Aaron Tracy

When he decided to write movies, he was completely clueless.

But soon, he was on top of Hollywood, working with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock.

When you go through life like that, with no apparent ceiling to what's possible, with life constantly reinforcing your crazy ambitions, you must start to feel like nothing is out of reach.

So when no device exists to help cure your infant son, you don't go to church and pray.

You call a doctor and a toy maker you know and say, let's get to work.

Dahl, of course, later puts all of this into his writing.

The lead character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is partly based on the toy maker, Wade.

And Willy Wonka has parts of all three men.

An innovating scientist, a creative genius, a toy-making savant.

But instead of torturing children like Wonka does, Dahl and his buddies build a device to save them.

That's, of course, a line from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

But Dahl isn't yet ready to write that.

He's still a few years away from dreaming Wonka up.

He's still writing for the wrong audience, namely adults.

And it's not going well.

Dahl's creative frustrations start bleeding into his home life, adding strain to a family already fractured by Theo's accident.

But if he thinks the pressures are intense right now, they're nothing compared to what's lying right around the corner.

Dahl and Neil's second oldest daughter, Tessa, sums up what's about to happen well when she says theirs was a family that, quote, toppled unwittingly over the edge of a jagged cliff face into a canyon of darkness, which was filled with such sadness, such total devastation, that we would never recover.

Yeah, get ready.

Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s.