Throughout this series, we've covered Doll's monumental literary successes. But here's the thing. For countless children around the world, their first taste of dolls stories came not from turning pages, but from watching screens. And all of these films and TV shows were created through the work of the screenwriters and directors who adapted Doll's stories. These adaptations create a
whole new dimension to a storytelling legacy. That's what we're diving into today for my hard podcasts, Imagine Entertainment and Parallax. I'm Marrion Tracy, and this is the secret world of Roll Doll. To start, let me take you back to the early in eighteen sixties. We're at a starry Hollywood party and a giant, opulent producer's house in the hills, one of those suffocating parties where everyone's on top of each other and thick cigarette smoke gives all the faces
a hazy sheen. Roll Doll lurks in the corner, glass in hand, rattling his ice cubes, keeping himself apart. He's studying his surroundings, taking mental notes, a habit he found useful both as a spy and a writer. He's watching his actress wife, Patricia Neil, float through the room, working her magic with a kind of effortless charm. It is, after all, the rap party for her latest film. She thinks it turned out well. You may have heard of it.
It's called Breakfast of Tiffany's. Doll is very much his wife's plus one tonight, which he always hates. He hasn't enjoyed a Hollywood party since the one Walt Disney through in his honor decades earlier. Doll can't stand actors, especially the ones always coming in and out of his house, being loud and emotional, disturbing his work, and he really can't stand the phony unsophisticated producers who continue not to see his brilliance. He's still several years away from getting
hired to write James Bond. But then scanning the room, he spots something that intrigues him. An incredibly beautiful brunette delicately perched on the back of the couch. Audrey Hepburn is in the middle of a story to her captivated circle of admirers, her giant eyes flashing despite himself, Dahl moves toward her, as if helplessly pulled in by a movie star's gravitational force. He listens transfixed as Hepburn recounts
a story from her youth. She was sixteen, she says, living in a small village in the Netherlands, which had been invaded by the Nazis. During the occupation, her uncle was shot and both of her brothers were forced underground. All Dutch civilians faced severe food shortages, regardless of whether or not they were Jewish. It became especially dire in late nineteen forty four, when Audrey and many others nearly starved to death. She weighed about eighty pounds and suffered
from severe anemia and edema. Then on April sixteenth, nineteen forty five, she continues, her town was finally liberated by Allied forces. The Nazi occupation was over. Audrey could finally venture into the streets, the first time in years. She had been alloted in public without fear of punishment or attack. The entire population was just erupting in celebration and embracing the Canadian and Dutch soldiers who pressed condensed milk and
chocolate bars into their desperate hands. One officer spotting this skeletal waif of a girl with the giant brown eyes handed Audrey all seven of the chocolate bars he was carrying. It had been a very long time since Audrey had eaten anything sweet. The taste of these chocolate bars was the polar opposite of the fear and pain she had been forced to live in throughout the war, and so having barely eaten in weeks, she devoured all seven bars in a row, just gobbled them all up, and then
she threw up. Despite that, Audrey tells her spellbatt listeners, all these years later, after everything she's been through, all the fame and success she's achieved, chocolate, more than anything else, represents freedom to her and opportunity. The very smell of it feels like an escape from darkness into the life. Doll is mesmerized, and like I said, he's taking notes.
It's not too long after hearing Audrey Hepburn tell this Dale that he begins work on his own story of a child for whom chocolate also represents the kind of freedom and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams. And ironically, even though it was one of Hollywood's greatest legends who may have partially inspired his chocolate factory, Doll absolutely despised what Hollywood did with that story and so many of the others. I reached out to an expert on the subject to
hear more. All Right, hopefully you've got a message that says you're being recorded.
Okay.
If you're a long time podcast junkie, you might recognize that voice just from that one word. I've been following his film and TV criticism for years, and his perspective has genuinely changed how I watch things. I'll let him introduce himself.
I'm David being Cooley. I'm the TV critic for Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. I'm also a professor of Television studies at Rowing univer and I'm a lifelong TV critic.
I asked David what he thought about the most famous and most beloved of the Doll adaptations.
Mel Stewart, who directed the original Willy Walko movie, gets it so right in terms of tone that my kids watching it growing up, they're in their forties now, they still quote from it. There are still so many lines that hit them very long in there from the book. They were also in the Johnny Depp movie directed by Tim Burton. They landed better in the original.
I think a movie the doll really didn't like and sort of disowned.
Oh see, I don't even know that.
Yeah, he wrote the screenplay, Yeah, but I.
