Adaptation

This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.

“Late one night, Bobby Gumpride 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

- Tomorrow night, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards are happening live in South by Southwest. - This is the biggest night in podcast. - We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. - And the winner is...

- Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be unfolded display. - Thank you so much, I heart rate you all. Thank you to all the other nominees, you guys are awesome. Watch live tomorrow at ap and eastern five p.m. pacific free at feeps.com or the feeps app. - I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt,

the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? - Out of this space of fist. - The moment you look at the whole picture of the case, collage.

“- What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

- Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - What if mine control is real? - If you can control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you?

- 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 neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to mind games on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Throughout this series, we've covered dolls monumental literary successes.

“But here's the thing, for countless children around the world,”

their first taste of doll 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 doll stories. These adaptations create a whole new dimension to a storytelling legacy. That's what we're diving into today.

- For my Heart Podcasts, imagine entertainment and parallax. I'm Aaron Tracin, and this is the secret world of "Roll doll." To start, let me take you back to the early 1960s. We're at a starry Hollywood party in a giant opulent producers 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 hezy sheen. "Roll doll 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 actor's wife, Patricia Niel, folk through the room,

working her magic with a kind of effortless charm. It is, after all, the rap party for her latest film. She thinks it turned out well. You may have heard of it. It's called Breakfast Attivities.

Doll is very much his wife's plus one today, which he always hates.

He hasn't enjoyed a Hollywood party since the one Walt Disney threw in his honor decades earlier. Doll can't stand actors, especially the one's 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, doll 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 starve to death. She waited about 80 pounds and suffered from severe anemia and a demon.

Then, on April 16, 1945, she continues, her town was finally liberated by allied forces.

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 chalkabars into their desperate hands. One officer, spotting this skeletal wave of a girl with a giant brown eyes, handed Audrey all seven of the chalkabars he was carrying. It had been a very long time since Audrey had eaten anything sweet. The taste of these chalkabars 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 seven bars in a row, just gobbled them all up, and then she threw up.

Despite that, Audrey tells her spellbatten listeners, all these years later,

after everything she's been through, all the fame and success she's achieved, chalklet, more than anything else, represents freedom to her and opportunity. The very smell of it feels like an escape from darkness into the light. Doll is mesmerized, and like I said, he's taking notes. It's not too long after hearing Audrey happen to tell this tale that he begins work on his own story

of a child for whom chalklet 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 chalklet factory, Doll absolutely despise what Hollywood did with that story, and so many of the others. I reached out to an expert on this 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 Bean Coolie. 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 doll adaptations. Menel Stewart, who directed the original Willie Walka movie, gets it so right in terms of tone that my kids watching it growing up. They're in their forties 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 Dep movie directed by Tim Burton. They landed better in the original, I think.”

I movie the doll 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 Willie 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 Chaka River. Several movie stars have played Willie Wonka over the decades, including Timothy Shalom, Johnny Dep and even Neil Patrick Harris in a strange video parody you can find online. Now, to mention all the stage actors who perform

“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 dolls most memorable, most elusive character, is by Gene Wilder in the 1971 film. There is nowhere to be way of knowing. I think which direction we are going. There is no knowing where we're going or which way the river is flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane of blowing? Not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be grown.

Are the fires of hell of blowing? Is the grizzly reaper blowing? Yes, the danger must be growing for the roars keep on rolling and they're certainly not showing. Any signs that they are slowing? Yeah, it's a nutty performance. As I mentioned to David, rolled doll, heated it. Doll's friend andographer Donald Sturac 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 chorubic sweet face. I think rolled felt there was something wrong with Wonka's

To be fair to doll, Gene Wilder does take some crazy swings in that movie. If you've seen it, and since you're still listening to the show nine episodes in, I bet you have, you know what I'm talking about. While there'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's 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 Maybe 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 summer salt,

and then bouncing up and they all applauded, and the director said, "Whoa, 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, did that mean do it. 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.”

In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer

in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended.

A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppi. Lucy Leppi has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? A moment you look at the whole picture of the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi,

we follow the evidence in here from the people that lived it, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was. No voicing of any skepticism are doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Gumpride became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground.

He identified Termine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termine was sentenced to 99 years. And I know this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years only two people knew the truth and till a confession changed everything.

I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.

Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be unfold display. Thank you so much, iHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live tomorrow at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m pacific free at feeps.com or the feeps app. What if mine control is real?

“If you can 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.

I gave you some suggestions to be sexually roasted. Can you get someone to join your cult?

“NLP was used on me to access my subconscious NLP, aka neuro-engestic 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. Mine games is the story of NLP. It's 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 mine game of all NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mine games on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Doll's Buck, Charlie, and the chocolate factory.”

