As production rolled on, it became clear that fighting off MGM's demanding promoters while overseeing production of The Wizard of Oz was beginning to take it's toll on Mervyn LeRoy. Until now, King Vidor had been running a classic, old-school angle with a strong emphasis on realism and pure cinema build. With the help of LeRoy assistant William H. Cannon, he had mapped out a long-term vision for the angle that would have converted the fantastic and wholly implausible story that Baum had concocted into something fans could actually buy into. The Scarecrow gimmick would be that of a man so dumb that he could only get work by dressing up in rags and scaring off crows in a cornfield. The Tin Man was to take a very dark turn as a heartless criminal serving a life sentence inside a hardened tin suit. Though unconfirmed, it is believed that the Cowardly Lion would simply be one of the farmhands working at Dorothy's farm, who would choose to accompany her on her journey and ultimately don a lucha libre-inspired lion mask in order to scare off their opponents. And the Wizard himself was to be nothing more than a travelling con man posing as a fortune teller named "Professor Marvel".
We're lucky than Vidor got to carry out his vision long enough to see that last bit, but it was right at that time that LeRoy was finally driven off of the rails entirely. But interestingly, the last straw wouldn't come from the further meddling of MGM executives. No, it would come from another man in another studio altogether - Walt Disney. Disney had made a name for himself over the past decade booking short undercard animated angles that had proven very effective as a sideshow attraction. But with their emphasis on gimmickry and the prohibitive costs that would be involved, no one ever could have expected that a feature-length animated Disney angle could be anything less than a disaster. They were wrong. "Disney's Folly", Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was a smash hit, completely changing the landscape of the industry irrevocably and forever...and LeRoy wanted a piece of the action. Armed with the knowledge that a main event fantasy angle could draw at the box office, a maddened LeRoy ordered that the angle be reverted to it's original literary entertainment roots. Cannon's vision was scrapped, and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Noel Langley, and Ogden Nash were soon brought in to take his place. In classic pro wrestling fashion, the three writers were all lead to believe that they were the only ones working on the angle, presumably for no other reason than to fool the boys in the back. They were soon joined by Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, and by the time the angle was over, the booking team would be massive and completely out of control as LeRoy's vision for it changed on a seemingly daily basis.
Vidor saw the writing on the wall. After a pointless on-screen burial where Dorothy got to meet Professor Marvel, only for Marvel to - get this - tell her to go back to the farm (seriously, is there some LeRoy blood in the Russo lineage?), he gave his notice, and Norman Taurog was brought in as the new head booker to carry out LeRoy's bizzare new vision.
All the while, Judy continued to deliver strong performances for management that seemed increasingly hellbent on destroying their own creation. Her work with Frank Morgan's Professor was a great display of the mix of charming innocence and moral conviction that was rapidly making her a star performer. And, for his own part, Morgan came up big in what he must have known was an act of futility, playing the character to the hilt and leaving the rest of us wondering what could have been. Between the two of them, I dare say they almost made a completely nonsensical swerve meant only to bury Vidor and Cannon on their way out and set up the complete reboot of the angle seem somewhat plausible.
Of course, what came next was anything but plausible. Dorothy and Toto hurried back to the farm, hoping to reunite with a grief stricken Auntie Em, just in time for a tornado to touch down in the surrounding area. The storm cellar is already locked shut by the time they arrive, so they attempt to take shelter in the farmhouse.
The problems begin in earnest here. Firstly, after Vidor did such an excellent job of establishing the intense realism of the film, we have Dorothy and Toto squaring off with a god damn tornado. The tornado, by all rights, should just rip through the house, and destroy Dorothy and Toto. It would have taken Judy out of the equation, which would have been foolish, but audiences would have actually been able to buy into that, and it would establish the tornado as a force to be reckoned with. It also would have set up a natural revenge feud, with Auntie Em, Uncle Henry, the farmhands, and possibly even Professor Marvel all out to bring the Tornado down, with the Tornado slicing through them all until Dorothy makes her triumphant return from injury to defeat the devestating force of nature in a big money blow-off match. Yes, I know that human beings feuding with a tornado is pretty silly, but if they were going to bring it in, they could have at least gotten their money's worth out of it, and it's certainly not as silly as what actually happened - the Tornado rolls in and knocks one window loose. The window KO's Dorothy, and even being forced to work with kid gloves in terms of the kind of beating it was allowed to lay on her, you still could have spun this into a Dorothy/Tornado feud. You probably couldn't stretch it out as long, you wouldn't make as much money off of it, and it would still be silly, but it could have served as a decent upper-midcard feud while the other faces fought Almira Gulch, eventually building up to the big Dorothy/Gulch showdown that people really wanted to see. But that's not what happens, either. Instead...well, this needs to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, since all the clips I can find of it online disabled embedding, all I can do is point you in the direction of one:
Judy Garland - The Cyclone Scene - The Wizard Of Oz, 1939
I can't say enough good things about Judy Garland's performance in this movie, but in this scene, even she seems in shock over the film's lunacy. The tornado uproots the farmhouse completely. I suppose if it came crashing down, putting out Dorothy for a while....oh, screw it. I think you get the idea. Any possibility of an event being followed by the next, most logical booking move, is going to be wasted so that LeRoy could indulge every little whim that popped into his head, booking this thing like a five-year-old with ADD and a crystal meth habit. Barn animals and even people fly by the window as Dorothy comes to, and while she tries to react in an appropriate fashion, there is no appropriate fashion to react to this idiocy in, and her smile belies a state of shock, suggesting she knows exactly that. But the real coup de grace is when Almira Gulch flies by on her bicycle. For a moment, Dorothy seems ready to shake off what she's just seen and get back down to business. She is, after all, face-to-face with the top heel, her arch-nemesis, and Dorothy/Gulch was established from the get-go as the big money match that this angle was building to. Judy was primed and ready for the next major chapter of what was still looking like a strong feud to play out, and perhaps save the angle from the mess going on around it.
And then Almira Gulch turned into a witch.
No, seriously, she turned into a witch. Why? Because Mervyn LeRoy said so. No set-up, no promos explaining it, no reason for it to happen whatsoever. She just turns into a witch. And Dorothy reacts the way any other rational person would upon seeing a gimmick change that stupid - she turns away and buries her head in her mattress, ashamed to look at it, ashamed to be a part of it.
With that final bit of stupidity out of the way, the Tornado subsides, never to be seen again. No feuds with angry faces. No blow-off with Dorothy. It just shows up once, chucks a window at Dorothy, tosses her house around, and leaves. What a great booking move. Dorothy lands, shakes the cobwebs out, head to the front door, and well, we're not in Kansas anymore.
Unfortunately, we're not in a good angle, either.