(CLASSIC MOMENTS) 10 Days of BW: Judy and Lorna!

 

My mentor, Barbara Walters is retiring on May 16th and we are counting down 10 of  her best interviews. 

Today, Barbara is interviewing Judy Garland shortly after her oldest daughter, Liza Minnelli, married Peter Allen. With Liza out of the nest, the great star is flanked by her younger children Lorna Luft and Joey Luft.

She’s in good form here – clear and charming.

Miss Garland wanted to be a grandmother and was eager to babysit. So sad that two years later she would be dead from an accidental overdose.

In this interview, she denies drug and alcohol abuse and being temperamental: ‘I’m as difficult as a daisy.”

OBIT: Merry Little Christmas Songwriter Reunites with Judy!

The man who wrote the holiday classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is dead at 96. Hugh Martin gets a nice sendoff from Richard Corliss at Time, who recounts how the song—written in the 1940s for the film Meet Me in St. Louis—originally had more somber lyrics: "Have yourself a merry little Christmas. It may be your last. Next year we may all be living in the past ... "

Asked to lighten it up, Martin changed it to "Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Let your heart be light. Next year all our troubles will be out of sight ..." And the result "set the properly poignant tone for one of the loveliest, most longing of Christmas songs," writes Corliss. Martin was just 30 at the time and went on to have a long, successful career, but that song remains his "enduring work." (It's co-credited to Ralph Blane, but Martin later said it was entirely his own composition.)

News Flash: What would Judy say?

According to the LA Times:

Fresh off Disney's massive success with Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," Warner Bros. wants to remake another childhood classic. Like, really classic.

The studio is examining two existing "Wizard of Oz" projects, with an eye toward giving one of them a modern gloss and moving it toward the screen.

One project, called "Oz," currently lives at Warner's New Line label. It's being produced by Temple Hill, which is behind a little franchise called "Twilight," and has a script written by Darren Lemke, a writer on the upcoming "Shrek Forever After."

A second "Wizard of Oz" project, set up at Warners proper, skews a little darker -- it's written by "A History of Violence" screenwriter Josh Olson and focuses on a granddaughter of Dorothy who returns to Oz to fight evil. "Clash of the Titans" producer Basil Iwanyk and his Thunder Road Pictures are behind that one. ("Spawn" creator Todd MacFarlane is potentially involved in a producerial capacity, to give you some idea of the tone.)

While the idea of a new "Wizard of Oz" movie is said to be in the development, let's-bat-this-around stage, it's been advanced seriously enough on the lot that representatives for some of the top directors around Hollywood have been briefed.

The Judy Garland-starring "The Wizard of Oz" from 1939 -- we could give you the refresher on witches, tin men, Dorothy and everyone else, but really, do we need to? -- has been given alternative treatments before. There was the 1978 black-themed film adaptation of the stage play "The Wiz." And of course about six years ago came the Broadway adaptation of Gregory Maguire's "Wicked," an alternative story of girls, witches and Emerald City politics. The property proved a huge stage hit, prompting a film version that's in development at Universal and "Wanted" producer Marc Platt.

Audiences are likely to respond to the idea of a new silver screen "Wizard of Oz" with gusto ("at least the first one was good," said one colleague we told) or with horror, precisely because the original is such a classic.

But for Warners, there's plenty of appeal in trying to take the story of Dorothy & Co. back to the big screen. For one, there's the bonkers $210 million global opening for "Alice," which shows that if you're trying to create a mega-blockbuster, one smart way to do it is to take a title people know and update it for the effects era. And there's a neat symmetry, since the Technicolor version of the classic film did for color in the movies what a lot of people say that "Avatar," "Alice" -- and now, perhaps, "Wizard" -- could do for 3-D in the movies.

With its Harry Potter series drawing to an end, Warners also likes the idea of a franchise, and "Wizard of Oz" and the many books L. Frank Baum wrote featuring many of the same characters (all of which are in the public domain) fit the bill nicely. And let's not forget the property's strong, young female protagonist, hugely in vogue now in the post -Twilight" and -"Alice" eras.

There could still be questions about the project's title (the book's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is in the public domain but the movie's "The Wizard of Oz" is not; it's owned by MGM, whose library is partly owned by Warner Bros.). And then there's the matter of whether filmmakers would make the movie with musical elements, as the original, of course, did. Those questions aside, it could be the moneymaking formula.

Follow the yellow brick road. It's strewn with CGI, tent poles and 3-D. And, of course, a little green.