The Sphere Worked Modern Magic on the Soundtrack for ‘The Wizard of Oz’

It seems like it’d take an actual wizard to transform a soundtrack recorded in 1939 in mono and on primitive equipment into a score for one of the most immersive, cutting-edge audio systems on the planet. But that was Sphere Studios’ rainbow-sized wish when the company decided to convert The Wizard of Oz into an experience for their high-tech entertainment bubble in Las Vegas.

The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will debut on August 28.  The extrapolation of the old film’s visuals to fill the Sphere’s enormous domed screen has drawn much of the attention, and it’s a wizardly feat in its own right. But Oz is, at its core, a movie musical — and making that work for the world’s most eye-popping venue proved to be just as fantastical a challenge as translating Dorothy’s Technicolor environment for 40,000 eyeballs.

“Obviously we’re not going to do a 1939 optical audio track in the venue,” says Paul Freeman, Principal Audio Artist at Sphere Studios. “But on the other side of the coin, we weren’t going to do a Judy Garland soundalike and all that.”

Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the MGM classic and has licensed it to Sphere, worked with the venue using modern technology to separate dialogue from sound effects from music — so all the distinctive dialogue and singing remain pure, with only modest EQ and enhancements. No A.I. (flying) monkey business, Freeman insists, just ordinary tools.

“It’s Judy Garland singing,” Freeman says. “It’s the real Munchkins talking — if there is such a thing. I’d love to be able to say there’s some big, giant Sphere secret, but there isn’t. It’s taste and art and that’s it.”

The sound effects were less sacrosanct, and notably sparse on the 1939 soundtrack, so the film was given an almost completely new sound design and foley track, taking advantage of the venue’s vast spatial canvas.

But when it came to the orchestra, the original soundtrack was both sacred and insufficient. So the (expensive) decision was made to re-record the entire score — but done on the exact same soundstage as the original Oz, with the same performance practices, and even using some of the same instruments.

Julianne Jordan supervised the recording, and David Newman — whose family roots go back to 1930s Hollywood and who specializes in vintage film music restoration and bygone performance techniques — conducted. Newman and a contract orchestra assembled on the Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage, the pop temple on the old MGM lot where Garland laid down her vocals with composer Herbert Stothart. There, he had their strings reproduce all the warbling vibratos and their brass instruments the jazzy mutes that were en vogue in 1939.

Everyone knows how Oz sounds, Freeman notes. “The musical character is spectacular. So we wanted it to sound like the character of the original film,” he says. “From a performance standpoint, it sounds right.”

But, he continues, the Sphere is a round building, which creates “some very strict rules in regard to what you can do and what you can’t do from a time domain standpoint.”

“It is the definitive immersive venue for listening to sound,” Freeman says. “The biggest issue with Sphere is that there is no sweet spot — every seat in the house is a sweet spot. So when you place things in the venue spatially, everybody gets the same experience.”

To meet these demands, sound engineer Shawn Murphy recorded the music not only with a host of modern microphones in the highest fidelity they could, but in almost every isolated variable imaginable: short string phrases, long strings, short brass, long brass. Freeman wound up with a full series of 7.1.4 “stems” so that “you get this really, really wide, immersive, sonically correct version of the score,” he says, “where you’re not just hearing things really wide — you’re hearing the depth of it.”

Freeman’s aim was to make what he calls “a hug of sound.”

The new, many-stemmed recording also allowed his team to get creative. For example, when the violins sway alongside the Tin Man, Freeman could sway those specific stems, but not the rest of the orchestra. When the tornado swirls around Mrs. Gulch on her bike, her wicked theme spirals in kind.

Oz will be a test balloon for other hopeful transformations of beloved films at the Sphere. Carolyn Blackwood, who took the helm of Sphere Studios last year after a long career at New Line Cinema and Warner Bros., calls it “the next frontier of how we entertain people in a visual medium.”

“It’s a leap of faith,” Blackwood says. “We’re trying to do our best to maintain the integrity of the original source material and do it justice and really push those boundaries, without doing something that is not completely consistent with the integrity of the original film. I’m not ready to take a full victory lap yet, but it’s pretty epic.”

Freeman has been working on the mix on site for about a year. He first saw Oz when he was seven years old, and he’s watched it countless times over the years, so he’s intimately familiar with its sound, and he’s confident in what they’ve developed. “I think that this recording of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ is the definitive, will never be beat,” he says. “That’s not an arrogant statement; this is spectacular. It’s what it should be.”

As proof of his reverence, he points out that there are certain flaws in the original sound, like some of the Wicked Witch’s dialogue being harmonically distorted. Trying to keep the integrity of the original, those distortions remain.

“We’ve done certain things to fix that, but then they don’t sound right in the film. I don’t care who you are: you know what the film sounds like,” he says. “If you try to correct too much, it just doesn’t sound like the Wizard of Oz anymore.”