The Gaunts question

[Carol]

zanooda wrote:
>
> The WB announced today that the casting is complete for the HBP movie. 
> They gave the names of Boy!Voldemort and Teen!Voldemort actors, but
they didn't even mention the Gaunt family. Does this mean that there
will be no Gaunts at all in the movie? They can't leave the Gaunts
out, or can they? I really wanted to have a look at Merope ...
> 
> http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=213122

Carol responds:

I'll bet you're right. It looks as if they've cut the five or so
Pensieve scenes down to two (eleven-year-old Tom at the orphanage and
sixteen-year-old Tom with Slughorn). No Gaunts, no Mrs. Cole, no
teenage Slytherins with Tom in Slughorn's office (unless they're
unbilled extras), not Bob Ogden, no Hepzibah Smith. Dumbledore will
probably sum it all up (Tom's mother gave his father a love potion,
his father deserted them, the mother sold her only possession, a
locket, before giving birth and dying, Tom later murdered his father
and grandfather for revenge). If they leave out Morfin, they'll
probably have Tom steal the ring from his father's finger. They have
to keep the ring, after all, and we know they're using CGI for DD's
injured hand.

Since they're keeping Quidditch (sigh!) and there's so much good stuff
that really can't be cut, it makes sense to eliminate the Gaunts. I
expect they'll also eliminate the Dursleys (and certainly, Fudge and
the Muggle PM). I do hope that they don't shorten it as much as they
did OoP, and, most of all, I hope they don't cut dialogue from the
books to include extraneous material, as they did in PoA, GoF, and
OoP. If you have a long book to make into a movie, especially a book
that will work cinematically as I think HBP will, it makes sense to
prune carefully, simplify the main plot, snip nonessential subplots,
and add virtually nothing. (The HBP subplot and Snape/Draco subplot
are, presumably, essential and should be retained.) If we ever get a
Harry Potter TV series, which could be much more episodic and faithful
to the books than a set of films, all those quirky minor characters
and interesting little subplots could be worked in, and spread over
seven years and some 175 episodes, all the plotholes would be
considerably less visible than they are in the books.

Carol, who thinks that viewers who haven't read the books might be
confused by the Gaunts and thinks they're expendable, much as she
would have liked to see poor Merope