Garland received a Juvenile Award at the 1939 Academy Awards ceremony — an honorary Oscar presented to performers under eighteen for exceptional accomplishment. It was not a competitive award in the same category as the film’s other nominations, but it was a recognition of her central contribution to the film’s success.
The film’s commercial performance at release was modest. It did not recoup its production costs — estimated at around $2.7 million — during its initial run. It became profitable only through subsequent re-releases, and its status as a cultural landmark was solidified by its repeated television broadcasts beginning in 1956, which introduced it to new generations and cemented its position in American popular culture. At the time of its release, it was a successful film that made Judy Garland famous. The full weight of that fame — and the distance between the film’s image and the conditions of its making — would take years to become clear.
Fame, Workload, and the Years That Followed
The success of The Wizard of Oz transformed Garland’s professional position at MGM without transforming the institutional conditions under which she worked. She was now a star — not just a successful contract player, but a performer whose name meant something at the box office and whose image was actively managed as a valuable asset. MGM’s response to this increased commercial value was to schedule her more aggressively, work her harder, and extend the industrial management of her body and schedule that had already been in operation.
The years between 1939 and 1945 were among the most professionally productive of her life and also among the most damaging in terms of what was being done to her physical and psychological health. She made film after film: Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Little Nessie (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), Babes on Broadway (1941), For Me and My Gal (1942), Presenting Lily Mars (1943), Girl Crazy (1943), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Clock (1945), The Harvey Girls (1946), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). The pace was relentless by any standard, and it was being sustained, at least in significant part, by the pharmaceutical management of a performer who was not generating this output from her own natural energy reserves.