“I gave myself a creative challenge as a documentary format: what would a documentary of a fictional character look like?” asks It’s Dorothy! director Jeffrey McHale. “We’re used to seeing biopics and documentary films about artists and musicians and painters and politicians and whatnot, but what does that format look like when you apply it to a fictional character who’s been reimagined in so many different ways by many different people?”
It’s Dorothy! gives the ultimate biopic treatment to Dorothy Gale, the iconic heroine of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. McHale charts a biography of Dorothy, in a way, following her journey down the Yellow Brick Road in print and many cinematic adaptations. However, It’s Dorothy!, which has its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs, demonstrates how one fictional character invites so many interpretations by touching so many lives. McHale interviews many actors who’ve played Dorothy over the years on screen and stage, while also doing a deep dive on the enduring legacy of Judy Garland’s formative take on the role and Dorothy’s influence on her star status.
These conversations shape the film into a biography that’s more thematic than linear. “One of the discoveries along the way was Nichelle [Lewis]’s interview, which we did in New York, which was very exciting because she was currently Dorothy on Broadway,” says McHale. Lewis situates her connection to Dorothy with the loss of her father and the ways in which that shaped her youth, as well as her trajectory as an actor. “We were speaking to someone who was living it, who was still very much in the shoes or ‘boots,’ as she says [referring to the ruby slippers of the production], so her vulnerability around the loss of her father at the age of nine, after that interview, it hit me. It was like this was her tornado, this was her cycle, and this is the thing that ripped her world apart.”
The film creates Dorothy’s biography with the actors as an emotional conduit. So too do interviews with stars like Lena Waithe, a superfan who calls The Wizard of Oz “a Bible for life.” McHale says that interview with Waithe was equally crucial to shaping the story. “She said one line that stuck with me. It was that Dorothy and ‘Over the Rainbow’ represent the breadth of our lives,” explains McHale. “I wanted there to be a parallel motif where we are also with this character for the course of a lifetime, very much first act of our childhood, middle life, and then ultimately death.” The filmmaker adds that the experience was especially poignant on that level when he lost his father just a few weeks before It’s Dorothy! premiered at Tribeca last year. The film explores the role of beginnings and endings that Dorothy invites.
“Many people’s idea of Dorothy is very different and very personal to them, so one of the big surprising things about this film was the ways in which the character is introduced to our lives,” explains McHale. “Most people were introduced to the character through Judy Garland, and she will be forever immortalized through that character, and thankfully so. But when you have things like The Wiz [with Diana Ross] or Return to Oz [with Fairuza Balk], and even The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz [with Ashanti], there was a large cult following around that version. There was a lot of excitement from people that we actually approached Ashanti and Muppets’ Wizard of Oz because for many people, that was their Dorothy.”
Just as children, like this writer, who first encountered A Christmas Carol through the Muppets’ take, Ashanti might do for Dorothy what Michael Caine does for Ebenezer Scrooge in lieu of Alistair Sim. It’s Dorothy! beautifully captures the ways in which classic works assume new meanings generation by generation and endure by fuelling the cultural conversation by becoming more accessible to more factions of the audience.
“The idea of Dorothy is so personal to each person,” adds McHale. “It created a lot of challenges and interesting contradictions as far as how we view this character.”
Doing a deep dive on Dorothy Gale and The Wizard of Oz, moreover, may seem like an odd character to tackle for McHale after exploring the lore of Showgirls’ heroine Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) in the documentary You Don’t Nomi. However, McHale says the bridge between the films isn’t too great upon close inspection.
“The logical leap, for me personally, is the love of the film and the characters and the women who played them,” he observes. “It might seem like a stretch to go from a cult classic that was NC-17 and based in the Las Vegas strip-houses, but there is a very clear line to Dorothy. Both Nomi and Dorothy were outsiders, and I feel like Dorothy is the ultimate outsider.”
Dorothy also embodies a sense of lost innocence when she crash lands in Technicolor Oz after being transported from dreary black-and-white Kansas. Nomi’s journey to different places as a directionless ingénue carries similar traits. Her outfits are just very different, but no less glittery, than Dorothy’s famous shoes.
McHale also adds that he found himself drawn to the character by the way in which one can approach Dorothy from so many angles of pop culture. He points out that since Baum’s work resides in the public domain, people may adapt it freely. (See: Wicked.) “One of the things that drew me to this project and this character was that there’s no other character like this in our culture that we can have these fascinating conversations about who touches on so many interesting things and that has been reimagined and adapted in so many ways.”
It’s Dorothy! energetically cuts these many variations of the Land of Oz together. Snippets from Family Guy references and Simpsons’ spoofs mix parody with origin stories like Wicked, while clips from silent works predating Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic position The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy as a point of consistency in audiences’ lives since motion pictures began.
