Welcome back! Time to restore the text of Fantastic Beasts to the shooting script “book.” First stop, Newt’s entrance on the ship as it docks in New York.

As explained in part 4 of this series (all ‘Unlocking Fantastic Beasts‘ links are at the bottom of each post), MinaLima created a prop letter written by Theseus Scamander to his brother about Gellert Grindelwald’s escape and the efforts to recapture him. The LEGO Dimensions stop-picture animation video of the movie has Theseus reading this letter aloud in voiceover to Newt who is seen reading it on his advent to New York City on an ocean liner. The movie and “original screenplay” elected to cut this out and give us our Gellert Grindelwald introduction and story bracket, the open parenthesis for the movie, just in the bad guy’s escape and in a newspaper montage.

That Gellert escape and montage works as a bracket, certainly, with the big Grindelgraves reveal at the finish in the subway being the close bracket. That choice of start instead of the Theseus letter in the shooting script also points to Interrogation Room Graves in the story center as Grindelwald by the formula requirements of a ring composition’s story turn (the center reflects the opening-close latch).

At least as important, though, is what this beginning omitted by not featuring the letter, the all-important mentioning of the name ‘Theseus‘ at the start. Without that note, the later mention of Newt’s brother Theseus, “the war hero,” in the Magical Congress at Newt’s appearance from the suitcase Tina opens, consequently, is not a marker of the beginning of the story turn as it should have been. More important, we lose Rowling’s reference, consequent to her being a Classical Studies in Mythology student at the University of Exeter, to the mythological hero’s adventure that Newt is about to repeat, more or less.

Newt’s adventure in Fantastic Beasts, in other words, has a ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ scaffolding, a story template Rowling signaled with the letter at the start and the mention of “the war hero” brother’s name again at the turn.

If your Greek mythology is a little rusty, here is a thumbnail sketch of Theseus’ most well known adventure.

The Minoans on Crete have commanded their vassal state in Athens to send them seven warriors and seven virgins every nine years as a sacrificial demonstration of their fealty. These flowers of Athenian youth are fed to a Minotaur, half man, half beast, who lives at the center of an inescapable maze. Theseus, the son of the Athenian king, volunteers to go to Crete as an offering to kill the Minotaur and free Athens from this curse.

He arrives and, to his great good fortune, Ariadne, daughter of the Minoan king, falls in love with him. She gives him the string he needs to escape the maze and a sword with which to kill the monster in the middle. Theseus kills the Minotaur and escapes with Ariadne, but leaves her on an island off of Crete in obedience to a divine command. His first marriage after his return to Athens is to an Amazon queen named Hippolyta.

Newt is Theseus in that his adventure is a mission he makes to a foreign country to which he travels by boat. It is a secret mission that he cannot openly discuss even with those who assist him. The mission involves mastering magical creatures and surviving a trip into a death trap that is essentially undeserved state execution. A woman highly placed helps him in this effort, but, mission accomplished, though she clearly loves him, he leaves her on the shore as he departs on a boat. His true but complicated love? A woman named ‘Leta.’

What we lose without the Theseus connection is that he is on a mission greater than releasing Frank in Arizona, i.e., he is there, as the letter from his brother describes, as part of the efforts, probably directed by Dumbeldore, to find Gellert Grindelwald. That the story center has Newt and Ariadne, I mean Tina, miles beneath MACUSA staring into the Death Pool after a meeting with the Half-Man, Half Beast Grindelgraves, confirms the Minotaur correspondence. Newt’s improbable, liberating victory over the monster completes the parallel.

We also miss the sadness of the Theseus departure on boat. In the original, Theseus is so broken up about leaving Ariadne that he forgets to change the color of the ship’s sails from black to white, the agreed to signal so his father would know from afar off that he had survived. The King sees the black sails at a distance and commits suicide in grief. Theseus’ relationship with his Amazon ‘Lyta doesn’t end well, either.

The deletion of the Theseus letter from the “original screenplay” (and leaving it in a MinaLima prop exhibit) obscures (ahem) Newt’s classical hero’s story template. Restoring it to the start and recalling it in reflection on the story’s meaning adds a great deal to our understanding of Rowling’s original story. Part 1 of our restoration of the shooting script text, then, is reinserting the Theseus voiceover, reading the letter he wrote to his young brother, as Newt arrives in New York.

On to our next task: restoring the scene of Mildred returning Jacob Kowalski’s engagement ring because he did not get the bank loan.

Unlocking Fantastic Beasts: Finding the Text Round Up

Part 5A: So What? The Found Text and Its Meaning

• 5.1 The Story of the Text We’re Looking For
• 5.2  Theseus the Hero and Newt Scamander
• 5.3 Jacob Kowalski: Is He Bigger than Newt?
• 5.4 The Grindelwald-Credence Relationship
• 5.5 Lumos and the Barebone Orphanage
• 5.6 Dougall, Intratextuality, and Readers
• 5.7 Fantastic Beasts and the Beasts Within

Part 5B: The Shooting Script — A Corrected Text for Serious Readers

Part 5C: Conclusions and Predictions

 

As we learned yesterday in Part 3 of this five part series on ‘Interpreting Fantastic Beasts: Finding the Text,’ the film and the published “original screenplay” was not the movie as written by J. K. Rowling or as shot by director David Yates and producer David Heyman. It had six significant cuts taken from it, cuts made for reasons of film dynamic and progression and which disregarded Rowling’s structural artistry and narrative release.

