Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Original theatrical poster
Directed by	Mel Stuart
Produced by	David L. Wolper Stan Margulies
Written by	Roald Dahl (novel) David Seltzer (uncredited)
Starring	Gene Wilder Jack Albertson Peter Ostrum Julie Dawn Cole
Music by	Anthony Newley (lyrics and score) Leslie Bricusse (lyrics and score)
Cinematography	Arthur Ibbetson
Editing by	David Saxon
Studio	Wolper Productions
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures (original) Warner Bros. (current)
Release date(s)	June 30, 1971
Running time	96 minutes
Country	United States Germany
Language	English
Budget	$2.9 million
Gross revenue	$4 million

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 film adaptation of the 1964 Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It stars Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and was directed by Mel Stuart. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

Plot

Charlie Bucket is a poor boy living with his mother and four grandparents in a tiny house. Charlie supplements the meager family income by delivering newspapers after school. The family, along with the rest of the world, learns that the candy maker Willy Wonka has hidden five Golden Tickets amongst his Wonka Bars. The finders of these special tickets will be given a full tour of his tightly-guarded candy factory, as well as a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie wants to take part in the search, but cannot afford to buy vast quantities of chocolate like most other participants. Soon, four of the tickets are found by: Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous German boy; Veruca Salt, a spoiled English girl; Violet Beauregarde, a gum-chomping American girl; and Mike Teevee, a television-obsessed American boy. As they find their tickets, a sinister-looking man is observed whispering something in their ears, to which they listen attentively despite their preoccupations with their particular obsessions. Charlie's hopes were dashed when news broke out that the final ticket had been found by a Paraguayan millionaire.

The next day, as the Golden Ticket craze dies down, Charlie finds a silver coin in a gutter and uses it to buy a Wonka Bar. Simultaneously, word spreads that the ticket found by the millionaire was forged. When Charlie opens the bar, he finds the true final ticket inside, and races home to tell his family, but is stopped along the way by the same man who had been seen whispering to the other four winners. The man introduces himself as Arthur Slugworth, a rival confectioner who offers to pay Charlie for a sample of Wonka's latest creation, the Everlasting Gobstopper.

An excited Grandpa Joe manages to get out of bed in order to serve as Charlie's tour chaperone. The next day, Wonka greets the children and their guardians at the factory gates and leads them inside, requiring each to sign a contract before the tour can begin. Inside is a psychedelic wonderland full of chocolate rivers, giant edible mushrooms, lickable wallpaper and other ingenious inventions and candies, as well as Wonka's workers, the small, orange-skinned, green-haired Oompa-Loompas. As the tour progresses, each of the first four children misbehave against Wonka's warnings, resulting in serious consequences. Augustus is sucked through a chocolate extraction pipe system and sent to the Fudge Room after trying to drink from a chocolate river. Violet transforms into a giant blueberry after trying an experimental piece of Three-Course-Dinner Gum. Veruca and her father are rejected as "bad eggs" and sent plummeting down a garbage chute in the Chocolate Golden Egg Sorting Room. Mike is shrunken to only a few inches in height after being transmitted by "Wonkavision," a broadcasting technology that can send objects through television instead of pictures. The Oompa-Loompas sing a song after each mishap, describing that particular child's poor behavior.

Charlie also succumbs to temptation along with Grandpa Joe, as they stay behind in the Bubble Room and sample Fizzy Lifting Drinks. They begin floating skyward and are nearly sucked into a ceiling-mounted exhaust fan. To avoid this grisly fate, they burp repeatedly until they return to the ground. Wonka initially seems unaware of this incident.

When Charlie becomes the last remaining child on the tour, Wonka politely dismisses him and Grandpa Joe and disappears into his office, without awarding Charlie his lifetime supply of chocolate. Grandpa Joe and Charlie enter Wonka's office to investigate. There, Wonka tells them that Charlie does not get the prize anymore because he broke the rules. Puzzled, Grandpa Joe denies seeing any rules.

Wonka irritably explains the forfeiture clause of the contract Charlie and the other four ticket winners signed at the start of the tour-Charlie's part in the theft of the Fizzy Lifting Drinks means that he violated the contract, and therefore he receives nothing. Wonka furiously dismisses them both.

A livid Grandpa Joe vows to give Slugworth the gobstopper in revenge. However, Charlie cannot betray Wonka and leaves it on his desk.

