The Wizard of Oz at Sphere Is Nightmare Fuel

I think I first learned about Sphere's production of The Wizard of Oz on CBS Sunday Morning. The mythical, mystical Land of Oz. For decades, we've seen it depicted in books, on screens large and small, even on stage. Now, Dorothy and friends are getting a high-tech new look.

The 8-minute segment explained how state-of-the-art VFX and artificial intelligence transformed the 1939 classic into a spectacle befitting the Las Vegas strip. Forget boring old movie watching in a regular theater or in your living room. Now, with the help of Google AI, you can see Dorothy and friends in 16K on a 160,000 square ft screen at Sphere, which I have learned is infuriatingly not called the Sphere.

This immersive, experiential production comes complete with pyrotechnics, drones, and other 4D multisensory effects that make you feel like you're right there in Oz walking down the yellow brick road. Indeed, as the segment wore on, it really put me in Dorothy's shoes as she opened the door to the technicolor world of Oz in that I, too, was asking myself, "What the hell am I looking at?" This image sent a literal shudder through my body. "Why does it look like that?" I wondered. "Surely this can't be what the film actually looks like." Unfortunately, yes, that is what it actually looks like.

Look how they mask with my boy. The previews provided in the segment not only looked legitimately terrible to me, challenging the fundamental aesthetic principles of film in a bad way, but also introduced some serious ethical questions about the function of generative AI, its implications for the future of film. Who owns a work of art? Who can change it? To what extent, and for what purposes? Of course, CBS didn't really bother to ask any of these questions, but cinephiles around the world certainly did.

The project immediately became controversial for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the film's truncated film time. They chopped off a full half hour, the aforementioned visual horrors, and some truly shocking creative decisions. The production's creators were quick to defend it. James Dolan, CEO of Sphere Entertainment, really didn't think all that criticism over AI was fair. "See the movie before you cast judgment." VFX supervisor Ben Grossman added, "You're watching people talk about something that they haven't seen. 90% of the stuff that they say is just made up and not true." Producer Jane Rosenthal agreed. "Anyone who's talking about this hasn't seen it. So, you've got the blind talking to the blind."

And you know what? You're right. Sure, the scarecrow is literally falling out of the frame, but these are unfinished visual effects. What if it looks great now? How can I really say I'm uncomfortable with something if I've never even seen the thing that I'm talking about? There was only one thing I could do.

Are you recording? Are you recording? What? Are you recording? Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm here. Oh no, my thumb. Do it again. Well, I'm here at the Wizard of Oz at Sphere. But then it's interesting when you have something like the Wizard of Oz, which is like a studio product. Like what is disrespect of a corporate product that just has like Vanderpump paparie. You know, there's all those ads for like the Museum of Illusions. And I feel like that's kind of what everything is in Vegas. Everything is an illusion. It's like the Wizard of Oz is an illusion of the original. This is an illusion of a painting. Yeah. The Carpenters's Legacy is an illusion of of a dead band.

A ticket to the Wizard of Oz at Sphere will run you between $124 and $349. I was neither committed to the bit nor flushed with cash enough to justify a $350 ticket purchase. So, I chose a $124 ticket in section 407 toward the top of the venue. I bought two tickets totaling a whopping $248. One for me, an aging showbiz-obsessed workhorse. And one for my friend Spencer, a young writer from LA who, in spite of the abuse I hurl at him, always pushes me to do my best work. "Hey, I'm not paying you to sit there and thirst tweet Zoron. Get my bag."

Needless to say, this is a steep price to pay to watch a movie, even a 4D enhanced 16K mega movie. I could certainly imagine this being a barrier to entry for a lot of people, especially families. It would cost a family of four close to $500 to sit in my section, which, spoiler alert, is not a great section, and yet costs twice as much as other family-friendly shows and activities in Vegas. I will come back to this.

Anyway, with my $248 worth of tickets secured and my accommodations booked, I finally took off for Vegas. Now, I'm no stranger to Las Vegas. I've been there a handful of times, primarily to see Lady Gaga. It's the egg. But I hadn't been back since Sphere opened in September 2023. At 366 ft high and 516 ft wide, it's an imposing structure on the Vegas skyline. 1.2 million individual LED displays dot its exterior which don't seem like much up close but from far away coalesced to form one massive spherical image that you can see clear as day from a plane. Sure enough, I spotted it right away after I landed. There it was taunting me from the runway.

Spencer and I occupied ourselves with some typical Vegas activities, gambling, vintage shopping. We saw Dita Von Teese, which I do wholeheartedly recommend. But before we knew it, we were making our way to the Venetian Hotel towards Sphere to experience the Wizard of Oz for ourselves.

There it is, right? That's it. Yeah, that's her. Lots of people are dressed up. Lots of people are dressed up. It's cute. And a lot of different variable ages.

Prior to the show, the venue has a Kansas theme with sepia images of Dorothy's farm throughout the lobby. We grabbed some popcorn and souvenir cups, the prices of which are actually pretty decent, at least compared to New York City theaters, before making our way up what seemed like 100 escalators to our seats. The Sphere's theatrical space is almost as imposing as its exterior. This is the Sphere's main screen. It's roughly 20 times larger than the biggest IMAX cinemas and curves over and around the audience. It's made of tiles covered in LEDs that are thin enough to bend to the curve of the sphere. The screen has a whopping 256 million pixels, making it by far the highest resolution screen in the world. Although the venue seats 17,600 in total, it uses only about a third of its capacity for Oz, right down the middle for optimal viewing.

