Here's what sometimes happens in Hollywood.

It's a cautionary tale that we've all heard in a million books and movies and pop songs.

A young, sometimes talented actor filmmaker goes out to LA to pursue their dream, gets seduced by the flash and glamour of the industry before they've done the hard work of mastering their craft.

And what does it always lead to?

They get chewed up and spit out.

There's a reason the cliche exists.

Roll Doll is twenty six.

He has one published story to his name, one he's never read a screenplay before, let alone written one.

But the most successful producer in Hollywood history, more than him in a sec has just flown Doll all the way from DC to Beverly Hills, where he throws a lavish welcome party in Doll's honor.

The guest list is like the front row at the Oscars.

Giant movie stars, beautiful actresses, all looking ridiculous because they're dressed up as tiny green creatures.

Why you ask, because those are the main characters in dull short story, The Gremlins.

Imagine the head trip for Dahl seeing all this, just strolling through the party, champagne in hand, looking at his boyhood heroes and his greatest fantasies in these ridiculous costumes based on creatures he thought up sitting in his underpants in his tiny walk up apartment in DC.

He doesn't know whether to laugh hysterically or cry at the absurd sight.

A powerful producer throws his beefy arm around Doll's shoulders.

The producer ushers Doll through the party and guides him over to a little man who's currently delighting a whole circle of giggling women by the bar.

The producer wants to introduce Dall.

The little man turns around, sees that the producer is giving him the eye, looks Doll up and down, then winks at him, followed by an exaggerated theatrical bow, as if welcoming the young writer into a secret society like everybody else.

The little man is dressed up as a green monster, but despite the costume, Doll recognizes him.

Of course he does.

He's the most beloved man in the country.

What the hell is happening?

When we talk in future episodes about Dolls, sometimes bomatic Ego try to remember that he's twenty six years old with zero produced credits to his name.

When a starry Hollywood party is thrown in his honor and Charlie Chaplin bows at his feet, what chance did the poor guy have?

As we discussed in previous episodes, Dahl packed a lot into his twenties and thirties.

He was starting to figure out where his passions lie.

He suspected they were somewhere in the dark, twisty short stories he was writing, which leads to the next completely crazy and intoxicating chapter that he wills into the story of his life.

Welcome to Hollywood for my hard podcast, Imagine entertainment and Parallax.

I'm married, Tracer, and this is the secret world of Roald Dahl.

Episode three.

Imagine for a second that you're a young, ambitious short story writer being praised for the originality of your voice and your clever to steddings.

And imagine that you've just spent years as a spy learning how to seduce and manipulate and lie your way into the highest echelons of power.

If you were such a person, where would you go when the war ends?

Of course, you would pack up and take your talents to the movies.

The dream is intoxicating, especially back in that era.

Oh y, look, Hollywood's out there.

Like countless writers before him, Doll is blinded by the promise of celebrity, money and mingling with the tan and beautiful, and honestly, after years in spycraft, where he lived in a world of smoke and mirrors, transitioning to another world of illusions does make some sense.

Succeeding in Hollywood and succeeding in espionage require many of the same skills, like manipulation and seduction for starters.

Plus, after all, the daily adrenaline he's become used to from flying aerial missions then spying on the rich and powerful.

I think it would have been too difficult for Dol to transition directly to the sedentary life of a novelist, which is what he really wanted to be.

Screenwriting is different, beast.

It's an adrenaline roller coaster.

I've been doing it since right out of school.

There are crazy high highs and awful lo those and every day is different.

So Doll tries on yet another mask as he attempts to figure out who he is now.

He'll see if this one fits better than businessman, fighter, power or spy.

This one is Hollywood power Player.

The short story directly responsible for bringing Dall to La is the one about the Gremlins, those menacing little green creatures destroying RAF planes, The one Eleanor Roosevelt likes so much she invited Doll to the White House.

The hero of Doll's story, Gus, is an RAF pilot who's playing crashes because of a Gremlin.

He learns that the little creatures are avenging the destruction of forests where they live to make way for British airfields.

Gus heroically convinces the gremlins to redirect their energy into helping the war effort instead of sabotaging it.

The Gremlins become allies of the Brits, using their expertise to repair planes and even make them faster.

