In 1978, 39 years after the release of the original, iconic film version of L. Frank Baum's American fairytale, Sidney Lumet directed an all-black version of the classic story, a film adaptation of the musical The Wiz. Starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Lena Horne, and Richard Pryor, The Wiz was a reimagining of the classic story set in New York City, and musicalized through the music of soul. While it has become a cult classic, the film was a critical and commercial failure, and some have credited it with tanking a resurgence movement of black film that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, starting with the blaxploitation genre.
The Wiz follows Dorothy from Harlem in New York City, through a snowstorm to Oz. There, she meets different versions of the original characters, and sings original songs penned by legendary songwriters Charlie Smalls, Nickolas Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Anthony Jackson, Luther Vandross, and Quincy Jones. Quincy Jones was the musical supervisor for the film, which was a "loose adaptation" of a Broadway musical that had opened in 1974. Critics and audiences loved the stage musical, and in an article about the film/musical for Time Magazine, Lily Rothman wrote, "The Broadway smash, which made $10,000 a week in its first month, was part of a larger theatrical box-office upswing that year. At the Tony Awards, it went home with seven prizes including best musical."
The film was not so fortunate, with many reviewers criticizing Diana Ross for being too old for the part, and saying the film did not retain the spark of the musical. It also became an excuse for critics to make rather general structural statements about the box office viability of black films (The Wiz was incredibly expensive and a box office bomb), and Roger Ebert wrote, “The failure of The Wiz seemed to prove that multimillion-dollar productions starring Blacks couldn’t make money. And Hollywood didn’t need more than one movie to prove that to itself.” It's worth noting that the producer and director of The Wiz were both white men.