But I'm not sure Doll would have liked it any better. Johnny Depp also gives a bananas performance as Wonka, basing it on the hosts of children shows from his youth. In-provisation, you, little girl, say something. Any?

Fungum. 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. Doll'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 Doll'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, Wolper persuaded the food company, which of course had zero previous experience in the film industry that Doll's Buck was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for them. Amazingly, he got Quaker Oats to buy the rights to Doll's Buck and to fund the entire budget of

the movie. Go back and rewatch the opening credits to 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 in step-to-way, that might have been fine with Doll, but that's not how Hollywood works. Everyone wants their say, especially those opening their walls. In my conversation with David just now, I suggested Doll 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 Doll 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 loved the movie,”

learning this backstory has definitely put me in Doll'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 Doll 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, Nestle was able to buy the Willy Wonka candy factory and started making a new Wonka bar to write off the goodwill the movie

his sense of crude. Doll was never shy about telling people how much he hated the film.

It wasn't just the title, or the focus, or Jean Wilder's performance. He also hated the music, which he described as "saccharin, 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, it's a tool. Did you have anything to do with it? Well, I originally read the screenplay, but I made the mistake of letting a 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 doll adaptations, including a piece I loved on Wonka. He's someone who's childhood was really shaped by the author. My name's Ben O'Bentenquirt, and I'm the author of Hello Stranger and The Mail Gazed. I grew up in Colombia, but I went to a British private school in Bolveda, and so Oliver Curriculum,

so I was reading George's Marvelous Medicine and James to Giant Peach,

“eventually something like that, which is in Matilda before I was 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 doll 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 has been well to talk a little bit more about role dolls specific feelings about the gene wilder film. Then it gets the one that everyone knows the best, and it's probably the one that he disliked the most. And so it exists at this weird intersection where like, if he had had his way,

that is not the felt that we would have gotten. There's a reason why there was never

another charlae in 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 charlae.

“I think the reason is why he disliked it or he's 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 cookie and quirky and kind of out there, but he 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 and both happy that we have it and then also keep wondering what kind of film would he have wanted for charlae that maybe needed to be more biting, it maybe needed to be cooler, it needed to be a little bit

more charlae and also sort of like adult. It's a fascinating curiosity that he's so disowned it. But of course, Dalton hate all of his Hollywood experiences or adaptations. He loved writing James Bond and he loved working with Alfred Hitchcock on TV. David being coolie is an expert on the Hitchcock anthology that adapted Dal. So I asked him to tell me a little bit more about that. Six stories of his were done for the Hitchcock show. Two of them are absolute classics,

“man from the south and lay him to the slaughter. And so I think anybody 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 for 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 roll doll by just adding

five thousand percent more profanities. It's just didn't work. Yeah. Any thoughts on why Dal and Hitchcock were such a good match and maybe why he and Tarantino were a less good match? Sure, I think did you think of the other great anthology series of the time, which was the Twilight Zone by Rod Sirling? When he went and had writers writing for him, Richard Mathison was a really good match for Rod Sirling in much the same way. I mean, Hitchcock already thought like roll doll 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 roll doll stories. I asked David to describe

two of the most famous doll stories that were used on Hitchcock's show. The one's David referred to as classics. Man from the South started Steve McQueen before he was star Steve McQueen

comes up to him and offers him basically a barbed. And says, I've got the latest convertible.

I'll give that to you if the lighter that you just let 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.”

He 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 you still live, he took 47 fingers from different people. He lost 11 cars. That was one role though story. Another is a woman

played by Barbara Belgettys, 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 the younger woman and he's just wants to leave. So she tells him he's had a bad day at work. He's upset. He's probably hungry, litter, 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, that's just classic. Boy, this is great. He's the meat I've had in my room. He 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. It's supposed to be right to take this bone on to my dog. You know, she's judging not wanting to see it again. I also asked David about Dallas, other most famous filmmaking association

after Hitchcock. And that, of course, is with West Anderson. He found a kindred spirit. Again, it's sort of like when a director or writer finds somebody else that speaks in the similar voice, it's just a marriage that works. And so those four stories that West 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 in,

it to 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 roll doll the spirit of roll doll not being

happy with those adaptations. Anderson does have such a unique style. Do you think that when he works on the doll shorts and on the feature? Does it become more intersonian? Does it become more

“dollian? Is there a blending of the two? Oh, it's a blend. That that's the best way to put it because”

one of the things that roll doll 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 surling. And he would sit in his little armchair the place where he actually did his writing and film introductions to his stories. Well, West Anderson took that and had Ray Fines play role doll introducing the story. So he adopted one of roll doll'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. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppi.

“Lucy Leppi has been found guilty, but what if we didn't get the full story?”

The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppi was. No voicing of any skepticism are doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level at the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to doubt, the case of Lucy Leppi,

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season two podcast. This is a story

of a random crime. He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years. And like Laura, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth, until a confession changed everything. I was a monster.

