The story of the stolen Wizard Of Oz ruby slippers would make for a pretty good movie
What happens when a thief pulling off one last job realizes his score is technically worthless?
Aux News Ruby slippers
Fire up your text editing software, aspiring screenwriters: We’ve got a good pitch for you. In 2005, a man named Terry Jon Martin stole one of the pairs of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard Of Oz from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota. More than a decade later, the FBI recovered the stolen shoes after some kind of sting operation, and now Martin is facing sentencing this week after pleading guilty to stealing them.
But the interesting bit in all of this is that Martin has explained why he stole the shoes and why they didn’t turn up for so long, and it has a lot of the hallmarks of a good crime movie. As reported by Variety, Terry Jon Martin was an old career criminal who hadn’t broken the law at all in “nearly 10 years” after his last time in prison, but an unnamed “former mob associate” convinced him to steal the slippers after telling him that they contained real rubies.
According to Martin’s attorney, the idea of pulling off one “final score” kept him away at night, and though he initially refused to do the heist, he had a “criminal relapse” and decided to do it anyway. Martin says that he took the shoes to a fence and was told that the rubies were actually made of glass, so he says he ditched the shows as soon as he could. At some point after that, the FBI found out who had the shoes and recovered them, implying that there’s more to the story that we don’t even know.
So you’ve got a retired criminal reluctantly agreeing to one last heist, you’ve got the hook of the thief targeting an iconic piece of movie history, and you have the twist where the thief finds out that the score is effectively worthless. And if the Wizard Of Oz rights holders don’t want to play ball, you could substitute the ruby slippers for any number of other iconic film props: A plastic Maltese Falcon, a glowing Marsellus Wallace briefcase with nothing inside, a lightsaber missing the crucial kyber crystal that makes it function. Any of those could be stolen!
33 Comments
I think the copy editor was also kept “away at night.”
And he ditched the shows as soon as he could …
The old AV Club is dead. We should hold a way for it.
I see what you did there!
Do you think it’s gotten too woy?
“You want… money? What kind of copy editors are you?”“Ha ha ha ha…. Who said we were copy editor?”
This would be terrible a better crime movie but it might make for a “Dumb and Dumber” style comedy. Why would anyone ever think that one of many pairs of shoes made for a movie would be encrusted with genuine rubies? Or that said ruby-encrusted shoes would be kept under such poor security? Or discard movie memorabilia that might have still been worth several hundred thousand dollars to the right collector? (I don’t know how hard it is to fence hot shoes and I’m sure you wouldn’t get full auction price, but it might be worth taking a few days to find out.)
I can see some juice in this film if he goes on to sell the shoes to some Garland fanatic. You start with a grizzled cook who’s all business; there’s nothing in his life but stealing, hiding away money for his retirement, and staying clear of the cops. He gets duped into stealing the slippers (or equivalent; you also need to write a plausible reason why he was fooled, because I don’t think the story works if he’s just an idiot), but discovers there are people who will pay huge money for the memorabilia of it. At first he thinks these people are crazy, but he slowly learns to appreciate that they’re just passionate about something and realises his own life is kind of empty by comparison.
Can you get Paul Giamatti as the crook?
I know it was a typo but I kind of love the idea that the main character is a cook rather than a crook. Gives it that extra layer of weirdness.
Scorsese and De Niro. A sort of King of Comedy riff.
(or equivalent; you also need to write a plausible reason why he was fooled, because I don’t think the story works if he’s just an idiot)He’s not really fooled. He knows that the ruby concept is nonsense, but either he’s being blackmailed/pressured by someone who doesn’t know, or he’s working some kind of double-cross that falls apart.
I can see some juice in this film if he goes on to sell the shoes to some Garland fanatic.So a friend of Dorothy?
See, I want to add a bit of lore that says the rubies in the slippers were being used as a way to secretly move Nazi coded messages through the diamond networks of LA and New York, and they accidently found their way into a Hollywood costumer. These Nazi messages relate to deciphering where the U.S. government has hidden the Lost Ark from Raiders.
I agree, the slippers were stolen in 2005, there was plenty of places to research the materials used to make them. What was the thief’s excuse?
I’m thinking Steven Soderbergh.Maybe Rian Johnson.
Coen Brothers, George Clooney as the crusty old pawn broker.
“And all for what, a pair of shoes? There’s more to life than a pair of shoes, you know.”
This, this right here.
You mean, crusty but dreamy?
Aww, now I want that.
Come on! He thought he would look pretty in the shoes, so he stole them End of story.
Bonus – there are lots of pairs of ruby slippers floating around out there because they made several for the movie.
Guy really did not do his due diligence on this particular heist.
I know an AI didn’t write this because of the atrocious errors.
I’ve always thought you could do an interesting comedy based on a true crime that took place back in 1983 when Return of the Jedi was in theaters. In Overland Park, Kansas, thieves forced their way into the projection book of one area theater, in order to steal their film print. Their plan was to make a bootleg copy, this being an age when there was good money to be made in black market VHS copies. Problem was that theater’s print was a 70mm print, which would’ve weighed several hundred pounds altogether. It has comedic elements, but you could also do something interesting about the whole intersection of film and video, make it an ode to an era that was rapidly ending.
Maybe they could kill a theater full of Nazis, including Hitler, while they’re at it.
Well it would be set in the 80s so maybe they could be Soviets or the Ayatollah?
Whatever happened the movie they were going to make based on the Action Comics #1 that got stolen from Nic Cage? For that matter they could also make a movie about the stolen dinosaur skull he bought too LOL.
It’s charming how the shoes are mostly sequin. These days they probably would make them out of real rubies for no reason other than the flex and free press.
Too many movies are being made out of what are essentially really good podcast episode topics.
The Thief of OzStudio, there’s your on-the-nose title. I will be expecting my royalties.