Word: wiz
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...able to quell the mind-numbing trend was Paul Mazursky's marvelous An Unmarried Woman; it grossed $62.5 million and made Jill Clayburgh a star. Some pictures did well but not very well, or at least not as well as their backers hoped. Chief among those was The Wiz, the black version of The Wizard of Oz. Just about to go into wide release, the movie will probably make a profit, and it appears to have made a crucial inroad among white audiences. But it will almost certainly not be the blockbuster Universal counted...
Cohen is best known for his films "The Wiz," "Thank God It's Friday," and "Mahogony." He is a graduate of Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies Program. Corty directed the television film, "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman...
...depressing to realize that the production never had a chance. The trouble is not that memories are stirred of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, a film so indelibly fixed in the mind that to remake it would be like remaking Gone With the Wind. The Wiz, which came to life first as a Broadway musical, is a cousin of the movie, not a remake. Its independence is firmly based in its cheerful suppositions that Dorothy is a black girl from Harlem and that Oz is downtown somewhere in scary and wonderful Manhattan...
...made (over $30 million), there are sure to be boggy places where what we see is not a fairy tale but a wounded budget projection creeping off to die. The difficulty is not even that by now we are overentertained and grumpy about song-and-dance numbers. (In The Wiz they are bright and clever, but as elaborate...
...York World's Fair Pavilion at Flushing Meadow, where the Wicked Witch of the East has turned hundreds of juvenile spray-paint vandals into graffiti figures. The yellow brick road leads across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, where Richard Pryor reigns as the Wiz. But before Dorothy gets there, she meets a roarious but cowardly lion (Ted Ross) and a marvelous scarecrow (Michael Jackson), hung up on his pole and tormented by rascally birds. Jackson sings a piteous lament, to the effect that "you can't win, you can't break even...