Roald Dahl with his first wife Patricia Neal and son Theo (left) Photo: Hulton Archive
Long before Willy Wonka locked behind the huge iron gates of the largest chocolate factory in the world, becoming a recluse of rumors and magic, he was a dashing and penniless ingénue who dreamed of opening a chocolate shop in Paris. At least that's the story of the new «Wonka» prequel, now in theaters, in which Timothée Chalamet plays maverick young inventor Roald Dahl with such guileless sweetness that you wonder if he has sugar coursing through his veins.
Those with a strong affinity for the playful sadism that characterizes Willy Wonka in Dahl's beloved 1964 novel may wonder if they've come to the wrong movie. Yet the big-hearted character of Wonka Chalamet, whose Parisian capers are entirely the invention of co-writer and director Paul King, may not be so far from the Willy Wonka Dahl first conceived of when he wrote what would become Charlie and Chocolate in the summer of 1960. factory.
Five drafts of the original novel are known to exist, and four of them (the first is lost) are kept with the rest of Dahl's archive at the Roald Dahl Museum in Great Missenden, near the house in which Dahl and his first wife lived. , actress Patricia Neal, moved in 1954.
From the first surviving draft, it is clear that Dahl initially envisioned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory not as Charlie's story, but as Wonka's story. “From the very beginning, the inventor Wonka was at the forefront of Dahl’s mind,” says Steve Gardam, director of the Roald Dahl Museum. “In this first draft, you only get the skeleton of his character. But what immediately catches your eye is his genius and kindness.”
This first draft, which was never published, features a picture of Wonka on the very first page flaunting his silk hat and cane, accompanied by a list of his amazing achievements: chewing gum that never loses its appeal. taste; beautiful bluebird eggs that leave a tiny pink sweet chick sitting on the tip of your tongue. He is a family man, married, has a son. He is not secretive in the least: he opens the doors of the factory to everyone who wants to visit.
And he is a man of ostentatious generosity, giving a very rich man an Easter egg with a model village made of chocolate, where tiny marzipan people can be seen outside the windows. He then builds a life-size, 10-bedroom house for an even richer man, complete with hot chocolate flowing from the bathroom taps (a story that is repeated almost word for word in the palace Wonka builds for the Prince of Pondicherry in the published version), although he Warnings to eat it before it melts fall on deaf ears. When a man finds himself floating in a «huge brown sticky chocolate lake,» Wonka, we are told, goes to his inventing room and invents for him chocolate that won't melt. He later produces wood «whose leaves were made of mint crisp and green sugar» for a woman who, when hungry, would chop off a branch with an axe.
Dahl came of age during the great boom in chocolate technology. In the 1930s, Cadbury's sent prototype chocolate bars to Repton School in Derbyshire, where Dahl studied from 1930 to 1934, for testing before production. (Dahl apparently rated one of them as “too refined for ordinary taste.”)
As a boy and a self-confessed chocolate obsession, Dahl, Gardam argues, was confronted with evidence of the undeniably miraculous: bubbles placed in chocolate to produce Eros; the chocolate was folded to form flakes. “This led Dahl to suggest that there must be a room in the chocolate factory where someone would invent new and unusual forms of chocolate,” says Gardam. “In this first draft, you can see how he introduces the idea of an invention room in the very first paragraphs.”
Charlie and Roald Dahl's chocolate factory. Image (c) Quentin Blake, 2001
However, in a semi-tragic turn of events, Dahl soon became an inventor himself. In 1960, his four-month-old son Theo was hit by a taxi while he was in a stroller during the Daleys' trip to New York. He was thrown 40 feet into the air and suffered a fractured skull, resulting in hydrocephalus, which is when fluid accumulates in the brain. With the help of a neurosurgeon and, stunningly, a toy manufacturer, Dahl developed the Wade-Dahl-Till drain in 1962, which was so effective at draining fluid that the trio sold it on a non-profit basis around the world. “We made this great little valve,” Dahl said. “The most accurate. It had to be irreversible, open at a certain pressure, and not become clogged.”
It is difficult to separate the creation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was dedicated to Theo, from the tragedies that befell Dahl while writing it. The first surviving draft was preceded by a now-lost version written by Dahl shortly before Theo's birth, which told the story of a little boy who, while visiting a chocolate factory, falls into a vat of chocolate. He is turned into a chocolate figurine, sold to a store and eaten by a little girl. Apparently it failed to charm Dahl's young nephew, and Dahl apparently threw it away. (Dahl was an avid wastebasket user, often writing in pencil and then balling up the first page of each new story up to 150 times.)
He prepared the first draft, which was kept after Theo recovered from the accident. The named “Charlie’s chocolate boy” has the same beginning and the scheme as his lost predecessor, and Charlie intriguingly described as “a little Negro boy”, and in later drafts this detail was deleted at the request of agent Dahl. This time, Charlie, still encased in chocolate, is taken to Mr. Wonka's house as a gift for Wonka's son, Freddy, where he foils a robbery and Wonka gives him a chocolate shop in gratitude. However, shortly after he finished the story, Dahl and Neil's seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, died of measles. It took Dahl a long time to start the third.
Willy Wonka and Charlie performed by Gene Wilder and Peter Ostrum Photo: Alamy
Later versions show what we now know as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory slowly emerging into a glittering spotlight, like Wonka himself emerging from the depths of his factory after 10 years of isolation. A “golden ticket” scheme is introduced: first 10 children are taken through the factory, then seven, and then the five we have today. In the first surviving sketch, Dahl describes a factory inhabited not by Oompa Loompas, but by “7,384 men and women.”
Wonka, too, gradually transforms, losing his clear, benevolent charisma and becoming a more cunning, sinister, and morally ambiguous figure. In his 1994 biography of Roald Dahl, Jeremy Treglown argues that an early version of Willy Wonka appears in Dahl's 1943 children's story «Gremlins,» which was inspired by Dahl's experiences in the Royal Air Force and in which gremlins—mischievous creatures that are part of Royal Air Force folklore—unite their strength. with RAF pilots to defeat the Nazis.
“The leader of the Gremlins is a prototype of Mr. Willy Wonka … [ruling] a bizarre underground kingdom, alternately intimidating his subjects and placating them with sweet fruits called snozzberries,” writes Treglown. He also suggests that it is tempting to view Wonka as an avatar of Dahl himself, saying that Dahl personally often behaved like «an actor, a ringmaster, a sorcerer: Mr. Willy Wonka.»
Of course, none of this is even remotely about Paul King's Wonka. After all, having captured the public's imagination for more than 60 years and immortalized on screen by Gene Wilder in 1971, Wonka lives most alive in the eye of the beholder. “If you look now, you can easily see Mr. Wonka,” says the first paragraph of “Chocolate Boy Charlie.” If ever a sentence captured the seductive power of Dahl's most dynamic creation, this is certainly it.
The Roald Dahl Museum is open from Thursday to Sunday; roalddahlmuseum.org
Свежие комментарии