John Waters says he has been invited to speak at all sorts of different events. In this excerpt from his memoir/self-help book, Mr. Know-It-All, Waters remembers one unusual event. He wondered aloud what might have happened in it were he to have made Wizard of Oz II:
At a Wizard of Oz celebration in Chicago, I described my dream sequel of Dorothy returning to Kansas, and when she can’t stop ranting about her trip to Oz, Auntie Em loses patience after months of telling Dorothy, ‘It was just a dream,’ and Uncle Henry puts his foot down and forces his defiant niece to see a psychiatrist, who gives her shock therapy, but even that doesn’t cure Dorothy of her yearning to return to the magical land.
Did no one tell John that he was describing the opening scenes of the Disney-studios sequel to Wizard, Return to Oz? That movie came out 40 years ago! Maybe John did hear about it, but then convinced himself the ideas were his own; I mean, who could believe Disney would put out a major motion picture in which innocent little Dorothy is strapped down for electro-shock therapy? There are good things about Return to Oz — the costumes are great! — but that opening sequence still gives me the willies.
The rest of the plot is all Waters:
She tries LSD, but these hallucinations are not the same as the poppies of Oz. Mushrooms, too, but there’s no great and powerful anything much less a wizard. Finally she sniffs poppers and it works! She’s back in Oz. The Scarecrow is old but still brilliant, the Tin Man is a yoga instructor, and the Cowardly Lion is now a drag queen named Roara. They give her the Wicked Witch’s magic broomstick and Dorothy flies back to Kansas, starts cross-dressing as Margaret Hamilton, and opens a gay bar called the Yellow Brick Load.
source:
Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder
by John Waters
2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
No comments:
Post a Comment