Harry Potter TV Series: Maybe By 2027?

January 10, 2025 by Leave a Comment

In the same Entertainment Weekly article in which Sir David Waters (Mark Rylance) was rumored to be the Albus Dumbledore of the adaptation of Harry Potter for television, the CEO of HBO+, Casey Bloys, said the teevee series his company and Bronte Studios will be making will not premiere until early in 2027:

During Tuesday’s event, Bloys also predicted a potential early 2027 premiere date for the series. “But don’t hold me to any of that, because we’re just getting started with the writing and casting process,” the exec quickly added.

So, a tentative date of two years from now, the casting mavens have more than 32,000 audition tapes for Harry, Ron, and Hermione wanna-bes “ages 9-11,” with filming scheduled to begin this summer? The casting of the other principal roles is still only fascinating but unsubstantiated rumors — is it silly or prudent at the moment to be assuming that the rumored picks are really just some fan’s best guess or wish upon a Hollywood star? — and all of Hogwarts has yet to be staffed and populated with students, not to mention the Dursleys. Let’s not forget that seven to ten year contract commitments for most have to be negotiated.

It will be something of a miracle for filming to begin by this summer unless September and October are now considered summer due to global warming. This makes the 2027 premiere date make much more sense and Bloys’ hesitance to commit to that date with any certainty.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: HBO+ TV Adaptation, Hog Pro Notes

Black Snape, White Dumbledore? HBO+ Reaches Out to Mark Rylance for Albus

January 8, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Before Paapa Essiedu was rumored to be the new Severus Snape in the HBO+/Bronte Studios adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television, a rumor that set off the ‘Black Severus’ controversy a la ‘Black Hermione,’ there was already a casting outreach in the news, namely, that the film makers had contacted Mark Rylance’s representatives to begin a conversation about his playing Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

I can think of three obvious and relatively indisputable reasons to be excited about this possibility:

(1) Mark Rylance is the Closest We’ll Ever Get to Richard Harris: Sir David Waters is, in brief, a legend in his own time, a thespian whose talent, skills, dedication to craft, and accomplishments, if brought to this teevee project, immediately elevates it to a much higher level than it would have otherwise. Essiedu has a host of qualifications but his involvement is usually described as a potentially “break out” role for him. Rylance is so well known and so well respected that landing him to play Dumbledore may be the breakout hiring choice for the series.

(2) Mark Rylance has the Necessary Bardish Quirks to Be Dumbledore: Just surveying his Wikipedia bio-page, I was delighted to find that  he has serious Shakespeare chops — first artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for ten years — and that he isn’t a toady to popular opinion about the Bard or even to the RSC. The man staged an all-male production of Twelfth Night, for instance, as Shakespeare’s company had to (and he took the part of Olivia!) as well as all-female productions of Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, he has been an up-front proponent of the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ about the authorship of the Shakespeare plays (a declaration that causes academics’ hair to catch on fire, believe me), and broke with the RSC after they took money from British Petroleum. Climate change, don’chano. From his immersion in Elizabethan lore (can you say alchemy? ley lines and crop circles?) to his being comfortable with uncomfortable ideas, Rylance is a natural, I think, for the actor taking on the Dumbledore part.

(3) Mark Rylance is Sufficiently Liberal (and Humble) that He Mutes TRA Criticism: Any actor or actress agreeing to participate in what may be a ten year project with the notorious TERF and transphobe bigot J. K. Rowling as an executive producer is going to be called out as a traitor to what President Biden called the “civil rights issue of our time.” I think Rylance will duck that charge. He was a firm supporter of Jeremy Corbyn right through all the anti-Semite accusations, for example, dropped association with the RSC over a political issue, and played Cleopatra, for heaven’s sake, in a production of Antony and Cleopatra. More to the point, the man is so famous for being humble and hard-working, disdainful of pomp and ego even at awards ceremonies, that attacking him as being a traitor to progressivism is going to be a very bad look, a disaster in optics for a group reeling since November in a deluge of bad news and worse appearances.

Check out ‘The Weird World of Mark Rylance’ and ‘Mark Rylance: “Playing other ethnicities on stage helps develop empathy”.’ I think he’s va great choice.