It's steep as hell in there. I mean, you really feel like one slip and you're tumbling off a cliff. Upon entrance, the screen simulates the theatrical experience of old with a velvety curtain and the sounds of a non-existent orchestra rehearsing for the show. As the film begins, the curtain melts away to reveal the Kansas sky stretching all around the venue to completely consume you.

Here is probably a good point to pause and state that anything I say in this video is not meant to insult the hard work put into this project. I know Sphere Oz employed a lot of people who were attempting something that's never been done before and were employing the best technology available to complete a nearly impossible task. I respect that hard work. I also respect the hard work of everyone who made the original film. And the reason I'm making this video is to understand how that labor, new and old, compete or harmonize with each other. What this project signals about the future of film and the motivating factors that led us here in the first place. So with that in mind, please James Dolan, don't put me on your enemies list and prevent me from getting into Radio City Music Hall with facial recognition technology that is definitely surveying people in the sphere. All right, let's dive in to Wizard of Oz at Sphere.

Kind of the loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language from the objects it glorifies to the behaviors it regulates stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. First, I think we need to step back and really understand the core challenge of this project and why it's so inherently difficult. The original Wizard of Oz was filmed on 35mm in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, which was standard for 1939 and would remain standard until the early 1950s with the invention and proliferation of widescreen formats.

Sphere's screen is so big that they had to invent a special 18K camera with a 165-degree field of view in order to film content that would properly fit the venue. Other modern cameras simply wouldn't cut it. They initially tried welding 11 cameras together, then stitching the footage in post to make an image that would be big enough, but that process proved far too cumbersome. So that is the challenge here: make an 86-year-old 35mm film fit convincingly on a screen so advanced and so big that it is literally incompatible with technology used by current filmmakers.

It's a little like so how did they choose to approach this problem? Well, remember this absolutely demonic transition from the introduction? Let's use that shot to illustrate the solution. In the original film, this is a run-of-the-mill close-up. The composition highlights the star of the film. She's lit beautifully and situated in the center of the frame. The scenery takes a back seat and is out of focus.

Even in a simple shot like this, we can see how a ton of creative decisions were made with the original aspect ratio in mind. How do we arrange the actors in the frame? What are we seeing in the background? What sets do we need to build? How many extras do we need? How should we move the camera? Etc. When you change the aspect ratio, you basically explode the original answers to all of those questions. So, imagine the screen is a billion [expletive] times bigger.

I'm assuming there's a reason they didn't maintain the proportion of actor to screen. Maybe the digital upscaling looked too otherworldly at that size. Or maybe the proportions looked too warped because of the curved screen. So, she stays this size. Regardless, now you have a problem. What the hell are you supposed to do with all this extra space? They're not going to leave it empty. So, Sphere's answer is to completely rebuild everything. Generate a highly realistic, detailed background that can better fill the screen, or rather justify the size of the screen, with AI and VFX. What will become increasingly obvious to you over the course of this video is that many of the people who worked on this project were not filmmakers, but engineers.

My position at Google is a principal research scientist and research director. When the request came to us, I was really excited almost to jumping up and down that this is the best opportunity to showcase the magic that we develop.

And even the filmmakers have very tech-forward minds. Visual effects supervisor Ben Grossman appears in a lot of interviews about Sphere Oz. He has a wildly impressive resume, including an Oscar for Martin Scorsese's Hugo. But he has since pivoted to running Magnopus, a content-focused technology company that has been designing and building XR experiences and doing virtual production work on films like The Lion King. When you listen to these guys in interviews, you get the sense that they're much more interested in seeing what they can do with their toys than they are in telling a narrative and filmically cohesive story. I mean, Grossman went so far as to argue to Deadline that the Sphere's Oz occupies a new space and shouldn't even be considered a film project. "Movies are so old that you think of them as a serial process," he said. "But we think of this more like software where we put it out and then we can do updates and make adjustments after we see what the audience wants and make adjustments."

I'd argue that you can very much tell that they think of this as software because while I can imagine an AI guy looking at this and being like, "Holy [expletive], look what we made," I cannot imagine an actual filmmaker being remotely comfortable putting these images out into the world as a finished product. It takes a specific kind of tech hubris to even approach a project like this because overhauling the Wizard of Oz to this degree inherently presents a number of problems that fundamentally challenge basic tenets of film. And to me, that's the primary reason this looks like absolute ass.

So why does this look so bad? One of the most fundamental components of cinematography is depth of field. Without getting into the gritty details of f-stops, apertures, filters, etc., etc., depth of field basically refers to what is in focus in a shot. A shallow depth of field means a smaller area is in focus with a blurred background. A deep depth of field means a larger area. Usually, everything in the shot is in focus. Sphere Oz opts for a deep depth of field for almost the entire film. With a screen that big, you don't really have much of a choice. Leaving the entire film in focus adds a lot visually, but rarely does it honor directorial and editing decisions made by the original filmmakers. Focus isn't just about aesthetics. It has narrative purpose.

This is one of the most iconic lines in the film. "No, I I know we're not in Kansas." What is originally a close-up in which the shallow depth of field gives the impression that we're having a private moment between Dorothy and Toto, centering her perspective and importance as our main character, is then exploded into this complex diorama of stuff. "No, I I know we're not in Kansas." You're invited to look at so much and none of it really contributes to our experience narratively. This is more intimate than this, which is what you expect from an exchange between a girl and the dog who she was willing to run away from home for.

Related to depth of field is the film's lighting. Everything is pristinely detailed and everything is lit to high heaven so that you can see that detail. Shadows make no distinctions between what is miles away and what is inches away, making each shot feel remarkably flat. Let's play a little game called "Where is the sun?" The scarecrow is stuck on his pole and we see the sun clearly in the shot. Now obviously I saw this in person and even then I found it hard to tell if the sun is supposed to be directly above him or behind him. And either way, that's not at all what the shadows on his face would suggest given that he was lit for a close-up on a sound stage, which is partly why he looks pasted into the scenery.

