Transcript of Adaptation New

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.

I was a monster.

Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. This podcast is all about going deeper with the women shaping culture right now. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work behind it all.

As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated, so you have to work extra hard in a way that doesn't compromise who you are and your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja.

Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real?

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Laurie Segal, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real-world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.

Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering.

Listen to Mostly Human starting March 26th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Throughout this series, we've covered Dahl's monumental literary successes. But here's the thing: for countless children around the world, their first taste of Dahl's 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 Dahl's stories. These adaptations create a whole new dimension to his storytelling legacy. That's what we're diving into today. For My Heart Podcasts, Imagine Entertainment, and Parallax, I'm Aaron Tracy, and this is The Secret World of Roald Dahl. To start, Let me take you back to the early 1960s. We're at a starry Hollywood party in 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. Roald Dahl 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 Neal, float through the room, working her magic with a kind of effortless charm. It is, after all, the wrap party for her latest film.

She thinks it turned out well. You may have heard of it. It's called Breakfast at Tiffany's. Dahl 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 threw in his honor decades earlier. Dahl 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 16, 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 1944 when Audrey and many others nearly starved to death. She weighed about 80 pounds and suffered from severe anemia and edema. Then on April 16th, 1945, 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'd been allowed 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 7 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'd been forced to live in throughout the war. And so, having barely eaten in weeks, she devoured all 7 bars in a row, just gobbled them all up. And then she threw up. Despite that, Audrey tells her Spellbound 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 light. Dahl is mesmerized, and like I said, he's taking notes. It's not too long after hearing Audrey Hepburn tell this tale that he begins work on his own story of a child for whom chocolate also represents a 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, Dahl 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 got a message that says you're being recorded.

Okay.

If you're a longtime 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 Bianculli. I'm the TV critic for Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. I'm also a professor of television studies at Rowan University, and I'm a lifelong TV critic.

I asked David what he thought about the most famous and most beloved of the Dahl adaptations.

Mel Stewart, who directed the original Willy Wonka movie, gets it so right in terms of tone. That my kids watching it growing up, they're in their 40s now, they still quote from it. There are still so many lines that hit them very long. And they're 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 that Dahl 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 in focus. You know, he wrote Charlie and 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 he 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 Timothée Chalamet, Johnny Depp, and even Neil Patrick Harris in a strange video parody you can find online. Not 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 Dahl's most memorable, most elusive character is by Gene Wilder in the 1971 film. There's no earthly way of knowing. He's singing. Which direction we are going.

There's no knowing where we're rowing. Or which way the river's flowing? Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing?

Not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing. Are the fires of hell a-glowing?

Is the grisly 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 slowing down! Yeah, it's a nutty performance. As I mentioned to David, Roald Dahl hated it. Dahl's friend and biographer Donald Sturrock 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 Roald 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 Sturek. To be fair to Dahl, Gene Wilder does take some crazy swings in that movie. If you've seen it—and since you're still listening to this show 9 episodes in, I bet you have—you know what I'm talking about. Wilder's entire performance It's 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 as 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 Gene 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 Mabee in 2009: I wouldn't have done the film 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 lying." 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 Roald 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 Dahl was always going to have a problem with whoever played Willy Wonka.

In his book, Wonka is very underwritten purposefully. He's an enigma like his author. Which offers the reader a delicious 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.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime.

He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.

He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.

I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.

I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth.

For 22 years, only 2 people knew the truth until a profession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years, well, I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women shaping culture right now. As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated, so you have to work extra hard and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are and your integrity.

You know, I like I was kind of like a silent ninja.

Each week I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being an It Girl isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it. I think the negatives need to be discussed and they need to be told to people who maybe don't do this every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey girl, what if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. "It's about engineering consciousness." Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Laurie Segal, a longtime tech journalist, and consider my new podcast, Mostly Human, your bridge to the future.

Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.

Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future, and we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you.

What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating these AI companions, they're actually dating the companies that create this.

We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history. And let's be honest, that can be messy. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment. Mostly Human will show you how. My goal is to give you the playbook so you can benefit.

The reason I say agency is because, like, if we can give power back to people, then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health.