True confessions: I’d never heard of him until watching The Outfit in 2022 which led to my looking up Bridge of Spies. In a world in which professional actors rarely impress positively with their character and opinions, Sir David is exceptional, though I doubt very much we’d agree about much. I’m hopeful, even excited about his taking the role of Albus Dumbledore, if suspicious that a ten year commitment to a man devoted to stage craft is not in the works.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Merry Christmas, Rowling Readers!

January 7, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Back tomorrow with more conversation about the artistry and meaning of the works by the world’s most famous writer! Joyous Noel!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

The Rowling Library Magazine #97: BBC Ink Black Heart, Ghost Plots, Rowling Newsletters, and Very Potter Christmas

January 6, 2025 by 1 Comment

As I wrote yesterday, The Rowling Library Magazine for January 2025 is out and can be downloaded here. For serious readers of J. K. Rowling, it is the Christmas present you wanted; informative, ‘instructing while delighting,’ challenging, and a reminder of what a blessing TRL is to Rowling’s global fandom.

Here are my homeopathic doses of each of this issue’s articles:

Cover Story: ‘The Daily Prophet Newsletters — Uncovering one of the most elusive Harry Potter writings: J.K. Rowling’s Newsletters from 1998 and 1999.’ In an article I want to assume was written by Ibid, the eccentric Go-To expert and unchallenged authority on JKR textual histories, the reader is introduced to perhaps Rowling’s most elusive and curious work, the four newsletters Rowling penned in 1998 and 1999 for a short-lived Bloomsbury fan club in the UK. Surviving copies of the mailed newsletters are rare, especially as complete sets, and Rowling, Inc., has forbidden their reproduction. The author of this piece lovingly shares how s/he came to read an original set and enough of the newsletters to communicate their value without violating copyright. The sports page excerpts are a delight.

‘Ghost Plots.’ I expressed my frustration yesterday with this article’s lack of source citation in my ‘Rowling’s Real World Inspiration for Leda Strike: Nancy Spungen? but my having been inspired to write that post I hope points to the remarkable value of this survey of Rowling’s abandonded or re-shaped original ideas for the Hogwarts Saga. I expect it will inspire serious readers everywhere, as it did me, to follow up on an intriguing name or plot point suggesting a link to Rowling’s ‘Lake,’ her post Potter efforts, or to both. It merits repeated readings in this regard and makes the absence of source citations that much more disappointing.

Publication Announcement: ‘The Phoenix or the Flame Set for February Release — Explore the release date, essays, and insights from TRL Books’ newest look at the original outline for The Order of the Phoenix.’ I wrote a chapter for this new Rowling Library (TRL) anthology and enjoyed every minute of my exchanges with The Phoenix or the Flame’s editor and the publisher, but I confess to not having an appreciation of its depths and breadth until reading this brief piece in January’s magazine. I can say as a relative insider that the textual history provided in the book of Rowling’s outline of the fifth Harry Potter novel is worth to Potter Pundits whatever they’re charging for the essay collection and I’ll admit to being delighted for the opportunity to write up at last my thoughts about the Department of Mysteries adventure’s chiastic structure, a jewel box for those sensitive to Rowling’s artistry and meaning. I’m excited by next month’s publication of The Phoenix and the Flame and I’m grateful to this article for re-igniting that flame of interest.

Media Review: ‘A Heart Too Big for the Screen — The BBC’s bold attempt at bringing Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart to Life.’ TRL’s anonymous reviewer congratulated the screenplay writer for his adaptation of Galbraith’s Strike 6 and tipped the hat to the principal actor and actress, but noted with kindness the near impossibility of adapting this novel so that its power was communicated into an alien medium. Really, Ink Black Heart has been Rowling-Galbraith’s most challenging book to read due to its extensive use of simultaneous online chatter threads and, as hard as it was to convey that internet experience in codex, the jump to screened images alone was virtually impossible. [I thought of the conversation that was supposed to have been had between the translator of Marx’ Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848 into English from the German with its author, in which he complained of the difficulty in moving from one language to another with this book. Marx is said to have shrugged and replied, “The ideas didn’t translate easily into German, either.”] An excellent review that actually made me more interested in seeing the adaptation than I had been.

