‘Sean Connery? He never stood anyone a round’: Roald Dahl’s love-hate relationship with Hollywood

Patricia Neal and her husband Roald Dahl attend the 1969 Oscars
Patricia Neal and her husband Roald Dahl attend the 1969 Oscars Credit: ABC Photo Archives

One of the things that annoyed Roald Dahl about Sean Connery was that he never got his round in. During the summer of 1966, Dahl was in Japan for the filming of You Only Live Twice, the new James Bond movie he had adapted – very loosely – from Ian Fleming’s novel. The shoot was based for a time around the city of Kagoshima in the country’s sweltering south, and at the end of the day the cast and crew would relax with a cold beer on set. Connery joined in with the drinking but, as Dahl quickly noticed, left the business of paying to other people.

“He was the only man making a million in the film and he never stood anyone a round,” Dahl later observed. “This was known. They all talked about it. He is not an attractive personality.”

When it came to unattractive personalities, Dahl was an expert. The then 50-year-old author had just published Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which four obnoxious children are variously squeezed, inflated, shrunk and attacked by squirrels during a visit to Willy Wonka’s confectionery plant. That book went on to be adapted into two successful films – and over the half-century since, Dahl’s work has remained catnip for film-makers, including Steven Spielberg, whose retelling of The BFG arrived in UK cinemas yesterday.

Mark Rylance as the BFG
Mark Rylance as the BFG Credit: Storyteller Distributuion Co

But the strange chain of events that yanked Dahl himself from his six-by-seven-foot “writing hut” in the garden of his house in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, to the set of the biggest film franchise on Earth – and back again, just as sharply – is a heartsore rags-to-riches tale to rival Charlie Bucket’s. It starts in Honolulu. In 1964, the writer’s first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, was filming Otto Preminger’s war epic In Harm’s Way in Hawaii, and Dahl and their children, Tessa, Theo and Ophelia, had flown out to join her. 

The family had become tight-knit through tragedy: the couple’s eldest daughter, Olivia, had died two years earlier from measles encephalitis at the age of seven, and Theo was still recovering from an accident in 1960 when his pram had been hit by a taxi in New York.

Also in town was the director Robert Altman, who approached Dahl at his hotel and told him how much he would like to write a film with him. Altman was then an unknown toiling in television – M.A.S.H. was still six years away – but he and Dahl hit it off immediately, and together they cooked up an idea for a comedy about First World War fighter pilots, titled Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling-a-ling? after a line from an old British airmen’s song. Experience had taught Dahl to be suspicious. In 1942, he had been summoned to Hollywood by Walt Disney to adapt a series of his short stories. The project had taken up a year of his life and then been abandoned (although Dahl, single at the time, had taken the opportunity to date a string of actresses and socialites, including Ginger Rogers).

Despite this professional failure, Dahl found he enjoyed writing the Oh Death script and, although the film was never made, the author was paid around $100,000 for his efforts. What’s more, the sharpness of his screenwriting had piqued the interest of the James Bond producers “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and they asked him to take on the latest 007 film, which was proving tricky to adapt. 

During the Second World War, Dahl and Fleming had both been members of a British spy ring based in New York – Dahl’s life story is littered with improbable details like this – but while the men were firm friends, Dahl was not a fan of his latest Bond adventure, and Broccoli and Saltzman seemed to agree. They gave him the freedom to adapt it however he liked, on three conditions: that Bond would still be identifiable as Bond, that Japan remained the setting, and that the film’s “three-girl rule” – that the spy must sleep with three women during his escapade – remained inviolate. His fee would be $165,500. Dahl agreed, wrote the first draft in eight weeks, and happily informed his US agent in a letter that it was “the biggest load of bull---- I’ve ever put my hand to”.

Though he was fed story ideas by Broccoli, the final film, with its giant magnets, spiral slides, rocket-firing cigarettes and hollowed-out volcano, is pure Dahl.

No expense was spared: Dahl’s redrafts were driven from Great Missenden to London in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. And when he joined the production out in Japan, he found himself travelling by helicopter more often than Bond himself.