Wonka recants his penalty and begs for his guests' forgiveness. He reveals that Slugworth is actually an employee named Wilkinson, whose offer to buy the gobstopper was a morality test for the Golden Ticket winners, and Charlie was the only one who passed.

The trio enter the "Wonkavator", a multi-directional glass elevator, and fly out of the factory in it. As they soar over the village, Wonka tells Charlie that his actual prize is the factory itself, as the Golden Ticket search was created to help Wonka search for an honest and worthy child to be the heir to his chocolate empire. Charlie and his family will reside in the factory and take over its operation when Wonka retires.

Cast

Production

Pre-production

The idea for adapting the book into a film came about when director Mel Stuart's 10-year-old daughter read the book and asked her father to make a movie out of it, with "Uncle Dave" (producer David L. Wolper) producing it. Stuart showed the book to Wolper, who happened to be in the midst of talks with the Quaker Oats Company regarding a vehicle to introduce a new candy bar from their Chicago-based Breaker Confections subsidiary (since renamed The Willy Wonka Candy Company and sold to Nestlé). Wolper convinced the company, who had no previous experience in the film industry, to buy the rights to the book and finance the picture for the purpose of promoting a new Quaker Oats Wonka Bar.^[1]

It was agreed that the film would be a children's musical, and that Dahl himself would write the screenplay.^[1] However, the title was changed to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in order to promote the aforementioned candy tie-in.

Screenwriter David Seltzer conceived a gimmick exclusively for the film that had Wonka quoting numerous literary sources, such as Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Seltzer also worked Slugworth (only mentioned as a rival candy maker in the book) into the plot as an actual character.^[1]

Dahl, who had rights to the film production, unsuccessfully pushed for Spike Milligan to play Willy Wonka. His next choice, Ron Moody, rejected the part. Jon Pertwee also turned down the role due to ongoing commitments to Doctor Who. Also initially considered was Broadway star Joel Grey, who ultimately was rejected due to his small physical stature. Auditions were held for a week in New York City's Plaza Hotel, where Gene Wilder was immediately awarded the role. Wilder said that he would only do the movie if Wonka first appeared onscreen coming out of the factory hobbling with a cane, only to then lose it and do a somersault. Further auditions were held in New York, London and Munich to fill the parts of the other children and their parents.

Dahl was ultimately unhappy with the production, feeling "disappointed"^[2] about many elements. These included the non-casting of Milligan as well as the emphasis on Wonka and not Charlie.^[3] He was said to be "infuriated" at the plot changes made by David Seltzer, which included the conversion of Slugworth into a spy and the "belching" scene.^[4] This displeasure led to Dahl ultimately not allowing the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to be made.^[5]

Filming

Filming commenced on August 31, 1970 and ended on November 19, 1970. The primary shooting location was Munich, Bavaria, West Germany, because it was significantly cheaper than filming in the U.S., and the setting was conducive to Wonka's factory. Stuart also liked the ambiguity and unfamiliarity of the location. External shots of the factory were filmed at the Munich Gaswerks (Emmy-Noether-Straße 2); the flats and clocktower still exist.^[6] The closing sequence when the Wonkavator is flying above the factory is footage of Nördlingen in Bavaria.

Production designer Harper Goff centered the factory around the massive Chocolate Room. The two-foot deep chocolate river and waterfall were created by adding chocolate ice cream mix to 150,000 gallons of water, which eventually created a foul odor that permeated the entire soundstage.

Reception

Willy Wonka was released on June 30, 1971, and earned a positive response from moviegoers, but box office figures were less than desirable due to lack of promotion. As a result, it was the fifty-third highest grossing film of the year in the U.S., earning approximately $4 million (on a $2.9 million budget, therefore making the movie profitable), equivalent to about $17.4 million in 2009.^[7] Even though the film received positive reviews from critics such as Roger Ebert^[8] and Wilder would later earn a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, Dahl was displeased with the final product and refused to sell the rights to the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Seeing no significant financial advantage, Paramount Pictures decided against renewing its distribution deal for the film when it expired seven years later. Quaker Oats sold its share of the rights to Warner Bros., who had acquired Wolper Productions, for $500,000 in 1977. WB's ownership of this film helped them get the rights to remake it under the book's original title in 2005.

By the mid-1980s, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory had experienced a spike in popularity thanks in large part to repeated television broadcasts and home video sales. Following a 25th-anniversary theatrical rerelease in 1996, it debuted on DVD the next year, allowing it to reach a new generation of viewers. The film was released as a remastered special edition on DVD and VHS in 2001 in order to commemorate the film's 30th anniversary. It is now considered a cult classic, with Gene Wilder's performance being hailed as one of his greatest roles.

