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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
How one artist turned a kids movie into a poetic masterpiece J.K. Rowling never could've imagined.
Jun 22, 2004 | On the day "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" opened, as they say, at theaters everywhere, some 50 people gathered in a concrete-walled screening room in Brooklyn, N.Y., that was the only theater anywhere showing the other new Harry Potter movie, "Wizard People, Dear Reader."
Actually, "Wizard People" isn't a movie, exactly. It was conceived as an audiobook that tells the story -- or rather, a story -- of Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts Academy. Creator Brad Neely, 27, recorded narration to be played while watching the first Potter movie, 2001's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," on mute. In the projection booth, Myles Kane of the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival, which sponsored the screening along with Stay Free magazine, tried frantically to get the sound and picture in sync using an iPod and DVD player. But the DVD kept starting at the wrong point, or not starting at all. An error message flashed on the screen: "Operation currently prohibited by disc." Stay Free publisher Carrie McLaren chuckled. The screening itself was quite possibly prohibited by law.
"If they wanted to take a hard line on protecting their copyright, they could," said McLaren. "Wizard People" belongs to a small but growing movement -- in the loosest, most accidental sense of the word -- of what she calls "illegal art." D.J. Dangermouse's "Grey Album," which reinvents Jay-Z's "Black Album" through the filter of the Beatles' "White Album," is the most notorious example. "Art that appropriates other work is one of the few taboos that are left," said McLaren. "The more people see something like [Wizard People], though, the more they're going to be inspired to do it themselves."
"That wasn't a consideration," swore Neely, an Austin, Texas, writer/actor/cartoonist/toy store employee. "I hadn't ever thought, Is this wrong? or, Am I championing some sort of idea? I was just like, I'm going to make something funny."
In Brooklyn, the audience was laughing. The DVD had been scrapped for a more reliable VHS tape from Blockbuster, and "Wizard People" was in progress.
[Listen to an excerpt here.]
Neely explained the genesis of this fractured yet oddly literary retelling of "Sorcerer's Stone."
"I was out at a bar with some friends," he recalled. "There was this guy playing pool all by himself with headphones and sunglasses on, and we were just having a really fun time postulating, What could he possibly be listening to? And just out of the blue, I started doing that voice talking like he was listening to a book on tape of 'Harry Potter,' and ad-libbing 'Harry Potter' scenes from what I remembered of the movie."
That voice, as it happened, was a dead-on impersonation of gravel-mouthed, pre-slam poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. Neely doesn't expect many people to get that obscure joke, but doing an impression allowed him to make the narrator of "Wizard People" a character in his own right. "If it was just me taking shots at the movie," he explained, "there's no story there. But now there's this mystery element of, Who is this guy?"
Neely's "naive and sometimes overexcited" narrator tells a story that very closely follows J.K. Rowling's original one. His main departure is in subtly altering the personalities of the main characters and the natures of their relationships. Also, he keeps getting some of the names wrong. You begin to wonder if maybe he's just not paying attention.
The result is very different from the gag-fests of precursors such as "Mystery Science Theater 3000" or Woody Allen's "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" "I didn't want to do 'Mystery Science Theater,'" said Neely. "Anybody can make fun of a shitty movie or get a few good lines in. What I wanted to do was not make fun of the movie" -- which he actually likes -- "but build something around that preexisting thing."
"It seems almost an homage to oral tradition," said McLaren. "Before we had mass media and electronic media, how people entertained themselves was telling stories. And people would tell the same story, but every person would tell it a different way. You'd add certain things, subtract other things, blend in something else, and that in itself is an art form."
