Explore the life and times of author L. Frank Baum, the creator of one of the most beloved, enduring and classic American narratives. By 1900, when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, Baum was 44 years old and had spent much of his life in restless pursuit of success. With mixed results he dove into a string of jobs — chicken breeder, actor, marketer of petroleum products, shopkeeper, newspaperman and traveling salesman — Baum continued to reinvent himself, reflecting a uniquely American brand of confidence, imagination and innovation. During his travels to the Great Plains and on to Chicago during the American frontier’s final days, he witnessed a nation coming to terms with the economic uncertainty of the Gilded Age. But he never lost his childlike sense of wonder and eventually crafted his observations into a magical tale of survival, adventure and self-discovery, reinterpreted through the generations in films, books and musicals.
Tracy Heather Strain, a two-time Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker, explores stories about the ways diverse peoples have experienced life in the U.S. A 2022 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Award, Strain won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and subsequently aired on American Masters. Her directing debut, “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” in Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, “Building the Alaska Highway,” as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.” Other credits include Race: The Power of an Illusion and duPont Award-winning Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?. Strain, who also teaches documentary filmmaking at Wesleyan University, is president of The Film Posse, which she co-founded with Randall MacLowry. The pair is presently developing several independent projects including Survival Floating, a hybrid personal meditation on African-descended peoples’ relationships with swimming and a new documentary for American Experience.
