Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he " read with a passion the forty-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt (" I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented ") to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon — horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him.

Baum wrote a sequel, The Woggle-Bug, but since Montgomery and Stone balked at appearing when the original was still running, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman were omitted from this adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, which was seen as a self-rip-off by critics and proved to be a major flop before it could reach Broadway.

After little success probing the unrealized children's film market, Baum came clean about who wrote The Last Egyptian and made a film of it ( portions of which are included in Decasia ), but the Oz name had, for the time being, become box office poison and even a name change to Dramatic Feature Films and transfer of ownership to Frank Joslyn Baum did not help.

The Oz series was continued long after his death by other authors, notably Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote an additional nineteen Oz books.

Providing a twenty-first century perspective about the novel, Leonard Everett Fisher of The Horn Book Magazine wrote in 2000 that Oz has " a timeless message from a less complex era, and it continues to resonate ".

Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz without any thought of a sequel.

After reading the novel, thousands of children wrote letters to him, requesting that he craft another story about Oz.

In 1904, he wrote and published the first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, explaining that he grudgingly wrote the sequel to address the popular demand.

In his 1911 The Emerald City of Oz, he wrote that he could not continue writing sequels because Ozland had lost contact with the rest of the world.

The children refused to accept this story, so Baum, in 1913 and every year thereafter until his death in May 1919, wrote an Oz book.

Alexander Volkov introduced fantasy fiction to Soviet children with his loose translation of Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published as The Wizard of the Emerald City, and then wrote a series of five sequels, unrelated to Baum.

The highly influential American author L. Frank Baum wrote the first and most famous of his Oz books, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1900.

With Schwartz, he wrote " Mr. Dooley "', sung by the title character in The Wizard of Oz.

Harburg and Gorney were offered a contract with Paramount: in Hollywood, Harburg worked with composers Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Jerome Kern, Jule Styne, and Burton Lane, and wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz for which he won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song for Over the Rainbow.

" Since the stage adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had been a huge hit, with two companies still touring the country as the second book was published, the reviewer's suspicion was both natural and accurate: Baum wrote a stage adaptation called The Woggle-Bug that was produced in Chicago the summer of 1905.

After Princess Ozma decreed that no one could practice magic in Oz except for Glinda the Good Witch and the Wizard of Oz, Bini wrote down the directions for pronouncing " Pyrzqxgl " and hid them in his magical laboratory.

) Between 1921 and 1939, she wrote one Oz book a year.

He was first commissioned to illustrate The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second Oz book L. Frank Baum wrote, published in 1904 ; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had been illustrated by W. W. Denslow, with whom Baum argued and lost contact afterward.

* Wizard of Oz ( 1925 film ), directed by Larry Semon

* The Wizard of Oz ( 1933 animated film ), directed by Ted Eshbaugh

As an actor, Oz appeared in a bit part as Prison Storeroom Keeper in The Blues Brothers ( 1980 ), directed by John Landis.

Goodman scored four films directed by Oz: Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob?

A production of Twelfth Night was directed by Patrick Garland in the gardens with Oz Clarke as Sir Toby Belch and Francis Matthews.

In & Out is a 1997 American romantic comedy film directed by Frank Oz and starring Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, Matt Dillon, Tom Selleck, Debbie Reynolds, Bob Newhart, and Wilford Brimley.

Category: Films directed by Frank Oz

He has also directed numerous episodes of television shows, including ; Homicide: Life on the Street, The Sopranos, Oz, 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie.

In addition to feature films, he directed episodes of the television shows Homicide: Life on the Street, four episodes of The Sopranos, as well as two episodes of HBO's prison-drama series Oz, entitled " U. S. Male " and " Cuts Like a Knife ".

* Little Shop of Horrors ( film ), a 1986 film adaptation of the musical, directed by Frank Oz

The Score is a 2001 crime thriller directed by Frank Oz and starring Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Angela Bassett and Marlon Brando in his final film role.

Category: Films directed by Frank Oz

The Dark Crystal is a 1982 British-American fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz.

Baum subsequently loosely adapted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a 1914 motion picture directed by J. Farrell MacDonald titled His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz with Violet MacMillan as Dorothy.

In 1985, Walter Murch directed the movie Return to Oz distributed by Walt Disney Pictures starring Fairuza Balk as Dorothy.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a 1988 American comedy film directed by Frank Oz and starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine.

In a DVD extra providing a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, Frank Oz discusses a teaser trailer he directed for the studio, which wanted to begin promoting the film before there was enough actual footage to assemble a trailer.

Category: Films directed by Frank Oz

Also in 1986, Ashman wrote the screenplay for the Frank Oz – directed film adaptation of his musical Little Shop of Horrors, as well as contributing the lyrics for two new songs, " Some Fun Now " and " Mean Green Mother From Outer Space ," the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1938 she was chosen to play Glinda, " the Good Witch of the North ", in the Oscar-winning seminal 1939 musical film The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming, with Judy Garland.

* Other notable actors who have played the Tin Woodman include Oliver Hardy in a 1925 silent version of The Wizard of Oz directed by and starring Larry Semon, in which a villainous farmhand briefly fell into a tin pile and emerged as a " Tin Woodsman ".

) In 1985 he directed his one film, Return to Oz, which he co-wrote with Gill Dennis.

In 2009 Bell directed the opera Madama Butterfly for Oz Opera ; this production toured throughout Australia.