Forty-eight years ago this Saturday, “The Wiz” opened in theaters. It was a new spin on “The Wizard of Oz,” with an all-Black cast, and a young Michael Jackson played the Scarecrow. He was about 20 then, still known mostly as the little brother who sang lead for the Jackson 5. The makeup alone took around five hours before he could even start a scene.
If you remember the Scarecrow, he kept pulling little scraps of paper out of his straw chest and reading famous sayings off them. Old lines from long-gone thinkers.
One of those names tripped Michael up in rehearsals. He said it wrong, again and again, and nobody around him said a thing about it.
Somebody was listening, though. Quincy Jones, the music man on the film, had been watching this kid very closely. Quincy was already a giant in the business, a producer and arranger who’d worked with the biggest names in jazz and pop. In this interview he talks about Michael himself.
Quincy Jones remembers the young Michael he watched on set
The word was “Socrates,” the ancient Greek philosopher. Michael kept saying it his own way, and because he was the star, nobody wanted to correct him. By the second day Quincy got worried the wrong way would stick. So he took Michael aside. “Michael, it’s Socrates.”
What struck Quincy was how Michael took it. He wasn’t embarrassed at all.
“And he said, really?” Quincy recalled later. “His eyes were so innocent, and I had been watching him. He knew everybody’s dialogue. He knew everybody’s songs. He knew everybody’s steps… And so I saw another side of him, and I said, I’d like to take a shot on your album.”
That was the moment. Michael had been asking Quincy to help him find a producer for his next solo record, and Quincy had said he’d think about who might be right. Turned out the right man was standing on the same movie set. Right there, after one gentle correction and a lot of quiet watching, the partnership began. The album was “Off the Wall,” out in August 1979, and it turned Michael from a former child star into a grown solo force. “Thriller” came a few years later, and the two of them kept working together into the 1980s on the biggest records anyone had ever sold.
The scene in the finished movie is worth a look too. In the version that made it to theaters, the Scarecrow reads a line and credits Confucius, the old Chinese teacher, not Socrates. The slip Quincy caught was back in rehearsals, not in the film.
The Scarecrow scene with the paper scraps
Watch how Michael plays him, loose and sweet and a little clumsy, and you can start to see what Quincy saw. A kid who had memorized everybody’s part on that set, not just his own. Quincy offered to make his album, and Michael said yes.