Under the Rainbow
Original screenplay and rewrite by Pat McCormick
June 12, 1979
As I understand it, the idea for this movie came from a studio executive who heard about or witnessed the filming of The Wizard of Oz, in particular, a melee in the kitchen of the hotel where the midgets were staying. He wanted a movie about the midgets, the melee, and all the destruction they caused. Apparently, the job of turning that melee into a movie fell to Pat McCormick.
That wouldn’t have been much of a movie, and as the concept progressed the kitchen melee gradually became a much smaller part of the overall story. As part of the process, though, several other writers were brought on board.
After its release, the general thinking seemed to be that Under the Rainbow was a stinker, so everyone was scrambling to take credit for the one or two bright spots, following the old saying that success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. One particularly hotly-contested morsel was the Timmy “Tiny” Tam-O-Shanter’s line (as uttered by Pat McCormick himself) to the Luigi DeJello character, “I would have held the elevator.” Pat called me after the release to have me go through my notes to prove that he was the one who came up with that line.
Under the Rainbow in IMDB.