One day several months ago in Culver City, California, orchestral musicians filed into the Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage at Sony Pictures Studios unsure of what awaited them on their music stands.
“They come in, and they see the Wizard of Oz sheet music,” recalls Grammy Award-winning music supervisor Julianne Jordan. “They were all freaking out. They all came up to me and were like, ‘We never thought we’d ever be playing this — let alone playing this here.’”
The Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage is hallowed ground in the world of film scoring. Countless soundtracks have been recorded there — beginning with The Wizard Of Oz, in 1939. Now, nearly a century later, another orchestra was re-recording the score, for a film experience that aims to be as groundbreaking as the original movie once was.
Jordan supervised music for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, the Las Vegas venue’s ambitious first foray into licensing — and modernizing — an existing film property for Sphere’s towering screen and cutting-edge audio system. Along with a team comprised of some of contemporary Hollywood’s best musical minds — including Oscar-nominated composer David Newman and Oscar-winning engineer Shawn Murphy — Jordan was instrumental in figuring out how, exactly, to bring Oz‘s score to life in a venue that its original creators could’ve never dreamed of.
For the same reason an old cassette tape might sound bad on high-end home audio equipment, Sphere, with its advanced technology, couldn’t simply press play on the original version of Oz. That meant augmenting the original visual component (including with the use of AI), but also reconstructing the film’s audio for Sphere Immersive Sound, in some cases from the ground up.
“It would be a huge miss to do this film as a 1939 optical audio track,” says Paul Freeman, who as vp and principal audio artist at Sphere Studios, the division overseeing the Oz project, touches “everything that makes noise in the venue.”
When it came to the score, the solution — re-record it — was deceptively complex. About a year and a half ago, when the project began gathering steam, Sphere’s team brought orchestras of different sizes to the venue, arranging them in various physical formats simply to see how orchestras sounded within its dimensions. Then, as recording commenced, the team divided the ensemble into component sections — “not unheard-of” in today’s filmmaking, Jordan says, but not common either — to record them separately, which would make the audio easier to manipulate in Sphere later. “When everybody’s in the room playing together, there’s a fluidity that you don’t get when you’re just playing in sections,” Freeman says, though Jordan notes that because Murphy “has done it before, he knew how to put it all together.”
This separation didn’t only allow the Sphere team to render the score in unprecedented clarity — it also provided narrative benefits. “An example is when the Tin Man sways back and forth,” says Freeman. “We’re taking the strings that are orchestrationally augmenting that, and we’re positionally augmenting that with him. The strings are playing, mimicking his movement [musically], but now we’re physically moving it in space [throughout the venue] at the same time. We do that several times in the film.”
When re-recording the score — originally captured in mono — musicians played in the era’s style of film music, using then-common techniques such as pizzicato and vibrato; the ocarina used for the original “If I Only Had a Brain” recording was used again this time around.
Sphere licensed the orchestral compositions from Sony Music Publishing, as opposed to the original vocal parts, for which it licensed the original masters from Warner Bros. Those vocals — not to mention all the other sounds heard in the film — presented both challenges and opportunities for Sphere’s team.
When remastering classic albums, audio professionals often face a dilemma: modernizing a recording too thoroughly can make it sound conspicuously, even distractingly, different from the original. This held true for Oz, which is at times defined by the era’s audio primitiveness. “You’re used to hearing the [Wicked] Witch sound bad,” Freeman says. “If you try and fix that too much, it doesn’t sound like the film anymore. It sounds correct sonically, but it doesn’t sound like The Wizard of Oz. We’ve all heard this film so often that you have to be true to that.”
The answer, he explains, was “just a bunch of smart guys with really good ears trying to get this stuff in the venue to sound correct.”
But fidelity concerns aside, Sphere’s team had the freedom to conceptualize what Oz‘s original creators might have done with the audio if they’d had access to Sphere. It’s not just orchestra following the Tin Man across the venue as he sways back and forth — it’s the way dialogue follows characters as they move across the screen, or how amidst the tornado’s swirl, the main orchestra remains centered while audio motifs move in tandem with the objects and people in the gale force wind. “Point blank, when you walk into this venue and minutes into the film the tornado happens, hold on to your wig, because you’re in it,” Freeman says.
Sphere’s capacity for immersive, 4D experiences have been a selling point — the venue hasn’t elaborated further, but promises “environmental effects and custom scents” during the Oz show — and that extends to the infrasound system running through the venue’s seats, which Freeman points out are actually speakers that activate when the seats are down.
“One of the things that our chairman [James Dolan] has wanted to do with our infrasound system since the beginning was make it emotional,” he says. “So, there are certain identifiable things that we’re doing, not necessarily to grab your attention to it, but to make certain components more special.” For instance, the Sphere team applied backward reverb to the Wicked Witch’s dialogue to create an almost imperceptible but unsettling feeling; it’s just one of the subtle ways they’re manipulating dialogue to elicit emotional responses from fans, and the first time Sphere has used its seats not only to vibrate, but to emit tones.
On paper, all this change might make an Oz superfan a little trepidatious — something the Sphere team and its colleagues at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services considered at every turn. For both the audio and visual aspects of the film, they combed through footage and archival materials and notes to understand where the original filmmakers were coming from.
“We all approached it with a lot of reverence,” says Sphere Studios head Carolyn Blackwood, who joined the company about a year ago, after nearly 25 years as an executive at Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. “The choices we made were done with the idea of the purity of the original film — always with the intention to get to the clarity and the original intent of what existed there, but couldn’t have been done back then, because the technology didn’t exist.”
In fact, modern audio advancements — from the techniques employed to Sphere’s audio system — have also helped to clarify certain aspects of the original film. “Most people are used to hearing this on their TV,” says Jordan, who recounts sitting in recording sessions and hearing cues she never knew existed in the score, including a snippet of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain that’s woven into scenes at the Wicked Witch’s castle.
As for Oz‘s most well-known musical moment, Judy Garland‘s performance of “Over The Rainbow,” Freeman says, “This is the definitive, all-time, greatest version that you will ever, ever hear. The track is all around you. It’s a perfect piece of audio.”
To Blackwood, the project is in keeping with Oz‘s broader cultural legacy. When she arrived at Sphere, the project was already in development, and naturally she asked why the team had settled on Oz, rather than another classic film. The answer she received was twofold: The cultural ubiquity was a factor, sure, but so was Oz’s spot in the evolution of cinema. “When Wizard of Oz was done in 1939, it was a technological marvel,” she says. “It made sense that, once again, this 1939 movie would break new ground.”
