Nightmare 'Wizard of Oz' Sphere Screening To Include David Zaslav’s Face

Expanding the scope of The Wizard of Oz, one of the greatest films ever made, to fit the absurd and sure-to-close-within-five-years Sphere didn’t offend me. It’s a dumb idea for people who don’t appreciate film but want to feel like they’re at the front of the line for something “cutting edge.” It doesn’t improve the film, nor is it a “new medium” as the people in charge of it like to say. It is a fad. It is dumb. And it was somehow made even dumber at the premiere.

Adapting Oz for the Sphere already generated controversy for using A.I. to ensure the film fit the 360-degree projection, because, when watching a movie, it’s important that you crank your neck in all directions. That really adds to the experience. The showing of the movie will also include effects like wind, lightning, and leaves during the tornado scene. If that sounds familiar (cough 4DX cough), you’re wrong. It’s new and innovative.

But that’s not all! While all these absurd bells and whistles don’t get under my skin, as they will slowly but surely go the way of alcohol-free DUFF. What sent me over the goddamn edge was Sphere CEO and businessman, James Dolan, announcing that he and David f***ing Zaslav were added into the film through A.I. “I won’t tell you where, it’s only for like two seconds,” Dolan noted. He then asked these entertainment reporters if they knew the great David Zaslav, and, after they presumably responded “Yeah, duh, of course,” he responded with “[They] replaced the faces of two very short, two-second characters in the movie with mine and David. I challenge you to find it.”

I’d take your challenge, James, but I’m too busy hurling myself off the nearest small cliff (I don’t want to perish, just be unconscious for a few years). Visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann was quick to assuage any fears people might have, saying of Zaslav and Dolan’s cameos, “they were uncredited characters who were too blurry to be identified, and have now been enhanced to be identified.” That makes it worse, Ben!!

All of this sucks, but saying “we threw them in the background in Munchkinland” would have at least seemed less sh**ty. Saying instead that you picked two people who you assumed weren’t important because they were “blurry” and replaced them with two rich dicks is about as representative of A.I.’s current usage as I could think of. It is vain, stupid, and wholly unnecessary. It doesn’t help that Dolan and Grossman make the whole thing worse with every quote they gave to the Hollywood Reporter. Just check out this nonsense from Grossman.

“We had a choice. We could either hire modern artists to reanimate those performances by hand, which we felt would destroy the integrity of the original performance,” [or embrace] “a new technology that allows you to train on things that existed before it, so that it can reproduce those things accurately. And then we tested it for two years to make sure that if we used A.I., we would actually have more integrity to the original performances than if we didn’t, because the only other alternatives were computer graphics that would be humans manipulating the performance.”

I would love to know what Grossman’s definition of integrity is, because he says it a lot in the interview. But all of this is the same bullsh** of “we didn’t want to pay humans to do new things, we wanted to take advantage of things they’ve already done.” Ironically, they still ended up spending an ass-ton of money on this monstrosity that only a handful of losers will get to see anyway.

Grossman goes on to say that the original film still exists, which is a fair point, but the way he discusses the film and “fixing” things about it that he claims were “off” shows a total disrespect for the film and filmmaking itself. I doubt the director, Victor Fleming, was concerned about making sure people were surrounded by the elements when watching Oz. He was too busy being mad that the United States entered World War II (don’t ever assume the best in people, even if they make things you love).

This is not a new medium. It is not the future of cinema. And no one is going to marvel at the project “correctly” or “safely” using A.I. as the people behind it want you to think. It is an exercise in excess and vanity, driven by the incorrect belief that several modern-day schmos had anything to add to a cinematic masterpiece. If the world were just, a house would fall on all of their heads.