1978 saw a little flurry of pop musicals that seemed to come out of nowhere and promptly vanished back the way it had come. Randal Kleiser’s Grease was the box office hit (and with its flying car at the climax it could just sneak into The EOFFTV Review one day) while Michael Schultz’s abysmal big screen adaptation of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the absolute pits. Somewhere between them lay this misfiring big budget adaptation of the Broadway musical The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical “Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

The stage production, which featured music by Charlie Smalls, Timothy Graphenreed, Harold Wheeler, George Faison and Luther Vandross and lyrics by Smalls, Vandross and Zachary Walzer, had opened in Baltimore in October 1974 before transferring to Broadway in January 1975. A retelling of L. Frank Baum’s famous stories (most famously filmed in 1939 of course) with an all-black cast, the stage show was a huge hit, the Broadway performance bagging seven Tony Awards, including the prestigious Best Musical.

A big screen adaptation probably seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, tampering with the story, hopeless miscasting of the lead and a director who, in retrospect, seems like the least obvious choice for the gig conspired to create one of the great financial disasters of the 1970s, lambasted by the critics and shunned by the public. What was seen by some as an antidote to the cynical, violent blaxploitation films of the 70s ended up sinking without trace, killing the idea of an all-black cast in a mainstream Hollywood film for many years to come.

Shy and insecure 24-four-year-old schoolteacher Dorothy Gale (Diana Ross) lives at home in New York with her Aunt Em (Theresa Merritt) and Uncle Henry (Stanley Greene). After a Thanksgiving dinner, her dog Toto runs out into a snowstorm and when Dorothy chases after him they are both caught up in a whirlwind that transports them into an alternative New York known as Oz. Her arrival causes the accidental death of Evermean, the Wicked Witch of the East which in turns frees the Munchkins from her spell – she’d transformed them into graffiti figures. She’s given a pair of silver skippers by Miss One, the Good Witch of the North (Thelma Carpenter) and advised to seek help in getting home from the powerful The Wiz who lives in the Emerald City. On her journey she rescues a Scarecrow (Michael Jackson) from a gaggle of bullying crows and together they travel along the Yellow Brick Road towards the Emerald City, the Scarecrow hoping that The Wiz (Richard Pryor) will give him a brain. They pick up a Tin Man (Nipsey Russell) who wants a heart and the Cowardly Lion (Ted Ross) who wants courage. On arriving in the city, they are captured by the sister of the Wicked Witch of the East, Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King) who wants Dorothy’s magic slippers. Can they escape her clutches, find The Wiz and get everything that they want?

When the idea was first floated of adapting the exuberant stage play into a film, the idea of who should direct it was obviously at the forefront of the corporate mind of producers Motown Productions. Who should be put in charge of an all-black cast, performing high energy soul, gospel and funk numbers? Who could capture the verve and ebullience of the long-running and much-loved musical? Why, 54-year-old white director Sidney Lumet, obviously…

Lumet was undoubtedly an excellent director as one look at his admirable filmography would attest – 12 Angry Men (1957), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), Equus (1977)… But what in that list of excellent films suggested that he had any particular aptitude for musicals, particularly pop music ones? Unlike the play, the film’s Oz is set in an alternate, stylised version of New York where many of Lumet’s films had been set. This would have been a good idea if he’d done anything with it, but simply painting the Brooklyn Bridge to represent the Yellow Brick Road and having a few cartoonish taxi cabs on hand seems like a terribly wasted opportunity.

The task of adapting the play into a script fell to Joel Schumacher who at least had some form – he’d written Michael Schultz’ Car Wash in 1976. But where the 1939 version of the stories had managed to tell its story in 100 or so minutes, Schumacher and Lumet drags this one out to an unwieldy and patience-testing 133. At the time, Schumacher and Ross were adherents of to the teachings of Werner Erhard’s and practitioners of his est (Erhard Seminars Training), a self-help program that assumed almost cult-like proportions in the States between 1971 and 1984 and which encouraged its followers to embrace “the ideas of transformation, personal responsibility, accountability, and possibility.” This goes a long way to explaining the cloying sentiments that pour out of Glinda the Good Witch at the climax which sound like they came straight from the pages of an est training manual.

The casting is largely very good though Ross, 34 at the time of the film’s release, was far too old to be playing even the 24-year-old version of Dorothy in the film let alone the very young girl from the stories. Her character is burdened with the need to make room for those est-ian sentiments, so she’s  a rather gloomy character, afraid of taking her place in the world and a bit too dour for a film like this. Michael Jackson was yet to become the Michael Jackson of 80s pop legend but is still very energetic as the Scarecrow but its Ted Ross as the lion who proves to be the most fun.

You can certainly see where the money went (the film cost an eye-watering $24 million) – Tony Walton’s gargantuan sets built at Astoria Studios in Queens are remarkable though Lumet tends to lose sight of his cast in their shadows, stranding his performers who are simply dwarfed by their magnificent but overwhelming surroundings. Locations are cleverly used – the abandoned New York State Pavilion from the 1964 New York World’s Fair makes for an atmospheric Munchkinland and today there’s an added poignancy to the use of the World Trade Center as the Emerald City.

There are a few genuinely creepy moments to be found in The Wiz that briefly bring the film to life – the chanting graffiti figures that come to life as the film’s munchkins is surpassed only by the surreal subway scene in which Dorothy and co are pursued by giant pink monsters unleashed by a sinister toy seller, killer rubbish bins, sentient electricity cables and bits of the station architecture that come clumsily to shuffling life. And the scene of Dorothy and her friends being tortured by Evillene is unusually intense for a film of this kind.

The film should have been a lot more exuberant than it is. It’s a strangely downbeat affair and Lumet’s odd decision to film many of the musical numbers in long or medium shot using a static camera simply stifles it even more. It needed more of the sinuous camerawork that graced the classic musicals (look at the brilliant Singin’ in the Rain sequence from the 1952 film of the same name for an example of how it should be done) than the rather stodgy work seen here. Apart from the various versions of the infectiously funky Ease on Down the Road and Mabel King’s spirited rendition of Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News, few of the musical numbers come to life in The Wiz – Ross’ many and often lengthy ballads are particularly insipid.

The Wiz tanked at the box office (it made just £21 million against that production cost of $24 million – factoring in prints and publicity and the deficit would be even greater.) In 1978, Michael Jackson had yet to crowned the King of Pop so his presence wasn’t enough to pull in the punters. A few years later of course and it would have been a very different story – before his reputation fell apart after the disturbing revelations about his private life became public knowledge, he had the proverbial Midas touch and could have elevated even a mediocre film like The Wiz to box office glory.

The box office failing of The Wiz seems to have had a knock-on effect on the play. After its original Broadway run that ran to 1,672 performances, it was revived in 1984 but closed after just 13 nights before transferring to London for an equally short run. A planned revival in 2004 was cancelled though it continued to surface from time to time outside the States. In December 2015 a live television broadcast, The Wiz Live! saw the original stage Dorothy, Stephanie Mills, returning as Aunt Em and Shanice Williams taking her old role.