Strange Conversation: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Why did Roald Dahl hate Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

The film was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin 11 months later. The book has been adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1971 and published in 1972. Dahl had also planned to write a third book in the series but never finished it.^[1]

The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products.^[2] At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.^[3]

Source: Wikipedia

What about the film?

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 American musical fantasy film directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. It is an adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. The film tells the story of a poor child named Charlie Bucket who, after finding a Golden Ticket in a chocolate bar, visits Willy Wonka's chocolate factory along with four other children from around the world.

Filming took place in Munich from August to November 1970. Dahl was credited with writing the film's screenplay; however, David Seltzer, who went uncredited in the film, was brought in to re-work the screenplay against Dahl's wishes, making major changes to the ending and adding musical numbers. These changes and other decisions made by the director led Dahl to disown the film.^[5]^[6] The musical numbers were written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley while Walter Scharf arranged and conducted the orchestral score.

The film was released by Paramount Pictures on June 30, 1971. With a budget of just $3 million, the film received generally positive reviews and earned $4 million by the end of its original run. The film gained a cult following and became highly popular in part through repeated television airings and home entertainment sales.^[7] In 1972, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, and Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, but both nominations lost to Fiddler on the Roof. The film also introduced the song "The Candy Man", which went on to become a popular hit when recorded by Sammy Davis Jr. and has since been covered by numerous artists.

In 2014, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[8]^[9]

Source: Wikipedia

Guy Lodge of The Guardian thinks Roald Dahl had a point:

"Dahl himself would be exasperated over the 1971 film’s endurance. Though he was nominally billed as its screenwriter, his original adaptation was scarcely detectable beneath all manner of uncredited rewrites, and he was vocal in his disdain for the result, Wilder and all. His list of grievances was long: Dahl had wanted the arch British peculiarity of Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers for Wonka, he was unhappy with the film’s foregrounding of Wonka over Charlie, he resented plot alterations and additions that muddied the cautionary neatness of his original tale, and he wasn’t a fan of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s perky song score.

"An author not caring for a creatively divergent adaptation of his book is hardly a stop-the-presses scandal, of course. But after watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the first time since my own childhood, where it was a VHS staple of 1980s schoolrooms and friends’ houses, I’m inclined to think he had a point. Stuart’s film is an odd, clunky beast, built from separate parts – a bit of Dahl’s updated Brothers Grimm misanthropy, a lot of cuddlier trends in 1970s family entertainment, and fading fumes from Hollywood’s blockbuster musical craze of the previous decade – that fit together as elegantly as Lego, Meccano and Play-Doh.

"Stuart, a workmanlike film-maker hitherto best-known for documentaries and sitcom-like farces, directed it with a halting, gear-grinding rhythm and an erratic sense of pace: it’s a stately 45 minutes before Wonka even makes his first appearance, whereupon the film rushes through its fantastical factory set pieces with businesslike indifference."

But does Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory deserve the wrath of its author?