Didn't know he disowned it.
What was his dissatisfaction, My guess is a big part of it was just the shift and focus. You know, he wrote Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, and the studio made Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and it's just that was not his intention. I think he had issues with Gene Wilder's performance, and he overall had a terrible taste in his mouth from Hollywood. The only experience you
ever liked in Hollywood. The two experiences were with Hitchcock and then writing the first James Bond film that he wrote. Let's pause for a second to dive a little deeper into the Chocolate River. Several movie stars have played Willy Wonka over the decades, including Timothy Shalomy, Johnny Depp, and even Neil Patrick Harris in a strange video parody you can find online now to mention all the stage actors who performed the role on Broadway and in various theater
productions around the world. But for me, and I think for most people. The defining portrayal of Doll's most memorable, most elusive character is by Gene Wilder in the nineteen seventy one film.
There's no earthy way of lowing, singing which direction we are going, There's no knowing where we're rolling or which way the river's flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a cane of blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing, So the danger must be grown. Are the fires of hell a glowing? Is the grizzly Reaper mowing? Yes, the danger must be growing, for the rowers.
Keep on rowing, and they're certainly not showing any signs that they are flowing.
Yeah, it's a nutty performance. As I mentioned to David, Roald Dahl hated it. Doll's friend and biographer Donald Sturrek says, quote, I think he felt Wonka was a very British eccentric. Gene Wilder was rather too soft and didn't have a sufficient edge. His voice is very light, and he's got that rather cherubic sweet face. I think Roll felt there was something wrong with Wonka's soul in the movie. It
just wasn't how he imagined the lines being spoken. According to Derek, to be fair at it, do all, Geen Wilder does take some crazy swings in that movie. If you've seen it, and since you're still listening to the show nine episodes in, I bet you have, you know what I'm talking about. Wilder's entire performance is just kind of nuts in a really glorious way. Terrifying one second, bursting into song for no reason, the next sadistic, cruel and incredibly creepy later on, and then ends as kind
of a teddy bear. It's just all over the place in a way that feels really interesting and unexpected. The director Mel Stewart says about Wilder, quote, he came up with the most wonderful moments in the film portraying Wonka's half man, half saint, and that's what makes the movie
so good. In fact, it's such a unique performance that there's been a persistent rumor for half a century that Geen Wilder improvised the whole thing when he arrived on set, And of course that's not true, but it does sort of feel that way, and the actor did have a lot of input. Here's Wilder from an interview he did with filmmaker Stuart Maybe in two thousand.
And nine, I wouldn't have done the film. And if they didn't let me come out walking as a cripple and then getting my cane stuck into a cobblestone and then doing a forward somersault and then bouncing up and they all applauded. And the director said, well, what do you want to do that for? And I said, because from that point on, no one will know whether I'm telling the truth or a lyne. And he said, you mean,
if I say no, you won't do the film. And I said, that's right, I won't and I meant it too, so they let me do it.
It's not a surprise that role. Dahl had a problem with this, As I already mentioned, he wasn't a fan of actors in general, and here's an example of an actor being given a lot of authority to alter a role that Dahl created. But I think Doll was always going to have a problem with whoever played Willie Wonka. In his book, Wonka is very underwritten purposefully. He's an enigma like his author, which offers the reader al mystery.
But when you put that same character on film and put a human face and voice behind him, either the mystery fades, or the actor comes up with such a strange interpretation that a whole new mystery is born. When Tim Burton made his version of Wonka in two thousand and five, he went back to the source material and gave his film the same title as Doll's book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But I'm not sure Dal would
have liked it any better. Johnny Depp also gives a banana's performance as Wonka, basing it on the hosts of children shows from.
His youth improvisation You Little Girl, Say Something.
Any schelling gum?
Chewing gum is really gross chewing gum.
I hate them most see exactly the same.
