Americans...
I was just wondering if it was mainly Americans (or Aussies/Chinese/whatever)who were posting and voting, or whether it was more of a cult thing over there and it is mainly seen by the British.
shareI'm an American and saw this years ago when it was first broadcast on PBS here in San Francisco. I rented it from Netflix recently and was blown away again by it. I wanted to rewatch some of it before I saw the American version. Somehow I knew I'd be disappointed in the recent film, and I was. Downey's performance doesn't even come close to Michael Gambon's. The story also had to be cut down so much for the recent film most of the good bits are gone.
I've read that Potter himself did the adaptation for the film version shortly before he died in 1994. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm eagerly waiting for the last three episodes of the original from Netflix to help me forget how awful the American version was.
So, not a good idea to rent the film version, then? I didn't think it would be, because I don't think this story can be compressed into 2 hours (even if the great man himself did it, which I think he did, though who knows how much editing there was) but it's good to see some confirmation.
shareSadly, yes Potter did adapt his own work. Hate to admit that. But in all fairness, it is the money/the studio and the production heads that really control the development of a script. I am sure he had many notes on changes, etc. It was not a good script, maybe if one didn't know the original at all...?
But the updates that they tried were not good. The music didn't need to be changed and the setting...they just made a mess of it. Personally I don't think that the material can be edited as severly as it needs to be to fit a 2 hr film format and still tell te story effectively.
I saw it first time around when i was 13 on BBC TV. I remember some of the morality discussions around it in the newspapers, and on TV. Despite that it was regarded as an instant classic as i remember.
I am still in awe of it... it is to the moving image what Ulysses is to the printed word,
If I remember correctly, Potter wrote the screenplay for the American remake, in order that it wouldn't get butchered in the same way that 'Pennies from Heaven' was. Sadly, without his presence during its production, it fell very much the sae way.
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