Lead Article: ‘Why Christmas to Me is J. K. Rowling’s Old Website.’ This was far and away my favorite piece in this month’s magazine, an article that touched me as it might few others. First, it provides an inside-look at the remarkable person behind the curtain that makes TRL happen, Patricio Tarantino. I communicate with him regularly and my debts to him for the resources and tools he has created for Rowling readers grow ever deeper in depth. Yet I know very little about him, really, outside of his sterling character and fine judgment. This autobiographical episode was, consequently, a revelation on several levels and much appreciated.

Second, tonight is Christmas Eve to Orthodox Christians and I have experienced reading (and re-reading) this article, delayed from December when the great majority of TRL readers were preparing for their Nativity celebrations, as something of a personal present under my family’s tree, delivered by TRL House Elves dispatched from Buenos Aires.

Thank you, Mr Tarantino, for this gift and for all that you and the magazine contributors give to Rowling’s global fandom in these magazines!

Filed Under: Rowling Library

Rowling’s Real World Inspiration for Leda Strike: Nancy Spungen?

January 5, 2025 by Leave a Comment

The new issue of The Rowling Library magazine is out and it’s another winner. Download it here.

I’ll write about my favorite pieces tomorrow. Tonight, though, I want to focus on one paragraph in Oliver Horton’s ‘Ghost Plots,’ his survey of the various plot directions, names, and characters that Rowling chose not to include (or to change into an unrecognizable version of the original) in the Hogwarts Saga. It’s a frustrating article, however interesting all of Horton’s points are (very!), because not once, anywhere, does he mention the source of these ‘Ghost Plots,’ even where Rowling called them that.

The paragraph in question is about Draco Malfoy’s original surname and its probable source.

Harry’s rival Draco Malfoy was at first called Draco Spungen, presumably because of Nancy Spungen, the blonde mentally ill teenage girlfriend of Sid Vicious, bass player in iconic 1970s punk band [the] Sex Pistols. This is a curious choice: the late Ms Spungen is a much maligned figure in rock history. Yet it makes you wonder if other musical notes have been embedded in the story. Are there references to The Beatles and The Smiths, favourite bands of the author, hidden as if under a Cloak of Invisibility? (13)

Again, I don’t know where Horton found this jewel tidbit but, if I ever knew it (as I did many of the Ghost Plots), I’d long ago forgotten it and I’m sure I’d never heard of Nancy Spungen before. So I did the quick online search — the Wikipedia bio, the Rowling Stone ‘Who Killed Nancy Spungen?‘ archive profile, the CrimeAndInvestigation.co.UK piece ‘Sid and Nancy: A Punk Rock Murder Mystery,’ and a piercing film review of Sid and Nancy (‘Requiem for a Blonde: A Tribute to the Most Hated Half of Sid and Nancy‘ — cameo from Sirius Black!).

Check those out if you have a minute. It is painful reading of a wasted life involving mental illness, drugs, and misery in the fast lane of the 70s high-flying punk rock scene. With names like ‘Johnny Rotten’ and ‘Sid Vicious’  — and ‘Nancy Spungen’! — it reads like a Medieval morality play or Victorian allegory of sin and consequences.

Why should we care, though, about Rowling’s one-time long ago fascination with a super-groupie attached to a 70s punk-rock band with drug issues, one who died a mysterious death that many consider a suicide but others are as sure it was murder?

It’s intriguing, to me at least, that Rowling originally named the Malfoys the “Spungens.” She clearly was very familiar with the groupie nutcase attached to Punk royalty who died horribly and mysteriously. The Malfoys are central figures in the Hogwarts drama; Draco plays the part of Harry’s Flashman patrician foil throughout the series so giving him that name had to have been as meaningful (or almost as, at least to the author) as the Malfoy moniker is.

I don’t get the connection of Nancy Spungen with the patrician wizard family, frankly, but, unlike Horton, I think most Rowling readers would connect the super-groupie with Leda Strike.  In a flash.

The question that popped into my mind was “Did Rowling-Galbraith’s fascination with Nancy Spungen take flower years later with Leda Strike, Cormoran’s mother, whose death is shrouded in mystery?” There are some interesting parallels.

Points of Correspondence between the Lives and Deaths of Nancy and Leda:

I came up with seven after reading the four articles mentioned above. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike