Crimes of Grindelwald: Fun Speculation

October 3, 2018 by 2 Comments

As y’all know, I hope, I have not invested myself in speculation about the next Fantastic Beasts film, Crimes of Grindelwald (not much, at least, since I wrote this a year ago). I don’t follow the trailers, MinaLima art, and still photography releases because we have only scratched the surface in unpacking Lethal White, the fourth Cormoran Strike novel, and the film speculation turns on information released in exotic places, seemingly at random, and semi-continuously. I’m busy, in other words, on reading a long work that is a Rowling solo effort — and I like my speculation to be based on the clues and mysteries in fixed texts we have in hand. Full stop.

Having said that, I would be neglecting my ‘Dean of Harry Potter Scholars’ responsibilities if I didn’t acknowledge the remarkable work being done at TheRowlingLibrary (Go, Patricio!), Univers Harry Potter, and by S. P. Sipal to monitor the global release of clues, to assemble them in tweets, posts, and videos, and to offer fascinating theories about what is coming in the next movie. This is some studiously serious Wizard sleuthing.

I love, for example, Sipal’s explanation of what DDore’s wrist manacles mean in the video above, the guess work connecting the necklace on the screenplay cover and the phoenix tears mentioned in the first film’s bar ballad, and the ideas about Grindelwald’s work with the skull, his transformation into a blue dragon, and the ingredients he needs for this alchemical magic. If half of what Sipal and company have doped out comes true, actually seeing the film will be anti-climactic! Did I mention an Unbreakable Vow?

Take that as a spoiler warning before you watch the video — and please let me know if you are as startled and impressed as I am about the worldwide search for Crimes of Grindelwald clues and the teams of researchers dedicated to finding and turning them into fun theories. I’m back to a re-reading of Lethal White…

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts

Oskar Eustis: Theater and Democracy

October 3, 2018 by Leave a Comment

A long time friend of this blog sent me a link to a TED talk by Oskar Eustis called “Why Theater is Essential to Democracy.” He wrote that he thought I might find Eustis’ thoughts “useful or at least interesting.” Right he was!

It’s a short piece, only 13 minutes instead of the 18 allowed by TED, and, as you’d imagine, it celebrates live stage performance and the outreach efforts by the Public Theater in NYC, which Eustis leads as their Artistic Director. He is an unapologetic missionary for Culture. I admire him for his zeal and concern for the Great Unwashed, if at times I admit I had to grit my teeth at the condescension for the Deplorables in Flyover Country he sees as his mission field.

What I found “useful” and “interesting” in the talk was the distinction made between watching a movie and watching a live performance on stage. For years I have said in talks and written here and in my books that movies are not an imaginative experience but sensation, and, as such, they are incapable of transforming audiences in any meaningful, lasting way. All film can do is scare us or move us to a sentimental moment, not just tears and smiles, granted, but the sentiments of rage and pity as well, none of which, however, last very long.

I have found that this assertion about film, the distinction between active imaginative experience versus passive sensation, really annoys people that prefer screened images to reading books or who “just love movies” (which is to say “almost everyone”). One of the more interesting counters to my thesis I’ve heard through the years is the question, “Well, what about the stage? That’s not imaginative, either; you watch the characters rather than imagining them. Are you saying contra-Aristotle and millenia of experience that audiences at live theater are not experiencing catharsis?”

No, I’m not. With Oskar Eustis, though, I am saying that the experiences of staged drama and screened images are fundamentally different — and the effect of this difference is that one is an individual’s sense experience of little effect on the person watching and the other is at least potentially transformative. We imagine, Eustis says, ourselves as the speakers in dialogue on stage, which imagining in conjunction with our being part of an audience witnessing a live event exercises our empathy, the experience to be had in fiction read in books.

Let me know what you think. Does Oskar Eustis have it right about the difference between film and stage? Does that or does it not confirm my disregard for the movie medium relative to book reading or play watching? Let me know what you think!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Movie Thoughts, Shakespeare

Lethal White: BBC1 Adaptation a ‘Go’

October 2, 2018 by 1 Comment

BBC One announced today that Lethal White is coming to the little screen in your living room.

Piers Wenger, Controller of BBC Drama, says: “We are delighted to announce that the Strike series will return to BBC One with Lethal White. J.K. Rowling, once more in the guise of Robert Galbraith, has delivered another brilliant, knotty and original crime story. We are honoured to be working with Jo and once more with Holliday and Tom as Robin and Strike, to bring this hit series back to BBC One.”

The details?

(1) It will be a “four-part drama,” longer than any of the previous adaptations, which, given Lethal White‘s length, is simultaneously a relief and a shock: great that they aren’t going to squeeze it the way they did Silkworm and Career of Evil so that the story is almost not recognizable, but, then again, only four parts? How are they going to break this story up so that it works in four installments?

(2) Everyone in the original teevee series is back. Bronte Film and TV, Rowling’s production team, are all on board again with Rowling, Neil Blair, and Ruth Kenley-Letts listed as Executive Producers and Tom Edge as screenwriter. Tom Burke, not quite six feet tall, will return as well as the diminutive Cormoran Strike, and Holliday Grainger, too, is back as Robin Ellacott-Cunliffe.

(3) We get some numbers in this press release. The BBC brags that each of its adaptations reached a big audience: “Each series was watched by more than 7 million viewers in the UK alone.” I guess that’s really good for ‘over there.’ In the US, a much, much more populous country, our top teevee shows get almost three times that number as their audience. And I doubt the ‘Strike’ adaptations on cable here managed even seven million viewers.

