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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/tyrion2024 on 2024-07-13 12:36:16+00:00.
Original Title: TIL George Lucas saved Walter Murch’s job as director of Return to Oz (1985). After Disney fired Murch, Lucas flew to London to urge Disney to reinstall him by using himself as collateral. He said that if Murch failed to deliver, he’d finish the film himself which got Disney to rehire his friend.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Return to Oz, Disney’s 1985 dark take on Dorothy Gale (played by a then-9-year-old Fairuza Balk), shares its creative DNA with Star Wars.
They later moved from Los Angeles to California’s Bay Area, where they established American Zoetrope studio with Francis Ford Coppola, and Murch would work on such landmark Coppola films as 1972’s The Godfather, 1974’s The Conversation and 1979’s Apocalypse Now (for which he won an Oscar for best sound and was nominated for an Oscar for best editing).
Disney was also watching the success of the Star Wars franchise very carefully, and so they approached Murch, seeking new ideas.
He proposed making a sequel to The Wizard of Oz — but not a musical, like the Judy Garland-starring predecessor from 1939, but one that hewed closer to the original L. Frank Baum books, which Murch adored as a child.
Five weeks into production, the elaborate and technically complex shoot began to fall behind its schedule, and Disney, disapproving of the footage it had seen, fired Murch from the project.
He used himself as collateral, telling executives that if Murch failed to deliver the film as promised and on time, he would see to it himself that Return to Oz came to fruition.
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