One may be wondering why the original Oz doesn't look very flat given that the background literally is for much of the film. 400 ft long muslin backdrops painted to look like fields, ravines, and Munchkin Land make up most of what you're seeing in the background at any given moment. The production team was obviously aware of this and took extra measures to give the impression of depth, even if it didn't actually exist. Lighting played a key role here, too. For example, they always installed a 12-foot light well between the edge of a set and the painted backdrop, tricking the viewer's eye to see the first row of painted corn as a continuation of the three-dimensional corn in the foreground.

Given that Sphere's appeal as a technical marvel is its resolution, perhaps it's no surprise that they attempted to make The Wizard of Oz as high of a resolution as possible to meet the demands required by the venue's tech. The CBS piece boasts that the computer's AI-powered super resolution gets rid of that pesky unsightly film grain. In reality, that super resolution is super inconsistent to anyone with a minimally discerning eye. Sometimes Dorothy's face has a yassified glossy texture. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes she has freckles, sometimes she doesn't. Oftentimes, the only remaining elements from the original shot are the actors. And you can tell it looks like they've been rotoscoped out and plopped into an entirely new digital background, largely because the textures of the new and old images don't match or interact well to the point that their feet don't even appear to touch the ground.

As is typical with rotoscoping, the edges of these images sometimes have those blurry green screen borders around more detailed areas like hair. Rotoscoping, for what it's worth, is a perfect example of what AI is good for. Doing that many keyframes is genuinely insane, and automating that process as much as possible is truly a lifesaver. Upscaling resolution to such a high degree also presents some other problems. One, you have to compensate for detail that isn't actually there. Auntie Em is one of the first people you see in the film, and I honestly gasped when I saw her because she had been upscaled to the point that the visuals dragged in a bizarre way that recalls early Dolly images. And two, you accidentally reveal or emphasize details that are unnoticeable in a normal viewing context. I know intellectually that the Tin Man is wearing a bald cap-adjacent headpiece, but I never really thought about it until his head was the size of a football field and every ripple in the cap was drastically more pronounced. I know that's not Margaret Hamilton's chin, but it's much easier to ignore when the edges of the prosthetic aren't clearly demarcated right in front of my face.

Any film conservator will tell you that this is exactly the kind of thing you want to avoid when restoring a film. Listen to this conversation between film curator Josh Seagull and conservator Katie Trainer about how they approach restoration at the Museum of Modern Art.

"You don't want to over-restore a film. You don't want to clean it up too much. You don't want to uh freeze the image through..."

"It's a really fine line. Yeah, there are technologies that exist that enable you to do things, but you don't necessarily want to use those technologies and turn them up to 11. Um, stabilizing the image can sometimes make the image look embalmed and makes the image look lifeless and dead."

"I call giving it the soap opera effect, like making it look like like a soap opera on TV. And and and it for us at MoMA, we are uh I'd like to think we're pretty conservative in that arena. We we like to keep some of the filmic artifacts of the the materiality of 35mm or 60mm and not over-clean it. I think some of the film artifacts give it a certain life and breath and a warmth. So, I think a good example is that you can now do 4K digital restorations and even upwards of 6K restorations that are extreme in their ability to scan a still image of a film and uh bring out so many of the details that are latent in the image. However, if you scan too much, for example, with uh uh The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a great German Expressionist film, you get too much detail. You have the actual nails that were used in the building of the set. Something that obviously intended to be unseen now wanted you not to have to see it. It distracts you from the the aesthetic and the atmosphere created by the expressionism. Similarly, if you go too bright on a Hitchcock film, uh, like Dial M for Murder in the '50s, uh, you'll see occasionally things like the, uh, gaffer, the lighting man, under a chair in a shot because he knew that the way he lit the film and the way he printed the film, that lighting gaffer would not be seen. And simply because you scan it and you bring that out, you have to be mindful of the fact that obviously not everything that you can see should be seen."

Obviously, this isn't a restoration of The Wizard of Oz. It's an experiential version, but I do think following the principles of film restoration in future projects would build a better, more immersive world by avoiding distracting details like this. Now, given how much bigger the aspect ratio of this film is and how much AI-generated content appears, a lot of new decisions had to be made about how you fill the screen and where you put what. There's no two ways about it. The framing in this production left me gobsmacked. So much of the screen is simply filled for the sake of filling the screen. No human film director would ever find it necessary to show the ceiling of a room in a scene like this because it doesn't matter and it doesn't add anything of value. And yet here it looms.

Compositions that look artful and interesting in the original lose their impact. For example, the witch is tastefully framed by her soldiers and Dorothy's crew as she melts in the original, but the iconic moment is dwarfed by extra visual information at Sphere. I made a TikTok making fun of how this shot was like 90% sky. And I got a few responses like, "You don't get it. This was made specifically to be shown at the Sphere. Of course, it looks off now, but in the venue, it won't look distorted because it's curved." Well, no, actually, it's 90% sky in person, too. Well, it is if you sit where I was sitting. From what I can gather on social media, if you pay for the expensive seats, which is, I think, where they seat paid influencers and critics, you'll see much more focused framing. All of the extraneous stuff like the mountains, the sky, the ceiling, can only be seen in your periphery, making for a much less offensive visual experience. If you sit in the cheap seats, you're getting an eyeful of nothing most of the time and looking down at the action. Call me crazy, but I don't think you should get a completely different experience of a film based on where you're sitting. It's almost as if The Wizard of Oz was not made to be viewed on a screen that big.