Dall thought of the story as just a silly fairy tale about quote little creatures with horns and long tails who walk about on the wings of your aircraft urinating in your fuse box, So all this hoopla around the story is kind of hard for him to believe.

At the time Dahl writes the story, all the big Hollywood movie studios are on the lookout for patriotic films.

Unlike the First World War, when the industry was still in its infancy and there was more ambiguity about the conflict, this war offers the opportunity for big, noisy, nationalistic movies to feed an existentially terrified audience.

This war is tailor made for the movies.

It's an easy to digest good versus evil storyline, those who love freedom versus fascists trying to conquer the world.

Here's Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

All working as a spy for the Regulars when he writes The Gremlins, his employment requires him to run any story he wants to publish by the British government first, so they can pass judgment and be sure no national secrets are being spilled.

The government reader assigned to Doll's story happens to be a very well connected businessman with a passion for film, Sidney Bernstein.

Bernstein is a devout anti fascist desperately trying to help Jewish actors and filmmakers get the hell out of Germany right now.

He's also a producing partner of Alfred Hitchcock.

When Bernstein reads The Gremlins ahead of its publication, he instantly sees the potential.

It's a little diamond of a story instead of just straight propaganda, which can be heavy handed and boring.

Doll story is full of clever, inventive details, but is still an inspiring tale of US and British cooperation to defeat fascism.

Bernstein has just come off a consulting gig on Missus Miniver, William Wiler's Best Picture winner, about how an unassuming British housewife is affected by the war of the.

People, of all the people, and it must be fought in the home and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom.

Missus Miniver is also the highest Christman film of nineteen forty two.

With its huge success, Bernstein can kind of write his own ticket and get any material he wants into the hands of practically anybody he wants.

He could have decided to give Doll's story in Hitchcock and potentially saved all decades of pushing a boulder up a hill.

Instead, he goes in a different direction, he decides the perfect fit for Doll's Gremlins.

Is a charismatic producer in his early forties who happens to be on a hot streak.

His name is Walt Dissey.

Animal anatomy is a thing that is not taught properly in the art school.

So I started the special course in animal anatomy.

Yeah, that's Walt Disney with weirdly specific insight into the kind of small details that differentiate his technique.

Disney is only a handful of years removed from his giant, industry changing success with snow White.

In just the past couple of years, he's made Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi.

I'm gonna make you stop and think about that for a second.

When people debate the best run by an American filmmaker ever, some argue for Hitchcock's six year period of nine absolute bangers ending with Psycho, or Billy Wilder's decade long run of eight classics starting with Cells at Boulevard and ending with the Apartment.

Personally, I advocate for Rob Reiner in the late eighties, who had a string of five perfect movies and six years with When Harry met Sally's Smack in the middle.

Disney produces rather than directs, but he's the creative force behind his films, so you've got to put his miraculous period just before meeting Dol up there with anyone.

Like seemingly everyone who meets young Doll, Disney takes right to him.

He loves the Gremlin story, which somehow blends fantasy and horror with patriotism and heroics without feeling it all manipulative.

Disney see's serious promise in the Young Writer, just like Ces Forster had, so he takes Doll under his wing to show him how movies are made, which is pretty nuts.

Doll is twenty six.

He's trying to make a career out of writing, and specifically, at this moment, screenwriting.

When a typical young writer goes to Hollywood and gets really lucky, maybe a junior development exac at a mid sized production company lets him be an intern, offering pointers while making him carry his golf clubs at Hillcrest.

But if you've learned anything about Roll Dall by this point in our season, it's that normal rules just don't apply.

Dall's introduction to Hollywood is getting mentored by the most creative and arguably the most successful producer the town has ever known.

Right at the moment of his peak creativity, Disney puts the Gremlin story right into development, and rather than hire a professional screenwriter to come adapt it an adult, he decides he wants to keep Doll's unique voice.

Here's Doll talking about it on Desert Island discs.

That went out to Hollywood at his expense with raf permission on the stain of the car provided by Walt.

This silly young man in the RIF uniform staying in the suite in the bevel Hill's Hotel.

It's the same swanky hotel that's about to be a favorite of Mariel Monroe, Howard Hughes, and Frank Sinatra.

And it's Disney who throws Doll that welcome party where everyone dresses as a gremlin.

From the top of this episode.

According to writer Matthew Denison, a Disney illustrator who meets Doll at the time, all the girls in Hollywood went crazy for Doll, and he basically starts dating all of them and flirting with alist actresses like Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich.

Heard here in Angel in Paris.

Well, we must see that you have a very amusing time, So down, please have you been in Paris before?

Those are Doll's evenings.

During the days, he and Disney spend long hours in story conference, working with illustrators and directors.

Disney is crazy about Doll, though he has a lot of trouble pronouncing his first name, so instead, in very Disney fashion, he calls this tall protege Stocky.

As Walt and Stocky continue to break story for the Gremlins, Disney does what he's learned to do best, active the publicity machine.

He puts the little Green creatures into advertisements and even creates a comic strip around them.

Disney is basically willing the film into the public consciousness well before the screenplay is finished, where Craft Services has laid out a single cracker.

At first glance, Dall and Disney seem to be total opposites.

Dall's work, even at the beginning, is dark and subversive, often satirical.

Disney's is bright and idealistic.

Doll's stories have a creepy edge and explore greed and cruelty and the grotesque, leaving the reader with moral ambiguity.

Disney makes movies with clear moral lessons and usually happy endings, aiming to inspire joy.

It's the difference between the dark, all skater kid in high school who listens to a lot of Billie Eilish and Old Cure albums and the upbeat, preppy cheerleader who loves Ariana Grande.

As for their take on childhood, which is a key subject for both men, Dall sees it as an existential battle against cruel adults.

For Disney, it's idyllic, filled with wonder and innocence, sir, and the two men do share a bunch of things in common.

For starters, both create trippy, fantastical worlds, and both champion the underdog, big time Doll's Matilda, Charlie and James overcome huge challenges.

So do Disney Cinderella, snow White and Dumbo.

All of them rise above adversity, screaming at the world that I better not overlook them.

Like Disney's Pinocchio, I'm am real, I'm a real boy here life, you are a real boy.

The biggest difference between dal and Disney, and what's going to lead to their undoing, is they're very different approaches to work.

Dall is a writer's writer in the mode of great novelists.

He likes to work alone, doing battle with the page, fulfilling his very personal vision.

Disney is the ultimate collaborator.

He works with teams of writers, directors, animators, and musicians to bring ideas to life in a communal environment.

So it's not a surprise that dal and Disney begin butting heads.

Dall is just not capable of letting go of his vision at this point in his life.

He doesn't understand or doesn't care, that filmmaking is collaborative.

The screenplay is just a blueprint for a structure that will be built by lots and lots of people.

For his entire career, Dall will have a hard time with anyone who dares to edit or change his vision.

His ego just always gets in the way, and right now, because of his success with the Gremlin short story, he is quote more arrogant than ever, according to his buddy Antoinette Marsh, So of course he believes there's no need to change anything he doesn't want to, even if Walt Disney, the King himself, is the one asking.

Eventually, inevitably, Disney decides the collaboration or black thereof just isn't working, and there are about a million other stories he could be working on.

So, after all the time, money, and advanced publicity he's poured into this thing, Disney pulls the plug.

Doll is furious at first, then maybe a little embarrassed.

He quickly he tries to find another producer.

But the war has wound down.

Audience's tastes of bevan to change.

Troops are coming home completely traumatized.

Two world changing nuclear bombs have been set off Audiences they don't want a story like The Gremlins anymore, a story that highlights cooperation and camaraderie.

People start demanding more challenging, more morally ambiguous movies like film noir.

Dahl is incredibly disappointed, but self aware enough to realize he's just gotten a crash course in Hollywood's inner workings from one of its all time master craftsmen.

He's determined not to let that go to waste.

He decides to keep at it.

Dahl's decision to keep fighting that uphill battle of a Hollywood career could have been game over.

There are so many stories of gifted writers coming out to La and falling on their faces.

William Faulkner comes to mind, Aldois Huxley, Truman, Capodi.

Maybe the most interesting and most tragic is f Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald had every reason to think he'd be a success in the movies.

