The Wizard of Oz 'was my very first literary influence, ' writes Salman
Rushdie in his account of the great MGM children's classic. At the age
of ten he had written a story, 'Over the Rainbow', about a colourful
fantasy world. But for Rushdie The Wizard of Oz is more than a
children's film, and more than a fantasy. It's a story whose driving
force is the inadequacy of adults, in which 'the weakness of grown-ups
forces children to take control of their own destinies'. And Rushdie
rejects the conventional view that its fantasy of escape from reality
ends with a comforting return to home, sweet home. On the contrary, it
is a film that speaks to the exile. The Wizard of Oz shows that
imagination can become reality, that there is no such place like home,
or rather that the only home is the one we make for ourselves. Rushdie's
brilliant insights into a film more often seen than written about are
rounded off with his typically scintillating short story, 'At the
Auction of the Ruby Slippers, ' about the day when Dorothy's red shoes
are knocked down to $15,000 at a sale of MGM props. In his foreword to
this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the
BFI Film Classics series, Rushdie looks back to the circumstances in
which he wrote the book, when, in the wake of the controversy
surrounding The Satanic Verses and the issue of a fatwa against him, the
idea of home and exile held a particular resonanc