We learned about those six scenes in the myriad interviews given by producer, director, and actors in the run-up to the movie’s premiere and since its release. In the struggle to find Rowling’s actual “original screenplay” and Newt Scamander adventure with all its details and clues, it has been necessary to study what the players tell us about the shooting script that Katherine Waterston said was “like a book” in all that it told them about the story.

Serious readers and Diagon Alley Irregulars learned a lot from these interviews but the search cannot stop there. Unlike Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga, in which the published novel was canon for Harry’s annual adventure and everything else, to include the author’s asides in interviews and articles, was ancillary and incidental, the film version of Newt’s story on screen and its mirrored published text has been supplemented by tie-in texts, film prop exhibits, and the author’s twitter feed and revived web site.

Today, in our efforts to come to grips with the story as conceived by Rowling, we will review the information we have from these deuterocanonical sources with short glosses about the relative importance of these details. In Part 5 of ‘Interpreting Fantastic Beasts,’ I will bring together what we have learned from published script, film, interviews, and the extras to offer some speculation about the series to come from our ad hoc assembled text.

After the jump, the five tie-in and exhibit revelations and the several Rowling answers to fan questions!

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If you’re a fan of Joanne Rowling Murray as I am, whether she’s writing under her J. K. Rowling pseudonym or the Robert Galbraith nom de plume, you were as happy as I was to learn that her first screenplay was to be published as a book. That pretty much guaranteed, I thought, that we’d be getting what Rowling wrote versus what the producer, director, script re-write, and editor chose to put in the film.

The excitement about even the possibility that Beasts would be an actual Rowling product rather than a “story approved by” and fan-servicing debacle a la Cursed Child was sufficient to make me shell out the cash for “The Original Screenplay.”

But, as learned in the first post of this five part series on ‘Interpreting Fantastic Beasts,’ “The Original Screenplay” is not the original draft. the second draft, or even the shooting screenplay from which the film was shot. The book we have is just a transcription of the film as it appears in the theaters.

It is, in effect, not Rowling’s screenplay. It is the screenplay of the film that David Heyman and David Yates decided to release after making their cuts from Rowling’s work. In the third post of this series, we’ll review the six scenes, two of them crucial, that the filmmakers decided the movie didn’t need. Here I want to go over very briefly the narrative Heyman and Yates are giving the press about their being the decisions makers and how Rowling, as screenwriter, works for them and not vice versa.

It’s an interesting story they’ve decided upon, if they struggle to keep to the script. After the jump, David Heyman and David Yates on their successful efforts to get J. K. Rowling to write a decent screenplay.

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I spent the better part of a day last week reading the transcripts and watching the videos of online interviews with Fantastic Beast actors, the director, the producer, and the principal screenwriter, The Presence. I stopped counting after the first fifty articles. My notes, essentially cut and paste extractions of the parts of each interview I thought memorable, ran to just shy of 7,000 words. Please note: I have never bothered to read any interviews with the stars of the eight Harry Potter movies or with the various directors, producers, or screenwriters involved with those blockbuster projects.

I did this for Fantastic Beasts not because I have lost my mind, or, at least I hope that is not the reason for or a consequence of this largely demeaning exercise. I spent a precious day searching and surfing the pablum of discussions between journalists assigned to the entertainment beat and celebrities using those journalists to create greater interest in their product because I wanted to understand J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

In the not so distant past, if I wanted a greater understanding of Rowling’s work, I re-read the text she wrote. With her Harry Potter adventures and Cormoran Strike mysteries that has proven to be a successful method: read, reflect, re-read, discuss with thoughtful readers, write about, reflect, re-read, chart, et cetera.

But with Fantastic Beasts that method won’t work. Yes, we have a text that purports to be “The Original Screenplay.” It is not, however, the Rowling screenplay used to shoot the film or in which she tells her story. It does not include the six deleted scenes we have been told about (I assume there are more). It does not include the explanations and information available only in exhibits and in the number of movie tie-in books that have been published for the Wizarding World fandom to purchase in the Christmas gift-giving season. There are at last count five revelations with important ramifications that have been discovered by fans in the last two weeks alone and Rowling is making almost daily supplements to what we know on her revitalized jkrowling.com website.

Interpreting a movie is a different thing than reading a book. I have said that before in the context of the difference between the imaginative and sense experiences one has in a book and at the movies. It is true as well because of the significantly different artistry and techniques involved in delivering such antipodal experiences. Here I mean something else.

Reading a book and understanding it for the most part is me and the text as published and, sadly, too often as augmented by continued revelations of the author. ‘Reading a movie,’ especially a blockbuster movie involving hundreds of millions of dollars, I’m learning is a scramble to assemble the text, a definitive text, from the inputs and changes made to the screenwriter’s text by the many collaborators and decision makers involved in making the sausage, not to mention the designers, prop makers, and tie-in books writers.

Today I want to start a five part series on ‘Interpreting Fantastic Beasts’ with a review of all we’ve been told to date about Rowling’s writing process as a new screenwriter. In the next four posts, I hope to look at the filmmakers’ story about Rowling’s efforts, the six cuts we know they made to the original screenplay, the five tie-in story revelations fandom has discovered thus far as well as Rowling’s addenda, and, to conclude, a ‘So What?’ review of what we’ve learned and what it means in understanding and speculating about the five film series.

It starts after the jump!

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