He was maybe the most gifted novelist in an era that included a hell of a lot of gifted novelists, and he loved film.

He didn't just come to Hollywood for the paycheck like so many others.

Part of what makes Fitzgerald's attempts at screenwriting so sad is that he seemed to put as much effort into it as he put into Tender as the Night or The Great Gatsby.

One of the reasons we only have four and a half novels by Fitzgerald, each a masterpiece is because he spent some of his prime years trying to break into movies.

He blamed his failure on the studio system, which is always totally demeaned writers.

Here's Robertson Eiro as a studio head and Jack Nicholson as a union organizer from Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.

I'll tell you three things.

All riders are children.

Fifty percent of drunks, and up till very recently, writers in Hollywood were gag men.

Most of them still are a gagman, but we call them writers.

Uh huh.

But there's still the farmers in this business.

They grow the grain, but they're not in at the feast.

Fitzgerald's pal, Billy Wilder, compares him to a great sculptor who's hired to do a plumbing job.

Fitzgerald simply didn't know how to connect the pipes so the water could flow.

In his entire Hollywood career, Fitzgerald only got a single screenwriting credit, and even on that one, he was totally rewritten by the producer Lake Dahl with his gremlins.

Many of Fitzgerald's projects were scrapped or he got fired off them.

By the time Hollywood kicked him out, Fitzgerald was broke alone, his body ravaged by alcohol, and years of his talent completely wasted.

That's the potential future that awaits Doll.

Whenever there's a forking path and the universe splits in two directions, the path Doll goes down as always, always the more interesting one.

I want to jump forward to several years after the Disney debacle, Dall is still trying without success to get a movie made.

His agent brings him an offer from United Artists to write a screenplay called wait for It, Oh Death, Where is thy Sting?

A Lingling?

The reason Doll is interested in it, aside from the hefty check, is that it's based on a story by a very talented, very eccentric, young director, Robert Alman.

Here's Alman on The Dick Cavit Show from nineteen seventy one on starting new projects.

No matter how easy it seems, is always impossible, and there's a thousand things to get in the way, and then you go into making the picture, and then finishing the thing, and then going through this business of getting it opening and seeing properly, and luckily the cycle.

About the time you really get bored and tired with one thing, the next one comes up and you get a kind of a whole new shot of enthusiasm.

Alman will bring that enthusiasm to some of the defining films of the nineteen seventies that he directs, like Mash mckayban, Missus Miller, and Nashville.

The idea for single Lingling centers on a raid by World War One fighter pilots on the German Swiss border.

Doll, of course, has first hand experience as a pilot in a world war, and he sees promising Alman seems like a fet he takes the gig.

United Artists loves the script all rights, but they do not want Altman to direct it.

Almond's too stubborn to avant garde for the studio system, which he freely admits here on the Charlie Rose Show.

I think that had I had to always make successful films, I would have failed.

But Almond is so angry at getting booted that he tries to get the entire project scrapped, which really angers Dahl, who's desperately trying to get his first movie made.

Dall hires a famous pit bull of a Hollywood agent, Swifty Lazaar, to fight for him, and eventually all Men gives him.

A new director is brought on, and filming in the movie actually begins with Gregory Peck, the legendary Starve to Kill a Mockingbird and Roman Holiday in the lead.

Dahl seems to have finally done it after several failed attempts.

He's finally going to have one of his screenplays produced.

The Curse of f Scott Fitzgerald be damned.

But then during the shoot, the head of United Artists watches the footage and doesn't like what he's seeing.

He pulls the plug in the middle of production, just shuts the whole thing down.

According to Doll, two million dollars had already been spent, Just like with the Gremlins, Doll's left with yet another abandoned project and more of his heart fought writing that will never see the light of day.

It's devastating for Doll.

He was so close he could taste it.

Cameras were rolling, a movie star was saying his words, and then nothing.

He's ready to give up, to abandon this insane business that just keeps delivering heartbreak.

But after some sleepless nights with that awful three am wake up where you feel trapped wondering if you're wasting your life on something that will never ever happen, Doll does an amazing thing.

He walks it off.

He puts the rejection behind him, chalking it up to an industry that is very much not a meritocracy, and decides to keep trying.

