Failure™ Magazine

Wonka Vision

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

What do you get when you take a popular children’s book, manufacture an adult-friendly screenplay, sprinkle in a handful of inspired songs, and wrap it up in a movie produced by a food conglomerate for the purpose of launching a new chocolate bar? Of course, you get Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the classic 1971 film that has become one of the most popular movies of all time. Despite its legacy, Willy Wonka wasn’t a hit from the get-go. Much like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz, it took television to turn the film into a popular and commercial success. In the new book “Pure Imagination” (St. Martin’s Press), director Mel Stuart tells the inside story of the making of Willy Wonka and provides his personal take on what’s right and wrong with his timeless good-versus-evil morality tale.

According to Stuart, his 12-year-old daughter Madeline was the person most responsible for Willy Wonka. “I would have never read ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ [by Roald Dahl], but Madeline liked it and asked me to make it into a picture,” he recalls. “Otherwise it would have never been made.”

While Madeline had no idea how difficult it was to get a feature film produced, Stuart—director of If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium and the documentaries The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Four Days in November—was acutely aware of the challenges. Stuart showed the book to producer David L. Wolper, who by chance, had a meeting scheduled with the Quaker Oats Company, which happened to be looking for a vehicle to introduce a new chocolate bar. “He never quite read the whole book,” remembers Stuart, “but he knew what the story was and he told them, ‘I’ve got the perfect thing. It’s a movie about a man who has a chocolate factory and makes Wonka bars. Give me the money to make this picture.‘”

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