As a very belated postscript to my Willy Wonka / Charlie review, I thought it was worth expanding on my comments about the tantalising collaborations that almost happened throughout Roald Dahl’s life. Dahl was a very difficult and in some ways a very solitary man. It’s probably telling that the only really protracted creative collaboration he had while alive was with the illustrator Quentin Blake. That was a partnership founded on a lack of direct interaction: while Dahl and Blake were a perfect fit for each other, they didn’t really work together. Dahl would turn over his writing, and Blake would illustrate it.
Generally, the more directly Dahl worked with someone, the quicker the relationship would founder. Dahl chewed through a number of publishers and editors. He wrote a Bond film (You Only Live Twice, the worst 60s Bond movie, but arguably the most iconic – it’s the one with the hollowed out volcano and the Dr Evilesque Blofeld) and was not asked back for another (although he did subsequently work on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the same producers). He fell out with Mel Stuart, director of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, even before his script was finished, and publicly called for people to boycott Nicholas Roeg’s film of The Witches. The most successful Dahl collaborations, as I’ve suggested before, generally came after his death, as those who liked his work could finally attempt adaptations without having to deal with Dahl himself. Examples of such posthumous Dahl “collaborations” include with Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach); Tim Burton (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory); Danny De Vito (Matilda); Wes Anderson (reportedly working with Selick on a version of Fantastic Mr Fox); John Cleese (who has co-scripted a version of The Twits); and Quentin Tarantino (whose segment of Four Rooms is based on Dahl’s story “Man from the South”).
Yet despite his thorny personality he was a partygoer and raconteur who moved in influential circles, both in his own right and as the husband of actress Patricia Neal. So he came into contact with, and caught the imaginations of, lots of exceptional people. The story of Dahl’s career is therefore full of collaborations that didn’t quite come off – but which are nevertheless intriguing. Several of these are film related, which is enough of an excuse for me to write about them.
Roald Dahl & Spike Milligan / Peter Sellers
Okay, this is a beat-up. As I noted in my review of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptations, Dahl wanted either Milligan or Sellers as Wonka. It’s an intriguing idea, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone got as far as approaching either man: the producers were set on an American name. Dahl never did warm to Wilder’s portrayal of Wonka, despite its popularity with audiences.
Roald Dahl & Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, is one of the few children’s authors with a vision as dark and compelling as Dahl’s own. He achieved fame when he published Where the Wild Things Are in 1963 – but in 1962, he was a relatively unknown candidate for the job of illustrating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl had seen and liked Sendak’s illustrations for Robert Graves’ The Big Green Book (which was part of the same project to get well known adult writers to write a book for children that spawned Dahl’s The Magic Finger), and suggested that Sendak would be worth a try. However, Sendak wanted a share of royalties rather than a fee, which would have cut into Dahl’s share from the book. Dahl quickly lost his enthusiasm for Sendak, and another illustrator was found.
Roald Dahl & Robert Altman
Dahl met Robert Altman in Honolulu in 1964. Altman at this point had directed his first feature film (The Delinquents) but was still an unknown, mostly working in television. Altman approached Dahl with a screenplay called Oh Death, Where is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling? and the two began working on it together. Yet the project fell apart in nebulous circumstances. The Dahl-approved version of events, recounted in Chris Powling’s imaginatively titled 1983 profile Roald Dahl, is that Dahl secured a price of $150,000 for the script but the project fell through when Dahl loyally insisted that Altman had to direct it. More thorough biographers later on questioned this version: Jeremy Treglown’s equally imaginatively titled 1994 biography Roald Dahl suggests that Dahl argued with Altman over his share of the money, and ownership of the story-line. Ultimately, says Treglown, Dahl managed to get Altman dumped off the project (despite the story being Altman’s idea) and the project fell through.
Ironically, much later (in late 2004) it was announced that Altman would produce a series of television adaptations of Dahl’s adult short stories (presumably along the lines of the 1970s Dahl-based series Tales of the Unexpected). Presumably, if Altman was soured on Dahl as a person, it didn’t effect his regard for his work.
Roald Dahl & Walt Disney
This is probably the best known of the near-miss collaborations: it is also the most intriguing. In 1941 Roald Dahl had been discharged from active duty in the RAF due to ongoing medical problems, and ended up working in the British Embassy in Washington. While there he started writing on the side, and one of his first pieces was a children’s story originally titled Gremlin Lore, about mischievous creatures that, in RAF mythology, caused malfunctions and technical problems in fighter planes. Dahl had to get it cleared by the British Information Services, and the person in charge of approving it was Sidney Bernstein, a friend of Walt Disney’s. He saw the story’s potential and passed it on to Disney in mid 1942.
During the war, the Disney studio, hit by the loss of much of its European market (which was a major factor in causing Pinocchio and Fantasia to flop) had moved heavily into government-backed propaganda filmmaking. Dahl’s Gremlin story therefore fit well with the kind of film they were making at this time, and Disney brought him out to Hollywood as a consultant on a filmed adaptation. Artists went to work, preparing conceptual art and two alternate scripts (one for an extended short, one for a feature). Disney – notorious for sinking development money into projects, many of which never materialised – spent $50,000 on The Gremlins in 9 months. Throughout the latter half of 1942 and early 1943 they started laying groundwork for the release of the film, publicising and popularising the legend in the press.
Treglown writes that Dahl was popular at the studio, including with the Disney brothers, but the problems with the project started to mount up. Firstly, a children’s fantasy about the RAF began to seem in poor taste as the war dragged on and casualties mounted. A contrasting concern was that the war could end: as development continued into 1943, Disney started to fret that the feature might be out of date before it was completed. Perhaps most serious, though, was the fact that others were stealing the studios limelight. Disney and Dahl had done much to raise awareness of the Gremlin legend, but they hadn’t invented it, and they couldn’t stop others publishing Gremlin-related stories. Disney pressured some not to proceed, but he couldn’t dissuade them all, and many of those rivals worked to much shorter production schedules than Disney. (Even in animation, Disney couldn’t keep up: Bugs Bunny was fighting Gremlins by October 1943, in Bob Clampett’s Warner Bros. short Falling Hare). By late 1943, plans for a film had been shelved. What did eventually appear was a picture book: The Gremlins, by “Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl,” and illustrated by Disney artists. It was Dahl’s first published children’s book.