Roald Dahl, author of the novel, has disowned the film, the script of which was completed and rewritten by David Seltzer after Dahl failed to meet deadlines, and produced as the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Dahl said he was "disappointed" because "he thought it placed too much emphasis on Willy Wonka and not enough on Charlie".^[9] He was also "infuriated" by the deviations in the plot devised by David Seltzer in his draft of the screenplay. This resulted in his refusal for any more versions of the book to be made in his lifetime.^[10]

Willy Wonka was ranked #74 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments for the "scary tunnel" scene and, in fact, the whole movie.^[11]

Home video

The film was first released on home video in 1997 as the "25th anniversary edition"^[12] as a double sided DVD containing a widescreen and "standard" version. The "standard" version is an open matte print, where the mattes used to make the image widescreen are removed, revealing information originally intended to be hidden from viewers.^[13] VHS copies were also available, but only containing the "standard" version.

A special edition DVD was released in 2001, celebrating the film's 30th anniversary, although only full-screen, on August 28, 2001. Due to the lack of a letterboxed release, fan petitioning eventually led Warner Home Video to issue a widescreen version on November 13, 2001. It was also released on VHS, with only one of the special features (a making of feature). Several original cast members reunited to film documentary footage for this special edition DVD release. The two editions featured restored sound, and better picture quality. In addition to the documentary, the DVD included a trailer, a gallery, and audio commentary by the cast.

In 2006, Warner Bros. released the film on HD DVD with all the bonus features from the 2001 DVD.^[14]

The movie was made available on Blu-ray Disc on October 20, 2009.^[15] It includes all the bonus features from the 2001 DVD and 2006 HD-DVD as well as a 38-page book.

Music

The Academy Award-nominated original score and songs were composed by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and musical direction was by Walter Scharf. The soundtrack was first released on Paramount Records in 1971. On October 8, 1996, Hip-O Records released the soundtrack on CD as a "25th Anniversary Edition".

The music and songs in the order that they appear in the film are:

1. "Main Title" - Instrumental medley of "(I've Got A) Golden Ticket" and "Pure Imagination"
2. "The Candy Man Can" - Aubrey Woods
3. "Cheer Up, Charlie" - Diana Sowle
4. "(I've Got a) Golden Ticket" - Jack Albertson and Peter Ostrum
5. "Pure Imagination" - Gene Wilder
6. "Oompa Loompa, Doompa-Dee-Do" - The Oompa Loompas
7. "The Wondrous Boat Ride"/"The Rowing Song" - Gene Wilder
8. "I Want It Now!" - Julie Dawn Cole
9. "Ach, so fromm" (alternately entitled "M'appari", from Martha) - Gene Wilder

Soundtrack

CD cover

Originally released on LP on June 30, 1971, an audio CD of the soundtrack was released on October 8, 1996. The tracklisting is as follows:

1. Golden Ticket/Pure Imagination (Instrumental) (Main Title Theme)
2. Candy Man - Aubrey Woods
3. Charlie's Paper Run - Instrumental
4. Cheer Up Charlie - Diana Sowle
5. Lucky Charlie - Instrumental
6. (I've Got A) Golden Ticket - Jack Albertson and Peter Ostrum
7. Pure Imagination - Gene Wilder
8. Oompa Loompa - Oompa Loompa cast
9. Wondrous Boat Ride - Gene Wilder
10. Everlasting Gobstoppers/Oompa Loompa - Oompa Loompa cast
11. Bubble Machine - Instrumental
12. I Want It Now/Oompa Loompa - Julie Dawn Cole/ Oompa Loompa cast
13. Wonkamobile, Wonkavision/Oompa Loompa - Oompa Loompa cast
14. Wonkavator/End Title (Pure Imagination) - Instrumental

See also

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka

References

Further reading

• Anders, Lou. Golden Tickets to Hell: Willy Wonka – Tour Guide of the Abyss, 2005. http://louanders.blogspot.com/2005/04/golden-tickets-to-hellwilly-wonka-tour.html
• Stuart, Mel, with Josh Young, Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, St. Martin's Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-28777-1, ISBN 0-312-35240-9

Notes

External links

• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory at the Internet Movie Database
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory at Allmovie
• Veruca Salt's memorabilia from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film"