McHale admits that growing up surrounded by Oz makes it difficult to pinpoint the moment that Dorothy made an impression on him. “I was obsessed with [The Wizard of Oz] from when I was a young child. I would constantly write stories and take the character and send Dorothy and her friends off on different adventures,” he says. McHale adds that after making You Don’t Nomi, his mom pulled out a stack of school projects: drawings, stories, etc. He says at the top was a notebook with a little Post-it note from his teacher and saying, “Jeffrey, I’m sure this will be a lovely story. Next time, write about something other than Oz.”
“You could see it from a very young age that I’ve carried it with me,” he laughs. The return to Oz with It’s Dorothy lets him see aspects of the tale with fresh eyes, including the story around the story. It’s Dorothy dives into the long history of Wizard of Oz fandom and particularly its place in LGBTQ+ culture. “Everybody alive today has had Oz in some capacity in their life,” he notes.
Coming to Dorothy’s story with the eyes of an adult, though, McHale says he saw The Wizard of Oz from new perspectives. Key to this is the fact that McHale and his husband became parents through adoption in 2016, so he was experiencing The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of a different generation. “Our son was born in Kansas, so his mother selected us and we flew out very last minute,” explains McHale.
“The first song I played for him was ‘Over the Rainbow’ and so when you become a parent, you’re engaged with many different conversations and ways in which I approached parenting that I hadn’t considered before,” he continues. “Looking at my son, he’s come into our life through a very traumatic way as far as we are his second family, and that also applied to Dorothy. She was not living with her biological parents. She was being raised by her aunt and uncle. It’s a little ambiguous of what the connection was or what happened there. But I then started to view Dorothy’s journey through the experience of potentially my son’s journey and the questions that you have about your place in the world, who your family is, and who you’re connected with.”
That perspective affords It’s Dorothy! a diversity of lenses. The film zeroes in on The Wiz and Diana Ross’s portrayal of Dorothy to explore the impact of the character and the films when it comes to authenticity and onscreen representation. Lenses of ableism consider the Munchkins and Dorothy’s trio of sidekicks—the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion—who receive treatments of sorts from the Wizard.
The film smartly connects its consideration of the queer legacy of The Wizard of Oz with its venture into the life of Judy Garland and the various elements of Hollywood’s star system that transformed her into a screen icon. “There was constantly this push and pull of how much of Judy’s story should be included in this film,” explains McHale. The doc features clips of Garland’s many performances in film and television, including running bits in which she playfully referenced her legacy as Dorothy with self-deprecating humour. As McHale speaks to other Dorothys, the conversation inevitably circles back to Garland as the O.G. Dorothy.
“It’s impossible to not watch those performances and not see Dorothy in her and see the ways in which she carried that character throughout her life,” observes McHale. “It was exciting to see these instances that would pop up in her films that connected to themes and moments in the lives of the women who I spoke with. That was also a fun creative opportunity: Let’s keep Judy alive throughout this film. In an early edit, I had a very hard time working her passing, her funeral, Stonewall, because I knew that those two events are spiritually and culturally connected, and it was [a process of deciding] where to place them because if I put them at the end of act one where we’re naturally closing our MGM period and it felt weird to then see her later afterwards.”
The film links Garland, Dorothy, and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights by reminding audiences that the actor’s funeral happened in New York City on June 27, 1969, just one day before the Stonewall riots. It’s Dorothy! doesn’t further the pop culture myth that the two events share a cause-and-effect relationship, but it acknowledges a place of hurt that many queer New Yorkers were likely feeling when events at Stonewall sparked a cultural movement.
Garland’s passing decades ago means that one key voice in the Dorothy story exists solely through the archives, so McHale admits that it would be interesting to know how the original Dorothy views her predecessors. “We had all these other adaptations and versions, so I would obviously would just love to hear her talk about the different versions, the music, and The Wiz and Return to Oz,” says McHale. “Obviously, she was a child still when she was going through that experience, and there was so much of her life that is very tragic, but I also didn’t want to frame her life around that tragedy.”
One also can’t help but wonder how Garland might have answered the question that McHale poses to each participant when ending their interviews. “Dorothy is…” lets interviewees fill in the blank, kind of like how Ron Mann’s Altman tasks its ensemble of participants to define “Altmanesque.”
Surprisingly, McHale notes, nobody gave the same word. “It was always something new,” he says, observing how the different answers reflect the Dorothy’s enduring appeal.
One answer strikes him especially well, and it comes from L. Frank Baum’s great-granddaughter, Gita Dorothy Morena, who faces the difficult task of upholding The Wizard of Oz’s legacy after pulling back the curtain on her great-grandfather’s past: “Dorothy’s you.”
“I had never heard anybody say that to me before,” explains McHale. “She looked at me and she had that pause before she responded and then she said, ‘Dorothy is you.’ I always felt a connection with the character, but I never saw myself as Dorothy. I knew that was the perfect way I wanted audiences to leave the theatre thinking that they are Dorothy: they can find the good in people; they can find community. They can uplift people around them.”
