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 a full church choir arrangement anchoring the film's emotional peak.
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.
Once you have seen it
Notice how still Diana Ross stays during the big numbers. (performance)
Through much of the film's biggest choreography, Ross holds her position near the center while hundreds of dancers and the environment itself do the moving around her.
Payoff: The city dances. She mostly does not, and that reversal is deliberate, not a failure of energy. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this handoff the movement of world: the star stops generating the dance and becomes its still center instead.
Watch how small and frightened Pryor plays the Wiz himself. (performance)
Pryor plays the Wiz as a failed politician stranded by his own balloon, scared and diminished rather than clever or grand when he is finally unmasked.
Payoff: The powerful figure everyone feared turns out to be small on purpose, not by accident. In the reading: inversion-image. The reading calls this reversal an inversion image: the sublime figure replaced by a feeble double instead of a satirized villain.
Watch workers physically shed their coverings during 'Brand New Day.' (staging)
Quincy Jones arranges the liberation number as a church song, and Louis Johnson stages the sweatshop workers casting off their uniforms as the literal action of the number.
Payoff: Freedom here is not a metaphor sung about. It is a costume being physically removed.
Watch how often the camera cuts inside a single dance. (cutting)
Dede Allen cuts the musical numbers into fragments and reaction shots rather than holding a sustained take on the whole dancing body, the way classical musicals usually do.
Payoff: You feel the energy of the choreography without ever quite being able to follow it.
Carry this in: Watch how still Ross stands while the city moves and changes color all around her.