A wizard of Hollywood

Kloves had considered directing "Wonder Boys" himself. "But I'm not sure I'm ever going to want to direct anything that's not an original, and when the time came to put or shut up I didn't want to. There was family stuff; my daughter was entering first grade; I didn't feel like I should direct it. I loved it but I had to let it go. All I feared was that the interpretation would be dead wrong. But I had a really great time with Curtis. He saw it the same way I saw it; there were never any ego problems. It's hard to quantify, but the script was made better by me talking to him and focusing with him."

Hanson and Kloves collaborated closely on and off for a year. "We kept tweaking the voice-over, doing all the usual things." And unusual things, too. When Hanson settled on his locations, he would send Kloves "real blueprints, even if it might only change one line, because it would allow me to see the scene better. We both feel that what the actors and crew read on the page should reflect what they see when they're standing there."

A screenwriter friend who was a veteran adapter had advised Kloves, "If you find something good, take it, because someday you'll be doing a book and you won't be able to take anything from it." Kloves seized on as much of Chabon's juicy dialogue as he could, including its literary references.

"One thing I am real allergic to is preciousness," he says. "But I found little of that in the book. Any references that were out in front and meant something we used; we figured it would be a bonus for anyone in the audience who would get them." When the Douglas character has lost his manuscript, and his editor brings up that [Thomas Babington] Macaulay and [Ernest] Hemingway once lost theirs -- "well, 90 percent of the audience won't know who Macaulay is, and 50 percent won't know who Hemingway is. But Curtis didn't want to talk down to the audience. Curtis said we should write this for our best audience, and not feel we had to make this understandable for kids who may know only 'Star Wars.' We wanted to make this movie for the right reasons."

That's Kloves' hope for his Harry Potter movie, too. "Adapting the first book in the series is tough because the plot doesn't lend itself to adaptation as well as the next two books; Volumes 2 and 3 lay out more naturally as movies, since the plots are more compact and have more narrative drive. The first one is about exposing you to this world of a boy who grows up in a cabinet and finds out who he really is -- that he is the son of wizards who are now dead and that he has inherited their talent -- and then goes to a school to explore that talent.

"It came about because a little less than a year ago Warner Bros. sent over this raft of coverages on books [that is, synopses of upcoming titles being considered as film adaptations]. I rarely read this stuff, but I don't know why, this time I did, and it really felt like Harry Potter was thrown in as the Cracker Jack prize. It was the only thing I was even remotely interested in. It stunned them. But I responded to it. I liked the feeling of the book -- there is genuine edge and genuine darkness to it. One reason it's so popular with children is that there's no pandering whatsoever.

"By the way, you couldn't tell a thing from the coverage -- the book was too hard to distill, so I went out and bought it. At the first page, J.K. Rowling had me. The book is written with tremendous charm. And having a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy, I felt it would be a wonderful movie to do for my kids. Because of my kids, I was able to read the book with different eyes. I read so many books to my children. Everybody should read to kids: It's amazing to do with any regularity because they're so open to a story and so smart.

"The first thing I said to Warner Bros. was that I love the characters -- and that is the whole movie. Obviously you need a plot, but the charm of the movie should be these kids, and you have to be as faithful as possible. The picture has to be British, and it has to be true to the kids. I'm speaking from my own experience, but I find that children 7 and under respond less to special effects than to characters and to what's happening to characters. And Warner Bros. seems to be wholeheartedly embracing this approach -- that if you don't care about the kids in 'Harry Potter,' you're not going to care about the movie, no matter how remarkable the dragon or the flying broomsticks."

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