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Salman Rushdie’s Yellow Brick Road Trip
The internationally celebrated novelist is a serious Oz man.
Salman Rushdie holds the dubious honor of being the world’s only Wizard of OZ nut to be the object of a fatwa, a holy Muslim order, seeking his execution. His 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was judged to have blasphemed Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.
And, yes, Rushdie is an Oz man. He published a lovely little book about the movie and what it has meant to him in 1992. It was adapted from a monograph he had written for a British Film Institute series about the all-time greatest films.
Unlike so many artists touched by the 1939 MGM movie, Rushdie didn’t grow up watching the annual American showings on TV. He saw it for the first time in a movie theater in Bombay, India, where he was born. He was 10 years old.
Soon thereafter, he wrote his first short story, titled “Over the Rainbow.” He remembers the long-lost manuscript as being about a boy. Essentially, he who stumbles upon the beginning of a giant, rainbow staircase and climbs it. He encounters a talking player-piano that he describes in his BFI book as “an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland and the ‘playback singers’ in Hindi musicals.” (If he could find it, it would likely sell at auction for more than Dorothy’s footwear.)
