This summer, Dorothy and Toto are going to skip down the Yellow Brick Road in the same cutting-edge Las Vegas arena that’s hosted everything from Phish and Backstreet Boys concerts to MMA fights. That’s right, one of Hollywood’s most beloved films, “The Wizard of Oz,” is coming to the Sphere.
But updating the cinema classic for the venue’s massive 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen required more than a dozen visual effects houses, teams of researchers and archivists, and Jane Rosenthal, the superstar producer behind “The Irishman” and “Meet the Parents.”
As part of this week’s Variety cover story, Rosenthal offered a first look at the secretive project ahead of “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere’s” Aug. 28 opening.
1.) Yes, It Uses AI
The 1939 version of “The Wizard of Oz” was made for a much, much smaller screen than the 160,000-foot one that the Sphere holds. That meant the makers of the new film needed to “outpaint” all of the images so they can fill the cavernous space, using AI to add characters and backdrops that weren’t included in the original scenes.
“When you see Dorothy running down the road in that opening shot and running toward Gale’s farm, you also see the full landscape and where the house is situated,” Rosenthal says. “The same thing with the props – Professor Marvel’s caravan, you only see this little part of it. But if you widen out, you see all this crazy stuff he had in there, like skulls and whatnot from his magic act.”
To do that, Rosenthal and her team went on an archeological excavation that took them through backlots, museums and studio repositories.
“We went and got the original shot list that the cameraman used,” Rosenthal says. “We went through all the production designer drawings. We looked at all the props in the Warner Brothers archives and the Academy archives.”
The result is an Emerald City, a Munchkinland, and a Wicked Witch’s castle that the original filmmakers would have been able to create if they’d only had a bigger canvas.
2.) But It Uses AI “Ethically”
Hollywood’s creative community sees AI is an existential threat. Rosenthal, however, says people need to find a way to work with the groundbreaking technology within ethical parameters. On “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere,” technicians trained the AI exclusively on characters and images from the original film — and nothing else. And they did it with the full participation of Warner Bros., the studio that owns the original film.
“Anytime we made a change, we talked to them,” Rosenthal says.
3.) It Takes Less Time to Reach the Wizard!
“The Wizard of Oz” clocks in at 102 minutes. The version that opens in Las Vegas, will run at a brisker pace. “It’s shorter, but it was also shorter on television because there had to be commercial breaks,” Rosenthal says.
And Rosenthal resisted the temptation to go back and include deleted scenes. “There’s nothing in this that wasn’t in the original,” she says.
One thing they did add were some immersive elements. But Rosenthal will offer only a few hints about what’s different about this Oz. “There are ruby slippers in this film,” she teases.
Get ready to click those heels!
4.) They’re Still Debating About Fixing the Lion’s Mane
Filmmaking has come along way in the 85 years since “The Wizard of Oz” was produced. Special effects and makeup have improved by leaps and bounds and CGI has made it easier to clean up errors in the editing room. Then there’s the fact that four directors (King Vidor, George Cukor, Victor Fleming and Richard Thorpe) worked on the movie at different points in its chaotic production and you have a recipe for some glaring mistakes.
“When you do look at this movie in high resolution, it shows interesting things,” Rosenthal says. “They didn’t have the same kind of continuity control that we painstakingly do now. There was also the way that the makeup was applied. Like how they glued on the Lion’s mane, you can see that. Do you change that, or do you just leave it?”
It’s still not clear which direction the Sphere team will lean.
“We’re still debating,” Rosenthal says. “There’s a couple of shots where you wonder if you fix it or leave it as this quaint sort of thing that ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is.”
5.) More Classic Movies Could Be Heading to Sin City
If “The Wizard of Oz” is a success, Rosenthal predicts other classic movies could get spruced up for the Sphere.
“It’s a template for our industry,” Rosenthal says. “It’s not the way that Marty Scorsese’s Film Society restores films, but it is a way for us to go back and look at films through the eyes of the director and the time in which they were made. We hope to do other films, but we don’t know what those are.”
She’s not saying if those would include some of the greatest movies in history (think “Casablanca” or “The Godfather”) or more popular successes like “Star Wars” and “The Avengers,” but she has some pretty strong opinions on what does and doesn’t work.
“You don’t want to do something that’s just ubiquitous and put ‘Harry Potter’ on Sphere,” Rosenthal says. Instead she believes the movies best suited for the Sphere are “something immersive with a four-quadrant audience.”
In other words, something the whole family will enjoy.
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