Living History
Pete and I went to see The Wizard of Oz at the restored Fox Theatre this Saturday. Wow, is that a venue. I've kind of been following the restoration, which is impressive all on its own. But not only have they restored it to essentially the state of the original 1930's opening (some changes for handicapped accessibility and wider modern butts, but that's about it), in terms of the back-stage and behind-the-scenes stuff, they've set it up to be a state of the art performance venue. I was incredibly impressed, and had great fun holding Pete's hand so the flying monkeys wouldn't get him. ;)
Prior to that, we wandered up to a site where an archeological survey is going on. There's a law, in Tucson (or perhaps it's county- or state-wide, I'm not sure) that whenever you build, you have to take reasonable precautions that you're not trashing buried artifacts. Well, someone did one of these downtown and found not only a piece of the original presidio wall, but a tower they had only speculated might be there, and at least four Hohokam pit houses. Currently, there's a project to create a site that displays one of the pit houses, a piece of the original wall (both of these protected from the elements), and build a replica of the two-story tower. We just thought we'd peer from outside the chain link fence and see what we could see.
They had the gates open and were giving tours. A couple of archeologists who were busily engaged in sifting excavated dirt for small artifacts stopped to point out the charred sections at floor level of the pit house they were excavating. Those were the remains of the original posts that held up the walls; evidentlly, the house had burned. They had sample trays of artifacts from three periods: frontier/pioneer, Spanish colonial, and Hohokam. There were several drawings of what the presidio would originally have looked like, what the project they're working on right now will look like, etc. The find of the day was a porcelain spittoon with a big chip out of its lip. I studied archeology in my gifted class when I was in fifth grade, but this was the first time I'd actually seen professionals at work. I was just tickled.
Prior to that, we wandered up to a site where an archeological survey is going on. There's a law, in Tucson (or perhaps it's county- or state-wide, I'm not sure) that whenever you build, you have to take reasonable precautions that you're not trashing buried artifacts. Well, someone did one of these downtown and found not only a piece of the original presidio wall, but a tower they had only speculated might be there, and at least four Hohokam pit houses. Currently, there's a project to create a site that displays one of the pit houses, a piece of the original wall (both of these protected from the elements), and build a replica of the two-story tower. We just thought we'd peer from outside the chain link fence and see what we could see.
They had the gates open and were giving tours. A couple of archeologists who were busily engaged in sifting excavated dirt for small artifacts stopped to point out the charred sections at floor level of the pit house they were excavating. Those were the remains of the original posts that held up the walls; evidentlly, the house had burned. They had sample trays of artifacts from three periods: frontier/pioneer, Spanish colonial, and Hohokam. There were several drawings of what the presidio would originally have looked like, what the project they're working on right now will look like, etc. The find of the day was a porcelain spittoon with a big chip out of its lip. I studied archeology in my gifted class when I was in fifth grade, but this was the first time I'd actually seen professionals at work. I was just tickled.
posted by Journey | 12:15 PM
2 Comments:
Wizard of Oz has been, recently, something of a stickler for me. I know enough about the books to realize the Wizard in question is a jerk.
Essentially, his scam is exposed, so he tries to send the four to their deaths. They come back alive.
He tricks three of them, and then with Dorothy, he comes up with this balloon thing (which is essentially him just trying to escape), and leaves without her.
The guy is, in essence, a huckster, and one not above having other people do his dirty work for him.
A shame this isn't played out more in the movie.
1) You're not telling me anything I don't know. It's deliberate on the part of the author, and when portrayed on film or stage, the same actgor plays both the Wizard and the huckster, just in case it wasn't painfully obvious.
2) The Wizard of Oz, as it was written, is a political commentary.
3) Most people read this political commentary as children, and so they take it as a children's book. When it was made into a movie, this is the paradigm that was used. It's not that the movie was untrue to the book, it's that the people who wrote the screenplay looked at it through a different lens, pardon the pun.
4) The movie came out in 1939. It was made in the middle of the US's Great Depression. People didn't go to movies to be preached at. They went to movies for hope. This affected how the film was made.
5) I went to see it this weekend because it was one of two films considered cinematic classics that were showing the day the Fox first became open to the public. Off actual celuloid, even--they'd done some creative splicing to get a single, functional reel. It was one of those things where you go for the experience, not the movie.
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