The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story


The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story is a 1990 American made-for-television biographical film starring John Ritter as Lyman Frank Baum, the author who wrote the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other Oz books. Also starring in it were Annette O'Toole as Baum's supportive wife, Maud, and Rue McClanahan as Baum's tough mother-in-law, Matilda Gage.

Plot

The film is told as a flashback from the point of view of L. Frank Baum's widow, Maud Gage Baum. It tells how her husband came to create The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while undergoing and eventually overcoming professional and personal failures.
It's 1939 and the classic MGM film The Wizard of Oz is about to premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. 78 year old Mrs. Baum has been invited to attend the premiere. Before she enters the theatre a young journalist recognizes her and asks if he may interview her. She politely agrees and begins to recount how she first met her husband. The story is interspersed with the famous Oz story, shown at certain points when Baum is imagining and refining his ideas. It is shown that he was originally telling this to a group of children, who asked him the name of this location, to which he looks at a file cabinet with the bottom drawer marked O-Z and decided upon "Oz". Another idea he had thought of was to say Dorothy was born in the Dakota Territory, only to scrap that sentence in favor of Kansas.
There is some literary license taken, especially in the completely-fabricated backstory regarding the creation of the character Dorothy. In truth, Dorothy Louise Gage died as a five-month-old infant, in Bloomington, Illinois. To console his wife on the loss of her beloved niece, Baum created an older girl, in the care of her Aunt Em, as the central character in the fantasy universe that became the Oz stories. "M" was the initial of Maud Baum's own first name, and there was no expansion of Em's name in the Oz books.
However, in "Dreamer of Oz" she is portrayed as a young child, living in Dakota Territory. As she lay dying, Baum tells her that the central character in his stories was actually a girl named Dorothy.

Cast

Reception

In his TV Preview, Tom Shales of The Washington Post proclaimed the film "cheerfully satisfying", and praised the production values, but wasn't impressed with Ritter's performance. John J. O'Connor of The New York Times praised Ritter's performance and called the film "heartwarming". Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "long on mush and short on magic", but praised the recreations from the original stories.