I’ve been listening to The Wiz lately. Watching clips on YouTube. I recently had an idea for an Oz movie or novel I’d like to do, but as I did research, I found that legally, even though the Oz books are in the public domain, when it comes to film, you can’t do anything that might resemble something from the 1939 original. The Emerald city must be different, the characters can’t look like the ones from the MGM version.  For a while, it seemed like there was no way to really do a great job of retelling or recreating that world.

Then as I watched The Wiz, I realized that the wonder of the movie is that it took something as iconic as the Original movie and through one single twist made sure NOTHING about this version of Oz looked like that old one. One twist is all it took. What if instead of Dorothy being a white girl from the rural Kansas at the turn of the last century, she was a poor African-American girl from the urban world of New York in the 70’s? Now, there is no way the Tin Woodman could look anything like hat first one. Dorothy could wear a similar dress but it wouldn’t be the same dress. And what I especially like in The Wiz is that they actually use the original version of silver slippers… Ruby slippers were made up on MGM’s watch.

Today, look at your work. Your themes. Your stories. And bring yourself to the page. One change changes everything. What will you change today?