It started in 1975 when a friend of film critic Roger Ebert suggested watching a movie, one frame at a time. The esteemed Chicago Sun-Times arts journalist had been attending the Conference on World Affairs, held every spring at CU Boulder, as a guest since 1970 and thought the idea was a good one.
So they borrowed a stop-action projector, the kind football coaches used to break down game footage, and invited conference attendees to dissect Citizen Kane, one frame at a time, inside the Fox Theater. A tradition was born.
The series went by many names (How to Read a Movie, Decoding a Movie, Analyzing a Film, etc.) before settling on Cinema Interruptus in 1996. An ideal choice for a series encouraging the audience to talk during a movie with observations and questions. CWA founder Howard Higman called it “democracy in the dark.”
In 2013, the program was renamed Ebert Interruptus following the critic’s death that April. And for the 50th anniversary of Interruptus, Chicago-based critic, author and Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen returns to discuss and dissect a cornerstone of any moviegoer’s cinematic upbringing: 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
You know the story: A young Kansas girl and her dog are whisked away to a mystical dreamscape where they immediately kill a witch and free the inhabitants of Munchkinland. But another still reigns terror over the people, so the girl and her dog assemble a motley crew to see the all-powerful wizard and vanquish the wicked witch.
The Wizard of Oz is one of those movies that never went out of fashion. And as long as there are children in the world, it never will. For filmmaker Karyn Kusama, Oz — particularly the shot of Dorothy and Toto leaving their sepia-brown Kansas farmhouse and walking on to the Technicolor dreamscape of Munchkinland — is the moment where kids see what magic cinema is capable of. After the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa for the death of Salman Rushdie, the author found resonance in Dorothy’s admission, “There’s no place like home.” And according to late filmmaker David Lynch, not a day went by when he didn’t think of The Wizard of Oz.
The influences this 85-year-old work of cinema holds are but the tip of the spear. Oh, the fun we’ll have at this year’s Interruptus. Sessions will be held 5 p.m. April 8-10 in the Bruce Curtis Building on CU Boulder. Larsen will be running the show and yours truly will be manning the Blu-ray player.
ON SCREEN: Ebert Interruptus presents The Wizard of Oz at the Conference on World Affairs. Bruce Curtis Building, University of Colorado Boulder, April 8-10, 5 p.m. Free | Uninterrupted screening: 2 p.m. Monday, April 7, UMC East Ballroom.