Depp's performance is a big swing, but it isn't nearly as interesting or live or compelling as Gene Wilder's take. Doll's other issue with the nineteen seventy one version is the big compromise that had to be made due to its really strange production story. It's actually pretty nuts. Apparently, it all began when the director, Mel Stewart's daughter ordered her father to make a movie out of this book that she loved so much. So Stewart took Dahl's novel
to his friend David Wolper. Wolper was a prolific producer with the rare ability to think and work outside the box. As an example, he was having conversations with the Quaker Oats Company, trying to convince them to make a movie that would introduce a new candy bar they were working on. Somehow, Wolper persuaded the food company, which of course had zero previous experience in the film industry, that Doll's book was
a once in a generation opportunity for them. Amazingly, he got Quaker Oats to buy the rights to Doll's book and to fund the entire budget of the movie Go Back and Rewatch the opening credits of the nineteen seventy one film. You'll be surprised when you notice for the first time that, in small type it clearly states the movie's copyright is held by Wolper Pictures Ltd. And the Quaker Oats Company. Bizarre. Now, if Quaker Oats had just funded the movie and stepped away, that might have been
fine with Doll, but that's not how Hollywood works. Everyone wants their say, especially those opening their wallets. In my conversation with David, just now, I suggested Doll didn't like the shift and focus to Wonka away from Chartley. The reason this change was made was because Quaker Oats needed Wonka's name front and center. Otherwise the film wouldn't help sell the line of Willy Wonka branded candy bars they were manufacturing, and it was this change that shifted the
entire focus of the film. It's pretty hard to blame Doll for being annoyed about this. It's one thing to receive an annoying note from a studio executive. We all get that, it's quite another to get a creative note from a company known for their oatmeal. Honestly, even though I loved the movie, learning this backstory has definitely put me in Doll's camp. Of course, he resents his hard fought story becoming a crass money grab for product placement.
One of the great ironies in all this that Doll probably really enjoyed is that although Quaker Oats did indeed develop a Wonka bar, apparently they couldn't get the recipe right. The chocolate kept melting before being opened, which is like the one thing you don't want your candy bar doing. The company eventually had to remove it from shelves, and to add insult to injury, the movie kind of bombed. It got some good reviews, but no one went to
see it in the theater. It wasn't until VCRs came around years later that the movie became the classic we now think of it as. Eventually, Nestley was able to buy the Willy Wonka candy factory and started making a new Wonka bar to write off the good will the movie has since accrued. Doll was never shy about telling people how much he hated the film. It wasn't just the title, or the focus or Gene Wilder's performance. He also hated the music, which he described as saccharine, sappy
and sentimental. Here he is on Desert Island Discs in nineteen seventy nine talking more about it.
It was made into rather crummy film. Yes, I wasn't pleased with it at all.
Did you have anything to do with it?
Well?
I originally wrote the screenplay, but I made the mistake of letting Holly would have a free hand, and I shall never do that again.
I want to bring in another voice now, a critic who's written extensively on the Doll adaptations, including a piece I loved on Wonka. He's someone whose childhood was really shaped by the author's.
Bet Court and I'm the author of Hello Stranger and The Mail Gazed. I grew up in Columbia, but I went to a British private school in Bowaka and so Oli. Our curriculum, especially for English, was very British focused, and so Dahl was my gateway drug to literature in general. So I was reading George's Martin's Medicine and James de Giant Peach eventually something like The Witches in Matilda before I was like twelve and I was reading in my
second language. It's one of those writers that I owe my own career as a writer and as a critic, because even then, there's no way to read Dahl without understanding how a sentence is structured, how language helps shape a character, how an adjective can suddenly turn a phrase. Hadn' dawned on me until I was starting to pull everything for that piece, how much of my childhood had been shaped by him in ways that I hadn't even remembered.
I asked ben Well to talk a little bit more about Roald Dahl's specific feelings about the gene Wilder film.
I think it is the one that everyone knows the best, and it's probably the one that he disliked the most, and so it exists at this weird intersection where like, if he had had his way, that is not the felt that we would have gotten. There's a reason why there was never another Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptation that happened in his lifetime, because that is how much he hated the Gene Wilder version, the way that it
focused on Wonka rather than Charlie. I think the reasons why he disliked it, or he voiced his dislike, is also one of the reasons that made it such a classic. There is a kind of honeying of his tone and
a kind of softening of even the Wonka character. I think once you'd cast Gene Wilder, who is cookie and quirky and kind of out there, but immediately draws you in and is able to sort of ground a kind of crazed energy into something that's intriguing and alluring rather than terrifying, which I think you can sometimes read into
the book. You have a very different story, a story that welcomes you, a story that the music is sort of enveloping you, that kind of wants you to embrace this bizarre world of chocolate factory that was creating the nineteen seventy one film and continues to speak to a
lot of people. I'm both happy that we have it, and then also keep wondering what kind of film would he have wanted for Charlie That maybe needed to be more biting, It maybe needed to be crueler, and needed to be a little bit more childlike and also.
Adult.
It's a fascinating curiosity that he so disowned it.
