Huxley in Wonderland
JA
September 16
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have had many incarnations, from early adaptations by Cecil M. Hepworth and Percy Stow to Tim Burton’s more recent 3D phantasmagoria. Yet perhaps one of the more interesting, though lesser-known versions, was that written by Aldous Huxley at the behest of Walt Disney soon after the end of the Second World War.
Disney had long harboured a dream of bringing Carroll’s books to the silver screen. Needless to say, he was far more interested in the underlying fantasy than any loyalty to the original text. ‘[I]t must be funny … to an American audience,’ he said during a story meeting in 1939, ‘To hell with the English audiences or the people who love Carroll … I want to put my money into something that will go in Podunk, Iowa, and they will go in and laugh at it because they have experienced it.’
In 1945, Disney commissioned Aldous Huxley to write a synopsis and screenplay for Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll. The movie, which was to be a mix of live-action and animation, would combine Alice’s adventures with a biographical tale of Charles Dodgson (who wrote under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll). Huxley, better known today for his science fiction novels such as Brave New World and Island, might have seemed like a strange choice. Yet according to a column in the Los Angeles Times announcing the news, he was also a well-established ‘authority on Carroll’ and had likewise already worked on several scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and Twentieth-Century Fox.
In retrospect, is it easy to see that the seams might have already begun to split at inception. While Disney wanted a story of absurdity and nonsense, with a trademark happy ending, Huxley confessed that he was far more fascinated by the politics of the day. In a letter to friend and fellow intellectual Victoria Ocampo, he wrote, ‘It would be nice to be able to reconstruct the university of the period … with its long-drawn struggles between tory [sic] High Churchmen and liberal Modernists, under Jowett and Pattison’. He added, however, that he was aware this would not sit well with the producers. The final script did include something to this effect, couched in the familiar Disney clichés. Huxley had Dodgson/Carroll and Alice pitted against two comical, conservative villains—a Tory-voting, churchgoing Oxford vice-chancellor named Langham, and a strict, dour governess called Miss Beale. The animation sequences for Wonderland went through various drafts but were ultimately seen as products of Alice’s imagination and her need to escape her cloistered world. The White Rabbit, talking flowers, ‘Drink Me’ bottle, ‘Eat Me’ cake and hookah-smoking Caterpillar all made their debuts. Huxley later confided to his wife that this was the first script he had truly enjoyed writing.
Unfortunately, Disney and his staff did not feel the same way. A story meeting held at the end of that year revealed much about the constraints of Hollywood culture. Disney in particular was eager to play up Dodgson’s relationship with actress Ellen Terry, because ‘we don’t want him to look like a “queer”’. He later qualified this further, ‘I don’t want to see us build up any sex story here … We don’t bring sex into it at all’. Eventually though, Huxley’s script was axed completely, with Disney confiding that he found it so literary, he could only understand every third word. The fully animated Alice in Wonderland was released six years later. While now an established Disney Classic, the film received a lukewarm reception from audiences and critics at the time. One reviewer wrote in the New Yorker that Disney’s version was weighed down by ‘a blind incapacity to understand that a literary masterwork cannot be improved by the introduction of shiny little tunes, and touches more suited to a flea circus than to a major imaginative effort’.
(With thanks to David Higdon and Phill Lehrman, ‘Huxley’s ‘Deep Jam’ and the Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland’, The Review of English Studies, Vol 43 No 169 (1992), pp. 57-74).
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Comments
16 Sep 10 at 9:13
such a brilliant word-play of a book – I’d be very interested in the Huxley version: maybe the next remake …
...16 Sep 10 at 9:39
Is the screenplay available in any form? I would love to read it!
...16 Sep 10 at 10:10
I’m not sure – I don’t think it is although you can read the very entertaining synopsis at the end of the essay linked to above.
...16 Sep 10 at 11:37
I’m trying to imagine how different my childhood would have been if I’d grown up with “Brave New Wonderland”. Given his interest in Huxley, I’d love to know what Disney made of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – they seem to have a common interest in anthropomorphism.
...16 Sep 10 at 11:37
I’m trying to imagine how different my childhood would have been if I’d grown up with “Brave New Wonderland”. Given his interest in Huxley, I’d love to know what Disney made of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” – they seem to have a common interest in anthropomorphism.
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