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her journey at the very point from which the Road spirals outward. And as she and the Munchkins echo Glinda’s instructions in tones both raucously high and gutturally low, something begins to happen to Dorothy’s feet. Their motion acquires a syncopation, which in beautifully slow stages grows more noticeable. By the time the ensemble breaks into the film’s theme song—
You’re off to see the Wizard
—we see, fully developed, the clever, shuffling little skip that will be the journey’s leitmotiv:
    You’re off to see the Wizard
    (s-skip)
    The wonderful Wizzardavoz
    (s-skip)
    In this way, s-skipping along, Dorothy Gale, already a National Hero of Munchkinland, already (as the Munchkins have assured her) History, a girl destined to be
a Bust in the Hall of Fame,
steps out along the road of destiny and heads, as Americans must, into the West.
    Off-camera anecdotes about a film’s production can be simultaneously delicious and disappointing. On the one hand there’s an undeniable Trivial Pursuit–ish pleasure to be had: did you know that Buddy Ebsen, later the patriarch of the Beverly Hillbillies, was the original Scarecrow, then switched roles with Ray Bolger, who didn’t want to play the Tin Man? And did you know that Ebsen had to leave the film after his “tin” costume gave him aluminum poisoning? And did you know that Margaret Hamilton’s hand was badly burned during the filming of the scene in which the Witch writes SURRENDER DOROTHY in smoke in the sky over Emerald City, and that her stunt double Betty Danko was even more badly burned during the scene’s reshoot? Did you know that Jack Haley (the third and final choice for the Tin Man) couldn’t sit down in his costume and could only rest against a specially devised “leaning board”? Or that the three leading men weren’t allowed to eat their meals in the MGM refectory because their makeup was thought too revolting? Or that Margaret Hamilton was given a coarse tent instead of a proper dressing-room, as if she really was a witch? Or that Toto was a female and her name was Terry? Above all, did you know that the frock coat worn by Frank Morgan, playing Professor Marvel / the Wizard of Oz, was bought from a secondhand store, and had L. Frank Baum’s name stitched inside? It turned out that the coat had indeed been made for the author; thus, in the movie, the Wizard actually wears his creator’s clothes.
    Many of these behind-the-scenes tales show us, sadly, that a film that has made so many audiences so happy was not a happy film to make. It is almost certainly untrue that Haley, Bolger, and Lahr were unkind to Judy Garland, as some have said, but Margaret Hamilton definitely felt excluded by the boys. She was lonely on set, her studio days barely coinciding with those of the one actor she already knew, Frank Morgan, and she couldn’t even take a leak without assistance. In fact, hardly anyone—certainly not Lahr, Haley, and Bolger in their elaborate makeup, which they dreaded putting on every day—seems to have had any fun making one of the most enjoyable pictures in movie history. We do not really want to know this; and yet, so fatally willing are we to do what may destroy our illusions that we also do want to know, we do, we do.
    As I delved into the secrets of the Wizard of Oz’s drinking problem, and learned that Morgan was only third choice for the part, behind W. C. Fields and Ed Wynn, and as I wondered what contemptuous wildness Fields might have brought to the role, and how it might have been if his female opposite number, the Witch, had been played by the first choice, Gale Sondergaard, not only a great beauty but also another Gale to set alongside Dorothy and the tornado, I found myself staring at an old color photograph of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and Dorothy posing in a forest set, surrounded by autumn leaves; and realized that I was looking not at the stars at all but at their stunt doubles, their stand-ins. It was an unremarkable