Listen to burden of guilt season two on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. I heard radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live tomorrow at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific Free at phips.com or the Vips app. What if mind control is real? If you can 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 you 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-Englisted 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 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. Listen to mind games on the iHeart”

Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk a little bit more about the West Anderson connection. Doll's work has been adapted by so many people, but I almost all of them. Even the ones we most associate with doll, like Tim Burton or Steven Spielberg or Mel Stewart, only directed a single film based on a doll story.

Hitchcock and West Anderson stand out here because they worked on so many. When Anderson and Noah Bombock, 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 Doll's widow, Felicity, about coming to Gypsy House,

where doll lived and wrote. Here's what Anderson and Felicity talking about that to be associated

with. 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, a 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 of Adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox slash. So I mean, it became about Doll. The character became about Doll. And the more 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 admired the West Anderson Adaptations. The man has this 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 die with yours. I think critics who say West Anderson's films are all the same and to mean them as the cinematic equivalent of a quarter or a suit are missing how much range

she actually has. The four 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'm a man who can see without using his eyes. He was a small man about 60 with a white nostalgia and a curious lighting and black hair growing all over the outside 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 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 doll.”

Roll doll 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 doll'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 an, you know, out of 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 doll to tell the story. It's great. My favorite of the Anderson doll films is Henry Sugar.

His star's Reef finds a role doll, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, Death 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 ease 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 doll is a character in the film works especially well here because it feels like such a perfect fulfillment of doll's original intentions. In his book, doll 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 tail. Near the end of doll's story,

the doll 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 doll and read some of the actual prose from the book, Anderson mirrors this metaphictional playfulness that began in dolls novella. I want to briefly return to my conversation with Manuel Bettencourt and hear his thoughts on the

role doll Wes Anderson connection, including all the other interesting ways that Anderson finds to be faithful to doll's text. It had seemed a better suited pair than I that I thought they'd be, both because Wes Anderson is, you know, we know him for the exacting zinmetrical, 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 doll short stories, was reveal, artistry, and craftsmanship in how he elevated dolls' prose. He's not using voiceover, he's having actually

these characters basically read out the story. So in a way, they're almost like audiobooks that are

coming to life in a sort of, I keep thinking of them as pop-up books because they have that kind of like handcrafted sensibility to them. Moving beyond Anderson, to me, the most interesting filmmaker who decided to tackle doll is Quentin Tarantino. We'll hear what Manuel thinks about that collaboration in a second. We already heard what David being coolly 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-ballet Hall of Fame filmmaker, but he made his adaptation of dolls the man from the self right when he was at the peak of his powers. He made it directly after pulp fiction. And a first glance, Tarantino would seem to be as perfect to compliment a doll as Hitchcock is. Both Tarantino and doll write very stylized dialogue. Both love dark humor, both revel and violent or grotesque story elements. Both make ample use of unexpected violence, like what befalls the kids and doll's

chocolate factory, or poor Marvin in the backseat and 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 at a row. And you can see why that set up 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 doll's story so great. Doll'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 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 doll's story into

stuck remembering this for the rest of your life, you have to decide what that memory will be.

“So, Ted, are you going to remember for the next 40 years give or take a decade that you refuse to”

$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 in Hollywood culture dilutes the universal human drama that makes dolls 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 doll. West Anderson had an Alfred Hitchcock succeed because they managed to put their egos aside and blend their distinctive styles with dolls. Man well 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, they're like weird, quirky, Britishism's that are so delectable in his work, tend to fail because I think that's for the magic lies and the ones that do it, best are the ones that he 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 some

of the James The Giant Peach. It visually, it's sort of so in the world of doll and Blake, that I think it hits the right spot. But when you have filmmakers that are instead trying to use scientists to set jumping off point and sometimes lose, probably wouldn't make him so special on the page. We'll talk more about exactly what made dolls so special on the page, including my conversation with an expert on the books who actually knew doll in life and can speak firsthand about the

kind of impression he made. We'll also talk about dolls fascinating writing process, which I'm pretty obsessed with. I'm really sad this journey with dolls 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 doll would have wanted. See you there. The secret world of "Roll doll" is produced by Maginario and Paralax Studios for iHeart Podcasts.

Created and written by me, Aaron Tracy, produced by Matt Schrainer, post production by Windhill Studios, with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phillips, editing by Ryan Seaton, music by APM, executive producers, Nathan Clokey, Cara Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Tracy. 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 2026. Imagine entertainment,

IHeart Media, and Paralax. 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 Gumpride 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 iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Creativity, knowledge and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much, IHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live tomorrow at APM Eastern 5pm Pacific Free at feeps.com or The Veeps app.

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Listen to doubt the case of Lucy Letbe on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mine control is real? If you can control behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would

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