<Li> William H. O'Docharty as Munchkin Carriage Footman </Li> <P> Development began when Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) showed that films adapted from popular children's stories and fairytale folklore could be successful . In January 1938, Metro - Goldwyn - Mayer bought the rights to the hugely popular novel from Samuel Goldwyn, who had toyed with the idea of making the film as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor, who was under contract to the Goldwyn studios and whom Goldwyn wanted to cast as the Scarecrow . </P> <P> The script went through a number of writers and revisions before the final shooting . Mervyn LeRoy's assistant William H. Cannon had submitted a brief four - page outline . Because recent fantasy films had not fared well, he recommended that the magical elements of the story be toned down or eliminated . In his outline, the Scarecrow was a man so stupid that the only employment open to him was literally scaring crows from cornfields, and the Tin Woodman was a criminal so heartless he was sentenced to be placed in a tin suit for eternity; this torture softened him into someone gentle and kind . His vision was similar to Larry Semon's 1925 film adaptation of the story, in which the magical element is absent . </P> <P> After that, LeRoy hired screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who soon delivered a 17 - page draft of the Kansas scenes, and a few weeks later, a further 56 pages . Noel Langley and poet Ogden Nash were also hired to write separate versions of the story . None of these three knew about the others, and this was not an uncommon procedure . Nash delivered a four - page outline, Langley turned in a 43 - page treatment and a full film script . He turned in three more, this time incorporating the songs that had been written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg . Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf submitted a script and were brought on board to touch up the writing . They would be responsible for making sure the story stayed true to the Baum book . However, producer Arthur Freed was unhappy with their work and reassigned it to Langley . During filming, Victor Fleming and John Lee Mahin revised the script further, adding and cutting some scenes . In addition, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr are known to have written some of their own dialogue for the Kansas sequence . </P>

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