A short but personal essay on the film, with a smattering of insight into the making of. Don't expect pages of juicy behind the scenes stuff, this really is his personal musings.
His hatred of Toto is quite amusing, as is his querying the state of Munchkinland under the supposedly tyrannical Wicked Witch of The East. Where ARE her soldiers, where IS her gothic castle, why are the houses so well kept, the people so aimiable?
It was interesting to discover that not a single member of the main cast was in fact the first choice for the role . . .
There is a short story included about the auction of the real Ruby Slippers in a post apocalyptic world which wasn't as engaging as the essay, if I'm honest.

Ho scoperto l'esistenza di questo volumetto, parte di un progetto più ampio creato per celebrare il ventesimo anniversario della serie Classici del BFI Festival.

Amo molto Rushdie come autore, e anche in questo caso il suo tratto distintivo è evidente nello scritto.
il volume si compone di due scritti: il primo è un saggio dedicato al film Il Mago di Oz con interessanti riflessioni di Rushdie, curiosità sul film, sugli attori e approfondimenti sui temi affrontati nella storia di Baum e nella sua trasposizione cinematografica.
Il secondo testo, invece, è un lavoro di fiction ispirato al tema della famosa asta nel corso della quale andarono vendute le famosissime scarpette rosse indossate da Judy Garland durante le riprese del film.

Interessante, ben scritto e con moltissimi spunti di riflessione.

I really like the British Film Institute's series on classic films (Wizard of Oz being, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest movies Hollywood ever released), and I was very interested in reading such an acclaimed and erudite writer's take on its cultural influence. Rushdie does make some interesting observations, such as seeing the film as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and how its ultimate denouement isn't really that there is no place like home, but that home no longer exists, and leaving home is really the fantastic dream. I found this essay rather pretentious in its approach to an obviously sentimental, and even magical, classic. Worthwhile if you are a Rushdie fan, but otherwise just okay.

Both personal and analytical, this short book looks at the movie and tangenitally at the book. Rushdie has been a long-time fan of both and this book had some interesting ideas that he has been mulling over for a long time. The book also includes a short story that I found pretty darn interesting, but not very enlightening.

really conversational and unaggressively pop culture infused writing. critical and detailed and not just over-adulation

notes
-see threepio
-Dorothy's last name Gale means strong wind
-at the auction of ruby slippers, the short story at the end, makes me really wanna read some more Rushdie fiction
-salman married a babe: Padma Lakshmie
props

When I saw the movie when I was REALLY little Ii think 2nd or 3rd grade I'm not sure I fell in love with it but when I saw the book I was not that interested in it because it looked kind of long well for 3rd grade standards. I decided to read it because it actually wasn't that long and it kind of reminded me of a lion the witch and the wardrobe a little because there were witches in it and what not. So Dorthy is the main character and she lives in Kansas but after a tornado she wakes up in another world with her dog Toto. Throughout the book Dorthy is just trying to find a way home with the help of her new found friends and also want something to. I recommend this book to anybody it was actually a pretty good book.

A slight little trifle of a book, but it was fun to read Rushdie's thoughts about The Wizard of Oz and how it had influenced him.

Aunque soy fan de las novelas de Oz, la verdad es que la película nunca fue de mi gusto. Jamás le encontré lo mágico y se me sigue haciendo una especie de espectáculo gringo que no es cine ni teatro musical. Otra cosa fue "Retorno a Oz" de Walter Murch (1985) que fue el filme que me acercó a las novelas y que es una de mis películas fantásticas favoritas.
Pues bien, para Salman Rushdie, "El mago de Oz" la película de Víctor Fleming , si le cambió la vida y fue la película que lo acercó a la literatura. Este breve librito es un comentario, un análisis light sobre esa película que tanto le gustó. Es interesante de leer, pero no esperen un trabajo de rigor sobre análisis de cine. El libro es parte de una colección de cuatro obras que analizan cuatro películas: "Amores Perros" por Paul Julian Smith; La novia de Frankenstein por Alberto Manguel; "Shoah" por Carles Torner y "El mago de Oz por Salman Rushdie.
El libro se complementa con un cuento escrito por Rushdie sobre la subasta de los zapatos de rubí de la película.

As this is one of my favorite movies and also the subject of one of my university papers, I wish this book was much longer. Rushdie's writing is very smooth and I definitely felt that he had much more to say but was unable to surpass a specific number of words. The middle and ending part of the film had a very rushed analysis compared to the details and concern used in the first half of the book.

Rating: 3.5/5

This was actually my first experience of Salman Rushdie outside of his cameo on Bridget Jones's Diary and I found his "voice" quite entertaining. I had recently read the original story, was in the play in high school, and of course I've seen the film like everyone else.

Most of this is a discussion of the film's triumph over too many writers, too many directors, and how Hollywood basically Forrest Gumps its way into good movies. They were going to cut "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at one point...