This is a good opportunity to go on a brief tangent about how this show is generally a tiered experience. A huge selling point of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is that it's a 4D spectacle with multisensory effects. And I have to say, these were some of the most successful aspects of the show for me. The seat shakes when you catch a glimpse of the Wicked Witch. A wind machine simulates a tornado. Drone monkeys fly around and foam apples drop from the ceiling as the trees launch them at Dorothy, etc., etc. These effects can be fun and corny in a good way. Just completely inoffensive enhancements that surprise and excite the audience effectively. If you're sitting in section 407, though, get ready to feel like you're not making it off the Titanic.

When Spencer and I bought popcorn and drinks before the show, we asked the bartender whether or not she'd seen it. She had and said the tornado was super intense, 30 mph winds, so we should be prepared. Judging by what I've seen on social media, I think that's absolutely true for people with better seats. We got a mild breeze at best. No apples fell anywhere near us. Others have mapped it out. It looks like it's really only possible to catch them in the lower tiers. The physical props like the monkeys and butterflies that fly throughout the space were pretty far away as to lose their immersive effect. And I don't really have any memory of snow or leaves falling on us either. So, I guess I would say I liked a lot of the 4D effects in theory, but also my experience was not optimized because I didn't pay $350 for my ticket. Some people will surely hear that and say, "Hey, you get what you pay for." But personally, I think the baseline price is steep and specs a multisensory adventure for everyone in the theater. Particularly because that price point is most affordable for families and I'm sure kids would enjoy those effects the most.

Thank you so much. The spectacle presents itself as a vast, inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is "what appears is good. What is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.

Perhaps nothing in The Wizard of Oz at Sphere launched me clear into the uncanny valley quite like the AI-generated actors created to populate the edges of this film. I truly haven't seen anything as strange and uncomfortable in a film in years. They provide eerie, nonsensical sideshows. Sometimes they look confoundingly out of place, like these soldiers in Munchkin Land. Sometimes they're stuck on an obvious loop.

In so many movies, they do like the repopulating the images. They were copying faces for sure. So many faces, especially in the Munchkin scene. Um, like all of the soldiers, there was like four people. Yeah. Sometimes they display behaviors that make zero sense in context. Take this scene for example. Here's Glinda arriving to save the day after Dorothy misses her hot air balloon ride to Kansas in the original film. Human beings in a crowd having a coordinated, rational, emotional reaction to a thing happening in front of them. Nice. Sphere Oz keeps the audio from the original film, but none of the AI-generated actors are behaving in a way that suggests the awe or reverence that you hear. Keep in mind, these extras are almost always in focus. So Dorothy will be weeping about how she'll never get home and then there will just be some guy smiling ear-to-ear waving on a loop in the corner. He's waving goodbye to the wizard, an action previously relegated to the background that now has to take a front seat.

The size of the screen not only required more extras, but also more screen time from the main characters. "Performance generation is what we use when a character leaves the frame. You've got to figure out where they went because the audience is going to see them at the Sphere because of the wider field of view." They used Uncle Henry to demonstrate how this technology works a lot. I imagine they like this because it's a relatively easy ask, like moving one guy across the room. But more often than not, they seemingly had no idea how to solve this problem.

Shot-reverse-shot specifically becomes much more complicated when dealing with this wider field of view. This technique is often used for dialogue. One character is shown in close-up looking out of frame, cut to another character looking the opposite way, and back and forth throughout a scene. The viewer assumes the two characters are looking at each other, even if they are not pictured in the same frame. Pretty straightforward. At Sphere, anything shot using this technique in the original Wizard of Oz suddenly requires the other person to be present because there's no way you wouldn't see them given the size of the frame. Sometimes you catch a glimmer of the other person's back, which is generated believably enough. Other times, you have to generate whole bodies to exist in the frame. Take this scene at the end. Dorothy is speaking to Glinda, but we can't see her or the rest of the crew behind her because we're in a close-up, which makes sense because Dorothy is delivering the literal message of the entire film. Why not focus exclusively on her? Anyway, the solution here was to generate approximations of the other characters and then blur them to death to mask that it's a looped image that doesn't correspond to what's happening in the scene at all. It's a pretty lazy solution that suggests the technology is not at all where it claims or needs to be to properly achieve what this production sets out to do. These aren't actors acting. They're models largely guessing at gestures and physicality, which is why they always look so dead-eyed and robotic. They aren't reacting to anything.

In that sense, this technology also presents a serious ethical question. Obviously, none of these actors consented to having their likenesses manipulated in this way. How could they? This technology would have seemed impossible in 1939. This issue becomes even worse when thinking about Judy Garland specifically, who famously had little control over her own body as a young woman under contract at MGM.

"We built a custom-built an AI model that understood how Judy Garland looks and then was able to generate the super resolution. Her body was treated like a commodity then and it's treated like a commodity now, one that can be resurrected to perform for us without her consent." To assume that a computer can magically spit out something equivalent to what a singular talent like Judy Garland could offer is simply demeaning and disrespectful to the human capacity to create art. The good news is that because this project was limited to an existing film and script, no new words were put in her mouth and very little performance was generated. Although she doesn't fully escape the uncanny valley, this is the expression they give Dorothy while she watches the Tin Man dance. Garland's daughter, Lorna Luft, appeared in the CBS segment to bestow her approval upon the project, claiming that Garland would have enjoyed it. I'm not sure the estate really had a choice here. My guess is Warner Brothers now owns Dorothy's likeness in the way that Star Wars can do anything with Carrie Fisher as Leia. That said, even if Sphere didn't necessarily cause a panic, they seem to understand the threat that this technology poses outside of limited use IP-based projects. Garland's Estate was one of many seeking protection against unauthorized digital use and manipulation on AI video generation apps like Sora. All of this is particularly disappointing given how hard SAG has worked to prevent situations like this and the efforts California has made to enshrine rights to performers through legislation.

