L. Frank Baum: Yellow Brick Road to Hollywood : Film history: The author founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Co. This film flirtation is the subject of an exhibit.

Once upon a time, Gower Street in Hollywood was also known as Gower Gulch, because of all the quickie Westerns being made at the small and struggling studios along it. It was also known as Poverty Row because so many of the studios’ struggles were unavailing. Only Columbia ultimately prospered on Gower.

The Gower Gulch days were early Hollywood, before production had begun to be dominated by a handful of majors, and there seemed to be new studios on every block.

One of them, for a moment and half from 1914 to 1915, was the Oz Film Manufacturing Co., founded by L. Frank Baum, who had just published the eighth of his Oz books, “Tik-Tok of Oz.”

The film company adventure, and Baum’s whole, quite remarkable life, are on view in an ambitious and inventive display at the Frances Goldwyn branch of the Los Angeles Public Library on Ivar in Hollywood. I caught up with it belatedly, I confess in some chagrin, but it runs through Aug. 31 and is engrossing. It includes a video display of Oz on film, television and stage, with rare clips from some of the five films the Oz studio made in its short, troubled life.

Baum, who had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago with his wife Maud and his children in 1910, had had a life strewn with ill health and financial troubles. He’d had to sign over to his creditors the rights to the first Oz book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” even though it had already sold 780,000 copies.

He built a house, Ozcot, at Cherokee and Yucca, and he raised capital to launch the studio by tapping his new pals in the Los Angeles Athletic Club and the Uplifters, a kind of boys’ night out club in Rustic Canyon famed for its lively revues, which Baum wrote and performed in.

Baum produced “The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” “The Magic Cloak of Oz,” and “The New Wizard of Oz” and two non-Oz films. On the evidence of the clips on view at the library, the Oz works were full of trick photography and slapstick. They were silent, of course, although there were scores written for in-theater use by Baum’s compatriot from the Uplifters, Louis Gottschalk.

There were distribution problems (then as now) and a harassing suit by the Edison interests, trying to assert its monopoly over the motion picture camera. Baum himself fell seriously ill again and after a brief cessation in 1914 the Oz studio, on Santa Monica Boulevard, shut down for good in 1915.

The Oz books have had tremendous appeal and staying power since Baum published the first one in 1900. He wrote 14 before he died; Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote many more before she wearied, and only recently a new Oz appeared, written by a Baum grandson.

Baum seems as prototypical an American story as, say, Mark Twain. He led a peripatetic life as a writer of all trades who tried his hand at everything from raising purebred chickens to running a dry goods store to editing newspapers in South Dakota and conducting a satirical column. He wrote in many forms, from songs and plays to retellings of Mother Goose, and he used several pseudonyms before, at his family’s urging, he turned his spur-of-the-moment bedtime stories into that first Oz book.

Like Howard Garis, who wrote the first titles in the Tom Swift series, Baum was from Upstate New York (Chittenango in Baum’s case) and was nuts about all the emerging technologies of the 20th Century. There are glimmerings of science fiction as well as sheer fantasy in the Oz books. Partly for this reason, and for his slyboots commentaries on the real world, he has been read not only by children but by all ages.

Like other authors, Baum at one point felt himself a captive of his creations and tried to stop the series, reporting that it was no longer visible and reachable. There were such outcries that he relented and decided it could be reached by the relatively newfangled wireless telegraph, and the next book was in essence a report from Oz.

Judy Garland and a song may have given Baum and Oz their widest fame, but you have to hope that new generations of readers are continuing to discover the books themselves, because they represent a unique and many-faceted body of work. Baum’s mother-in-law was a famous and ardent suffragette, for example, and militant feminists, led by General Jinjur and armed only with knitting needles, have their day in one of the early Oz books, “The Land of Oz.” Oz has been ruled by men long enough, the general says. The women are temporarily, but only temporarily, routed by mice.

Baum with all else was a prophet, possibly with tongue in cheek, a sly satirist with all his other endearing charms.

The exhibit, researched by Carroll Hodge, with Deni Wohlgemuth Ponti and Richard Shea as designers, is open daily except Sunday from 10 a.m. and admission is free.