“My greatest experience so far. I’ll never forget that.”
That’s how Michael Jackson talked about making “The Wiz” a couple of years after it was done. It was his very first movie. In 1977 he was a teenager from a famous singing family, and he had just landed a big part in a musical version of “The Wizard of Oz.” Diana Ross was playing Dorothy. Michael was the Scarecrow.
Not everyone was sure about him at first. The director reportedly thought of the Jackson brothers as a Las Vegas act, not movie actors. Then Michael flew to New York to meet him, and that was the end of the doubts.
He moved into a Manhattan apartment with his sister La Toya, and filming started that summer at a big old studio in Queens.
Every morning began the same way. Michael sat down in the makeup chair, and he stayed there for hours. Some reports put it at about four hours a day. The young artist in charge of it would later build creatures for movies like “The Terminator” and “Aliens.” For the Scarecrow, he covered Michael’s face in soft rubber pieces and gave him a big round nose.
Then came the rest of it. A huge shaggy wig. A hat. A vest stuffed with scraps of old newspaper. The costume was hot and clumsy to move in, but Michael made it work. He’d studied Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and he wanted his Scarecrow to move like nobody else’s.
Most actors would have counted the minutes until they could peel it all off. Quincy Jones, who made the music for the movie, recalled that the long hours in that makeup never bothered Michael one bit.
Michael and Diana Ross on the yellow brick road
Here’s the Scarecrow in action, dancing down the road with Dorothy in one of the movie’s best-loved scenes.
“The Wiz” came out in October 1978. Critics weren’t kind to the movie, but they loved Michael. One of America’s best-known film critics wrote that Michael filled the role “with humor and warmth.”
So how much did Michael love being the Scarecrow?
The days on that set were long. And at the end of some of them, he reportedly didn’t bother taking the makeup off at all. He kept the Scarecrow face on through the night and went to bed in it.
A year later, he made “Off the Wall” with Quincy Jones, the man he’d worked with on that movie set.