The team allegedly considered hiring VFX artists to do the work without AI. Hell, considering this whole project cost $100 million, you probably could have hired real actors to play the extras for less. Grossman told the Hollywood Reporter, "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 2 years to make sure that if we used AI, 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."

It's amazing to me how much trust is endowed in this technology. "Human artists might destroy the integrity of the original, but if the computer magically generates an image, well, sure, of course, it must be right. I mean, look at it. The AI was trained to make this, which is how we know it's accurate." What are we measuring exactly whether to say it's accurate? Who can say? Surrendering to the god brain of AI in this way essentially absolves the engineer of responsibility. "What appears is good. What is good appears." In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

All of the promotional materials about The Wizard of Oz at Sphere make a big deal about how much research the team did to ensure that they maintained the integrity of the original film. Interviews emphasize that everything was made with "loving, deep care and attention." "The key for us is to maintain the integrity of the original filmmaker's intent. It's part of our cultural history. You can't just take it and do anything with it. You can't just take it and do anything with it."

"We've taken a lot of the intent of what they had wanted to do and added that to the picture," Rosenthal explained, noting that they painstakingly sifted through original shot lists, prop lists, and scripts of what the '30s era filmmakers intended to capture, but either ran out of time or didn't have the budget or technological means to achieve. I really respect anyone who's willing to do the research to make things the quote-unquote right way, but this logic doesn't exactly square with me. As Alyssa Wilkinson put it in her review in the New York Times, "I've heard the suggestion that the original filmmakers would have done all of these alterations if they'd been possible at the time. But even if that's true, and that's a big if, it's both wild speculation and pretty convenient at best. How on earth can we presume to know what people would have done? Victor Fleming died in 1949. Why do we feel comfortable saying what he'd do with technologies he could never even have fathomed?"

Plus, The Wizard of Oz basically succeeded in spite of itself, powering through several staffing and script changes that somehow never threw it off course. It's a true testament to the collaborative nature of film within the studio system. More on that in this video. "He could have if he would have" is an extraordinarily convenient take and an extremely presumptuous one. As David Erlick wrote in IndieWire, "It's an argument that presumes authoral intent as a means of inviting people to override it." And override it they did.

As often as these producers and engineers claimed they wanted to maintain the integrity of the original film, they certainly seem willing to make massive edits wherever they deem it necessary. The clearest example is the fact that the original 102-minute runtime was paired down to 75 minutes. "The original kind of dwelled on a few things that were somewhat superfluous," Dolan told the New York Post. "You probably won't be shocked to discover that you can't trim 30 minutes out of an already tight film without feeling the impact."

"I just don't, as you were saying it, like the emotional tenor of the thing was completely lost. So rushed and strange."

"Yeah."

"And I think the funniest part was when Miss Gulch takes Toto."

"Yeah."

"And then literally 5 seconds later, Toto hops out of her."

"But that is kind of how the movie is, though. Like..."

"It is. It's true. But it was legitimately 5 seconds."

"Yeah."

As we've already discussed, many images were generated to fill space that never existed in the original. Many images were also generated to replace things that did exist in the original. It makes me laugh when they say things like, "Want to get back in again?"

"Our standard on this was not to modify the film at all, but to try and bring you into the film as if you were in the studio when it was shot. Because if you were in the studio when it was shot, you'd see George Gibson, head of the scenic art department, painting 400-foot long backdrops to turn plain white muslin into a cornfield. You'd see Henry Groder, head of the sculpture department, handcrafting each of the trees in the haunted forest. You'd see Vera Morant of the wardrobe department, dyeing 300 pairs of shoes green to costume the inhabitants of the Emerald City. You'd see special effects maestro Buddy Gillespie tearing down version after version of the tornado until he got it right."

Indeed, some of the most astonishing special effects from the original film are completely remade for Sphere Oz. Take the tornado. Gillespie tried a bunch of different techniques to make this effect possible. He landed on a muslin stocking held up with a crane, rotated by a motor, then dragged across the set by a vehicle hidden below the stage. This was filmed on a miniature set while fans blew dust and debris around to simulate the tornado hitting the ground. Then they projected that footage behind Garland, making it look like there was a tornado in the distance.

Glinda's bubble got a full reanimation as well. In the original, that effect was achieved by photographing a small silver ball against a neutral background. Then they moved the camera toward it so it appeared to get bigger and bigger and seemed to float across the screen. They filmed Munchkin Land by itself, then stood Billy Burke in the shot where she'd appear, filmed her, and double-printed it, put one piece of film over the other so that it was transparent, then did a simple dissolve effect so that the ball disappeared, and Billy Burke stood in its place. The Wizard has also been replaced with a fully CGI'd creation that again has the digital sheen that clashes with the texture of the material filmed in 1939. Grossman, defending the production's new effects, told the New York Post, "We never touched any of the things you're complaining about. I've heard, 'I can't believe they changed the design of the wizard's head,' but that's the design of the wizard's head from the original movie, from production sketches." Okay, sure, but it's not the one they actually filmed, and I think that kind of matters. Production sketches are just that, sketches. The visuals we see in the final film resulted from several rounds of experimenting and iterating on what did or didn't work.

