The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Mark Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich movie has less in common with his Murder in Greenwich book than you might think. It could have more in common with the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie, the writer of the1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz book, and its illustrator. Sounds like an overblown, rhetorical analogy, doesn't it? Well, it's not. Depending on how you parse the key building blocks of Mervyn LeRoy's Oz  movie and the L. Frank Baum / William Wallace Denslow Oz book vs. Fuhrman's 2002 Murder in Greenwich movie, it might be true.    

How many Wizard of Oz references can you extract from the combined 13 seconds of Murder in Greenwich trick or treater scenes? The "little people" are naturals for Munchkins. But, did you get the green-wich / Green Witch word play on the why-is-it-there Greenwich police car? The two Wicked Witches? The Good Witch? The stockings of the witch wearing the ruby slippers? The Wizard? The witch's bucket? Remember the cow swept up in the cyclone? No trick-or-treater cows – but there is a cowboy. The pieces are all there. What you get depends on how you put them together. Collecting the pieces and then putting them together in a relevant story-telling context is how all of this works.

Take Maggie Grace as Martha Moxley, for example: She is obviously no green witch. But her first name is a piece you can use to conjure "Maggie Hamilton," who played the green-skinned witch in The Wizard of Oz.

 

It is natural that bestselling author Mark Fuhrman, the pen & ink book illustrator and movie producer, would see aspects of himself in some men with improbable names who helped to give us Oz in its best known incarnations. Fuhrman didn't have to say, in so many words, that he associated himself with William Wallace Denslow. Click on the first of Denslow's five drawings below (Little Boy Blue) to see how Fuhrman did it in pictures. 

 

   Little Boy Blue                   Oz book cover                   nursery rhyme                     William Wallace Denslow self-portraits

 

 

The next time you hear or read that a movie is based on a true story, remember that L. Frank Baum's Dorothy, Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, and "man behind the curtain" were based on real people.

 

Murder in Greenwich with Christopher Meloni as Mark Fuhrman and Maggie Grace as Martha Moxley is based on a true story. The screenplay itself is a game, a story within a story and patches from other stories stitched together into a fairytale quilt dressed up to look like a serious drama. It's Zardoz with a twist of reality... Make that, twisted reality with a pinch of Dorothy and a dash of Balk.  Dorothy in Return to Oz is a patch in the Murder in Greenwich quilt. Fairuza Balk is the thread that stitches it to American Perfick with Robert Forster and to Red Letters with Ernie Hudson, Christopher Meloni's warden in the cable TV series Oz. 

 

Murder in Greenwich has all of these storyboard check-offs for the Wizard of Oz  

 

Dorothy  

    "Toto" 

         Cat 

            Chicks 

                  Pigs 

                     rainbow 

Girl's bicycle, etc. 

     Picnic basket 

        Uncle Henry's paintbrush

Professor Marvel 

Crystal balls 

Aunt Em's picture 

Cyclone 

Broom 

Munchkin City 

      Plastic daisies 

Kansas 

Yellow brick road 

      Scarecrow 

          Tin Man 

               Cowardly Lion 

Munchkins

  Good witch of the North 

     Good Witch's magic wand 

       Wicked Witch of the East  

           Wicked Witch of the West 

Ruby slippers 

Crows 

Shaking the tree    [Tik-Tok]

Lions & tigers & bears, Oh my... 

Horse of a different color 

Searchers in the woods 

Winged monkeys 

Castle guard 

Man behind the curtain 

Scarecrow's "brain" 

Tin Man's "heart" 

Lion's "courage" 

Wizard's balloon 

Dorothy's home 

 This is how to find them

Put yourself in the shoes of Mark Fuhrman, a man who rose from high school dropout to bestselling true crime author; a man who became the best known homicide detective since Columbo for his part in one of the biggest media events of all time.

Assume, for the sake of testing an extreme possibility that O.J. Simpson's image as a murderer was carefully crafted to put Fuhrman on stage as "a great detective." If that's true, a closer look at the evidence associated with Fuhrman's role in writing a screenplay about fictional cops and his ambition to become a rich and famous crime writer is in order.

Wherever Mark James Fuhrman walked in the footpaths of Orenthal James Simpson – whenever he described what he did, reported what he saw, what he thought and how he felt, a patchwork of movie moments followed. He spoke the way the evidence left by the killer spoke, in familiar, tightly grouped patterns traceable to movie clichés in some instances and to specific movies or TV shows, actors or characters in others.

Fuhrman has an exceptional talent for hiding his poverty of creativity. He shrouds it in a wealth of eclecticism – using many prefabricated patches of this and that taken from here and there in different sizes, shapes, numbers and orientations. Need a crystal ball? Any clear or frosted glass sphere will do. How about a horse of a different color? Is it more akin to a purple pony or "a new ballgame"?   Normally it would be a new ballgame, period. With Fuhrman you should also look for a horse inside and outside of his movie but also logically attached to the expression.

Fuhrman's movie is only superficially related to his Murder in Greenwich book. That's interesting enough to signify a hidden agenda. But the substantive ways that it is related to a name-that-Wizard-of-Oz-scene game with cleverly planted clues, say something about the producer that only a sociopath can say about himself. They say that he made a show of having feelings that he never had about the murder. They say that the most important thing to him in the entire project was to prove his superior intellect over everybody.