More interesting to me was the number of books the Robert Galbraith series has sold. 

The Cuckoo’s Calling was published to critical acclaim in 2013 and went on to be a global bestseller, followed in 2014 by The Silkworm and Career of Evil in 2015. All three books were number one Sunday Times bestsellers in both hardback and paperback and Little, Brown has sold in total more than four million copies worldwide across all editions.

Three books by J. K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym have sold “four million copies worldwide” in the five years of their publication. I know comparisons of this kind are simultaneously odious and inevitable but here it is: Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million hardcover copies in the United States in the first 24 hours of its being on sale. Cursed Child, the best selling book of 2016, a story not even written by Rowling, sold 4.5 million copies in the US alone in its first year. I couldn’t find any numbers for the Fantastic Beasts screenplay beyond that it made #3 on the USA Today best sellers list the week of its release (Lethal White is now #2 there) — and it, of course, was only a transcript of the film’s final cut (sort of); few wanted to read the movie they could watch.

What are your thoughts about this news and these numbers? Are you looking forward to seeing the adaptation of Lethal White? What scenes do you hope they get right? Which ones will almost certainly get cut? Let me know in the boxes below!

Tomorrow I’ll share a literary reason why Strike will never sell like Harry Potter did and the Wizarding World does: ostrananie. Stay tuned!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike

Guest Post: Three Reasons to Believe Dumbledore’s Sexuality will NOT be a Highlight of the Fantastic Beasts Films

October 1, 2018 by 7 Comments

Christina Semmens, a Potter Pundit I have known and whose work I have admired since our first meeting at the innaugral LeakyCon in Boston years ago, writes about the role ‘Gay Dumbledore’ will or will not play in the ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’ movie and later films in that series. She last shared her thoughts at HogwartsProfessor in a post on the hits and misses on the mobile app Harry Potter game. Enjoy her challenging thoughts below about why DDore’s sexuality will be downplayed in future feature films about his past!

Three Reasons I Believe Dumbledore’s Sexuality Will NOT Be a Highlight of the Fantastic Beasts Movie Franchise

Recently, I was sharing with a friend my excitement about the upcoming November 16th release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. His response was very subdued, and when I queried him as to why, he responded, “I’m just not interested in seeing the whole Dumbledore-Grindelwald love story on screen.” I quickly assured him that I highly doubted that such a thing would happen, particularly since JK Rowling is the one writing the screenplay.

Although my comments seemed to mollify my friend enough that he was willing to go see the movie, his reaction caused me to reflect that perhaps other people might be having similar reservations. It seems a real possibility that people may shy away from seeing the upcoming Crimes (and the subsequent three movies in the franchise) due to the concern that instead of these “family movies” that are focusing upon the great struggle to decide what the proper interaction and treatment of all magical and non-magical beings and creatures in the wizarding world should be (and therein a commentary on our own world), that it will devolve instead into focusing upon the romantic interest of one of the most beloved characters of the Harry Potter world, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

First is the reality that the occasion on which Jo Rowling revealed Dumbledore’s sexuality was not a planned one, but rather was in response to a question about whether Dumbledore had ever fallen in love himself. Her response at the time in 2007 was: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts, Guest Posts

Lethal White: Parliament Prediction ‘Hit’

September 30, 2018 by 1 Comment

On 24 August this year, Friend of This Blog Lesley Stevens wrote me from the UK with this prediction about Lethal White:

I just wanted to send you this extract from a newspaper article I found on line re St Mary’s Undercroft. Whilst I appreciate it probably has no relevance at all, it just made me wonder that with JKR having such strong political views, that she may have been aware of this story of Emily Wilding, who untimely died under the hooves of a horse, and her night in St Mary’s Undercroft. 

‘Yet there have been moments when the two worlds met. On January 1, 1911, the night of the national census, Emily Wilding Davison – a militant suffragette – hid in a St Mary’s Undercroft cupboard.

As a result, her entry in the census recorded her address as ‘the House of Commons’ – a declaration that she had a right to sit, as well as sleep, in parliament. She died when, as a more dramatic protest, she ran in front of King Edward’s racehorse on Derby day. 

The memorial plaque, inside the cupboard, is a tribute and an apology from the MPs whose predecessors denied her access for so long. It adds to the tranquillity of the most peaceful place in the whole Houses of Parliament.’

A woman fighting for her rights dying through contact with a horse ! Just a thought! 

In Lethal White Robin is undercover in the House of Commons. At one point she descends into its depths to read a text from Cormoran and finds herself in a “crypt,” one “decorated like a medieval jewel casket.”

The minutes slid by and still Strike hadn’t answered. Robin got up and walked around the chapel. At the very back she found a cupboard. Opening it, she saw a plaque to suffragette Emily Davison. Apparently, she had slept there overnight so that she could give her place of residence as the House of Commons on the census of 1911, seven years before women were given the vote. Emily Davison, she could not help but feel, would not have approved of Robin’s choice to place a failing marriage above freedom to work.

Bullseye, Lesley! We get to claim at least partial credit for this remarkable ‘hit’ because a post at HogwartsProfessor about a Rowling Twitter Header in February led to the identification of St Mary’s Undercroft chapel by Beatrice Groves as a likely scene in Lethal White. But the plaque find and the link of Davison, death, and horses is all yours, Lesley. I’ll be sending your Order of Nostradamus medal, First Class, and attendant paperwork out tomorrow.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike