Every morning in 1977, Michael Jackson, a skinny young guy from Indiana, sat in a makeup chair in New York while somebody turned him into a pile of straw.
He’d been famous since he was a little boy, singing lead with his brothers in the Jackson 5. Now he was about to try something new, a real movie role.
The movie was The Wiz, an all-Black retelling of The Wizard of Oz set in a dreamy version of New York City. Michael played the Scarecrow. His Dorothy was Diana Ross, the former lead singer of the Supremes and an old friend from his Motown days.
The makeup was the work of Stan Winston, an artist who’d later build monsters for movies like The Terminator and Jurassic Park. It reportedly took about four hours to put on each day.
Michael got a big curly wig, a floppy hat, a vest stuffed with newspaper and a painted-on nose.
Michael actually liked the fake nose. Tony Walton, who designed the look of the film, said Michael was thrilled to have his real one covered up. His brothers used to tease him about it, and now nobody could see it at all.
Some nights, the shoots ran so long that he reportedly went to bed still wearing his Scarecrow face.
He’d turned 19 during filming, and he was living away from his family for the first time, in a Manhattan apartment with his sister La Toya. On set, he worked hard on the Scarecrow’s wobbly walk, stumbling and rolling around like a puppet with its strings cut.
You can spot that loose, rubbery body in his first big number with Diana.
The Wiz | “Ease On Down the Road” Performed by Diana Ross and Michael Jackson
Quincy Jones, the jazz musician and producer, was running the movie’s music.
The two had crossed paths before. Quincy later said he first met Michael at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house when Michael was about 12. But The Wiz is where they really got to know each other.
It began with a Scarecrow line that named the old Greek thinker Socrates. Michael kept saying it wrong, something like “SO-crates,” and nobody on set fixed it. By the second day, Quincy was worried it would stick, so he pulled Michael aside and gently showed him how to say it.
“Really?” was all Michael said.
Quincy later told NPR that Michael knew everybody’s lines and songs, even their dance steps. So he asked if he could take a shot at producing Michael’s next solo album.
Years later, Quincy sat down and talked about how the two of them came together.
Quincy Jones: Meeting and Working with Michael Jackson
The Wiz came out in October 1978 and flopped at the box office. Critics were hard on it, but many were kind to Michael. Roger Ebert wrote that he filled the role “with humor and warmth.”
The next summer, Michael and Quincy put out Off the Wall together, and Thriller followed a few years later.
But first, there was one more song for the Scarecrow, stuck on his pole while a gang of crows laughed at him.