Harry Potter and the Bone-Head Screenwriter
About ten years ago, a courtly, genial Brit named David Heyman sent me a book, for my consideration to adapt into a feature film. I was in the middle of a bunch of other projects and was not looking for work, but Mr. Heyman was very polite and my representation assured me he was a real guy. So I said I’d take a look.
It was a paperback of a boy’s adventure novel, not yet published in the US, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I’d never heard of it or its author, and frankly, the front cover didn’t look promising. I flipped it over and started reading the back-cover blurb: “Harry Potter is entering his first year at the Hogwarts Academy of Wizardry — “
And that’s as far as I got. I rolled my eyes at the cutesy names, breathed a sigh at what felt like labored whimsy and handed the book to my wife, who is a children’s librarian and an expert in kid lit. “Could you do me a favor?” I asked. “Read this and tell me if it’s any good.”
She read it and said it wasn’t very good. She felt the plot was sluggish, the protagonist was too passive and the narrative devices were simply a cobbling-together of things that had worked better in other authors’ work. I politely declined Mr. Heyman’s offer and Harry Potter was never heard of again.
No, wait, that’s not what happened. What happened was that Harry Potter went on to become a publishing phenomenon on the scale of the Bible and I did a rewrite on Valentine.
I was not alone in my disinterest in Harry Potter; many other writers turned down Mr. Heyman, before and after me, before Steve Kloves, legend has it, found the title on a list of open projects and was intrigued. Soon after, the book exploded in a super-nova-like blast of sales and an A-list movie franchise was born.
I followed the development of the movies with interest, heard all about how the book’s author was making all kinds of outrageous demands, was stunned at the four generations of Great British Actors they got to be in the first movie, grumbled at my wife every time we drove under a billboard for one of them, but somehow never got around to seeing any of them. It wasn’t out of spite, my career just kind of seemed to always be heading somewhere else.
Anyway, now all the studios are looking desperately for the next Harry Potter and I am shown every kid-lit magic adventure with whimsical names under the sun, all of which aspire to the sales figures of Harry Potter, if not his ambitions. Which means that I get shown, frankly, a lot of shallow, irritating, poorly thought-out crap about magical kids and goofy adults with names like Flipperus Flappy and Stumblebum Stinknose and Percy Peddiwig, stuff that is trying, without trying hard enough, to copy the Potter magic. It then, naturally, falls to me to try to make it more like Harry Potter, while making it completely different from Harry Potter. So, in recent weeks it has become my duty to finally sit down and watch these movies and see what they’re all about.
Know what? They’re pretty good.
No author in history, including God, has been better served by Hollywood than JK Rowling. The production of the Harry Potter movies is probably the most lush, attentive and sympathetic in cinema history. Reviews of the new one, Order of the Phoenix, have all been like “yeah, it’s good enough I guess,” and I have to wonder what movie those people watched, because Order of the Phoenix, like the rest of the Potter movies, is exquisitely produced, cast and acted, and hugely entertaining. I suppose The Prisoner of Azkaban was scarier and snappier than the others, but it wasn’t better plotted than Chamber of Secrets, and Goblet of Fire is better plotted than Azkaban. In script terms, I would say that the Potter movies keep getting better and better, with the caveat that they are only getting better as Harry Potter movies — that is, like James Bond, Harry Potter has become his own genre, with expectations and habits all his own. The “year per movie” device is the enemy of typical cinematic narrative, which demands events follow hard upon each other. But now that that has become a formal given, it allows the Harry Potter movies to explore the life of its teen characters with a complexity and depth that I don’t think I’ve ever seen explored before, certainly not in movies aimed at children. The stories are deeper than Star Wars, scarier than Jurassic Park and more fun than Lord of the Rings, but at the same time we care about Harry and his friends because we literally see them age from movie to movie, and while I still haven’t read the novels, I’m guessing that “coming of age” is a strong theme of Rowling’s mega-narrative.
The casting — hoo boy, what casting these movies have. I expect old pros like Michael Gambon and Alan Rickman to bring depth and subtlety to characters with names like Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, but those kids! They’re miracles. I have the same feeling watching Daniel Radcliffe as I did watching Jody Foster as a teenager — not watching a “kid actor,” but watching a great actor, who happens to be a teenager. Radcliffe is amazing in these movies, and the great thing is that, like Foster, I’m confident that he’ll shed his Harry Potter skin the moment he needs to and not end up like, say, Danny Bonaduce. Radcliffe is not Roger Moore, he’s not Jerry Mathers, he’s a real actor and he’s going to be fine. But Rupert Grint and Emma Watson are great too, giving three-dimensional, living, breathing performances, and it’s, frankly, breathtaking to see them literally grow up in these parts. In their own way, the Harry Potter movies constitute a daring cinematic gamble, placing long, complex, subtle, grown-up narratives (far more grown-up than most “adult” narratives in the marketplace today) in front of a “children’s” audience and hanging their leads on three unknown, untested actors, who then have to sustain the quality of their work through what are traditionally the most tumultuous and torturous times of human maturation. Growing up in public, as it were.
I also understand there’s a new book out — is this true?