Sex-Crazed Dwarves
14 June 2006

Little People in a Big People's world.

Movie history has never been very fair to little people. With the notable exception of the diminutive central character in Thomas McCarthy's 2003 gem The Station Agent, played by Peter Dinklage, dwarves repeatedly come across on screen as not much more than adorable soft toys with helium-fueled voices; they are Snow White's sidekicks, Dorothy's guiding lights, and Willy Wonka's worker bees. The idea of showing undersized people having sex or mainlining heroin or transgressing in any way is out of the question, as far as filmmakers from Walt Disney to Tim Burton are concerned.

But if Trainspotting and Porno author Irvine Welsh and British screenwriter Dean Cavanagh have anything to do with it, the portrayal of little people in pop culture may never be the same again. The world premiere of the authors' new stage play, Babylon Heights, reveals dwarves to be every bit as complex as the rest of us -- and at least as corruptible.

The evidence to support the playwrights' claim is apparently right there in The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 classic starring Judy Garland as the ruby-slippered Dorothy and a panoply of Munchkins. In the scene in which Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow set off down the Yellow Brick Road, a disturbance in a tree to the right of the frame has become the source of endless speculation over the decades since the movie was made. Some accounts (such as the one on the Internet Movie Database) attribute the scuffle to "a large bird stretching its wings." Other people, including Welsh and Cavanagh, have a more sinister take on what's swinging from the branches: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's a dead dwarf.

The rumored on-set suicide of one of The Wizard of Oz's Munchkin actors is the starting point for Babylon Heights. Set in a Culver City hotel room in Depression-era Hollywood, Welsh and Cavanagh's salacious comedy explores the events leading up to the fabled suicide. Drawing upon the annals of industry gossip as evidence (always a reliable source), the authors relate the untimely demise to wild Munchkin sex orgies, drunken behavior, and general debauchery that allegedly took place during the shooting of Oz. The blurb for Vintage's forthcoming published edition of the play sums up the playwrights' view: "If you put four dwarfs in one room with enough opium and alcohol, it's bound to end in tears."

Yet there might be a more obvious explanation for the suicide: According to lead Munchkin Jerry Maren, who's quoted on IMDB's page about the film, Oz's dwarf actors worked six days out of seven for a paltry $50, while the pooch hired to play Dorothy's dog Toto received weekly wages of $125. If that isn't enough to drive a person to despair, I don't know what is.

Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy (at Taylor) , San Francisco