Super JK
No one will be offended if we say that JK Rowling is the smartest writer to walk the floor on this planet. Spontaneously, she was able to stop at the right moment, that is, at the peak of his success: "there will be no more Harry Potters", she said, hinting at a certain creative crisis. While most of its competitors drew their revolver when they were asked to publish their works digitally, JK not only prepared an interactive ebook edition of each book, but also created a specific online resource (Pottermore) where to make them known, interact with readers and, why not?, sell them. The iPad versions that fully accepted Steve Jobs' invitation to go beyond the "print experience" with ebooks were very nice.
After having sold quite a few, JK decided to give the ebooks, on his own commercial terms of course, to large distribution platforms such as Apple and Amazon (who had rolled like cats in love to get them) and we can bet that it was the latter who left us the shirt. Mrs. Rowling, who had started writing in pubs because she couldn't afford to heat the house, had therefore more than arrived: the richest woman in the United Kingdom, as a home an immense castle villa with a park worthy of the queen guarded by ferocious dogs like witnessed director Chris Columbus spending a couple of hours up a tree for forgetting the fence exit code on JK's property
Get away from Potter
As Rowling is a workaholic as well as an intellectually kinetic person, the quiet life was not for her. And in fact this break was, in some way, functional in launching a new phase of her career, that of crime novelist: new genre, new target. Quite a leap: it is as if Valentino Rossi passed from MotoGP to Formula One.
Precisely for this reason, a coup de théâtre was needed to bring JK back to the center of media and public attention. Here JK looked for a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, for her first thriller, The Cuckoo's Call, and then launched a real media bomb through a piloted tweet that attributed the paternity of the work to Rowling. When the official confirmation arrived, the book, which was lying around Amazon's umpteen thousandth place, climbed the rankings of Amazon and all the other charts in the world to become number one.
In reality, as a mystery writer JK has not had the success that smiled at him with Harry Potter. But as we know JK, in addition to being a great writer, she is also a superb organizer of culture and entertainment and it was this second aspect of her talent that came into play. And here is JK's new plan: to give continuity to the Harry Potter series with an eighth story that breaks with the previous ones but is also the natural continuation. JK could rest assured that the Harry Potter fan base would follow her into any territory no matter what form the character would take in fiction. And it actually happened, even if there were some contained and noisy defection.
Potter comes in through the window
And here comes the billion-dollar idea: not a new novel, but a five-hour play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, divided into two parts. It opened its doors to the public in London at the Palace Theater on Monday 25 July 2016. The play was presented as the official sequel to the seven books/films. Tickets sold out until next May for both performances. "Moral" embargo also respected by theater critic of the "New York Times", Ben Brantley, who in his review was careful not to reveal the slightest detail about the show for which he only had words of strong appreciation. Upon exiting the theatre, spectators received a pin reading #KeepTheSecrets, a pledge that will no doubt be kept out of respect for Harry Potter fans. It is to be certain that The Curse Child will break the box office record of the blockbuster Hamilton, close to a billion dollars, and as such considered the most commercially successful musical of all time.
To then return to the book
But the more interesting matter, for us, however, is not this. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a story, yes, conceived by Rowling, but written by screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne and staged director John Tiffany. Well so far so nothing to be surprised. It is in going further that JK's genius is expressed
Thorne's screenplay became a book, the eighth (official) book in the Harry Potter series. The book is not a novelization of the play (i.e. a prose rewriting of the script), but a mere replica of the screenplay printed on paper and bound. Scholastic, the US publisher of Harry Potter, has pulled the beauty of 4,5 million copies of this book. 2,5 million were booked in the first 48 hours. The supply chain of Harry Potter publishers in the world has already activated for the global launch which in English-speaking countries took place on 31 July and in the others it will take place in September 2016.
JK is a boon to the publishing world; she has the same effect as lowering the interest rate of money on world stock exchanges, the economy and employment. It amounts to a veritable stimulus package for the publishing industry. And you will see the results soon. We can bet that by the end of 2016 the book will reach 30 million copies sold and, by making people go to bookstores, it will transform 2016 into an excellent year for the whole sector. JK is definitely good for the business and God knows there's a need for that.