Here's Oz historian Tory Calamito, better known as the Oz Vlog, explaining how they landed on the wizard we see in the original film. The original idea was to use this creepy, crazy model in a miniature of the throne room. The Fab 4 would be filmed separately, and they were going to use smoke effects to try to mask the fact that this was stationary. But not even the smoke could cover the fact that the mouth wasn't moving. So then they pivoted and they tried to animate the mouth. But with the rest of the face not emoting to Frank Morgan's recording of his voice, it really was obvious that this was fake. They really liked the design of the model, so they used that to design the makeup. They made up an uncredited actor. We still have no idea who this is, and he lip-synced to Frank Morgan's vocal performance. They piped steam in from a boiler that was offset and they actually projected the recording of the made-up actor over the steam. You can see here that they used a mockup to get the technicolor lighting correct. The simple projection of the wizard's head onto that steam worked perfectly and it holds up to this day. To simply animate a sketch from the production notes circumvents all of this trial and error. Dorothy was originally a blonde. Should that wig make a comeback because it appears in the production notes?

Personally, I think the actual purpose of animating the wizard was to make this post-film interactive show in the lobby possible. At the end of Sphere Oz, an announcement rings over a loudspeaker telling you to head to the lobby for continued entertainment. Sphere Productions likes to have interactive elements in the lobby, like this robot who hung out in the venue before screenings of Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth.

We have a hand up over here. Hello. Could you repeat that, please? I do love Sphere. For this show, an actor portrays the wizard hidden behind a curtain where presumably he's looking into a camera or something that captures his face and projects it through a filter to the audience. He chats with the moviegoers and asks them what they'd want. The way you have to ask the wizard, "AJ, what is your heart's true desire?" "I'd like to leave Vegas the winner." It's a pretty cool live effect. 100% something you'd see in a theme park, which kind of confirms for me what Sphere Oz really is at its core. Again, I think kids got a lot out of this, and I think that's nice.

"What do you want from the wizard, Perry?"

"I want to be a veterinarian."

"Perry wants to be a veterinarian."

"Perry."

"Yes."

"Veterinarian is good work. You can help out little puppies, is that right?"

"Yes."

"Yes."

It's not necessarily that I think the tornado or Glinda's bubble are unsuccessful in this new version. Actually, those animations seem to be some of the most engrossing and popular of the new production. I'm sympathetic to that for sure, but it does kind of suck, doesn't it? That some of the things that made the film so remarkable upon its release have just been replaced like they don't matter. People made these things.

One of the pro-Sphere Oz arguments I often hear is that it's fostering a love of classic cinema. "Watching classic movies begets more classic movies. This is good for classic cinema. It keeps them alive. More people will be interested in Judy and her films for this." If we take for granted that sure, people are going to spend $150 to see The Wizard of Oz for the first time, which I don't buy, to be clear, what expectations are we setting here? Does masking the technologies of classic cinema for the purposes of modern aesthetic sensibilities actually contribute to that goal? Or does it just obscure what people should expect to see? If we want people to enjoy classic cinema, is the best way to do that to sell them the illusion of it rather than the thing itself?

That question isn't limited to specific special effects, though. How do you maintain fidelity to the original in a world designed to adhere to aesthetic realism? Sepia separates Kansas and the technicolor world of Oz, but so does the production design's willingness to be whimsical and fantastical. I don't think anyone is seriously looking at the backdrops in the original film and thinking, "Wow, I've never been more convinced that they're actually outside." MGM could have used rear projection of a real forest or valley. But they didn't. Instead, they opt for these bulbous, cartoonish hills covered in a patchwork pattern echoing the sewn fabric skin of the scarecrow. The design distinguishes Oz as a mystical place like nothing Dorothy would ever find in Kansas.

In contrast, Sphere Oz aspires to aesthetic realism. The mountains look like mountains. The trees are trees, diminishing, in my mind, the spirit of whimsy inherent to the original production design. The team emphasizes again and again that they trained the AI models on the original film, but surely they also used pictures of real mountains to inform the models. It's not like the original backdrops actually look like this and all it took was computer enhancement. The environment looks like this in part because AI as a tool inherently favors the mathematical average. Lev Manovich and Emanuel Arieli write in Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art, and Visual Media, "When we train AI models, the training data is also compressed and the particular and unique are omitted. Extracting patterns from the data in machine learning involves eliminating outliers and many unique details and only selecting the most frequently appearing associations, characteristics, and structures. Pursuing different aesthetics that combine general and concrete and have a high degree of individualization can be challenging, at least during this period of generative AI development."

The results can ironically ruin the suspension of disbelief. Let's look at Oz's skyline. Cedric Gibbons, head of MGM's art department, imagined this iconic design after he unearthed a small photograph of a German sketch in MGM's research library that looked like test tubes upside down. A member of the art department later said, "We all thought the German sketch was right because it wasn't detailed. It looked like something strange we had never seen before." That otherworldliness felt right for Oz. And that's exactly what we see in the film: this incredibly sleek, streamlined skyline sitting beautifully on the horizon.

But what happens when you insert a high degree of photorealism around this image? When the mountains look real, when you can pick out every blade of grass on the side of the yellow brick road, you suddenly look at the Emerald City and you wonder, "Why aren't there any windows?" Of course, there are. In the original, when the group approaches the door to the city, we see lovely Art Deco details that break up the exterior of these towers. And ultimately, it doesn't really matter because we never have to consider what these buildings look like up close ever again until now. In Sphere Oz, Dorothy and Co. enter the city limits, but with a larger screen, you have to account for the fact that a person would be able to look up. What looks sleek and stylish from afar looks more like disturbing cacti or asparagus up close and from the ground. The production uses the original artist's logic, upside-down test tube simplicity. Good. In a context that the artist never actually considered. Might he have made a different choice? Might he have added detail like he did in the other close-ups? Who knows? But I guess we're trusting the computer to tell us.

