| Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory | |
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Original theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Mel Stuart |
| Produced by | David L. Wolper Stan Margulies |
| Screenplay by | Roald Dahl David Seltzer (uncredited) |
| Based on | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl |
| Starring | Gene Wilder Jack Albertson Peter Ostrum |
| Music by | Anthony Newley Leslie Bricusse |
| Cinematography | Arthur Ibbetson |
| Editing by | David Saxon |
| Studio | Wolper Productions |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures Warner Bros. (Current) |
| Release date(s) | June 30, 1971 |
| Running time | 100 minutes |
| Country | United States United Kingdom Germany |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2.9 million |
| Box office | $4 million |
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 musical[1] film adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, directed by Mel Stuart, and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. The film tells the story of Charlie Bucket as he receives a golden ticket and visits Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with four other children from around the world. Filming took place in Munich in 1970, and the film was released on June 30, 1971. It received positive reviews, but it was a box office failure despite the fact that it was able to recoup its budget. However, it developed into a cult film due to its repeated television airings and home video sales. In 1972, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.
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Charlie Bucket is a poor boy living with his widowed mother and four bed-ridden grandparents in a dilapidated house in a West German town. Charlie supplements the meagre family income by delivering newspapers after school.
One day, the family, along with the rest of the world, learns on television that the local 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 other participants. 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 in their ears, to whom they listen attentively despite their preoccupations with their particular obsessions. Charlie's hopes are dashed when news breaks 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 and that one ticket is still about somewhere. When Charlie opens the bar, he finds the real golden ticket, 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 a large sum of money for a sample of Wonka's latest creation, the Everlasting Gobstopper.
Grandpa Joe manages to get out of bed 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 despite Wonka's warnings, resulting in serious consequences. Augustus is sucked through a chocolate extraction pipe system and sent to the Fudge Room, having fallen into a chocolate river from which he was trying to drink. Violet transforms into a giant blueberry after trying an experimental piece of Three-Course-Dinner Gum. Veruca is rejected as a "bad egg" 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 the office, where Wonka tells them that Charlie does not get the prize because he broke the rules. Puzzled, Grandpa Joe denies seeing any rules. Wonka irritably reveals the forfeiture clause of the contract Charlie signed. Charlie's part in the theft of the Fizzy Lifting Drinks means that he violated the contract, and therefore he receives nothing and Wonka furiously dismisses them. Grandpa Joe vows to give Slugworth the gobstopper in revenge, but Charlie can't bring himself to hurt Wonka and places the gobstopper on his desk.
Wonka recants 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 city, Wonka tells Charlie that his actual prize is not just the chocolate but the factory itself, as the Golden Ticket search was created to help Wonka search for an honest and worthy child to be his heir. Charlie and his family will reside in the factory and take over its operation when Wonka retires.
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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.[2]
It was agreed that the film would be a children's musical, and that Dahl himself would write the screenplay.[2] 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.[2]
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.
Filming commenced on April 30, 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 10); the entrance and side buildings still exist. The closing sequence when the Wonkavator is flying above the factory is footage of Nördlingen in Bavaria.
Production designer Harper Goff centered the factory on the massive Chocolate Room. The 2-foot-deep (0.6 m) chocolate river and waterfall were created by adding chocolate cream mix to 150,000 US gallons (570,000 L) of water, which eventually turned rancid and created a foul odor that permeated the entire soundstage.
When interviewed for the 30th anniversary special edition, Gene Wilder stated that he enjoyed working with most of the child actors, but said that he and the crew had some problems with Paris Themmen (who played Mike Teevee), mentioning that he was "a handful" back in the day.[3]
Willy Wonka was released on June 30, 1971, and was the fifty-third highest grossing film of the year in the U.S., earning approximately $4 million (on a $2.9 million budget), equivalent to about $21.3 million in 2010.[4] The film received positive reviews from critics such as Roger Ebert[5] and Wilder would later earn a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. 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. (whose parent company, Warner Communications, had acquired David L. Wolper's production company), for $500,000 in 1977. WB's ownership of the film helped them get the rights to film a new version of the book in 2005. The film currently holds a 88% 'Fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[6]
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 re-release in 1996, it was released 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 to commemorate the film's 30th anniversary. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked it 25th in the "Top 50 Cult Movies" of all time.[7]
Willy Wonka was ranked #74 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments for the "scary tunnel" scene and, in fact, the whole movie.[8]
American Film Institute Lists
Roald Dahl disowned the film, the script of which was completely rewritten by David Seltzer after Dahl failed to meet deadlines. Dahl said he was "disappointed" because "he thought it placed too much emphasis on Willy Wonka and not enough on Charlie," as well as the non-casting of Milligan.[14] He was also "infuriated" by the deviations in the plot Seltzer devised in his draft of the screenplay, including the conversion of Slugworth into a spy and the "belching" scene.[14] This resulted in his refusal to allow an adaptation of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to be made.[14]
The film was first released on DVD in 1997 as the "25th anniversary edition"[15] as a double sided disc 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.[16] 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.[17] The film was released on Blu-ray on October 20, 2009.[18] It includes all the bonus features from the 2001 DVD and 2006 HD-DVD as well as a 38-page book.
A "40th anniversary edition" Blu-ray Box Set was released on November 1, 2011.[19]
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 by Paramount Records in 1971. On October 8, 1996, Hip-O Records (in conjunction with MCA Records, which by then owned the Paramount catalog), released the soundtrack on CD as a "25th Anniversary Edition".
The music and songs in the order that they appear in the film are:
The track listing for the soundtrack is as follows:
| 1. Main Title (Golden Ticket/Pure Imagination) |
| 2. The Candy Man |
| 3. Charlie's Paper Run |
| 4. Cheer Up Charlie |
| 5. Lucky Charlie |
| 6. (I've Got A) Golden Ticket |
| 7. Pure Imagination |
| 8. Oompa Loompa |
| 9. The Wondrous Boat Ride |
| 10. Everlasting Gobstoppers/Oompa Loompa |
| 11. The Bubble Machine |
| 12. I Want It Now/Oompa Loompa |
| 13. Wonkamobile,Wonkavision/Oompa Loompa |
| 14. Wonkavator/End Title (Pure Imagination) |
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