The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays

The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays
One of the few surviving stills from the film displaying the quality of the Radio-Play coloring process.
Directed by	Francis Boggs Otis Turner
Produced by	William Selig John B. Shaw, Jr L. Frank Baum
Written by	L. Frank Baum
Starring	L. Frank Baum Romola Remus Frank Burns George E. Wilson Joseph Schrode Burns Wantling Grace Elder
Music by	Nathaniel D. Mann
Production company	The Radio Play Company of America
Distributed by	Selig Polyscope Company
Release date	September 24, 1908 (1908-09-24)
Running time	120 minutes (3600 m)
Country	United States
Language	English

The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays was an early attempt to bring L. Frank Baum's Oz books to the motion picture screen. It was a mixture of live actors, hand-tinted magic lantern slides, and film. Baum himself would appear as if he were giving a lecture, while he interacted with the characters (both on stage and on screen). Although acclaimed throughout its tour, the show experienced budgetary problems (with the show costing more to produce than the money that sold-out houses could bring in) and folded after two months of performances. It opened in Grand Rapids, Michigan on September 24, 1908. It then opened in Orchestra Hall in Chicago on October 1, toured the country and ended its run in New York City. There, it was scheduled to run through December 31, and ads for it continued to run in The New York Times until then, but it reportedly closed on December 16.

Although today seen mostly as a failed first effort to adapt the Oz books,The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays is notable in film history because it contains the earliest original film score to be documented (an innovation often erroneously credited to the 1915 landmark film The Birth of a Nation).

The film is lost, but the script for Baum's narration and production stills survive.

The films were colored (credited as "illuminations") by Duval Frères of Paris, in a process known as "Radio-Play", and were noted for being the most lifelike hand-tinted imagery of the time. Baum once claimed in an interview that a "Michael Radio" was a Frenchman who colored the films, though no evidence of such a person, even with the more proper French spelling "Michel", as second-hand reports unsurprisingly revise it, has been documented. It did not refer to the contemporary concept of radio (or, for that matter, a radio play), but played on notions of the new and fantastic at the time, similar to the way "high-tech" or sometimes "cyber" would be used later in the century. The "Fairylogue" part of the title was to liken it to a travelogue, which at the time was a very popular type of documentary film entertainment.