Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wiz
1978 · Sidney Lumet · The Wiz on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the crowd in Emerald City change color together. (staging)
Hundreds of dancers shift costume color on a single loudspeaker cue in the World Trade Center plaza, moving as one continuous mass rather than as individual figures.
Payoff: The city tells this crowd what to feel, and it obeys all at once.
Notice that every Oz landmark is a real New York place. (setting)
Tony Walton turns Munchkinland into a graffiti playground, the Lion into a stone library lion, and Emerald City into the World Trade Center plaza, finding Oz rather than inventing it.
Payoff: Every wonder and every terror here already existed on an actual block. In the reading: derived-milieu. The reading calls this visible cityscape a derived milieu: the actual social surface with an older, wilder world showing straight through it.
Listen for the score pulling toward funk and gospel, not showtunes. (sound)
Quincy Jones arranges Charlie Smalls's stage songs closer to the R&B and disco charts of 1978, with gospel choir arrangements.
Payoff: This score comes from a recording studio, not a Broadway pit, and it sounds like it.
Watch the subway pillars and trash cans come alive. (staging)
Ordinary subway fixtures, pillars, trash cans, a peddler, turn hostile with no witch or monster required, staged as the film's most frightening passage.
Payoff: The scariest thing in this Oz is furniture you already recognize from real life.
Watch how clearly Michael Jackson moves under heavy prosthetics. (performance)
As the Scarecrow, Jackson's numbers and his acting occupy the same physical register, weightless and precise, in his very first feature film role.
Payoff: You can see, even under makeup, exactly why this performer was about to become huge.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how still Ross stands while the city moves and changes color all around her.