[the_old_crowd] Unsuspected influences

[Richard]

At 13:39 18/12/2005 , Barry Arrowsmith wrote:

>Christmas Eve, 5pm BBC Radio 4, 'Living with Harry Potter.'
>A two-hander - Jo and Stephen Fry.

That's "old news" rather than "new news". It's a repeat of a programme 
broadcast last week. A full transcript is available online:
http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2005/1205-bbc-fry.html


>"And it transpires that Fry's readings have actually affected the way
>Rowling has written subsequent instalments."
>
>Oops.
>Can it really be that Fry's vocal interpretations have slanted how
>those characters have developed later?

It's dangerous to extrapolate full content from a two-sentence summary, 
especially when that summary is designed to (over)sell the original. I 
*suspect* that what the summary is referring to with that comment is JKR's 
realisation that "It's very hard to hiss something with no sibilant in it. 
Someone had hissed something like 'don't do that.' [...] Every time I want 
someone to be hissing, which Snape does quite a lot, I have to check 
there's actually an 's' in it [...]".

>I've commented before that I don't like the films much, that the
>director's view tends to replace the image of the character that had
>developed in my mind as I read the books

Surely that's axiomatic? What's on the screen with any film adaptation *is* 
the director's view of the story and world in question. Of course, that 
view will differ from the views of a significant number of readers, who 
will therefore be unhappy with the outcome. Personally, I just take it as 
just one of many views I encounter and draw appropriate conclusions.

Of course, in the case of blockbuster movies, their ubiquity in the 
"cultural space" can make some viewers question their own perceptions of 
the source material, and give a particular film weight it doesn't deserve. 
In the case of the HP movies, this is made more difficult by the fact that 
JKR is known to have input, and some people assume that the movies' 
perceptions are *her* perceptions, which is a particularly dangerous 
assumption to make. Furthermore, some people have difficulty disassociating 
the images on the screen from the images in their heads when reading the 
books, which further confuses the issue (personally, I don't have that 
problem; I certainly don't see Radcliffe's face - or even hear his voice! - 
when reading).