Motion Picture
For more details on this topic, see The Wiz (film).Motown Productions acquired the film rights to The Wiz in 1977, and signed Stephanie Mills in anticipation of having her star in the film adaptation. Motown singer and actress Diana Ross asked Motown CEO Berry Gordy to cast her as Dorothy instead, but he declined, feeling that 33-year-old Ross was far too old for the part. However, she contacted Rob Cohen of Universal Pictures, who offered to have Universal finance the film if she were to play Dorothy, at which point he acquiesced.
The resulting film version of The Wiz also starred former Motown star Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, Richard Pryor as the Wizard, jazz singer Thelma Carpenter as Miss One and Lena Horne as Glinda the Good Witch. Ted Ross and Mabel King reprised their respective roles of the Cowardly Lion and Evillene from the Broadway production. Sidney Lumet served as director, working with screenwriter Joel Schumacher (who used none of Brown's stage script) and music supervisor Quincy Jones. The film was a critical and commercial failure, performing poorly at the box office and being panned by critics.
Read more about this topic: The Wiz
Famous quotes containing the words motion picture, motion and/or picture:
“Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)