I know what some of you are thinking. Hey, I had fun. Loosen up. You're taking this way too seriously and being really nitpicky. And look, I hear you. Sometimes I listen to myself and I hear the punk character Fred Armisen plays on Portlandia.

"The pop DJ stood at attention and the people just fed off of it. Yummy. Can I have some more slop? There was learning. There was reading. Do you remember what reading was?"

I know this production gave people joy. I saw it firsthand. The day I arrived in Vegas, Spencer and I went to Sphere to check out the venue and capture some B-roll. While we were standing there, we witnessed how excited something like this can make a person. So, we were standing here. There's a selfie spot and this little girl came up and she was ecstatic. She was so excited 'cause she watched The Wizard of Oz. I don't know how old she probably...

was, like eight, maybe.

Eight.

Yeah. Then watched Wicked. I was obsessed with Wicked. She was quizzing me about Wicked. That was really nice.

No, it was nice. And like she's so, she was so excited.

And it's funny that it's like she saw Wizard of Oz, then she saw Wicked. It's like another version of Wizard of Oz.

Yeah. Her mom was like, "She's connecting all the dots." Blah blah blah.

Excited for Wicked Part Two.

Yeah.

And then now she's going to see another version of the Wizard of Oz today.

Today.

It's good to experience that maybe because I'm such a Grinch.

Yes.

And it's like that is I think ideally what this is for. And I, it's like hard to kind of think about it and be like the principles of AI when you're like watching this kid have the time of her life.

But it's worth asking, is this the best we can offer? Might it have been possible to deliver something more deliberate, more considered? Would that have delighted a child like that even more? Does this technology help or hinder us when facilitating that sense of childlike wonder? What is this new technology giving us? What is it telling us about ourselves?

The electric age is changing you. It is changing your family. It is changing your neighborhood. It's changing your education. It's changing your job. When you going to do it's changing your government. It's changing your relationship to others. These little circuits are making our world go. The electric age is having a profound effect on us. We are in a period of fantastic change that's coming about at fantastic speed. Your life is changing dramatically and you are numb to it.

Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan is probably most famous for coining the phrase "the medium is the message." He wrote societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. McLuhan believed that whatever technology we use in his time, telephone, telegraph, radio, or television, surrounds us in a certain environment. We change how we communicate and how we think because of that environment. And because we are steeped in those environments, we don't often realize that we're making changes.

If advances in technology tell a story, we can learn a lot from the history of exhibition. In the 1950s, as white people experiencing the post-war economic boom, fled to the suburbs and filled their living rooms with televisions, studios wondered how they could convince them to leave the comfort of their homes, drive to a theater, and see a film. So studios invested a lot of time and money to invent widescreen formats like Vista Vision and Cinemascope to promise moviegoers greater visual clarity and brighter colors than they'd ever see at home. In Paramount's optical and electronic laboratories, where scientists have been working to develop a film that would combine spectacular size with complete focus across the screen to eliminate fuzziness and distortion to reproduce every scene photographically as clearly as the human eye would see it.

Studios have returned to this logic again and again, inventing bigger and bigger screens with more extravagant features to compete with smaller and smaller, more convenient screens. IMAX 3D, Smell-O-Vision, 4D, and one could see Sphere as the most recent extension of this logic.

Like I kept thinking about when I was like 12 and I went to Shrek 4D at Universal Studios.

Yeah.

And it was basically the same special effects.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, even better because they had like things spraying, like you could, you know, every seat had like water, so you'd feel like you were like running through something and they were spraying. So, in terms of that kind of stuff, it felt like like a natural evolution of IMAX with the added elements of a 4D theater that you would find at a theme park.

Mhm.

But then the outside is the actually kind of impressive thing cuz it's like an, like as an object. It's like it's impressive, but then it's just an imp, but then it's just used for advertising. So.

The problem with seeing Sphere as just another escalation for exhibition is that, for now at least, Sphere is a singular venue. For McLuhan, scale determines how we should think about a medium's impact. For the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. So while Sphere is a medium in a sense, it isn't really the concern here because it won't alter mass consumption habits in the foreseeable future. The technology is simply too expensive. What will alter, or is altering, mass consumption habits and is very present at Sphere is AI.

Generative platforms have become mediums themselves. How might those platforms shape the way we communicate? Either in developing new behaviors or accelerating behaviors we've already adopted. History is ours to manipulate and control at will. Choices made by artists are suggestions. Art on its own is not enough. It's okay to cut corners if it means more profit. Consent isn't necessary.

The Wizard of Oz Sphere has often been compared to the infamous Van Gogh immersive experience. And I don't think that's far off. Personally, Rachel Conny's review in The Guardian certainly reads like it could have been written about Sphere Oz. An experience like this, which warps the scale and form of the reproductions and so undermines creative decisions taken by the artist in making their work, that it seems less about finding new ways to contextualize art or bring it to new audiences than about leeching as much money as possible out of the Van Gogh brand name. The same could be said about The Wizard of Oz, and the numbers certainly back that up. Warner Brothers Discovery, a company that has been circling the drain for years now, has seen pure profit from this project, receiving both a licensing fee and a small share of sales. At this point, the studio can just sit back, reap the passive income, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Sphere Entertainment, too, can thank Oz for some financial relief. It cost $2.3 billion to build Sphere, an enormous, perhaps insurmountable sum to earn back. Investors and analysts initially showed little interest in Sphere as a concert venue because the bands who played there would keep most of the ticket sales. Films, though, have a much better margin. This production has been remarkably successful, drawing 4,000 to 5,000 fans two to three times per day, each of whom are paying an average of $200 per person. That means that The Wizard of Oz is generating ticket sales of as much as $2 million a day and could eventually gross up to a billion. Unsurprisingly, Sphere's stock has risen in value exponentially since The Wizard of Oz premiered. In other words, the film might have saved the venue.

