"I, on opening day, saw The Wizard of Oz — 1939, in Providence, Rhode Island. I even remember the theater, the Majestic Theater. Our dad [took us] and we slept in the street that night to wait for the first showing of it. And of course, just like everybody else on this planet, it’s made a lifetime impression on me. As a matter of fact, I think that H.R. Pufnstuft, which was our first television show, the whole feeling came from The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t like it, but the story — with a boy instead of a girl, and all the characters and the trees and the witch — but we went in a whole other direction with ours. As a matter of fact, when the first Pufnstuft movie came out a year after we did the series, Time Magazine said it was “the next Wizard of Oz.” That was quite a statement. What else? Margaret Hamilton — as a matter of fact, I think the very last job that she had before she left us was in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. She played the crazy lady next door who kept seeing the little monster and nobody believed her. She did two or three episodes for us. And the reason she wanted to do it? She wanted to meet Billie Hayes, who was Witchiepoo. She said Witchiepoo is the best witch; as a matter of fact, Billie Hayes met her at the airport and they became great friends. And the reason for being of Land of the Lost? In 1940 there was a movie called One Million B.C. Marty was just a couple of years old, and I was eleven. I had never seen a dinosaur moving; no one had. Only in our schoolbooks. I would take him to see One Million B.C. with Victor Mature… wow. That made a huge impression. It scared the hell out of me. Because, like I said, we had never seen a dinosaur moving before! And that idea gave us the idea to do Land of the Lost."

"This is a terrifying film to watch for any aspiring filmmaker worth his/her salt. One takes a look at it and soon realizes that it spells perfection. Not a reassuring realization when one is trying to enter the trade. The only thing that can mitigate somewhat this feeling is that Bergman himself expressed wonderment at what he had pulled off here, as if he weren’t entirely responsible for it and lady luck had been outrageously on his side. The conventional wisdom when one talks about Bergman is always to list the thematic bases he hits: the fundamental triviality of faith, the traumatic economy of unrequited love, etc. Better go small and more mysterious: this is a textbook of what drama is made of, each scene exploring relentlessly the perilous equilibrium of a situation, what makes it what it is, what will keep it there. Nothing ever comes to a trite conclusion in this film. Everything is suspended, held together by the contradictory forces that vie for the moment to be what they are, and as a consequence everything is resonant. It is so finely tuned that it can be unendurable: nobody has ever explored the savagery of gender relationships as accurately as Bergman, because nobody else has so detailed them as an ineluctable stasis. Yes, Bergman was right to wonder: there is a miracle at work here. It’s a film where the energies and the craft of the principals intersect so splendidly under the guidance of a director: the photographer’s eye (Sven Nykvist, who knows how to match the coldness of these souls with the cold dampness of the landscape outside); the actors’ bodies (Ingrid Thulin, her hands, wrecked by eczema, fussing around abjectly out of unrequited love for her pastor; Gunnar Bjornstrand, with a terminal case of the sniffles and an endless ability to tap into cruelty). Not a first-date movie, but it will do for the third. And, any time, a humbling lesson in film craft."