Rating: ****In pop culture, Candyman is typically synonymous with a movie based on the Clive Barker short story about a Bloody Mary-like spook with a hook for hand. Instead, think of this Candyman as a real-life Willy Wonka tale involving the American Dream, corporate greed run amok and the enduring free spirit of dreamers everywhere. But really, it’s just the first hand account of how the Jelly Belly came to be.
Once upon a time, jelly beans were boring. Separated into rather static, colour-coded flavours like orange, yellow and black, the jelly bean was a hearty candy, but not necessarily the one longed for when one was in the mood for something sweet. Enter David Klein. Klein was one of those kids that put himself through law school and then never took the bar exams. You know – an eccentric. An amateur inventor, Klein cam up with a simply ingenious idea to concoct gourmet jelly beans. Jelly beans with flavours like cotton candy, root beer or popcorn.
If the fictional Wonka (as portrayed by either Wilder or Depp) is a character of supernatural effervescence, then Klein is the man Roald Dahl inadvertently based his candy-maker on. Klein is the inventor of the Jelly Belly, and if you’ve never heard of him that’s not an intentional act of evasion by a private man. You see, the Jelly Belly Candy Company was once called The Herman Goelitz Candy Company. Klein brought his idea for the Jelly Belly to them in 1976; Goelitz made the candy while Klein sold it at a local ice cream parlour. A lot of blood, sweat, tears and energy later, Jelly Belly was about to make Klein the biggest name in candy since Milton S. Hershey. But that’s only part of the story.
The rest is typical of the American corporate culture. One man’s out-there idea proves successful and is taken over hook, line and sinker by a company smelling profits and not willing to share them equally. It’s a story as old as time, or at least as old as the first time one human bartered object A for his neighbour’s object B and ripped him off by keeping both A and B in the first place. Now if this were a Hollywood movie, then the next scene would be of Klein marching into a crusading lawyer’s office to see if he has a case. For Goelitz, being the evil corporate robber baron, must pay for merely giving an admittedly large stipend to the Jelly Belly creator and hording the millions more that Klein could have made for themselves.
But that’s actually not what happened. Instead Klein merely went about his life trying to figure out other great candy concoctions that kind of went no where. Or certainly no where that his first, great invention went anyway. The strange thing is that though Klein realizes he was ripped off, and many former Goelitz employees as much as admit that their former boss ripped off Klein, the inventor himself remains optimistic and composed. In an age of litigious overreaction, Klein is rare breed.
The tone is almost anti-climactic but it’s really not. Despite the fact that the inventor was quite nearly erased from the tale of his own invention, Candyman is a case of the truth bears out. It’s also an example for us all as Klein found contentment in the fact that he brought happiness to people rather that wallowing in the resentment that he got screwed over by a company that knew they were screwing him over and what’s more that they could get away with it. Some may call that being a sucker, but I call it heroic. And if there is any justice in this world Candyman will serve a greater legacy to Klein than any amount of candy royalties ever will.