Listen to Mostly Human starting March 26th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

When Tim Burton made his version of Wonka in 2005, he went back to the source material and gave his film the same title as Dahl's book. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But I'm not sure Dahl would have liked it any better. Johnny Depp also gives a bananas performance as Wonka, basing it on the hosts of children's shows from his youth. Improvisation. You, little girl, say something. Anything. Chewing gum. Chewing gum is really gross. Chewing gum I hate the most. See? Exactly the same. Depp's performance is a big swing, but it isn't nearly as interesting or alive or compelling as Gene Wilder's take. Dahl's other issue with the 1971 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 Wolpert persuaded the food company, which of course had zero previous experience in the film industry, that Dahl's book was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for them. Amazingly, he got Quaker Oats to buy the rights to Dahl's book and to fund the entire budget of the movie. Go back and rewatch the opening credits of the 1971 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 Dahl. 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 Dahl didn't like the shift in focus to Wonka away from Charlie. 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 Dahl 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 love the movie, learning this backstory has definitely put me in Dahl'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 Dahl 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, Nestlé was able to buy the Willy Wonka candy factory and started making a new Wonka bar to ride off the goodwill the movie has since accrued. Dahl 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 Disks in 1979 talking more about it. It was made into a 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 Hollywood 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 Dahl adaptations, including a piece I loved on Wonka. He's someone whose childhood was really shaped by the author.

My name is Manuel Bettencourt, and I'm the author of Hello Stranger and The Male Gazed. I grew up in Colombia, but I went to a British private school in Bogotá, and so all of 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 Marvelous Medicine and James and the Giant Peach, eventually something like The Witches and Matilda before I was like 12. 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. It hadn't 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 Manuel 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 exists at this, like, weird intersection where, like, if he had had his way, that is not the film 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 cast Gene Wilder, who is kooky 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 the chocolate factory that was created in the 1971 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, it needed to be a little bit more childlike and also sort of like an adult. It's a fascinating curiosity that he's 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. David B. N. Cooley is an expert on the Hitchcock anthology that adapted Dahl, so I asked him to tell me a little bit more about that.

6 stories of his were done for the Hitchcock Show. Two of them are absolute classics, Man from the South and Lamb to 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 Roald Dahl by just adding 5,000% more profanities. It just didn't work.

Yeah. Any thoughts on why? Dahl 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 Dahl did in terms of wanted twist endings, wanted a lot of macabre subtext, but also humor and surprise. And they seem 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 was British, and so there's that sort of affinity with understanding the understated approach to things that works with Roald Dahl stories.

I asked David to describe two of the most famous doll stories that were used on Hitchcock's 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 lit your cigarette with can light 10 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 bet 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 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.

The islands where we used to live, he took 47 fingers from different people. People, and he lost 11 cars.

That was one Roald Dahl story. Another is a woman played by Barbara Galgadis, 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 to the cops who come looking for the murder weapon. That's just, you know, it's just classic. Boy, this is great. Best piece of meat I've had in months. She said to 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. Suppose it'd be all right to take this bone home to my dog? Sure, she said she'd never want to see it again. I also asked David about Dahl'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 4 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 into 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 Dahl, not being happy with those adaptations.

Anderson does have such a unique style. Do you think that when he works on the Dahl shorts, and on the feature, does it become more Andersonian? Does it become more Dahl-ian? Is there a blending of the two? Oh, it's a blend.

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 Ralph Fiennes play Roald Dahl introducing the story. So he adopted one of Roald Dahl'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'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime.

He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.

He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.

I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.

I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth.

For 22 years, only 2 people knew the truth. Until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years. Well, I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women shaping culture right now.

As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated, so you have to work extra hard and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are and your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja.

Each week I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being an it girl isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it. I think the negatives need to be discussed, and they need to be told to people who maybe don't do this every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey girl, what if mind control is real?

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast cast of Disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all: NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

10-10, shots fired, City Hall building. A silver 40-caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: Murder at City Hall. How could this have happened at City Hall? Somebody tell me that! Jeffrey, who did it? July 2003. Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest. Both men are carrying concealed weapons. And in less than 30 minutes, Both of them will be dead. Everybody in the chambers ducks. A shocking public murder.

I scream, get down, get down, those are shots, those are shots, get down.

A charismatic politician. You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man. I still have a weapon and I could shoot you. And an outsider with a secret. He He was a victim of a slapdown that may or may not have been political. It may have been about sex. Listen to Rorschach: Murder at City Hall starting on March 25th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk a little bit more about the Wes Anderson connection. Dahl's work has been adapted by so many people, but almost all of them, even the ones we most associate with Dahl, like Tim Burton or Steven Spielberg or Mel Stewart, only directed a single film based on a Dahl story. Hitchcock and Wes Anderson stand out here because they worked on so many. When Anderson and Noah Baumbach, one of my all-time favorite screenwriters, were writing the adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson thought they should really immerse themselves. So he contacted Dahl's widow, Felicity, about coming to Gipsy House, where Dahl 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 here and if he could meet Lissy and see what it's like.

