The new film version of Wicked is currently setting box offices alight across the globe, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande wowing audiences in the $145M-budget fantasy film.
While fans are delighted that director Jon M. Chu has stayed almost entirely faithful to the original 2003 stage musical, which retells L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch (Erivo) and Glinda (Grande), there has been one major transformation in the cinematic 2024 reboot.
The Munchkins, Land of Oz natives who hail from Munchkinland, were all smaller than the character of Dorothy in both L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the famous 1939 film adaptation of his work, starring Judy Garland in the lead role.
Fast forward to 2024 though, and Chu’s Munchkins look very different to 1939 director Victor Fleming’s interpretation of the Land of Oz workers, who live by the start of the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.
The actors playing the Munchkins are led by Ariana Grande’s boyfriend Ethan Slater, who cuts a wholesome figure as curly-haired Boq.
During the film’s worldwide promotional tour, the new film’s director has explained why he took an entirely different approach to how the characters look in the latest incarnation of the film.
Chu said: ‘We wanted [Boq] to come from a culture, and so we were trying to reinvent what a Munchkin is. In our eyes, Munchkin was not a size,’ the 45-year-old filmmaker told GQ magazine.
He continued: ‘We built the Munchkinland look around him, in a weird way—like this red-haired, fair-skinned type of character.’
In another interview, Chu said the new Munchkins are ‘made up of many different types of people in Oz. They’re a very agricultural culture. They are in charge of collecting the color from the tulip fields.’
The original 1939 film used people of short stature to fill the roles but while the movie has become a classic, deeply unsettling stories about the actors’ behaviour on set have emerged in the decades since.
The tales are seemingly endless and lurid: holed up in a hotel with only each other for months on end, the Munchkins allegedly indulged in Bacchanalian orgies and heavy drinking bouts, swinging from rafters, gambling illegally, getting involved in prostitution and generally behaving so badly that police had to be stationed on every floor of their hotel.
A unearthed memoir by Judy Garland’s former husband Sid Luft, who died in 2005, made shocking claims that the film’s star, who was just 16 at the time, was also molested by some of the Munchkins while working on the legendary film’s set.
‘They thought they could get away with anything because they were so small,’ wrote Luft in his autobiography, ‘Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland,’ which was published in 2017.
‘They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress. The men were 40 or more years old.’
An assistant director was assigned to keep them in line and ensure that, if they ended up in jail, they were speedily bailed so they wouldn’t miss their calls on set.
Still wearing their make-up, Munchkins would retire after a long day’s work to the bars of Culver City, near Hollywood, and would get horribly drunk, Luft recalled.
‘They were disorderly as hell, yelling and screaming. The next day, on the set, hung-over, they would make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress,’ he penned.
Judy was just 4ft 11in and young-looking for her 16 years when she played the child Dorothy, he said.
‘The Munchkins, of course, were close to her in size and couldn’t resist teasing her, making her life a misery,’ he wrote.
‘The men were 40 or more years old, and there was Judy with boyfriends, and feeling sophisticated at 16.’
Luft’s claims were not the first time though that mention has been made of inappropriate behavior by the Munchkins on the set of The Wizard of Oz.
There were rumours at the time of ‘sex parties’ being held in the famous Culver Hotel (subsequently owned by John Wayne) where the actors who played the Munchkins all lived during filming.
And there were also reports of wild evenings with rooms ransacked and drunken Munchkin actors causing chaos. One horrified observer described the group as ‘an unholy assembly of pimps, hookers and gamblers.’
Garland herself later described some of the munchkin actors by saying: ‘They were drunks. They got smashed every night.’
Luft and Garland were married in 1952 and had a daughter Lorna and son Joey before divorcing 13 years later in 1965, with Garland claiming at the time that Luft was a drunk and abusive.
Garland would marry five times in her life before her death at the age of 47 from an overdose of pills. Luft also wrote about Garland’s struggle with drugs, something he blames for her many suicide attempts throughout their relationship.
‘She was married to the drugs before she met me, and she never really got divorced,’ said Luft. Judy admitted she felt she grew inches when she took Benzedrine.’
Garland’s pill use meanwhile became worse when she drank said Luft, who described her as a ‘raging pixie’ in those moments.
She also managed to hide her pills everywhere from cigarette cases to robes, where they would be sewn into the cloth.
Randy Schmidt, who edited the memoir, said: ‘Many people claim Judy… was an alcoholic. Sid disputes this and gives detailed testimony to her real demons, which were the pills.
‘More than any of her five husbands, [Luft] was the closest to what some might call the love of her life.
‘Even though they divorced in 1965, Sid was still the guy she most depended upon for the remaining four years of her life.’
Schmidt said the memoir was ‘Sid’s long-lost love letter’ as he writes of Miss Garland’s intelligence and torments.
‘Judy Garland was a very rare mix of shattered nerves and insecurities, self-destructiveness and suicidal tendencies but also a true genius,’ wrote Luft in his memoir.
‘She was to me the greatest talent who ever lived.’
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