The second part is a short story about the ruby slippers being auctioned in the (possibly) near future that is a critique of society still pertinent after 18 years. Also, what is home? And how is it better than Oz?!

As I was reading this book, one of my initial impressions was that he had never read the OZ books, despite brief trivial mentions of Baum's history and some of the inconsequential differences between the film and the book. If he had, some of the discrepancies he blames on Hollywood could have been cleared up as simplifications for script development purposes. The essay goes on for 57 pages presenting a variety of personal anecdotes that are only slightly more interesting than Rushdie's analysis--which brings up a number of thoughts which he neither bothers to offer adequate reasoning for, nor successfully argues the validity of.

Ultimately, Rushdie uses the BFI series as an opportunity to write an otherwise unpublishable short story--essentially the auction of the ruby slippers in a Warren Ellis style dystopia, with unnecessary incestuous themes. It becomes quickly apparent that the essay was used to highlight the oh-so-clever ideas he fools around with in an obscure story which lacked an interesting narrative beyond the briefest moments of strange imagery.

It's a pretentious essay, written by a pretentious author, for pretentious readers. If that's you, enjoy. Otherwise, it isn't worth even the short read that it is.

TL;DR — Not a good read. Borrow this from your library if you’re curious, or read my review. It’s about as in-depth as anything you’ll find in the book itself.

I don’t know why BFI even asked an emigre to analyze a film whose core theme is “there’s no place like home.” To my mind, Rushdie would be a good choice to offer a counter-analysis. He calls “there’s no place like home” The Wizard of Oz’s “least convincing idea.” He also hates Toto. (Why did they ask Rushdie to write this again?) Literally, his take away from TWoO is that old chestnut “you can’t go home again.” Both ideas give meaning to us at different times in our lives, but they are distinct and both truisms have merit.

This is a very slim volume. If you extracted all the photos you’d probably be lucky enough to get eight double-spaced pages. To add insult to injury, Rushdie or his editor thought it would be a good idea to pad the book out with a really, really shitty short story instead of fulfilling the book’s remit. Why? Who cares? This will be the last BFI book I pay for, that’s the message I took from reading this one. I don’t even feel like I read a book, in fact: I feel like I read an Entertainment Weekly article.

As for those eight double-speed pages: Rushdie’s not exactly wrong when he calls “Over the Rainbow” a migrant’s anthem, he’s just overly specific. “Over the Rainbow” is the anthem of anyone who wants to be, physically or metaphorically, elsewhere, on a greener lawn, under a brighter sky. And he’s definitely not wrong when he calls the film an authorless text (at least insofar that no single man can be said to have fully steered the ship.) And he’s not wrong when he states that making Oz a literal dream is the worst change the filmmakers made to the story. None of these observations are unique or interesting.

Rushdie peppers the book with facts taken from The Making of the Wizard Of Oz, written by film historian Aljean Harmetz. If you plan on reading both books, don’t read them one after the other. I read Harmetz’s wonderful book recently so a lot of the trivia was mere regurgitation and, gallingly, sometimes Rushdie manages to remember the trivia wrong (Margaret Hamilton did not burn her hand while filming the close-ups for the Surrender Dorothy scene; in fact, because her face had been so badly burned in her exit scene from Munchkinland Hamilton refused to film the scene with the skywriting contraption hidden beneath her cape. And good thing too as the damn thing exploded and seriously harmed one of her stunt doubles.)

As far as Rushdie’s criticism of the male actors who played Dorothy’s famous trio of friends, I’m disappointed. Garland as an adult was famous for her boozy talk show appearances—even her children admitted she made up stories just to get laughs. So, yes, she made up certain stories about the munchkin actors, and no, the male actors weren’t hogging the limelight and shoving Judy out of the way as they skipped along the Yellow Brick Road. If Rushdie actually read Harmetz’s book I don’t know how he could possibly conclude Margaret Hamilton felt excluded by the boys. Hamilton is quoted quite a bit there (and elsewhere) as saying she had so few scenes with “the boys” they were barely on set together at all. What a strange invention of Rushdie’s! Men Stink™, I guess, even in 1992.

Why it earned the one star: He does provide these few fun little insights into the film that were new to me: when the Witch “grows down” Dorothy grows up; real Kansas is all straight lines and simple shapes then the tornado (or twister) brings Dorothy to the gnarly, misshapen fantasy land of Oz; as the twister blows to transition us from one land to another the viewer is treated to a flurry of opening/shutting of doors/windows. But all in all, this is not worth the price of admission.

As for the short story: my God, it has to be seen to be believed. Picture the edgiest kid in a Creative Writing class tasked with writing a story about the famous auctioning off of the ruby slippers. Honestly, it is insanely bad. It takes place in a dystopia because of course it does. Totos are copulating. It is a turgid, dumb mess.

[Stray thought: it was annoying that most of the many photos used are the most often seen and remembered shots of the film while a rare photo of the stand-ins for Dorothy and friends, which so moved Rushdie he devoted two paragraphs to its mystery, is omitted.]