Producers and agents, after all, keep telling him how talented he is and cs Forrester asked him if he knew he was a writer, he'll crack the code eventually, he has to, too many people are telling him he will.

Dall becomes the living embodiment of my favorite quote about the industry from our greatest film critic Paulin and Kale.

Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement.

So he soldiers on.

He doesn't know it yet, but his script for that abandoned film will eventually do more for his career and for his finances than any other script he'll ever write.

We'll come back to that.

Over the next few years, Doll has a number of other projects fall apart.

Revered director Howard Hawks wants to work with him, but it comes to nothing.

Dall supposedly wins an incredible assignment to adapt the classic dystopian novel A Brave New World, but again it doesn't work out.

He also apparently tries his hand at adapting Moby Dick No Dice.

Then, in the late fifties, Dall finally hooks up with the person who feels like the platonic ideal of a collaborator for him, very much as long lost spiritual brother and sometimes that's all it takes.

Hitchcock started making movies in America in nineteen forty.

Fifteen years later, near the beginning of that wild six year run of Classics, he somehow finds the time to host, produce, and occasionally direct an anthology TV series on CBS.

The show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents is made up of thrillers, mysteries, and creepy stories of all kinds.

Here's the man himself.

Do you Believe in?

Ghost of I Knew?

The show is hugely successful and becoming a major influence on series like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror.

Now.

While most of Hitch's films are written by great playwrights like Thornton Wilder or novelists like John Steinbeck, or established Hollywood heavy rats like Ben Hecht, John Michael Hayes and Ernest Lehman, hitch needs way more writers and way more material for a weekly show.

Skimming through Collier's Magazine one week on the lookout for new blood, hitch comes upon a story called The Smoker, by a writer with a very unique name, dlor Is, about a man who gambles with strangers the stakes of the bet they're pinky fingers.

If they lose, they have the chop theirs off and hands it over Dolls sadistic hero a mass is a disgusting collection.

Hitch reads the story in one sitting and is completely tickled.

It's just his blend of dark and funny and sadistic.

Hitch buys the rights to the story immediately and asks what other tales mister Doll has.

Now?

You have to remember that TV in the late fifties and early sixties is not what it is now.

Prestige TV was an oxymoron.

The year Alfred Hitchcock presents First Heirs.

The top rated series are all inane variety in talk shows.

Number one in the nation The sixty four thousand Dollars Question before the massive scandal that revealed it was totally rigged.

Others in the top ten the Ed Sullivan show, You Bet Your Life and I've Got a Secret.

Hitchcock looks at the TV landscape and sees an opportunity for sophisticated scripted drama.

He adapts Dolls stories into episodes for three different seasons of his show, Watching Them Now.

It's obvious the filmmaker and writer are a perfect match.

Both delve into dark, unsettling themes.

Both love twist endings that throw their audience for a loop.

They both create morally corrupt protagonists.

Today we call them anti heroes.

Decades before, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad did the same thing, and people called it the Great American art form.

Hitch is the collaborator Doll has been waiting for.

He made no sense with Disney.

Hitch is his destiny.

It says a lot about Doll's range by the way that he could write movies for both of those men.

He's the only person on history to do it.

One of Doll's stories option by Hitch is called Lamb to the Slaughter, which centers on a wife who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves the murder weapon his dinner to the investigators searching for the killer.

The story shares a lot in common with hitches, dial and for Murder, and even more blatantly rope, where chilling murders are committed by killers arrogant enough to keep the evidence right beneath the nose of the lead investigator.

We've always said you and I that moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong don't hold for the intellectually superior.

Remember Rupert, Yes, I remember.

Hitch and Dahl also shared an interest in the psychological depths of their very flawed heroes.

Jimmy Stewart in Hitch's Vertigo, is obsessed with transforming a new woman in his life into his deack girlfriend.

In Doll's The Way Up to Heaven, he creates a hero who's just as manipulative a Stuart's character, taking pleasure and tormenting the woman in his life.

Dall has such a good experience with Hitch's show that he's inspired to create his own anthology series near the end of his life called Tales of the Unexpected.

