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Some characters are simply embedded in the cultural bedrock. Say the name “Dorothy,” and a very specific Kansas runaway in a gingham dress comes to mind, a figure who has been a fixed point in American storytelling for 125 years.

Director Jeffrey McHale’s documentary, It’s Dorothy!, takes on the formidable task of mapping the character’s sprawling journey. The film sets out not just to retell a familiar story, but to dissect how that story has been refracted through countless adaptations on screen and stage.

It approaches its subject with a clear affection, looking to understand how a simple fairytale character became an enduring and evolving piece of our collective mythology. The documentary frames itself as an energetic and sprawling exploration of a girl who is much more than her ruby slippers.

The Women Behind the Slippers

The documentary’s narrative engine is not the tornado or the trip to Oz,...

Upon hearing the name “Dorothy” I, like most, immediately think of The Wizard of Oz. I remember watching the film when I was a kid, sitting on the couch with my family. I remember my parents calling it “a classic.” Dorothy Gale has become synonymous with many things over the 125 years since she first appeared in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from Kansas to ruby red slippers, Judy Garland to a 1950s LGBTQ+ signifier.

Jeffrey McHale has made a documentary to look at the character of Dorothy Gale in her entirety. Over the last 125 years she has appeared through nearly every medium––more than 40 films, television shows, novels, and plays. It’s Dorothy! tracks Dorothy from Garland through every iteration, through each actor to portray the role, through her growing and changing cultural impact. More than anything, it’s a documentary about joy.

McHale focuses on...

A favorite nugget of Wizard of Oz lore for many of us is the sublimely funny TV guide blurb written for a 1998 TCM airing of the MGM classic: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” The inclusion of amusing oddities like that is what pulls It’s Dorothy! back whenever it threatens to go from exhaustive to exhausting, from dissection to dissertation.

Welcome humor comes also from new discoveries — at least to me — like the bizarrely kitsch spectacle of eliminated contestants on BBC talent search show Over the Rainbow removing their jeweled slippers and handing them to Andrew Lloyd Webber on a throne before being carried off the set on a cutout moon. Wtf? The winner — or survivor — of that Brit reality TV horror, Danielle Hope, went on to star in London as...

If there’s one criticism to be lobbed at Jeffrey McHale’s energetic, engrossing, and often quite loving documentary “It’s Dorothy!,” it’s that the documentarian has selected perhaps too good of a subject. The mythology and meaning of Dorothy Gale, the great hero of “The Wizard of Oz,” could easily inspire an entire series of films. While McHale somehow manages to touch on a dozen hot topics in his documentary — what the on-screen role means to the women who have played her, how and why the LGBTQ+ community so love her, how we grapple with the misdeeds of our favorite artists, and that’s literally just a small sample — that can make the actual film on offer feel a bit unfinished.

Still, McHale manages to hold all these very big topics together in an otherwise slim 97-minute running time. Packed with major talking heads, zippy animation, and a bouncing...

Exclusive: Andrew Herwitz’s Film Sales Company has come on to represent worldwide sales on two documentaries and two narrative features that are about to receive their world premieres at Tribeca Festival (June 4-15).

Jeffrey McHale’s documentaryIt’s Dorothy!explores the cultural relevance of Dorothy Gale, the heroine of L. Frank Baum’s 125-year-old classicThe Wizard Of Oz. The Spotlight Documentary entry uses archival footage and interviews with the women who portrayed Dorothy from Judy Garland to Diana Ross to examine the character’s enduring appeal.

She Runs The World focuses on the story of American athlete Allyson Felix,...

Patricia Arquette’s Gonzo Girl starring Willem Dafoe, Camila Morrone, Leila George, Ray Nicholson, and Arquette will have a Tribeca Festival Member Exclusive Event screening.

In the second instalment of my annual conversation with Artistic Director Frédéric Boyer we discuss some more of the highlights in the 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival. In Spotlight Documentary: Jeffrey McHale’s It's Dorothy!; Ole Juncker’s Take The Money And Run, and My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay (on Jayne Mansfield). Spotlight Narrative: Stephanie Laing’s Tow and Sophie Brooks’s Oh, Hi!.

Frédéric Boyer with Anne-Katrin Titze on the German film What Marielle Knows: “Extraordinary this is. I think it's the revelation of the Berlinale in terms of German cinema.”

In Viewpoints: Frédéric Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows; Lucia Garibaldi’s A Bright Future, and Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven. International Narrative Competition: Paul Andrew...