Episode 69: Tim talks about his disgust with the Harry Potter movie franchise and its insistence on making him feel inadequate. Then, he shares a recreation of a conversation he heard many years ago while hiding behind a curtain in Hollywood. It was a conversation between the higher ups of the Harry Potter movie franchise before they began filming the third movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
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I’ve never worked for a casting agency, so I cannot imagine the difficulties that lie therein. But I can only imagine what a disappointment it must be to have casted a young tot, a whole cast of young tots, to find out that as they age, despite all the practice, despite their access to the greatest acting coaches money can buy, a good three quarters of them can’t act worth a turd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I at least would have been totally fine should the producers of the Harry Potter franchise decided that they’d had enough with the original cast and swapped out the old for a set of new. Just as they could have gleaned over the differences in landscape with some of the dialogue from Hagrid I provided previously, they could have had the new Harry stop, with the new Ron and the new Hermione, and say “Isn’t this great! I mean, how wonderful is it that our emotions are actually believable now! I mean, now I can actually spark some emotional commitment from the viewer because of my competent acting.” See? That totally would have covered the transition.
My final critique with the films is a critique that could be used with almost every movie that is based on a book. I just don’t like their interpretation of it. My mind created a world based on the words I read and the movie didn’t exactly match this mental image. That the producers could not possibly know what I imagined in my mind is completely beside the point! That's their job! To match what's in my head!
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If you enjoy westerns like True Grit or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, check out Tim’s western novel, Dust, available on Amazon in eBook form in addition to being read on the podcast.
For more, visit timdrugan.com.