The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story

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The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story
Genre	Biography Drama Family
Written by	Richard Matheson
Story by	David Kirschner Richard Matheson
Directed by	Jack Bender
Starring	John Ritter Annette O'Toole Rue McClanahan
Music by	Lee Holdridge
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
Production
Executive producers	David Kirschner Robert M. Myman
Producers	Ervin Zavada Laura Moskowitz Clare Witt (associate producer)
Cinematography	Thomas Burstyn
Editor	Jerrold L. Ludwig
Running time	100 minutes
Production companies	Bedrock Productions Adam Productions Spelling Entertainment
Distributor	NBC
Release
Original network	NBC
Picture format	Black and White Color
Audio format	Stereo
Original release	December 10, 1990 (1990-12-10)

The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story is a 1990 American made-for-television biographical film starring John Ritter as Lyman Frank Baum, the author who wrote the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other Oz books. Also starring in it were Annette O'Toole as Baum's supportive wife, Maud, and Rue McClanahan as Baum's tough mother-in-law, Matilda Gage. John's son, Jason Ritter, makes his debut^{[citation needed]} in it as Harry Neal Baum. At the time of its debut, O'Toole and Ritter also starred in It, a TV miniseries in which they played a couple.

Plot[]

The film depicts how L. Frank Baum came to create The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while undergoing and eventually overcoming professional and personal failures. The story is interspersed with the famous Oz story, shown at certain points when Baum is writing down his ideas. It is shown that he was originally telling this to a group of kids, who asked him the name of this location, to which he looks at a file cabinet with the bottom drawer marked O-Z and decided "Oz". Another idea he had thought of was to say Dorothy was born in the Dakota Territory, only to scrap that sentence in favor of Kansas.

Cast[]

• John Ritter as L. Frank Baum
• Annette O'Toole as Maud Gage Baum
• Rue McClanahan as Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage
• Charles Haid as Al Badham / Cowardly Lion
• David Schramm as W.W. Denslow
• Nancy Lenehan as Harriet Alvena Baum Neal
• as Dorothy Leslie Gage / Dorothy Gale
• Nancy Morgan as Helen Leslie Gage

External links[]

• The Dreamer of Oz at IMDb
• The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story at AllMovie

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