A look inside Hollywood and the movies : TOTO-LY AWESOME! : Somewhere, Under the Rainbow . . .

“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home . . . . “

So chants Dorothy as she clicks her ruby slippers together in the Emerald City. One of the most famous lines in the movies is bound to have special appeal for novelist Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about being unable to go home--right?

Well, no.

In an excerpt from a book he’s written on “The Wizard of Oz,” published in the May 11 New Yorker magazine, Rushdie writes that he considers the line “the least convincing idea in the film.” The people who made “Oz,” Rushdie argues in the critical essay, went out of their way to make Dorothy’s home in Kansas an unappealing place, filling it with not only “the sadness of dirt-poverty but also the badness of would-be dog-murderers.” Rushdie is particularly harsh on Toto and calls the Good Witch Glenda “ineffably loopy.”

Rushdie was known as an avid film buff before he was forced underground more than three years ago after the furor over his novel “The Satanic Verses,” and he writes that “The Wizard of Oz” was his “very first literary influence.” The forthcoming book is part of a series published by the British Film Institute. (Others include Edward Buscombe writing on John Ford’s “Stagecoach” and Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel on Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity.”)

The first story Rushdie wrote, at the age of 10, was a direct descendant of “The Wizard of Oz”--it was called “Over the Rainbow”--and he says one character in his novel “Midnight’s Children” is a fusion of Indira Gandhi and the Wicked Witch of the West.

The head of research for the BFI, Colin McCabe, is an old friend of Rushdie’s from Cambridge University, and when McCabe mentioned the series to Rushdie a year ago, he reportedly jumped at the chance to participate. The short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” also appears in the book, which will be published in August by the Indiana University Press.

“Once we leave our childhood places and start to make up our lives, armed only with what we know and who we are, we come to understand that the real secret of the ruby slipper is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ ” Rushdie writes, “but, rather, that there is no longer any such place as home.”