Can the Oompa-Loompas Be Saved?

Hugh Grant, opposite Timothée Chalamet in “Wonka,” is the latest performer to bring an Oompa-Loompa to life (Warner Bros.)
Hugh Grant, opposite Timothée Chalamet in “Wonka,” is the latest performer to bring an Oompa-Loompa to life (Warner Bros.)
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Can the Oompa-Loompas Be Saved?

Hugh Grant, opposite Timothée Chalamet in “Wonka,” is the latest performer to bring an Oompa-Loompa to life (Warner Bros.)
Hugh Grant, opposite Timothée Chalamet in “Wonka,” is the latest performer to bring an Oompa-Loompa to life (Warner Bros.)

That’s a question filmmakers and writers have tangled with ever since the 1964 debut of the tiny, largely unpaid laborers in Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

In Dahl’s original, the Oompa-Loompas were starving African pygmies, subsisting largely on a mash of green caterpillars and tree bark until “rescued” by Willy Wonka. He smuggled the entire tribe out of Africa in packing crates to live and work, and sing and goof and dance, in the chocolatier’s factory.

“It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,” Dahl said in a 1988 interview.

In the five decades since their literary debut, the Oompa-Loompas have undergone a series of transformations to shake their story from its colonialist roots. Some fixes have been transparently cosmetic (in subsequent editions of the book, illustrators simply made the tribesmen white). Others weren’t fixes at all: In the 2005 film “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the director, Tim Burton, just shifted continents, moving the Oompa-Loompas out of Africa to someplace that vaguely resembles South America, as imagined by an adventure film director from the 1950s.

In the Warner Bros. prequel “Wonka,” which opens Dec. 15, the filmmakers address the colonialist aspects head on.

In many ways, the prequel format — with Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) struggling to get his chocolate business up and running — allowed the filmmakers to sidestep the book’s more off-putting elements. Instead of smiling servants, there’s a sole Oompa-Loompa, and he is something of a lone wolf, more cranky nemesis and eventual mentor than kowtowing lackey. Put simply, he’s Hugh Grant. As for the Oompa-Loompas’s sketchy working conditions (are they really just paid in chocolate?) and the questions about just how and where Wonka gets all those cocoa beans to make his delicious chocolate, well, he unwittingly steals them — from the Oompa-Loompas! — and makes the candy himself (at this point in the story, he’s still a small-batch candymaker).

“I was really interested in the idea of the Oompa-Loompas judging Wonka for having stolen their cocoa beans, and finding him extremely wanting, and meting out punishments,” said Paul King, the film’s director and co-writer.

In the film, we finally hear the Oompa-Loompas’s side of this once-lopsided story. Even so, there were complaints about these Oompa-Loompas even before this latest film opened, with some actors criticizing the decision to cast Grant in a role traditionally played by actors with dwarfism.

Scholars have criticized Dahl’s children’s books for decades, calling out instances of racist and sexist stereotypes. This year, Puffin Books ignited a firestorm when it released new versions of Dahl’s classics, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda,” that removed, among other things, references to skin color, body size, and slavery. For years, biographers have taken on Dahl himself, calling out his self-professed antisemitism and his stunningly cruel mistreatment of his first wife, the Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal.

So it’s little wonder that when the creators of the 1971 film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” starring Gene Wilder, first adapted Dahl’s story, they ran as fast and far as they could from the book’s “happy slave” narrative.

After race riots in Britain in the 1950s and the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, “there really is no way of overstating how not of the moment this was,” said Catherine Keyser, an English professor at the University of South Carolina and author of the article “Candy Boys and Chocolate Factories: Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry.”

In the Wilder version, the Oompa-Loompas morphed from starving natives from “the deepest and darkest part of Africa” into orange-faced, green-haired men in vaguely European togs. Their African home was changed to the fictional nation of Loompaland; instead of being smuggled from the jungle in crates, they were “transported.”

To play the newly refashioned Oompa-Loompas, the 1971 filmmakers hired performers with dwarfism and painted them green, a decision that Dahl found upsetting, according to Matthew Dennison, author of the critically acclaimed biography “Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected.” (He said, “Dahl hated the film version, partly because he couldn’t bear Gene Wilder, for reasons I don’t understand.”)

Dahl was also pressured to recast the Oompa-Loompas in later editions of his books. The illustrator Joseph Schindelman’s images of smiling Black natives were reimagined by various illustrators as fair-skinned sprites with spiky blond locks, or bearded hippies.

For Keyser, the novelist’s attempts to “de-Negro” (Dahl’s words) his own characters, admittedly under pressure, had the effect of making them, in some ways, even less human.

Over the years, the Oompa-Loompas continued to morph. In the 2005 Tim Burton remake, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” a single actor, Deep Roy, was cast to play all of the Oompa-Loompas, his performances digitally mashed together to create a sea of singing, dancing, swimming workers in identical shiny red jumpsuits (robots were also used in some scenes). Onstage in countless school productions, they have been played by children in green wigs, with or without orangeface, and on London’s West End by half human-half puppet hybrids.