Dahl takes a page r Hitch and introduces the stories on screen himself, though in his case he sits in a cozy armchair by a crackling fire, with his writing board on his lap and a pencil in his hand.

The image screams kindly, grandfather and I, which, of course is smartly undermined by the utter creepiness of his plots.

Here's a typical clip from dolls opening.

If a bucket of paint falls on a man's head, that's funny.

If the bucket fractures his skull at the same time and kills him.

That's not funny, it's tragic.

And yet if a man falls into a sausage machine and is sold in the shops at so much a pound, that's funny.

It is also tragic.

The show becomes a rare Hollywood success for Doll, one that took him decades to achieve.

Doll's show runs almost as long as Hitchcock's Dead, nine full seasons, and Doll becomes famous as his host.

The years before he conceives of that show, Doll's still chasing his dreams of getting a movie made.

You've got to admire his persistence and his hutzpah.

Dolls on the lookout for a project with even greater auspices than Disney or All Men or Peck, something even less likely to fall apart.

What's most amazing is he actually finds it in an assignment that he feels downright destined for.

Now.

Whenever I pitch a TV show or future I spend at least a minute at the very limited time you're given trying to explain why I'm the guy to write this particular project.

Writers joke about this.

It's kind of a silly thing.

Buyers want to know that if they're giving you all this money to write a script, it's got to be something you are the perfect fit for.

What goes unsaid, of course, is that you're a working writer who needs to pitch a new idea at least a couple times a year, and they can't all be perfect fits for his next project, though Dall didn't need to do much convincing.

In nineteen sixty six, Albert Broccoley and Harry Saltzman, producers and owners of the James Bond franchise, approached All with an offer.

They want him to write the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice.

The producers had read and loved Doll's script for O Death Where Is Thy Stingling a Ling Sorry, and they had heard about Doll's life as a British spy, possibly from Bond creator himself, Ian Fleming.

Fleming passed away in his mid fifties from a heart attack, two years before Dahl joined the franchise he created.

Dahl and Fleming, you may remember, were buddies in DC in their twenties, both writers, both working in espionage, both uncommonly handsome and charming, though Dall never felt comfortable around Fleming.

Fleming was always too cool, too cosmopolitan, two above it all.

Dall always felt like his raggedy younger brother.

But now Fleming is gone and Dall has seemingly been tapped to succeed him.

While Dall is privately thrilled about the opportunity to rate Bond, he's a little embarrassed at how far away it is from his ambition to write great novels.

As writer Matthew Denison points out, while in public, Dall maintains a snobby detachment toward Bond, like in a letter to a friend where he refers to the movie as quote my silly James Bond film, or when he tells his book publisher that he finds the whole enterprise exceptionally distasteful.

This is a theme that will recur throughout Dahl's professional life.

He becomes successful in something, but it's not the right thing, like later killing it in children's literature, and he'd rather be writing for adults.

But Doll's drawn to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and there is no glitzier franchise than James Bott.

It clearly feeds his ego to have a rolls Royce and to his writing studio to ferry new drafts of his script to London.

And remember, Doll is still desperate to finally actually get a movie made now with any script, even with the greatest auspices attached or based on a popular piece of intellectual property, there is no such thing as a sure thing.

A friend and I were once assigned to write the TV adaptation of the board game Risk, a beloved game with international name recognition but no human characters.

We still came up with a pretty good idea, but the project fell apart.

There are no guarantees in this business.

But for Dall being presented with the fourth sequel to a cultural touchstone and money printing franchise starring the same A list actor in what appeared to be his final time as the title character, that is as close to a sure thing as Hollywood ever has to offer.

And even though Dall despises being rewritten himself, he doesn't seem to have any qualms about totally rewriting his old pal Ian Fleming.

Honestly, it feels as if Dahl didn't even bother to read the book he's adapted on the film's release, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther says it is notable that only Bond, the title and the location of an Ian Fleming book have been used by mister Dahl in writing his screenplay, which is maybe for the best.

Fleming's novel is kind of dreadful, which Doll takes his license to create his own, completely Banana's story.

In the film, we follow Bond as he fakes his own death and goes under cover to Japan, who investigate the disappearance of American and Soviet spaceships which are threatening to ignite World War three.