But of course Dahl didn't hate all of his Hollywood experiences or adaptations. He loved writing James Bond, and he loved working with Alfred Hitchcock on TV. Being Coolly is an expert on the Hitchcock anthology that adapted Doll, so I asked him to tell me a little bit more about that.
Six stories of his were done for the Hitchcock Show. Two of them are absolute classics, Man from the South and Lamb of the Slaughter, And so I think anybody who who knows Hitchcock has run into both of those as absolute classics, and I think that the treatment of
them was absolutely perfect. Interestingly, one of those, Man from the South was remade by Quentin Tarantino in a movie Four Rooms, where he wrote, directed, and starred in one of the four segments, and he took the story and renamed it The Man from Hollywood, took the same basic idea and ruined it. I mean, much as I love Quentin Tarantino, you do not improve Hitchcock or Roll Doll by just adding five thousand percent more profanities. It's just didn't work.
Yeah, any thoughts on why and Hitchcock were such a good match and maybe why he and Tarantino were a less good match.
Sure, I think if you think of the other great anthology series of the time, which was The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling when he went and had writers writing for him, Richard Matheson was a really good match for Rod Serling in much the same way. I mean, Hitchcock already thought like Roald Doll did in terms of wanted twist endings. Wanted a lot of macabre subtext but also humor and surprise, and they seemed to be almost the
same person in that regard. So whether Hitchcock was directing it or one of his trusted people like Norman Lloyd was directing it, it came out the same way. And also Hitchcock British and so there's that sort of affinity with understanding the understated approach to things that works with roal doll stories.
I asked David to describe two of the most famous doll stories that were used on Hitchcock Show, the ones David referred to as classics.
Man from the South stars Steve McQueen before he was star, Steve McQueen in Vegas with his last like dollar and a half, and a guy early early in the morning in Vegas comes up to him and offers him basically a bar bet and says, I've got the latest convertible. I'll give that to you if the lighter that you just let your cigarette with can light ten times in
succession without failing. And Steve McQueen's character says, well, I don't have anything to bet, and he said, well, I wouldn't ask you to beout anything that you couldn't afford to lose. I'm just how about just the little finger on your left hand, And so that's what the the whole show is. It just screams, don't try this at home. I can't imagine this being on TV today, But that was the idea.
He is a menace. Of course in the islands where we used to live. He took forty seven fingers from different people and he lost eleven cars.
That was one roll dull story. Another is a woman played by Barbara Belgetti's who later was the matriarch on Dallas. She plays a pregnant woman. Her husband's a cop. He comes home and tells her that he wants a divorce, but she can keep the baby because he's fallen in love with a younger woman and he just wants to leave. So she tells him he's had a bad day at work, he's upset, he's probably hungry. Let her make him some
dinner and then they can discuss it. And she pulls out a frozen leg of lamb from the freezer and instead of cooking it, she hits him over the head with it and kills him. Then she puts it in the oven and serves it that The cops who come looking for the murder weapon just you know, it's just classic.
Boy, this is great.
This piece of meat I've had in food.
She said it finish it, didn't she jack?
She did I'd like to have a piece of this brown crispy stuff left on the end.
Here.
I supposed to be all right to take this bone home with my dog.
Gosh, she said you didn't want to see it again.
I also asked David about Doll's other most famous filmmaking association after Hitchcock, and that, of course, is with Wes Anderson.
He found a kindred spirit again. It's sort of like when a director or a writer finds somebody else that speaks in a similar voice. It's just a marriage that works.
And so those four stories that Wes Anderson did for Netflix I thought were wonderful and very complicated where you wouldn't think you'd be able to lift them off the page successfully because it was a narrator talking about a story that then goes in it to another story, and then that story there's somebody in there telling another story, and then visually it's so amazing. I can't imagine Roald Dahl, the spirit of Roald Dall, not being happy with those adaptations.
Anderson does have such a unique style. Do you think that when he works on the Doll shorts and on the future, does it become more Andersonian? Does it become more Dollion. Is there a blending of the two.
Oh, it's a blend that that's the best way to put it. Because one of the things that Roald Dahl did for television that wasn't with Hitchcock was he hosted his own anthology show in England and he introduced it himself, acting like a sort of Alfred Hitchcock or a sort of Rod Serling, and he would sit in his little armchair the place where he actually did his writing and film introductions to his stories. Well, Wes Anderson took that and had ray Fin's play Roald Dahl introducing the story.
So he adopted one of Royal Doll's television shows as himself as the host to play with that and enter into a world which was less real than surreal. So it was definitely a blending of the two, but very respectful.