There will also be a bet that there will be a film once the play enters its waning phase. The transition from screenplay to novelization is not a new idea: it started in the 20s with King Kong and then all the big and popular hits on the big and small screens became books. But an operation like the one concocted around the latest Harry Potter, which is not even a novelization, and has never been seen on this scale before. It is Rowling's latest diamond and evidence of the culture industry's vibrant vitality. But if you're not JK you have to make do. And someone really thought about making do.
Rummaging through the trash…
De André's verse “nothing comes from diamonds, flowers are born from manure” well identifies the business model of a daring Hollywood startup with the caption name of Adaptive Studio. Its founders are certainly not lacking in imagination and initiative as pointed out by Alexandra Alter, the NYTimes literary critic, who dedicated an article to this experience (A Hollywood Start-Up Sees New Life in Dead Movie Scripts) in the New York newspaper. The core of Adaptive's business is indeed a script, a screenplay, but not a screenplay for a hit show or a script for a blockbuster film, but a manuscript that has never generated anything that has been seen or read by any audience . This is a manuscript that was purchased or optioned by a studio or publisher and put away in a drawer to turn yellow forever.
It's not that it happens infrequently. The big studios and big publishers buy and option projects, even with purposes other than producing or publishing, such as removing possible competing projects from the market or barring them from the competitor on duty. Then it happens that many of these projects are placed in default because they do not fully meet the profitability criteria required by the shareholders and expected by the market. An immense landfill has therefore come to be formed in which there is truly everything: the boot with a hole in it, but also the good pair of shoes which, with a polish, can still be worn on important occasions. That's exactly what Adaptive's “trashbusters” are all about.
From old script to book to new script to movie
In fact, the Adaptive Studio team goes in search of rejected manuscripts, acquires the intellectual property for all media, entrusts them to its own specific team (Adaptive Book) which selects a writer with the task of making a novelization of them. . The writer works on a trace of setting, plot and characters identified by Adaptive Book which draws up a "blueprint".
When the book is ready and in distribution, a different team of analysts and writers draws a new script from the book to be produced into a film for the cinema or television market. A process which, in its various stages, truly resembles the recycling of waste.
Perrin Chiles, the CEO of Adaptive, used these words to describe the studio's business model: “We basically rummage through studio trash to find stuff that's been discarded. We want those things for which all hope has been lost and we take the crumbs that remain on the table”. Mr Chiles's, comments Alter, is only a slight exaggeration, because that's exactly what happens. It's not as outlandish and desperate an idea as it might seem, far from it.
Will the Lazarus effect work?
To date Adaptive has purchased 50 scripts, 25 of which are from Miramax. The founders of Adaptive come from the Santa Monica studio founded by Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein. For its part, Adaptive Book, the publishing arm, has published a dozen books based on these scripts and plans to publish 18 more over the next year and a half. Eight of these novels are being worked on to make a film with a budget that varies between 8 million and 5 million dollars.
Booksellers really like what Adaptive is doing. Barnes & Noble has pledged to give special exposure to the titles in its 640 stores in exchange for sales exclusivity for the first six months.
The first film, Coin Heist, built with this technique is in post-production. Obviously this is an important test bed for measuring the reactions of the public and critics. The original Coin Heist script dates back to 1998 and has been in a drawer for 15 years. Then in 2013 Adaptive arrived which resurrected it by changing the setting, the characters and the target. Now it's a story aimed at young adults (the protagonists are four high school students who carry out a plan to rob the state mint in Philadelphia). The novelization was entrusted to Elisa Ludwig who made it into a good novel.
At this point Adaptive brought in a screenwriter, Emily Hagins, to write the script for the film. Original script writer William Osborne, who also wrote the Scorpion King script, received a $1000 fee and credits. “It wasn't going anywhere, and I thought this was a great opportunity,” Osborne told Alter.
A wonderful opportunity indeed. It is precisely these initiatives of product innovation, continuing Harry Potter as a stage show also packaged for book readers and the recovery of lost manuscripts to transform them into books, films and TV series, that can save prestigious and secular industries like that of books and theater from the inevitable erosion brought about by destructive forms of entertainment and information such as those that are revealed with the digital revolution.
