As Dorothy Parker used to say, “What fresh hell is this?” Goodbye, Harry Potter and the flying broomsticks at Hogwarts. Hello, lovesick witches in South Carolina. Desperately seeking the next idiotic supernatural teenage box-office bonanza to replace the hormonally challenged vampires and oversexed werewolves of the Twilight series, writer-director Richard LaGravenese has dragged out of Read More
Oh my Dumbledorfs: Daniel Radcliffe (or as we like to refer to him, the British Elijah Wood), has come out and admitted that he copulated with fans of his Harry Potter films during a recent interview with The Daily Mirror. No, he didn’t have sex during the interview…you know what we mean.
So while we’re all still reeling from the shock that the boy wizard drinks too much alcohol (and is not that funny at live comedy), now we have to come terms that some lucky Muggle got Harry’s wand in their ____ (whatever the magical apparatus equivalent of a vagina is). Read More
Harry Potter is six feet under and Daniel Radcliffe is understandably looking for ways to move his career in new directions. Full frontal nudity all over the Internet and singing and dancing his way through a recent Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying broadened his fan base beyond the teenybopper rut. Now he’s trying something else: a creepy haunted-house thriller crawling with ghosts from the spirit world called The Woman in Black. It’s not exactly a setback, but it won’t break new ground, either. I’ve had bigger scares from a fish tank. Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe’s range and charm. Read More
In the next issue of Bullett, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe opens up about performing nude in Equus (“some nights there would be some beautiful girl in the front row and I’d be like, Oh fuck, in two hours you’re going to have seen everything”) and whether he wants kids (yes!). In a portion Read More
When Charlie Redmayne came to HarperCollins in 2008 to oversee the book publisher’s digital transformation, the move was greeted with fanfare, a sign that the industry was taking a proactive approach to the possibilities offered by new technology for interactive books. Today the news broke that Mr. Redmayne, who was named chief digital officer of HarperCollins in 2009, has left the company for Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s interactive web site. Pottermore will also be the exclusive retailer for the digital editions of the Harry Potter series, which are not yet available in e-book format. Read More
The Observer has spent a small amount of time tooling around the Beta version of Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s digital fantasmagoria, which is currently open to a select one million users. We’ll fill you in with more details later but so far our exploration of the site has been a somewhat uneventful experience (but Read More
The Observer is still awaiting our welcome e-mail from Pottermore, but today was the first day a lucky few users got to go explore J.K. Rowling’s interactive Potter experience. So far reviews are favorable. Entertainment Weekly reports:
“Those Read More
Last month The Observer managed to “find the magic quill” and register for early access to a Beta version of Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s online book store (this was all done with sober reportorial disinterest, with no childish excitement whatsoever.) It appears that yesterday Pottermore began sending out e-mails to a few of the Read More
The problem with looking to J.K. Rowling for inspiration about how to transition a book franchise into the digital era is that no author can really be compared to J.K. Rowling.
“She’s kind of like the Oprah of children’s books,” said Lorraine Shanley, co-founder of Market Partners International, which consults on digital books.
“I mean, Read More
After the newest Harry Potter movie shattered box office records, The Telegraph reports that Barry Meyer, the chief executive of Warner Brothers, gifted J.K. Rowling with an antique diamond bracelet. It’s very sweet of him because as the richest woman in Britain she really can’t afford silly baubles.