I want to talk a little bit more about the Wes Anderson connection. Doll's work has been adapted by so many people, but almost all of them, even the ones we most associate with Doll, like Tim Burton or Steven Spielberg or Mel Stewart, only directed a single film based
on a Doll story. Hitchcock and Wes Anderson stand out here because they worked on so many When Anderson and Noah Bombach, one of my all time favorite screenwriters, were writing the adaptation of The Fantastic Mister Fox, Anderson thought they should really immerse themselves, so he contacted Doll's widow, Felicity, about coming to Gypsy House, where Doll lived, and wrote, here's Wes Anderson and Felicity talking about that to the Associated Press.
And I thought it would be nice if Noah and I could visit, and if he could meet Lissi and see what it's like. And Lissi arranged at my request, I suppose that we could work here and we set up an office upstairs. So Lyssi set up an office for us upstairs with our own dedicated telephone line and a printer and a desk, and we worked here. And I think while we were here, it sort of went from being an adaptation of Fantastic Mister Fox to being
a combination adaptation of Fantastic Mister Fox slash. So I mean it became about Doll, the character became about Doll, and that the more time we spent here, the more ideas from Gypsy House found their way into the story.
Yes, I think that's just personally. I really admired the Wes Anderson adaptations. The man has his attractors, but it's really hard not to be charmed by these films. I just don't understand the venom that some critics reserve for Anderson. What it feels like ninety percent of movies these days are formulaic, ip driven sequels or comic books. Why would anyone who loves movies get mad about a filmmaker expressing a personal vision, even if that vision doesn't perfectly jibe
with yours. I think critics who say Wes Anderson's films are all the same and demean them as the cinematic equivalent of a corduroy suit are missing how much range he actually has. The four Doll stories he made for Netflix are a great example of this. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, for instance, is upbeat and vibrant and basically a morality tale with a super happy ending. It also has one of the all time great setups.
Gentlemen, I'm a man who can see without using his eyes.
He was a small man, about sixty, with a white mustache and a curious matting of.
Black hair growing all over the outsides of his ears.
You may bandage my head with fifty bandages in any way you wish, and I will still be able to read you a book.
You seem perfectly serious. Dad's Anderson's first Netflix adaptation of Doll his final one Poison, with basically the same cast, is the opposite movie downbeat, dark, muted, with a very unhappy ending, exposing the cruelty and bigotry of the main character. And when you think about it, this wide range of tone and plod and feeling is kind of perfect for
adapting the work of a problematic author like Doll. Role Dahl could be sweet and caring and loving and did a remarkable amount for charity and to make children's lives better all over the world. But according to some of those closest to him, he could also be mean spirited and sometimes cruel, And of course we know about his prejudice.
So what does Anderson do? He gives us both. What I like most about these adaptations is how Anderson remains so faithful to Doll's writing while seamlessly incorporating his own distinctive voice. Here's Anderson on a Zoom Roundtable for Netflix on how he went about the adaptation.
I took the text and the entire text, and I put it into my computer and started out an MS word document and started just pulling what I thought I wanted, And I realized that what I wanted was for him to tell the story. For Dahl to tell the story.
It was great, I wonder. My favorite of the Anderson Doll film is Henry Sugar. It stars Raife Finds as Roll Dall alongside benett At Cumberbatch, Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley. It tells the story of a wealthy gambler who learns to be able to see through playing cards, literally to look at the back of a card and see that it's the use of spades or whatever. He does this
by practicing intense meditation for years. Sugar uses his new power to win a fortune at casinos until he finds the thrill empty and unfulfilling, so he devotes his winnings to establishing orphanages and hospitals around the world. It's basically a story about the power of meditation and unrelenting hard work to make you a better, more generous person. The inclusion of Doll is a character in the film. Works especially well here because it feels like such a perfect
fulfillment of Doll's original intentions. In his book, Dahal deliberately plays with our perception of the story as constructed artifice. In other words, he breaks the fourth wall, reminding readers that he's an author spinning a tale. Near the end of Doll's story, the Doll figure cheicily steps out of the narrative to speculate about what might happen if this were a fictional story rather than a totally factual account of real life, even though readers understand it's clearly fiction.
By casting an actor to play Doll and read some of the actual prose from the book, Anderson mirrors this metafictional playfulness that began in Dalls novella. I want to briefly return to my conversation with Manuel Bettencourt and hear his thoughts on the Roll Doll Wes Anderson connection, including all the other interesting ways that Anderson finds to be faithful to Doll's text.
