Filmmaker Bill Still argues that L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is a coded monetary allegory, and builds this film around that claim against the backdrop of the 2008 foreclosure crisis and mass unemployment. Baum wrote during the Populist era's fight over gold versus silver currency, and the film reads the yellow brick road as the gold standard, the Emerald City as greenback paper money, and Dorothy's silver slippers (changed to ruby for the 1939 film) as a call for the people, not bankers, to control the money supply. Still traces this argument forward into a history of American banking, from the founding-era fights over a national bank to the creation of the Federal Reserve, framing recurring booms and busts as the predictable result of private control over currency. Interviews and archival material back the case for debt-free, government-issued money as the alternative. The film's real target is the present: it wants viewers to see 2009's foreclosures and bank bailouts as the latest chapter in a fight over money that Baum was already writing about a century earlier.