How did The Movie get started? Why did MGM make it?
In the early days of talking pictures, Hollywood rarely made fantasy movies because movie studio executives thought the public wouldn’t accept them, and the few they made usually didn’t do well. But in 1937 Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it became the all-time biggest money-making film up to that time. The other Hollywood studios took notice, and scrambled to make their own fantasy projects. (No, copying what works for other moviemakers is not a recent phenomenon.) MGM songwriter Arthur Freed, who wanted to break into producing, was looking for a vehicle for Judy Garland. A fan of the Oz books, Freed found out that independent producer Samuel Goldwyn owned the film rights to The Wizard of Oz and convinced MGM to buy those rights, beating out four other studios. Mervyn LeRoy was a producer that MGM had just hired away from Warner Bros., and he, too, was interested in making The Wizard of Oz. As a studio, MGM also wanted to make The Wizard of Oz a full-color, s
