An Interview with Gary Kurtz

So, transitioning out of Dark Crystal, what was the next project that you set your sights on?

KURTZ: Well, I had been working on several scripts. A friend of mine, Walter Murch, had done a version of an Oz story, and he wanted to do a kind of Return to the Wizard of Oz kind of story, and we talked about it at great length. Disney was interested seriously in doing it, so we said, "Well, it's a chance to do something" – a really interesting fantasy. It was quite a difficult situation, actually, because by the time we got into production, Disney was in serious trouble in the mid-'80s and they stopped the project two or three times. The management changed three major times. By the time the film was finished and ready to be released, the Eisner-Katzenberg regime was in and they didn't really want to know anything about the project – they just wanted to bury it and three other films made by the previous regime. Which is very demoralizing, and yet they did eventually release it, but without putting very much behind it, and it didn't do very well theatrically. It was one of those films that was very difficult to market. The artwork and things marketed it as if it was sort of a bright and bubbly sequel to Wizard of Oz – that's what the audience expected. It wasn't that at all. It was quite dark, actually. I don't know if you've seen it.

Yes. Oh yes. It disturbed me as a child, but I have grown to appreciate it.

KURTZ: It didn't satisfy any of the audiences, and I suppose a really astute marketing person would have told us to stay away from the L. Frank Baum Oz stories, because The Wizard of Oz set the tone for the audience's perception about Oz. Although The Wizard of Oz as a film was nothing like the original book, that's what people expected. So, when this film – which was an amalgamation of the second and third books, really, lumped together – came along, it was much more like L. Frank Baum's novels. But the audience that loved The Wizard of Oz didn't like it, because it wasn't a bright and bubbly musical. We had a kind of no-win situation, in a way; unless it had been marketed very, very carefully – which it wasn't.

It was a very, very frustrating thing for me, and it drove me away from Hollywood. I just didn't want to have anything more to do with Hollywood companies for a long time after that. I just said, "I just cannot put up with this anymore," and so I didn't. I went away, actually. I was living in England anyway during this time and just flying back and forth as necessary, but still it was kind of the last straw for me. I just didn't see it as possible to work in that environment and be satisfied. I knew a lot of other people who were, and that was fine for them, but I just couldn't handle it. Partially, it was that whole thing. Twice during the picture they tried to fire Walter. He was difficult as a director, because he's a wonderful editor but he's not very spontaneous. He plans things out very meticulously, which is what editors do best. As a director, you have to be pretty spontaneous, because if your plan doesn't quite work, you don't flog it to death – you try something else.

It requires flexibility.

KURTZ: Yeah, a lot of flexibility, and he didn't have a whole lot. It was his first film as a director, and we were all trying to help him as much as possible, but he had a clear vision in his head of what he saw, and if it wasn't working, he didn't have much to fall back on in terms of spontaneity. It was tricky. In the end, to keep him from being fired, I ended up having to bring in reinforcements, in a way. I got Francis and George to come over and talk to him, and then talk to the studio and say it'll be okay, and he'll be fine. In effect, it was just buying time, really, so we could finish the shooting. Because he didn't do anything differently ... they were just worried because it was a bit behind. It wasn't really over budget or anything, it was just a bit behind schedule and they were worried about him as a first time director anyway. Because the management changed so often, though, it was really difficult to get into a rapport with anybody at the studio.
 

Which was harder for you, or for him?

KURTZ: He didn't have to deal with it a whole lot, and so it was probably harder for me. But they cancelled the picture a couple of times ... they insisted that they put another guy on, as sort of a co-producer, Paul Maslansky, who had made a lot of low-budget films, and was a good, experienced production type. And he was fine... we got along with him fine. It was just a concern about the picture kind of going out of control, and the truth is that the Eisner-Katzenberg regime – when they came in – probably would have cancelled the picture if they could have, but we were almost finished shooting then. It was too late, really.

 At least it can be said that the film has found an after-market....

KURTZ: Yes. Yes it has. For years and years and years you couldn't buy it on video or DVD or anything. They never re-released it like they did their other films. I had a laserdisc of it that was in Japan that Disney put out in Japan only. But I see now that they actually have put out a video of it.

I think it did have some critical response that was positive to it.

KURTZ: Oh yes. There was quite a few. We had an interesting test screening with the National Research Group, where we screened it for a mixed group of parents and children. The parents, I think about 75% of the parents, felt it was way too scary for kids below 12, I think. Some of the kids who were young were a bit scared. But when the research people spoke with the kids, they said they liked it a lot, they had a great time. The parents of those very same kids said they felt that their kids would never want to see anything like this film.

I think, what, Harlan Ellison called it the greatest film ever made?

KURTZ: Harlan is prone to the superlative, I think. The interesting thing about it is that I show it to film students occasionally because this is a film that's ostensibly a children's film about going into a fantasy world. Yet it is not sentimental, and it is quite scary in a lot of ways – and yet children respond to it. It isn't sappy. One of the criticisms was that it wasn't funnier, it didn't have more humor, but there's a certain amount of strange humor in the whole repartee between Dorothy and Billina, the chicken, constantly throughout the story. But ...it's not a rip-roaring comedy type movie.

It's a disturbingly dark comedy.

KURTZ: Yes, it is.

I mentioned earlier it's something that it is appreciated more as one gets older...

KURTZ: Yes, I think it is. A real problem that we had with the film is that it ends about three times. We had a very difficult time trying to figure out how to get out. Because of the way the story is structured, we had to come back from Oz to Kansas, and so – even within Oz – there's a couple of endings. Actually the end of the movie, energetically for the audience and for all practical purposes, is when Dorothy makes the right guess in the trinket room at the end and brings back her friends... and when the gnome king is overcome, at the very end. Emotionally, that's the end of one, and the whole business of the big parade and all the Oz characters and the princess and all of that is a coda really. But then we have another coda, of her having to go home. It was really difficult. We knew that that was a problem in the script, and we never did solve it completely. I still don't know how best to have handled that because you can't just dump Dorothy out of the story at that point and take her back to Kansas.

Although, technically, comparing it back, the original Wizard of Oz had the same problem.

KURTZ: It did, but it worked better in the Wizard of Oz, I think, just because of the way it was handled and the kind of movie that it was. I think that if I were doing Return to Oz now, I would have eliminated a lot of the celebration in Oz and the whole "stay here with us, Dorothy" and would have gotten the princess out, and gotten her out quicker somehow. A movie is what it is because that's what happened at the time – that is one of the reasons why I rail against this idea about changing movies all the time. This is a very common practice now, which I really don't like – on any movie. I don't like the Special Editions of Star Wars and all these other movies that have come out with a super-duper director's cut like the special edition of Close Encounters. You name it. Practically every movie now does it, because they can do it for DVD.

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