Along the way, Bond trains with Ninja's infiltrates a secret layer that's housed inside a working volcano seriously and encounters one of Bond's greatest villains, Blofeld, who makes his first full appearance.

And you only live twice.

Here's Blowfeld himself, complete with his blue eyed Persian life.

You will see that my piranha fish get very hungry.

Zay can't strip a man to the bow, I mean thirty seconds.

And if that all sounds incredibly silly, it is ten times sillier when you watch actors try to pull it off with a straight face.

There are lines in the movie like bad News from Matter Space and Welcome to My Ninja Training School, which I transcribed I kid you not from the same scene.

But that's the contract the audience signs with the Bond movie when they buy a ticket.

Right.

The zaniness isn't a defect, it's built in.

Dol knows that and he delivers.

You can just tell how much fun Doll is having while writing.

He revels in the playfulness of Bond, even more than the screenwriter of the earlier four films.

Of course, there are some problematic elements in the film too, which is partly due to it being nineteen sixty seven, partly due to it being James Bond, and at least partly because it's from the mind of Roll Doll.

For instance, Bond's opening line in the film, why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?

Or the long section when Bond disguises himself as a Japanese fisherman yellow face and all.

Though it should also be mentioned how many Asian characters and therefore Asian actors have major roles in the film, which is very unusual for a major Hollywood movie.

At the time, and as for the typical Bond womanizing, there's a lot, which of course is baked into the franchise, though Doll has to take some of the blame for not even bothering to give Bond's love interest and name much less a personality.

Watching the movie now knowing its screenwriter was very much a real life James Bond, makes the espionage plot a lot of fun.

Dall was clearly drawing on his own experiences.

Much of the film is set in a foreign country for the hero, where he has to immerse himself in the culture in order to stop a world war, and he seduces influential women as he goes, just like Dahl had to navigate the elite social circles of DC in New York to extract information, build alliances, and do a hell of a lot of seducing during his World war.

The producers took a big gamble bringing Doll into the franchise.

The first four Bond films had all been hugely successful.

Doctor No introduced the series from Russia with Love outperformed it at the box office, which is super rare.

Goldfinger came next and became a cultural phenomenon.

Then Thunderball, the fourth in the series, which is still the biggest box office hit of any Bond ever adjusted for inflation, so expectations are sky high for the next one.

What's more, each of the first four are co written by Richard Maybom.

Maybom is the one who established the formula of Bond, and when franchises are working, you do not change writers mid stream.

Just look at the Harry Potter films, where seven of the eight movies were adapted by a single writer, Steve Cloves.

But while Maybom will stay with the franchise until his death, you got to wonder if the producers are growing tired of him or not sure he's up to the challenge of the fifth film, which is especially difficult because of how terrible the source material is and because there's now tons of competition from Bond knockoffs.

The real test for Doll and all of this is whether or not he's learned to collapse.

His inability to do so destroyed his film with Disney and contributed to his failures with Altman.

But by this point Dahl has learned his lesson and become a great generous collaborator.

Just kidding, collaboration is antithetical to Doll's nature, so he takes another path when the producers of Bond bring in a second screenwriter, Harold Jack Bloom.

Bloom is a veteran TV writer who comes in and basically rewrites all of the action scenes in the movie.

Dahl is furious about this.

He tries to completely rewrite Bloom until all Bloom's action scenes are gone, and through sheer force of will, Bloom's credit drops from the prestigious screenplay by to the sort of embarrassing additional story material by.

It'll be the first time on any Bond movie that a writer has received solo written by credit, and in the end, whether or not, Bloom deserves more credit than he got, the film does feel very dollian like, with a villain Earns Blofeld who becomes iconic in Doll's hands and calls to mind Doll villains like Miss trench Bowl and mat Hilda and the Grand High Witch and the Witches.

The whole vibe of the movie reminds you of Doll's children's books, with a playful tone mixed with existential cruelty and danger.

Dahl calls Bond the best experience of his Hollywood career.

After many failed or aborted attempts, Dahl has finally achieved his goal.

He's the writer of a major Hollywood hit.

Here he is again on Desert Island Discs, discussing the experience.

That was fun.

That's the only only one I've had any real fun doing.

