Rick's Cafe Texan: The Dreamer of Oz: The Television Movie

THE DREAMER OF OZ

There are few people, especially Americans, who are unfamiliar with the story of The Wizard of Oz. Most know it through the 1939 MGM musical film. There are those who have read the original Oz books along with their follow-ups. Few however, I think, know much if anything about the man who created this American myth. The Dreamer of Oz is the story of Lyman Frank Baum, the man behind the story of young Dorothy Gale from Kansas. Earnestly acted, The Dreamer of Oz does its best to follow a tried-and-true biopic trope of having the subject's best-known creation be made up of bits of the author's life rather than his imagination.

Using the framing device of an impromptu interview at The Wizard of Oz's premiere, The Dreamer of Oz has cub reporter Albert (John Cameron Mitchell) be the only one to recognize Maud Baum (Annette O'Toole), who is the widow of Oz's creator. Maud was the daughter of ardent feminist Matilda Gage (Rue McClanahan), which frightens struggling actor Lyman Frank Baum (John Ritter). However, at his sister's insistence, he makes the acquaintance of Maud and it is love at first sight. Despite Matilda's firm opposition to her college-bound daughter marrying a traveling performer, Maud and Frank marry and she begins touring with him.

Eventually, the need to settle down with their growing family brings the Baums to try a life in the Dakota Territory, where Frank is convinced his Baum's Bazaar will be a big hit in selling finery to the settlers. It isn't, and his other ventures in Chicago also meet with limited success. The one thing Frank has a strong affinity for is telling his children and their friends about a magical land with good and bad witches, scarecrows without brains and cowardly lions. He finally comes up a winner when he adapts Mother Goose rhymes into prose, then more success with a Father Goose book of original verse. However, he puts those royalties on the line for his dream project: the book on the Magical Land of Oz.

Maude finally snaps, terrified that this will put them in financial ruin after their decades of struggle. Frank gets a surprising ally in Maude, who finally sees the positive of fantasy in people's lives. Together, they now work to find a proper title for the book and bring an original American mythology to the world.

As I watched The Dreamer of Oz, the word that came again and again is "earnest". No one can accuse anyone involved in The Dreamer of Oz of insincerity when it came to the subject. Richard Matheson's screenplay (with story by Matheson and David Kirschner) along with director Jack Bender clearly had affection for L. Frank Baum, who is shown as a man who is almost always optimistic, convinced that the next venture will be a success.

The Dreamer of Oz also shows what is sadly rather rare in many biopics: a remarkably happy marriage. By all accounts, Frank and Maud Baum were indeed happily married and devoted to the other. That is not to say that The Dreamer of Oz does not have them having down moments or struggles. However, I can recall only one or two instances where Frank and Maud were anything other than supportive or stable. In one scene, a despondent Frank comes close to destroying his then-titled Emerald City of Oz manuscript after it meets with constant rejection. In another, Maud finally berates Frank for putting the book royalties they are living off on the line to self-publish The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

However, these scenes feel placed in the biopic to remind us that Frank and Maud were not perfect people who were forever looking doe-eyed at each other.

The earnestness in The Dreamer of Oz extends to almost all the performances. John Ritter, gone too soon, will probably always be best known as the lovable rogue Jack Tripper on television's Three's Company. The level and depth of his talent was never fully tapped, so it is nice to showcase Ritter in something that does not call for pratfalls. His L. Frank Baum, as I stated, is always an optimist, a man who loves the life he has no matter how unstable or peripatetic it is. You do like Baum for his boundless optimism, his inventiveness, his sincere, almost childlike belief that things will turn out well.

The same goes for Annette O'Toole, who rarely makes Maud's devotion and support for Frank look insipid or idiotic. Instead, her Maud is a woman who has faith in the man she loves and knows that in his way, he is perfect as he is. To be fair, sometimes that loving look manner to Maud becomes slightly silly, as when through a set of strange circumstances Frank ends up in a duel on the streets of Aberdeen, North Dakota. While her role is smaller, Rue McClanahan is in turns imperious and surprisingly supportive as Matilda Gage, the fearsome mother-in-law who ends up becoming Frank's champion.

Other times, the love displayed between Frank and Maud does look comical. When Matilda comes to stay with her daughter and son-in-law, Frank becomes visibly irritated at how Matilda puts him down while he adds a new section to his story. As Matilda is typing away, Frank talks about how only wicked witches are ugly while good witches are beautiful. One guess as to how Matilda and Maud are visualized as he talks about wicked and good witches.

Here is, I think, where The Dreamer of Oz fails. I cannot vouch for the veracity of every aspect in the biopic. However, The Dreamer of Oz has the unfortunate trope of metaphorically bringing the various elements of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz come to Baum through real-life interactions. The genesis of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, if The Dreamer of Oz is to be believed, is when he has to tell an impromptu story to distract his son from falling off the ledge while said son is holding Frank's razors.

His mother-in-law? She is like a Wicked Witch. When he is building his Baum's Bazaar, who should come work for him but Ned Brown (Ed Gale), who happens to be a midget, almost Munchkin-like. He has a young niece named Dorothy, who tragically dies at a young age. The duel he has to fight with local bully Al Badham (Charles Haid)? Badham, this big, burly man, ends up running away in fright, almost like a Cowardly Lion. On one of his traveling salesman trips, he overhears an old wheeler-dealer named Sullivan (Frank Hamilton), who is a flim-flam artist but is also a wizard at selling himself.

At one point, I genuinely wondered why Chicago did not look like an Emerald City when the Baums were headed that way. Perhaps that was a touch too much even for those involved the biopic.

The Dreamer of Oz goes almost out of its way to connect well-known elements from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Baum's life. I get what the biopic is going for: see how Baum found bits of his story along the way of his life. It is easy shorthand for the audience to connect Baum and his life to Baum and his work. I am sure that I have seen this kind of shorthand in other biopics of artists. However, those tend to be comedic like in Shakespeare in Love. Another recent biopic, Tolkien, did the same thing. For me, the results are always the same: slight frustration.

The frustration comes from how I do not need to have the author's work spoon-fed to me via the author's life story. I know the stories well enough to not need these "Baum thought up Munchkins when he saw a midget" bits. Moreover, these elements, for me, take away from what I think makes an author successful: his or her imagination. I get why The Dreamer of Oz put in those parts and the visualizations of Oz. I, however, think that those parts actually downplay Baum's creativity and talent for storytelling. I do not know L. Frank Baum ever hired a midget to work at his emporium, but I do not think he needed one to come up with the Munchkins.

A final element that works against The Dreamer of Oz is some simply ghastly makeup work when we get the older Frank and Maud. It looks downright freakish. Moreover, the ending seems a bit rushed where his death scene is rather quick.

I keep going back to "earnest" to describe The Dreamer of Oz. It is that, a sincere, heartfelt love letter to a man who gave the world a uniquely American fairytale, one that still is beloved long after the author's death. Respectable, entertaining if perhaps a bit heavy-handed, The Dreamer of Oz gives us some insight into one of childhood's greatest friends.