Video: UNDER THE RAINBOW Documentary Trailer Traces Dorothy's Ruby Slippers

The official trailer has been released for Under the Rainbow: The Curious Crimes of the Ruby Slippers, a new documentary chronicling the history of the iconic ruby slippers from 1939's The Wizard of Oz. The movie will hold its World Premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 21.

Directed by Seth Gordon and Nikki Calabrese,  the film traces the theft and recovery of the coveted piece of movie memorabilia that sent a small Minnesota town reeling after it was stolen from a local museum.

The eclectic cast of characters in the film includes the delinquent kin of an iconic comedian, a mafia hitman turned pot farmer, a cop who found her calling as an investigative local reporter, and a museum curator with a lifelong devotion to Judy Garland. 

"This project started as a fascination with the surrounding characters and perpetrators of a very peculiar crime, but turned out to be a bit of a homecoming, not unlike The Wizard of Oz film, whose power and inspiration underpins that crime,” said producers & co-directors Seth Gordon and Nikki Calabrese.

“That homecoming was — for us as the filmmakers — literal, in that it was a return to the Midwest where we are from, but also figurative in that we were able to engage with and get lost in the story in a way that reminded us of why we always loved films from the start. This film was 20 years in the making and at times felt stranger than fiction. The ending that unfolded couldn’t be more surprising and we can’t wait for audiences to experience it."

In 2024, the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota launched a fundraising campaign to acquire a pair of the shoes. They were stolen from the museum in 2005, where, at the time, they were on exhibition on a loan from collector Michael Shaw. The slippers remained missing until 2018, when the Grand Rapids Police Department and the FBI discovered them. It took another five years to discover the culprit. 

There are currently four surviving pairs of the slippers from The Wizard of Oz; one is on display at The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the other is displayed at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. The fourth remaining pair was auctioned by Heritage Auctions in December 2024 and sold for $28 million.

This now-classic musical film, The Wizard of Oz, stars Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, the young Kansas girl dreaming of a life away from her family farm. What begins in dull black-and-white soon becomes a Technicolor extravaganza as Dorothy and her dog Toto are whisked away to the colorful world of Oz.