By Michaela Gordoni
THE WIZARD OF OZ will come to the Sphere this summer, and the restoration team shared how they’re making it happen.
The classic movie’s restoration team used over a dozen visual effects houses to update the movie for the 16k, 160,000-foot wraparound screen in Las Vegas. THE IRISHMAN producer, Jane Rosenthal, and a team of archivists worked hard to make the movie ready for the mega screen on Aug. 28.
The team had to use AI to “outpaint” the images to fill the giant screen, Variety reported.
“When you see Dorothy running down the road in that opening shot and running toward Gale’s farm, you also see the full landscape and where the house is situated,” Rosenthal told Variety of the added features. “The same thing with the props — Professor Marvel’s caravan, you only see this little part of it. But if you widen out, you see all this crazy stuff he had in there, like skulls and whatnot from his magic act.”
To make it as true to the classic as possible, Rosenthal and her team searched through museums and studio repositories.
“We went and got the original shot list that the cameraman used,” Rosenthal said. “We went through all the production designer drawings. We looked at all the props in the Warner Brothers archives and the Academy archives.”
Jim Dolan, executive chairman and CEO of Sphere Entertainment, said, “Our goal for the Sphere Experience is a diverse slate that leverages Sphere’s power as an experiential medium.THE WIZARD OF OZ AT SPHERE…will push that vision forward in different ways.”
THE WIZARD OF OZ AT SPHERE, as the project is called, had AI train on only images and footage of the original movie. They collaborated with Warner Bros., which owns the original movie, the whole time.
The Sphere version is faster than the original, which runs for 102 minutes.
“It’s shorter, but it was also shorter on television because there had to be commercial breaks,” Rosenthal explained.
They did add some immersive elements but are keeping mum about what they are.
“There are ruby slippers in this film,” Rosenthal hinted.
There are some mistakes in the old movie that still have the restorers wondering if they should leave them or fix them with CGI.
“When you do look at this movie in high resolution, it shows interesting things,” Rosenthal said. “They didn’t have the same kind of continuity control that we painstakingly do now. There was also the way that the makeup was applied. Like how they glued on the Lion’s mane, you can see that. Do you change that, or do you just leave it?”
“We’re still debating,” Rosenthal said. “There’s a couple of shots where you wonder if you fix it or leave it as this quaint sort of thing that THE WIZARD OF OZ is.”
The movie’s entrance to the Sphere could set a precedent for more classic movies.
“It’s a template for our industry,” Rosenthal said. “It’s not the way that Marty Scorsese’s Film Society restores films, but it is a way for us to go back and look at films through the eyes of the director and the time in which they were made. We hope to do other films, but we don’t know what those are.”
“You don’t want to do something that’s just ubiquitous and put HARRY POTTER on Sphere,” Rosenthal said. She’s looking for “something immersive with a four-quadrant audience.”
“Four-quadrant” … So just family movies? What a great idea!
Read Next: AI Reimagines This Classic Movie for Las Vegas Sphere
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