It had seemed a better suited pair than I thought they'd be, both because Wes Anderson is you know, we know him for this exacting zymometrical, colorful diorama films and what I think he does and he did so well with Henry Sugar and these other short films that he made for Netflix in twenty twenty three based on Doll short stories was reveal artistry and craftsmanship, and how he elevated Dall's prose. He's not using voiceover, he's having actually
these characters basically read out the story. So in a way, they're almost like audiobooks that are coming to life in this sort of I keep thinking of them as pop up books because they have a kind of like handcrafted sensibility to them.
Moving beyond Anderson, to me, the most interesting filmmaker who decided to tackle Doll is Quentin Tarantino. Well, hear what Manuel thinks about that collaboration. In a second. We already heard what David ban Cooley thinks about it.
I think Quentin Tarantino is the biggest miss.
Yeah, that seems to be the consensus, which is really surprising. Not only is Tarantino a first ballot Hall of Fame filmmaker, but he made his adaptation of Dolls The Man from the South right when he was at the peak of his powers. He made it directly after pulp fiction, and a first glance, Tarantino would seem to be as perfect a compliment to Doll as Hitchcock is. Both Tarantino and Dall write very stylized dialogue. Both love dark humor, both
revel and violent or grotesque story elements. Both make ample use of unexpected violence like what befalls the Key Kids and Doll's Chocolate Factory, or port Marvin in the Backseat and pulp fiction. Both writers poke fun at genreck conventions, and both really enjoy subverting audience expectations. But Tarantino's movie
just doesn't work. He's adapting the same story that Hitchcock shows, the one about someone whose finger will be chopped off if he can't get a cigarette lader to work ten times in a row, and you can see why that set up would appeal to a guy like Tarantino, who made such a meal out of cutting off an ear in his first film. I think Tarantino's movie doesn't quite hold together because he's not interested in the thing that makes Doll's story so great. Doll's version is lean focused
and builds tension through simplicity. Its power comes from the escalating stakes and the psychological cat and mouse game. Tarantino, maybe because he was so young and it was only his third movie, gets bogged down in his own indulgences. I really do love Tarantino. I think he may be the most talented director working today. But in this case, it feels like he turned Doll's story into a verbose, self referential, wanna be thriller lacking suspense.
So, since you're going to be stuck remembering this for the rest of your life, you have to decide what that memory will be so ted you can remember for the next forty years, give or take a decade, that you refused a one thousand dollars for one seconds worth of work, or that you made a thousand dollars for one seconds.
Worth of work. Also, Tarantino's choice to change the setting and make it about celebrities in Hollywood culture dilutes the universal human drama that makes Dolls original so effective. Essentially, Tarantino tried to make it a Tarantino film instead of serving the story, which, as we've talked about, rarely works with Doll. Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock succeed because they managed to put their egos aside and blend their distinctive
styles with dolls. Manuel made a similar point when I asked him if there's anything he thinks the good adaptations got right and the bad ones got wrong.
I think the best ones, or the ones that have stood the test of time. I understand how language was so key to his success. I think there's a world in which adaptations that try to update him, or modernize him, or stand down the like weird, quirky britishisms that are so delectable in his work tend to fail because I think that's where the magic lies, and the ones that do it best are the ones that key into that
kind of sensibility. I also think that especially when it comes to the children's books, any of those films that don't just understand his work, but also his collaboration with Quentin Blake and those kinds of illustrations and the kind of tenor and tone of those you know, I'm thinking of something like James the Giant Peach It visually, it's sort of so in the world of Dull and Blake
that I think it hits the right spot. But when you have filmmakers that are instead trying to use him just as a jumping off point and sometimes lose probably what made him so special on the page.
In our final episode, we'll talk more about exactly what made Doll so special on the page, including my conversation with an expert on the books who actually knew Doll in life and can speak firsthand about the kind of impression he made. We'll also talk about Doll's fascinating writing process, which I'm pretty obsessed with. I'm really sad this journey with Doll is almost over, but don't worry. We've saved
some of the best for last. Join me for our final episode, where I promise we'll try to go out with the kind of bang that Doll would have wanted. See you there. The Secret World of Role Dall is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax Studios for iHeart Podcasts. Created and written by Me Aaron Tracy, Produced by Matt Schrader, post production by wind Hill Studios, with editing, scoring and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips, editing by Ryan Seton,
music by a PM. Executive producers Nathan Kloke, Karl Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Tracy. If you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to rate and review The Secret World of Role Dall on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Copyright twenty twenty six Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax