Laura Wright 
Hollyweird
Few movies seem less likely to be cursed.
Dorothy opens the door of a small Kansas farmhouse and suddenly the gray world becomes Technicolor.
There are singing Munchkins.
A yellow brick road.
A Scarecrow without a brain.
A Tin Man without a heart.
A Lion searching for courage.
And somewhere beyond the horizon lies the Emerald City.
Since its release in 1939, The Wizard of Oz has become one of the most beloved films in American cinema.
But behind the bright colors and cheerful songs is another story.
Actors were burned.
Others became seriously ill.
Performers fell from wires.
Toto was injured.
And decades later, some members of the cast suffered unhappy or tragic deaths.
Eventually, people began asking a question that has followed numerous troubled Hollywood productions.
Was The Wizard of Oz cursed?
Probably not.
But the truth behind the legend is strange enough without a curse.
The Hanging Munchkin
Perhaps the most famous Wizard of Oz legend concerns something supposedly visible in the finished movie.
Dorothy and the Scarecrow have just met the Tin Man.
After freeing him and surviving an encounter with the Wicked Witch of the West, the three companions begin skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.
Watch the background carefully.
Something appears to move among the trees.
For years, viewers have claimed that it is the body of a Munchkin actor who committed suicide on the set.
According to the legend, the death somehow went unnoticed during filming and the footage remained in the finished movie.
Once home video allowed audiences to pause and replay films repeatedly, the story became enormously popular.
There was just one problem.
There was no dead Munchkin.
The Bird in the Background
The mysterious figure is a large bird.
Several live birds were placed around the Oz sets to make the artificial forest appear more exotic and alive. What appears to be a dangling body is one of those birds moving in the background.
There is also no documented Munchkin performer who committed suicide during production.
The legend nevertheless became one of the most persistent pieces of movie folklore ever attached to The Wizard of Oz.
And it established a pattern.
Something strange happened during production.
Years passed.
The story became darker.
Eventually, the darker version became more famous than the truth.
But not everything associated with the supposed curse was invented.
Some of the accidents were frighteningly real.
Buddy Ebsen Becomes the Tin Man
Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Scarecrow.
Ray Bolger was supposed to play the Tin Man.
Bolger desperately wanted the Scarecrow role, however, and the two actors eventually exchanged parts. Ebsen became the Tin Man.
Rehearsals began.
Songs were recorded.
Production moved forward.
Then Ebsen became sick.
Very sick.
The Silver Makeup
The Tin Man needed to look metallic.
To accomplish this, Ebsen’s makeup contained aluminum powder.
The fine material became airborne during application.
Ebsen inhaled it.
Soon he experienced severe cramping and difficulty breathing. His condition became serious enough that he required hospitalization.
He couldn’t continue filming.
Buddy Ebsen was removed from the production and replaced by Jack Haley.
Some of Ebsen’s prerecorded vocals survived, however. Material from the original recording sessions remained incorporated into portions of the finished soundtrack.
The production also changed the Tin Man makeup.
Instead of the dangerous powder, aluminum was incorporated into a paste.
That solved one problem.
It created another.
Jack Haley’s Eyes
Jack Haley avoided Ebsen’s respiratory crisis, but the replacement makeup reportedly caused an eye infection.
Production involving Haley was interrupted while he recovered.
Two Tin Men.
Two medical problems.
Already, the supposedly cheerful Land of Oz wasn’t being particularly friendly to its inhabitants.
Then the Wicked Witch caught fire.
Margaret Hamilton Burns
Margaret Hamilton created one of cinema’s great villains as the Wicked Witch of the West.
Her disappearance scenes relied upon practical effects.
Hamilton stood on a concealed platform.
Smoke and fire erupted.
A trapdoor opened.
Hamilton descended beneath the stage while flames concealed her disappearance.
When everything happened at precisely the right moment, the illusion worked beautifully.
Then one day, it didn’t.
“I’ll Get You, My Pretty”
During the Witch’s fiery departure from Munchkinland, Hamilton was supposed to disappear through the trapdoor before the flames erupted.
The timing went wrong.
Hamilton was still exposed when the fire ignited.
She was badly burned.
Her face and hand were injured, and she required weeks to recover before returning to the production.
The green makeup complicated matters because it contained copper compounds that had to be carefully removed from the damaged skin.
Hamilton eventually returned.
But understandably, she was considerably less enthusiastic about fire.
The Wicked Witch had nearly been burned by her own special effect.
And she wasn’t the only person having trouble with Oz’s flying machinery.
The Flying Monkeys
The Wicked Witch’s winged guards were suspended above the set using wires.
The illusion looked wonderful.
The equipment wasn’t always cooperative.
Performers playing the Flying Monkeys reportedly fell when suspension wires failed, although the incidents fortunately did not result in the sort of catastrophic injuries that might easily have occurred.
Considering the technology available in 1938 and 1939, some of the physical demands involved in creating Oz were considerable.
There were no computer-generated monkeys.
Someone actually had to put on the costume.
Then somebody hung him from the ceiling.
Movie magic was considerably more literal in those days.
Even Toto Wasn’t Safe
Dorothy’s dog Toto was played primarily by a female Cairn Terrier named Terry.
She wasn’t spared the production’s run of accidents.
During filming, one of the actors playing the Witch’s guards accidentally stepped on Terry’s paw.
Her leg was broken.
A substitute dog was required while Terry recovered.
By this point, the production had hospitalized a Tin Man, injured his replacement, burned a witch, dropped flying monkeys and broken Toto’s leg.
If you’re determined to construct a cinematic curse, the raw material is certainly available.
But the legend doesn’t stop with production.
It follows the actors for decades.
Judy Garland
No member of the cast is more frequently associated with the supposed curse than Judy Garland.
Garland was only sixteen during production.
Her later life was notoriously troubled.
She experienced serious psychological difficulties.
Her finances became unstable.
She developed profound problems involving prescription drugs.
In 1947, she suffered a breakdown.
In 1969, Judy Garland died from an accidental overdose.
She was only 47 years old.
It is tempting to place Garland’s tragedy beside the production accidents and call it another piece of the curse.
But that creates a misleading connection.
Garland’s problems weren’t caused by some supernatural force attached to The Wizard of Oz.
Her difficulties existed within a much larger story involving the pressures of the Hollywood studio system, relentless work, complicated relationships, psychological problems and long-term drug use.
The tragedy was real.
The curse is an interpretation imposed afterward.
Frank Morgan
Frank Morgan, who played Professor Marvel and the Wizard himself, also suffered misfortune after the movie.
Four months after The Wizard of Oz was released, Morgan was seriously injured in an automobile accident.
He recovered and continued acting.
A decade later, while preparing for another film, Morgan suffered a fatal heart attack in 1949.
He was 59.
Again, there is nothing particularly supernatural about either event.
But once someone begins searching for evidence of a curse, almost any later misfortune becomes evidence.
There is another Frank Morgan story, however, that is much more charming.
L. Frank Baum’s Coat
Professor Marvel wears a rather battered old coat in the Kansas sequences.
According to the famous story, the production obtained the garment from a collection of secondhand clothing.
Someone later noticed a label inside.
The coat had supposedly belonged to L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The story has become one of the film’s most delightful pieces of behind-the-scenes folklore, and unlike the hanging Munchkin, the production itself treated the discovery as genuine.
If one wants something supernatural connected with Oz, that’s certainly the kinder option.
The author’s old coat somehow finding its way onto the Wizard.
Clara Blandick
Then there was Clara Blandick, who played Aunt Em.
Her later years were difficult.
Her marriage ended.
She had no children.
Her health deteriorated severely as she aged.
In 1962, at the age of 81, Blandick died by suicide.
Once again, her death was eventually absorbed into the curse.
But more than two decades had passed since The Wizard of Oz.
Calling Blandick’s suicide evidence of a curse requires assuming that practically any tragedy occurring to a cast member for the remainder of his or her life counts.
At that point, almost every sufficiently old movie becomes cursed.
Charley Grapewin
Charley Grapewin, who played Uncle Henry, died in 1956, shortly before the film began the television broadcasts that would help transform it into an American institution.