With numbers like that, why stop running it? Ultimately, we'll run the Wizard of Oz forever, Dolan said on a call with analysts. It's hard for me to imagine a better product than the Wizard of Oz. That's what AI is, an easy payoff for corporations, theft of creativity to benefit the 1%. Dig into the history of human creation, identify cherished stories, repackage them, and sell them back to the public for $350 at a quality that would not even stand up to the routine scrutiny that every other film receives upon regular release. I've certainly seen films get much more [ __ ] for less. At the end of this adventure, I found myself thinking about another IP resurrected to capitalize on any remaining affection fans have for the original in a cynical grift for a box office smash. You know, you read what others had done and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses uh to accomplish something as fast as you could. And before you even knew what you had, you, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you're selling it. You want to sell it? Well, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think they should.

Talks are already in progress to adapt more films for Sphere. According to Bloomberg, Dolan has already spoken to Warner Brothers about Harry Potter and Disney about a few titles, including Star Wars. It makes total sense to reach for the heavy hitters next. And to be honest with you, I'm kind of relieved that there are maybe like three other classic films tops that are popular enough with mainstream audiences to justify this treatment. Most of cinematic history will be left alone. I'd be curious to see though whether or not Star Wars fans would react the way they did to the changes made by George Lucas to re-releases of the original trilogy. Back then, even subpar CGI implemented by the series original creator was interpreted as a desecration of the original.

Everyone who participated in making those films had some type of creative input. I mean, they won an Oscar for best special effects. Some of those effects are stripped out and replaced with CGI enhancements, if you want to call them that. I think that that's really disrespectful to the people who worked on those models and did those shots. Something tells me that the precious reverence for cultural artifacts has gone out the window completely in favor of novelty, spectacle, and personalization.

Unlike the original Star Wars trilogy, the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz is still available to view in its original form pretty much anytime, anywhere. Realistically, Sphere's version will not tarnish the impact the original film has made and will make on generations to come. But for me, it's less about The Wizard of Oz specifically and more about what this production represents and signals for the future.

McLuhan contends that we don't often notice the ways new technology change how we think and communicate until it's too late. I'm making this video in part because I want us to notice what AI is doing and because I don't think it's too late to reject this as the future of art. We deserve better as audiences than this. As Ted Shang wrote in The New Yorker, "The task that generative AI has been most successful at is lowering our expectations. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are, creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

It would be really easy to ignore and accept it. Life is hard, and it's nice to step out of normal life and escape into another world for an hour. But after all, isn't that what the wizard wants from us? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. There is an illusion in front of you that promises to give you everything you could ever want. When art becomes independent and paints its world in dazzling colors, a moment of life has grown old. Such a moment cannot be rejuvenated by dazzling colors. It can only be evoked in memory. The greatness of art only emerges at the dusk of life.

Aside from everything I've already talked about in this video, one of the things I really worry about with respect to AI is its environmental impact. I don't think we've really come to grips with the fact that AI is the technological equivalent of no face in Spirited Away when it comes to guzzling resources. For example, OpenAI recently announced a plan to build data centers that will consume up to 10 gigawatts of power with additional projects totaling 17 gigawatts already in motion. That's how much power the countries of Switzerland and Portugal use combined. These data centers also require significant volumes of water to cool off the machines that power generative AI. New facilities in the Great Lakes region threaten to deplete drinking water resources in the Midwest.

To me, it's super important not only to understand the way technologies we use in day-to-day life affect the environment, but also learn how we can make a positive difference for the environment. One way you can do that is by joining Planet Wild. If you haven't heard of them, they're a community-based nature protection organization. Think of it like crowdfunding for nature. Here's how it works. Every month, Planet Wild partners with innovative environmental organizations around the globe to bring back endangered species, protect our oceans, or restore our forests. All their projects are funded by a global community of people like you and me. And the best part is they release a video report here on YouTube so you can see what the community contributions have achieved.

Planet Wild is refreshing because it's solution-oriented. It shows that if we pull our resources, we can make a difference. And that's why being a member is so fulfilling. In their app and YouTube channel, you can browse their previous projects that demonstrate how much impact we, a community of like-minded people, can have. Go to Kenya and learn about how a contraption that mimics humans walking around with a flashlight has kept lions away from livestock, preventing human-lion conflict, which has helped the lion population in Kenya rebound substantially. Or head over to Spain to learn how Planet Wild helped clean up discarded fishing nets and plastic waste on the ocean floor. The app shows you exactly how much Planet Wild has invested in a mission and what exactly it has achieved.

If you want to help make a positive change in the world, consider joining this growing community of over 14,000 members. You can give whatever amount that feels right to you, big or small, because every penny counts when it comes to protecting nature. Because Planet Wild is sponsoring this video, the first 100 people to sign up using my code kind paid for by me. To claim your first free month, scan this QR code or click the link in the description. It's such a satisfying membership because within 30 days, you'll see a new YouTube video showing exactly how your money has made an impact. And there's no catch. You can cancel at any time with no questions asked. To see Planet Wild in action, check out their video, Preventing Wildlife Conflicts in Kenya.

fake art. Real art.

Can you explain who James Terrell is?

Uh, James Terrell is a visual artist and he's associated with the light and space movement out of California. He was raised Quaker and so a lot of his art is kind of based off of uh like the Quaker meeting house and the idea of like quiet devotion. And so he uses different colors of light and different spaces to create kind of like meditative, meditative spaces of of pondering um that are akin to kind of like a religious experience. So, I think the perfect place is the mall.