In fact, one of Neely's inspirations was a less radical version of this tradition that is still prevalent in the theater world. "Every play has an intended tone," he observed. "But whenever anybody does a production of that, it's fair game" to turn tragedy into farce or slapstick into melancholy, simply by devising new line readings or stage directions. Neely's friends have told him that his remix of "Harry Potter" is more true to the whimsical spirit of the novel than the literal-minded original film. That wasn't his intent, though. He's never read the book. (And at least one serious "Harry" fan disagrees: a 10-year-old boy who wandered into the Brooklyn screening left after five minutes, finding it no less tedious than the art exhibit his mother was looking at upstairs. Neely dissuades children from watching "Wizard People" anyway, rife as it is with "fuck words").

After recording his narration -- improvising each scene a few times until he was happy with it -- Neely began dropping CDs off at Austin video stores. "I said, I want to give this to you guys and you can rent it as a free supplement if anybody comes to rent 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.'" Meanwhile, a friend of a friend got it into the New York Underground Film Festival last March, and word began to spread. McLaren got in touch and posted the audio tracks for free downloading on her Web site, Illegal-art.org, where it keeps company with dozens of more famous copyright-dicey works -- the "Grey Album," Todd Haynes' "Superstar," the 1967 poster "Disneyland Memorial Orgy."

"One thing everybody likes to ask is, Are you afraid that Warner Bros. is gonna come and get you? You know, those guys in black suits?" Neely said. But Stay Free's lawyer assured him that any challenge could be fended off, and Neely is fairly comfortable with the ethics of his art. "I haven't really done a gigantic amount of thinking about it," he admitted, "but I don't think what I did is any kind of wrong. Especially seeing as how I'm not making any flow from it."

That Neely isn't trying to profit from his work is the main reason he's probably safe, though as McLaren pointed out, corporations sometimes do sic their lawyers on people who are just trying to have a little fun. The derivative artworks may not technically be illegal, but most individuals realize that it's much easier to give in than to devote months or years -- and plenty of money -- to a court battle. And the law has impeded "Wizard People" at least a little. The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival could easily have avoided its audio troubles by burning a pre-synced DVD in advance -- and McLaren was eager to give out these goodies at the door. But that would have violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, something corporations always take seriously. Designed to fight piracy, the DMCA has become infamous for just such unintended consequences.

There is another way around the syncing problem, of course. At the next public showings of "Wizard People, Dear Reader" -- in Austin next month, followed by a few screenings in the Pacific Northwest -- Neely will be performing live, having just finished transcribing his voice-over. After that, he'll begin working on his next adaptation, a retelling of "Jurassic Park" (doing the second Harry Potter movie, he said, "would be pretty boring"). He thinks it will pan out, though he's had a few false starts with other projects, including an attempt to turn Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" into a biography of George Washington. "There's a very slim margin of movies that this sort of thing works with," he has come to realize. "It's kind of weird I just luckily picked one the first time that was the best choice."

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