The Wiz 4K 1978

The yellow brick road stretched through black New York this time. And walking along it was not just 11-year-old Dorothy, but the most successful singer of the 20th century according to the Guinness Book of Records, Diana Ross. Playfully shuffling her slender legs, she casually removed the unrealistically wrinkled, fat, and dark-skinned Michael Jackson from the metal crucifix.

With songs and dances, a group of African Americans pretending to be the Scarecrow, the Woodman, and the Lion achieved their main goal—an audience with the loser from New Jersey, Visa (the pseudonym of the head of the Emerald City), who, with his appearance, strongly resembled Ali G, aka Borat, to modern viewers.

Everything, of course, ended with a happy ending, Diana-Dorothy sang the final song about eternal values and safely returned to her mansion.

Motown Studios bet heavily on this film. It bought the rights to the cult American fairy tale and hired two of its biggest stars, with Ross herself at the height of her fame at the time, having been named “Artist of the Century” by Billboard magazine, won a Golden Globe, and been nominated for an Oscar. And pop idol Michael Jackson is known even to Taiwanese pensioners.

Motown did not skimp on the creators of the musical either. Oscar-winning director Sidney Lumet, screenwriter Joel Schumacher, who went on to make Batman and The Phantom of the Opera, producer Rob Cohen, who entertained today's teenagers with The Fast and the Furious and xXx, and cinematographer Oswald Morris, who also shot Moby Dick.

Huge studios were rented, fancy visual effects were developed, popular singles were written, and $24 million was spent in 1978—a considerable amount of money—to prepare for a blockbuster. But the film flopped.

No, of course, the resourceful Americans squeezed everything they could out of it, from records to television rights, but even after several decades, the budget was not recouped. The result was disappointment and the abandonment of Michael Jackson and Diana Ross's film careers. And Motown Production's film division never made another big-budget movie.

The reasons for the failure are politely ignored, but they are obvious: neither in 1970s America nor in the rest of the world would a film with an entirely black cast be a box office hit. That's what happened with this musical, which was actually quite good.

The creators managed to cram just about everything into this family film. There are bikers, flying monkeys, graffiti artists smeared across the wall, nude dancing, a snow tornado in the middle of New York, and trashy trash cans... It's surprising that the musical is virtually unknown to modern audiences, who seriously consider High School Musical: The Musical: The Musical to be the pinnacle of the genre.

Watch the film, if only for Michael Jackson quoting Confucius and Shakespeare.