“If the location was 10 miles away and hard to get to – like a Japanese fishing village – you would go there by helicopter and find that they had already dug a landing pad out of a cliff,” he said in 1980. “They were in on a gold mine and they knew it.”

There was damn little acting for him to do.
There was damn little acting for him to do.

Connery’s acting was one of the few things that didn’t leave him awestruck. “We went out of our way to give him quips that were incredibly clever, but they only had to be spoken with a straight poker face,” he said. “There was damn little acting for him to do. He walked through it, you know. Literally.” But he was delighted with the final result, largely because the director, Lewis Gilbert, left him to his own devices.

The same couldn’t be said for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the following year, another Broccoli production of a Fleming novel that required a comprehensive Dahlian rethink. Dahl’s plot is so different from Fleming’s that readers who discover the latter via the film are often disappointed: the fragrant Truly Scrumptious and the entire barony of Vulgaria were dreamt up by Dahl from scratch. And while the musical confectionery was Fleming’s idea, in the book they’re called Crackpot Whistling Sweets: it took Dahl’s brain to come up with the name Toot Sweets.

For director, Dahl fancied Lewis Gilbert, with whom he had got on so well on You Only Live Twice. Instead, Broccoli chose the considerably more hands-on Ken Hughes. Hughes wrestled the script away from Dahl as soon as he could and rewrote almost all of it: Dahl was paid $125,000 for his work, but was furious at how little of it ended up on screen. He fell out with Broccoli and was disinvited from the film’s charity premiere. “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was ghastly,” he told Twilight Zone magazine in 1983. “Once you get a rotten director, or an egocentric director, you’re dead. But they pay a lot, so you take the money and run.”

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

What love Dahl ever had for the film business was fading fast, but with his wife recuperating after a stroke, he needed to work. A few more scripts were hatched, then abandoned; among them Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, about the serial killer John Christie (which was later taken up by Clive Exton, and which gave a flesh-creepingly memorable role to Richard Attenborough.)

The last straw, and grandest payday, came when he was enlisted to turn Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a musical. Dahl was given $300,000 to rework his book into a script, but the project’s high profile brought unexpected complications. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People had taken exception to Dahl’s description of the Oompa-Loompas in the original book as “African pygmies”, and pressured Paramount to change their racial origins in the film. 

Dahl readily acquiesced, hence the famous green hair and orange faces of Willy Wonka’s helpers. The controversy also prompted him to change the book itself, giving the Oompa-Loompas golden-brown hair, white skin, and the mother country of Loompaland, rather than “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before”.

Willy Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas
Willy Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas Credit: REX FEATURES

Other changes, though, were harder to bear. The director Mel Stuart brought in the screenwriter David Seltzer to rework parts of Dahl’s story: the idea of Wonka’s rival Slugworth bribing the children to steal an everlasting gobstopper was his, and one that Dahl hated. Seltzer was also responsible for the lyrics of the film’s two biggest musical numbers, Pure Imagination and The Candy Man, the second of which Dahl loathed so furiously that he was still lobbying the studio to have it cut after the film’s UK release. His casting suggestions also fell on deaf ears: while he wanted Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers as Wonka, the studio cast Gene Wilder. Dahl was so enraged that he refused to sanction another adaptation of the book – or its 1972 sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – for the rest of his life.

Fortunately by this point, Dahl’s wife had begun to recover. Neal had returned to acting in 1968 in The Subject Was Roses, for which she was nominated for another Oscar, but her health and the resulting insurance costs had made her a liability. Dahl became determined to write her the comeback screenplay the industry wouldn’t give her, and bought the rights to Nest in a Falling Tree, a novel by Joy Cowley. Unfortunately, the subsequent film bombed in America.

Until his death in 1990, Dahl was continually approached to write more films, but he never did: after his return to writing children’s books in 1970, with Fantastic Mr Fox, it became apparent he could get by comfortably on work he actually enjoyed.

“It’s such a beastly job that no one would ever write film scripts except for money, or unless you wanted to defend your own property,” he said in 1983. “And even then you can’t, because they get hold of it and do what they like.”

 

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