Clearly, there was a lot of visual material for King to choose from. However, Dahl’s original characters, the African pygmies, were never a consideration.

“It was a good choice to change it,” King said. “I felt very comfortable with Dahl’s decision.”

It’s a relatively minor role for Grant, but one that plays into Keyser’s vision of a story that would redeem the Oompa-Loompas, one that was told from their point of view. “I think that Oompa-Loompas were a way to make globalization in a colonial vein seem cozy and appealing and comforting,” she said. “But maybe if you could have a Bildungsroman from the perspective of a single Oompa-Loompa, that gives an Oompa-Loompa interiority and a name, that might fix it.”

In the end, Grant’s Oompa-Loompa pays tribute to the 1971 original, even as he’s endowed with a sort of agency those original servants could only dream of.

The New York Times



Eminem, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, N.W.A. and Janet Jackson Get Songwriters Hall of Fame Nods

Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
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Eminem, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, N.W.A. and Janet Jackson Get Songwriters Hall of Fame Nods

Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)
Eminem performs during "Live From Detroit: The Concert at Michigan Central," on June 6, 2024, in Detroit. (AP)

Eminem, Boy George, George Clinton, Sheryl Crow, Janet Jackson, the Doobie Brothers, N.W.A. and Alanis Morissette are among the nominees for the 2025 class at the Songwriters Hall of Fame, an eclectic group of rap, rock, hip-hop and pop pioneers.

Joining them on the ballot are Bryan Adams, with radio staples like “Summer of ’69” and “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?,” and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, hoping to get in 25 years after band founder Brian Wilson. David Gates, co-lead singer of the pop-music group Bread, is also looking for entry.

The Hall annually inducts performers and non-performers alike, and the latter category this year includes Walter Afanasieff, who helped Mariah Carey with her smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You;” Mike Chapman, who co-wrote Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield;” and Narada Michael Walden, the architect of Whitney Houston's “How Will I Know″ and Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love.”

Eligible voting members have until Dec. 22 to turn in ballots with their choices of three nominees from the songwriter category and three from the performing-songwriter category. The Associated Press got an early copy of the list.

Several performers are getting another shot at entry, including Clinton, whose Parliament-Funkadelic collective was hugely influential with hits like “Atomic Dog” and “Give Up the Funk,” and The Doobie Brothers — Tom Johnston, Patrick Simmons and Michael McDonald — with such classics as “Listen to the Music” and "Long Train Runnin.’” Steve Winwood, whose hits include “Higher Love” and “Roll With It,” has also been on the ballot before.

Hip-hop this year is represented by Eminem — whose hits include “Lose Yourself" and “Stan” — and N.W.A. members Dr. Dre, Eazy E, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella. Already in the Hall are hip-hop stars like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and Missy Elliot. Tommy James, with hits including ”Mony Mony,″ ”Crimson and Clover″ and ”I Think We’re Alone Now,″ has also earned a nod.

If Jackson, whose 1989 album “Rhythm Nation” was a landmark, gets into the Hall, it will be more than two decades after her late brother Michael. The Canadian songwriter Morissette, whose influential “Jagged Little Pill” has won Grammys, Tonys, Junos and MTV awards would also add to the Hall's rocking women. (Glen Ballard, who helped produce and write the album, is already in.)

As would Crow, the “All I Wanna Do” and “Everyday Is a Winding Road” singer-songwriter, is having a critical resurgence after being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. Boy George lifts the flag for '80s New Wave with the Culture Club hits “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.”

Other nominees for the non-performing category include Franne Golde, who co-wrote Selena’s ”Dreaming of You;″ Tom Douglas, who wrote country hits for Tim McGraw, Lady Antebellum and Miranda Lambert; Ashley Gorley, fresh off his co-writing smash “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen; and Roger Nichols, who co-wrote The Carpenters’ ″We’ve Only Just Begun.″

They join Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who contributed to the hit ″The Boy Is Mine″ by Brandy and Monica; Sonny Curtis, former member of the Crickets who wrote and performed the theme song for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show," ”Love is All Around,” and British composer Tony Macaulay, who wrote “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

The Hall also put forward three songwriting teams: Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who wrote “Secret Agent Man;” and Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, who penned the Four Tops hit “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got);” and Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, who wrote the Percy Sledge tune “Out of Left Field.”

The Songwriters Hall of Fame was established in 1969 to honor those creating popular music. A songwriter with a notable catalog of songs qualifies for induction 20 years after the first commercial release of a song.

Some already in the hall include Carole King, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Lionel Richie, Bill Withers, Neil Diamond and Phil Collins. Last year saw R.E.M., Steely Dan, Dean Pitchford, Hillary Lindsey and Timbaland inducted.