There was nothing mysterious about his death.
Grapewin was 86.
But his death nevertheless appears in some collections of the supposed Wizard of Oz curse.
And that illustrates the fundamental problem with cinematic curses.
Eventually, everyone dies.
Given enough time, every movie cast will accumulate deaths, illnesses, divorces, accidents and tragedies.
If those events are counted as evidence, every production is doomed.
The Munchkins
Then we reach one of the ugliest legends surrounding the movie.
For decades, stories circulated that the actors playing the Munchkins behaved outrageously while staying in Hollywood.
They supposedly drank heavily.
Gambled.
Engaged in prostitution.
Held wild parties.
Some versions even described nightly orgies.
Your original article repeated these as rumors while acknowledging how suspiciously they resembled derogatory folklore surrounding people with dwarfism.
Today I would make that skepticism stronger.
These stories shouldn’t be presented as established facts.
Much of the notorious Munchkin mythology was repeated and embellished long after filming, and the performers themselves disputed the more spectacular accounts.
In other words, the Munchkins suffered from something resembling the movie itself.
People preferred the outrageous legend.
Was The Wizard of Oz Cursed?
Something interesting happens when we lay all the supposed evidence out chronologically.
Buddy Ebsen became seriously ill because he inhaled aluminum makeup.
Jack Haley developed an infection from makeup.
Margaret Hamilton was burned because a practical effect went wrong.
Terry’s leg was broken in an accident.
Performers fell from flying rigs.
Those aren’t supernatural events.
They’re workplace accidents.
And by modern standards, some reveal just how dangerous filmmaking could be during Hollywood’s studio era.
Then decades pass.
Judy Garland develops serious personal and medical problems.
Frank Morgan dies.
Clara Blandick dies by suicide.
Other actors die of old age or illness.
Those aren’t production accidents.
They’re human lives.
The curse exists only when someone places all of these unrelated events into a single narrative.
How a Cinematic Curse Is Created
This is what makes The Wizard of Oz such a good example of cinematic folklore.
Begin with a famous movie.
Find several genuine accidents during production.
Add later tragedies involving cast members.
Include a mysterious object moving in the background.
Misidentify it as a suicide victim.
Add scandalous stories about the performers.
Wait several decades.
Then connect everything.
Suddenly:
The production was cursed.
But nothing supernatural is required.
In fact, your original conclusion said essentially the same thing: a legend had been constructed around a collection of events that, individually, weren’t evidence of anything supernatural.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Perhaps that’s the strange thing about The Wizard of Oz.
The movie looks effortless.
Dorothy walks into Oz and the world explodes into color.
But creating that world required actors covered in uncomfortable makeup, enormous sets, primitive special effects, pyrotechnics, suspension wires and exhausting studio work.
Some people were injured.
One performer nearly died.
Margaret Hamilton was badly burned.
Terry broke a leg.
Those things happened.
There doesn’t need to be a curse behind them.
And there certainly wasn’t a Munchkin hanging from a tree.
That figure moving in the background has been given one of the darkest stories in Hollywood folklore.
Perhaps there was no curse at all. Movie sets were dangerous places in the 1930s, and a production as elaborate as The Wizard of Oz offered plenty of opportunities for accidents. The tragedies that followed some members of the cast occurred across decades and can easily be dismissed as the ordinary misfortunes of human life.
And yet, there were rather a lot of them.
One Tin Man was hospitalized. His replacement suffered an infection. Margaret Hamilton was badly burned. Flying performers fell from their wires. Toto was injured. Years later came other accidents, illnesses, breakdowns and deaths, each adding another thread to a story that had already begun to resemble a curse.
None proves that anything supernatural followed the production.
But perhaps that is the peculiar thing about curses. They rarely announce themselves. There is no moment when the lights go out and someone declares that the production is doomed. There are simply accidents, coincidences and tragedies, accumulating one after another until someone finally looks backward and wonders whether they were ever coincidences at all.
The Wizard of Oz gave audiences a world in which witches could curse their enemies, houses could fall from the sky and an ordinary road could carry someone into another world.
Perhaps all of its darkness remained safely on the screen.
Perhaps.
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