And Lissy arranged, at my request I suppose, that we could work here. And we set up an office upstairs, or Lissy 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 Mr. Fox to being a combination adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox slash— so, I mean, it became about Dahl. The character became about Dahl, and the more time we spent here, the more ideas from Gypsy House found their way into the story. Yes, I think that's true. Personally, I really admire the Wes Anderson adaptations. The man has his detractors, 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. When it feels like 90% 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 4 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 am a man who can see without using his eyes. He was a small man, about 60, with a white mustache and a curious smattering of black hair growing all over the outsides of his ears. "You may bandage my head with 50 bandages in any way you wish, and I will still be able to read you a book." "You seem perfectly serious." That'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 plot and feeling is kind of perfect for adapting the work of a problematic author like Dahl. Roald 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 Dahl'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, you know, on 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 if my favorite of the Anderson Doll films is Henry Sugar. It stars Ralph Fiennes as Roald Dahl alongside Benedict 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 ace 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 Dahl as a character in the film works especially well here because it feels like such a perfect fulfillment of Dahl's original intentions. In his book, Dahl 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 Dahl's story, the Dahl figure cheekily 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 Dahl and read some of the actual prose from the book, Anderson mirrors this metafictional playfulness that began in Dahl's novella. I want to briefly return to my conversation with Manuel Bettencourt and hear his thoughts on the Roald Dahl/Wes Anderson connection, including all the other interesting ways that Anderson finds to be faithful to Dahl's text.

It had seemed a better-suited pair than I, than I thought they'd be, both because Wes Anderson is, you know, we know him for these exacting, symmetrical, 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 2023 based on Dahl's short stories, reveal artistry and craftsmanship in how he elevated Dahl's prose. He's not using voiceover. He's having actually these characters basically read out the story. So in, in a way, they're almost like audiobooks that are coming to life in this sort of— I, I keep thinking of them as pop-up books 'cause they have that kind of like handcrafted sensibility to them.

Moving beyond Anderson, to me, the most interesting filmmaker who decided to tackle Dahl It's Quentin Tarantino. We'll hear what Manuel thinks about that collaboration in a second. We already heard what David Bianculli 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 Dahl's The Man from the South right when he was at the peak of his powers. He made it directly after Pulp Fiction. And at first glance, Tarantino would seem to be as perfect a complement to Dahl as Hitchcock is. Both Tarantino and Dahl write very stylized dialog. Both love dark humor. Both revel in violent or grotesque story elements. Both make ample use of unexpected violence, like what befalls the kids in Dahl's Chocolate Factory or poor Marvin in the backseat in Pulp Fiction. Both writers poke fun at genre conventions, and both really enjoy subverting audience expectations. But Tarantino's movie just doesn't work. He's adapting the same story that Hitchcock chose, the one about someone whose finger will be chopped off if he can't get a cigarette lighter to work 10 times in a row. And you can see why that setup 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 Dahl's story so great.

Dahl'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 Dahl's story into a verbose, self-referential wannabe 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, are you gonna remember for the next 40 years, give or take a decade, that you refused $1,000 for one second's worth of work, or that you made $1,000 for one second's worth of work?" Also, Tarantino's choice to change the setting and make it about celebrities and Hollywood culture dilutes the universal human drama that makes Dahl's 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 Dahl. Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock succeed because they managed to put their egos aside and blend their distinctive styles with Dahl's. 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 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 sand down the like weird quirky Britishisms that are so delectable in his work tend to fail. 'Cause 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 and the Giant Peach. It visually, it's sort of so in the world of Dahl 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 Dahl so special on the page, including my conversation with an expert on the books who actually knew Dahl in life and can speak firsthand about the kind of impression he made. We'll also talk about Dahl's fascinating writing process, which I'm pretty obsessed with. I'm really sad this journey with Dahl 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 Dahl would have wanted. See you there. The Secret World of Roald Dahl is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax Studios for iHeartPodcasts. Created and written by me, Aaron Tracy. Produced by Matt Schrader. Post-production by by Windhill Studios, with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips. Editing by Ryan Seaton. Music by APM. Executive producers: Nathan Cloake, Cara Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Tracy. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review The Secret World of Roald Dahl on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Copyright 2026, Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia, and Parallax.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. This podcast is all about going deeper with the women shaping culture right now. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure the expectations, and the real work behind it all.

As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated, so you have to work extra hard in a way that doesn't compromise who you are and your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja.

Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real?

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going I become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Laurie Segal, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world. I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real-world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.

Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.

Listen to Mostly Human starting March 26th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.