The Making of the Potterverse (18 page)

Fourteen-year-old British citizen Matthew Lawson raised about $5,000 for his education by offering his signed first edition of
The Chamber of Secrets
at auction. Said the teenager, “I am a great fan of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter and I am sure he would approve of me selling the book to pay for my education. After all, he was lucky enough to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”

Due to her pregnancy, J.K. Rowling served Bloomsbury notice that she would
not
be repeating the massive publicity tour she undertook for the release of
The Goblet of Fire
. In truth, this wasn’t deemed a major problem as the books were considered to be strong enough to generate sales on their own.

Father Peter Fleetwood, a representative of the Vatican, expressed appreciation for the Harry Potter novels because they helped children see the difference between good and evil. He said, “I don’t think there’s anyone in this room who grew up without fairies, magic and angels in their imaginary world.”

The initial print run of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix —
to be published on June 21 — was announced to be 6.8 million.

British actor Michael Gambon was announced as the successor of the late Richard Harris in the role of Professor Albus Dumbledore.

Fox announced that J.K. Rowling would be making an animated appearance on an episode of
The Simpsons
. Executive producer Don Payne explained, “The Simpsons bump into J.K. Rowling outside a bookshop and they talk all about Harry Potter. We’re very excited about the episode; and rest assured, every British cliché will be trotted out to get a laugh.”

Both director Alfonso Cuaron and director-turned-producer Chris Columbus discussed with the media the first week of production of

Prisoner of Azkaban
. Said Cuaron, “I look forward to bringing this intricate story to the screen and sharing it with film audiences around the world. To be entrusted with such rich and beloved material, and given the opportunity to collaborate with this extraordinary cast and crew on the next Harry Potter adventure is an honor.” Added Columbus, “I look forward to seeing it grow as Alfonso and the cast and crew further our imaginations with their truly inspired work. I’m so proud to have been involved in this truly amazing film series, both as a director and a producer.”

The ever-vigilant lawyers working for J.K. Rowling turned their sights on a Russian novel titled
Tanya Grotter and The Magic Double Bass
, written by Dimitri Yemetz, which focuses on the magical adventures of a young Russian girl. Noted Rowling’s lawyers, “There are three grounds: Copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition. It copies story line, plot and the characters.” Yemetz’s Dutch publisher, Byblos, responded, “Tanya Grotter doesn’t harm Harry Potter in any way, rather she is his burlesque sister. Yemetz writes his novels both as a parody to the English hero Harry Potter and as a cultural response to the world hype about the mega-bestseller.” In the end, the courts found that Tanya Grotter was more than just a parody of Harry, and the publishers were ordered not to allow the novel to be made available to the public.

The Oxford Dictionary said that the word “muggle” would be added to its text. The definition reads: “Muggle (noun) In the fiction of J.K. Rowling, a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses, a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way.”

J.K. Rowling and her husband, Dr. Neil Murray, announced the birth of their son, David Gordon Rowling Murray.

While
Prisoner of Azkaban
was being filmed, preparations were already underway for the fourth film,
Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire,
and for a time it seemed possible that the story would be split into two films rather than one. “We started work on the script last Monday,” producer David Heyman said early in the month. “We’re going to shoot it as one and see how it ends up. If it’s too long, then we’ll make it into two.” In the end, of course, it would remain one film.

Comedian Dawn French, who spoofed the Harry Potter films during the Comic Relief telecast, found herself cast in the role of the Fat Lady in
Prisoner of Azkaban
. Said producer Chris Columbus, “Yes, Dawn French is portraying the Fat Lady. I think she’s incredibly funny and her Harry Potter spoof for Comic Relief was pretty amazing.”

An Arkansas judge ordered a ban on Harry Potter books to be lifted, dismissing the notion that the novels encouraged witchcraft.

J.K. Rowling announced that she would appear in front of 4,000 children for a reading of part of
Order of the Phoenix
on June 26.

She said that she would also be taking questions from the audience, and would be interviewed on stage by Stephen Fry, who narrates the
Harry Potter
audio editions. The event, it was later reported, would be broadcast on the Internet as well.

When two copies of the yet-to-be-published
Order of the Phoenix
were found in a field near the printing plant, police were called in to investigate. Shortly thereafter, a pair of 16-year-old boys, an 18-year-old boy and a 44-year-old man were arrested and questioned. Rowling’s lawyers went into action to get a court-ordered sanction against any of the novel’s plot secrets being revealed.

Among the things J.K. Rowling discussed with the
BBC
was her feeling about writing the death of a major character in
Order of the Phoenix —
ultimately revealed to be Sirius Black. “I had rewritten the death, rewritten it and that was it,” she said. “It was definitive. And the person was definitely dead. And I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said to me, ‘What on earth is wrong?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve just killed the person.’ Neil doesn’t know who the person is. And he said, ‘Well, don’t do it then.’ I thought, ‘Well, it just doesn’t work like that. You are writing children’s books, you need to be a ruthless killer.’”

The
Washington Post
featured a story on the explosion of fan fiction on the Internet. “Fan fiction has existed for decades,” noted the story, “but primarily as a fringe hobby among friends who passed along typed or handwritten manuscripts to one another.
But thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, it has jumped into the popular consciousness with a following so large that it is now a topic of graduate theses and [the focus of] writing contests and a significant marketing outlet for media corporations. One of the largest collections of fan fiction is built on Harry Potter. On FanFiction.net alone, the granddaddy of fan-fiction sites, there are some 75,000 stories about the character.”

The
New York Daily News
found itself in deep trouble when they apparently received early information on
Order of the Phoenix
and went public with a number of tidbits. Rumors of lawsuits from Rowling and her publishers began flying, though apparently nothing ever came of them. Spokesman Ken Frydman said, “We will vigorously defend any action and are confident we did nothing wrong journalistically or legally.”

The
CBS
Early Show
offered a story on the growing anticipation for
Order of the Phoenix
and the sales records broken in bookstores, both traditional and online. Amazon’s Bill Carr noted, “We have more than 660,000 preorders we’ve taken for
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
in the U.S. and more than one million worldwide.”

Zap2it.com reported that props were stolen from the Glencoe, Scotland, location for
Prisoner of Azkaban
.

J.K. Rowling was interviewed by the BBC, where she admitted that she had begun to feel a bit guilty about the wealth she had accumulated thanks to Harry Potter. “The biggest jump for me,” she said, “was the American advance which was enough for me to buy a house, not outright, but you know we’d been renting until then. And I didn’t feel guilty, I felt scared at that point. Because I thought I mustn’t blow this; I’ve got some money, I mustn’t do anything stupid with it. And then, yeah, I felt guilty. I mean, at
least I could see cause and effect. I knew I had worked quite hard for quite a long time.”

Theage.com offered an in-depth look at the popularity of Harry Potter in an article called “Why Harry Potter is So Magical.” In that piece they note, “Rowling’s signal achievement has been to take the traditional boarding school story and to link it with a world of magic, with a universe that is full of deep wells of good and evil activated at the touch of a wand in the hand of a master wizard. . . . It’s a wonderful world, the world of Hogwarts, because it is deeply rooted in the world we know, of eccentric schoolteachers and kids (even nice kids) being cruel to each other. But then there is the magic — that’s why everyone’s here — and it summons up a world of dragons and giant spiders and every kind of horror and threat.... Rowling has created the highest level of bestseller popular fiction: a series of books that are going to entertain and enchant young people as well as their grandparents. She has written a set of stories that people will be reading for a long time yet and that will continue to be made into films and television shows the way Sherlock Holmes is or Agatha Christie or Superman.”