And it was Connray Sean Connery's last one.

Yeah, he did.

And we went to Japan.

And you you live in such luxury when you do a book and you're going helicopters everywhere, tops of mountains and everything.

It's en almost fun.

The film does not receive raves, but Bond movies aren't made for critics, and some reviewers do actually love it.

Bosley Crowther, again in The New York Times, writes, this way out adventure picture should be the joy and delight of the youngsters and give pleasure to the reasonable adults who can find release in the majestically absurd, which kind of doubles is a pretty good summation for all of Doll's children's books.

Actually.

Pauline Kale enjoys the film too, comparing it favorably to Stanley Kubrick.

Kale writes, there was a little pre title sequence and You Only Live Twice with an astronaut out in space, a daring little moment that I think was more fun than all of Kubrick's two thousand and one.

It had an element of the unexpected, of the shock of finding death in space lyrical.

Even more important than critical reception for Doll is the film's box office, which is huge to this day.

Twenty seven movies in You Only Live Twice is the fourth highest grossing Bond film ever adjusted for inflation, and in no small part because of that.

It's a turning point in Doll's career.

After Bond, he never has to worry about money again.

But of course it's a bit of a double edged sword.

He's gotten the film made, but it's not the serious literature he still aspires to.

Dolls massively conflicted and doesn't quite know where to turn next.

Producers have an idea.

As soon as Bond is completed, they bring Doll on to write another Ian Fleming adaptation.

But rather than another Bond, which plays into Doll's real life experiences, this new project takes advantage of Doll's recent success with children's stories.

The film is Chitty Chitty Bang, Bang starring Dick Van Deng.

What an Unusual Cop That's a curious name for amoto car.

The movie centers on an eccentric inventor who transforms a broken down car into something that can fly.

And while people still adore the film today, Dall found it a terrible experience.

It permanently soured him on filmmaking.

He had a very difficult relationship with the film's director, Ken Hughes, who dared rewrite Doll's script, which again veered far from Fleming's novel.

Doll is still struggling with what kind of writer he wants to be.

He'll soon find that Hollywood actually kind of gives him a roadmap.

Doll's experiences in La directly lead to the success he'll find writing for children.

You could call it a necessary step in his evolution.

His work with Disney two Light Chitty Chitty two, Saccharine Hitchcock Perfectly Dark help him find the sweet spot that will define his children's books, dark themes, packaged and accessible, entertaining ways.

It also helps him realize where his strengths and interest really lie.

For one thing, in creating original worlds rather than adapting other people's work, and it teaches him the importance of creative control and autonomy.

During all of Dall's adventures in the screen trade, he becomes notorious for dating beautiful actresses.

Doll is thirty six when he's invited to a dinner party one night at Lillian Hellman's house.

Hellman is one of the most respected playwrights and screenwriters in the country.

Also invited to the party is twenty six year old Patricia Neil, a confident, beautiful, redheaded movie star currently cast in one of Hellman's plays.

Here she is years later in her most famous film, Breakfast Aatifanies.

I am a very stylish girls.

What are you doing writing a check?

Don't look so bewildered.

Surely you've noticed me writing checks before.

Dahl will marry Neil.

I'll have five children together.

Their experiences during the marriage, writing bestsellers, winning oscars, and enduring some of the most devastating traumas and tragedies imaginable, will make all of Doll's exploits so far look like child's play.

Doll's life with Neil is eventful, emotional, and shocking enough to fill several books and movies, which it does, But this is not your typical love story.

As Neil reveals in her memoir written thirty five years later, even on the day of their marriage, she knew she didn't love him.

The reason for this She's in love with someone else, and this other man, this rival for Doll, happens to be the most famous man in the world.

The Secret World of Role Dahl is produced by Imagine Audio and Parallax Studios for iHeart Podcasts.

Created and written by me Aaron Tracy, produced by Matt Schrader, post production by wind Hill Studios, with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips.

Editing by Ryan Seton, music by APM Executive producers Nathan Cloke, Karl Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Tracy.

Additional voice performances and recreation by Mark Henry Phillips and Eleven Laps.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review The Secret World of Roll Doll on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Copyright twenty twenty six Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax