooting schedule for "Oz," the Munchkins, finally assembled, were the gayest detail of all. In response to a call sent out by Casting, midgets from all over the world came trouping to Hollywood; little midgets, middle-sized midgets, lady midgets, gentlemen midgets, midget graduates of Universities, a midget window demonstrator from Chicago . . . The littlest ones smoking the biggest cigars, eating the largest pieces of pie.
But the midgets, while perhaps the jolliest casting problem, were not the most difficult. Midgets, after all, are easy to find, but not so the frowsy little mutt who was to play the longest screen role ever written for a dog! Through the entire hour and a half of picture he appears in every scene! He will be remembered in the book as Toto; the illustrations showing a bright-eyed Cairn terrier. After many tests and long consideration, the role was entrusted to an engaging little girl dog named Terry who, as boy dog Toto, has delivered a superlative performance.
In Hollywood, Terry's owner and trainer, Mr. Carl Spitz, conducts a kindergarten, grammar school, high school and college for canines.
But, though Terry enjoys acting, the "Oz" role was something else again, the strangest background she has ever been called upon to understand! Our lady Toto found it obviously distressing, then suddenly everything was forgotten in complete devotion to the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Woodman.
(Continued on page 88)
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