Fatastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald - Prerelease Thread

Oh, good grief, that's a silly and legalistic way of looking at it. A screenplay is just the instruction manual for creating a film, not a complete work in itself. It's kinda like the outline to a novel, a preliminary step in the process. Or rather, an intermediate step, since the script is preceded by an outline, but of course there's a whole additional stage involved (several, in fact) in creating a filmed work as opposed to a prose one.

Besides, surely Rowling was consulting with Yates, Kloves, and the rest of the film team from the beginning of the creative process, since she was creating these as films to begin with. And as a producer on the films -- not merely an executive producer, but a producer, which is a less honorary and more hands-on title in the feature industry -- she no doubt has a say in the decisions made in translating script into film. So you're positing a dividing line that doesn't exist. Both script and film are collaborations between Rowling and the others.

Closer in what sense? Because she's white? She's also incredibly, sublimely beautiful, while book Hermione is much more plain-looking. So I'd say both actresses are equally far removed from the book character, just in different ways.

 

Hermione's ethnicity is never described in the novels, so there's no actual Canon information as to whether or not she's Caucasian, Black, etc., something that Rowling herself pointed out on Twitter.

That's really neither here nor there, though.

 

I can understand why you think it's silly, but I have my reasons for doing so, mainly in the area of control of detail. We can reasonably assume that anything in the script is there because JKR intended it to be there and may therefore be regarded as fully canon ("book canon" if you prefer), whereas even as a producer, she doesn't have the same level of control of the fine detail of what ends up on-screen, so therefore the end product is semi or provisional canon at best ("film canon", but perhaps at a higher level than the Harry Potter 1 to 8.)

I can accept that (particularly in the later films where Emma's hair becomes blonder and less bushy both of which specifically contradict the (partial) description of her from canon). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she doesn't prove that Hermione is black, merely that she could be non-white.

True. But it would be odd for Harry - who noted the ethnic background of most of his casual acquaintances - to fail to note that Hermione wasn't white at least once. However, if she is non-white (and the viability of this goes up if we allow for 2nd or 3rd generation mixed race), then she is almost certainly black, as the non-white population was already small in the late 90s to early 00s (around 8%), nearly two-thirds of those were of African or Carribean descent (ie black or white). An Indian! or Chinese!Hermione would be vanishly unlikely to impossible compared to Black!Hermione's possible but not probable.

 

But the problem is with the idea that "canon" can be applied to only parts of a work in progress. It doesn't work that way! "Canon" is not some mystical purity that's attached only to one person, it's just a description used for an overall body of work. If the author creates a new work in collaboration with others, then they are all creators of that canonical work.

I mean, even a prose novel is a collaboration. Rowling would've had input from her editor, and she probably got suggestions and advice from family and friends and beta readers, and some of the later books probably incorporated some ideas she'd gotten from discussions with the filmmakers, etc. No writer is an island. Canon is not about segregating the different influences that go into a work, it's just about saying whether the completed work is part of the original continuity or not.

My whole point is, it's problematical in itself to fixate on "black/white" as the exclusive thing that matters when considering a person's appearance or identity. Nobody is just their ethnicity. And there are differences between people that matter vastly more than how much melanin is in their cells. Even just physically, there are attributes like height, build, facial proportions, etc. that can be more similar between two people of different ethnicities, or more different between people of the same ethnicity. So it doesn't make sense to see ethnicity as the single, dealbreaking factor in whether two people (or an actor and a character) resemble each other. For instance, back in the '90s, I felt that someone like Michael Dorn or Tony Todd would've made a vastly better Batman than Michael Keaton. Being white was practically the only thing Keaton had in common with Bruce Wayne, and it was hardly enough for me.

 

Which, as far as we have been told, it is. At least until we are specifically told that it isn't, as the "book canon" and "film canon" are now a single whole going forward (unlike the HP books v movies that had specifically contradicted each other at times).

Despite what I posted above, I agree. While IMO Keaton was the 'least bad' of the three Burton-Schumacher Batman, looking back I think they could have done far better, personally I would've gone for someone like Cuba Gooding Jr or maybe Samuel L Jackson as they seems like they'd have a better balance between the "Bruce" side (which Keaton was tolerable at) and the "Batman" (which they didn't 'get' until Bale).

 

Okay, I guess that answers my question. The HP movies were just an interpretation of the books, so if you want the most complete and authentic version of the story, you need to read the books. But with Fantastic Beasts, there's only the one version, so it's the version, the most complete, authentic iteration of the story you can get.

It just feels weird to me to have one set of movies be the secondary incarnation and the other set of movies from the same producers and director be the primary incarnation. I mean, I don't treat canon vs. adaptation/tie-in as a moralistic value judgment the way some fans do, but my organized, scientific little brain likes to categorize things and to have distinct cubbyholes for each variant continuity of a franchise.

Just imagine how much more confusing it would be if there were novelizations of the FB movies...

 

Oh, it's definately a bit weird I agree with you on that one.

Given the timeline, I think a single anthology novel is probably more likely, particularly if CoG and the other sequels follow FB in only focusing on a few days of narrative. But yeah...

 

Further messing with @Christopher's head, we have the additional Canon of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - written largely by Jack Thorne but fully endorsed and supervised by Rowling - and the contents of Pottermore.

 

I don't know if it makes a difference, but they did release the script for FBaWtFTW. I think we are still getting copies at the Wal-Mart where I work.

 

Yeah... that's certainly not "film canon" but - as it's only endorsed but not written by JKR - I'd characterise it as "semi-canon" at best as part of "primary canon" (the HP books plus FB).

 

Cursed Child is decidedly "Primary Canon", as are the contents of Pottermore... hence why I said that they're there to further mess with @Christopher's brain.

 

Those don't bother me at all, because there wasn't anything in those formats before. As I said, what I find discordant is going from one set of movies that were just adaptations of the real thing to another set of movies from the same creators that are the real thing.

And, dude, I've been putting up annotations to my fiction on my own website(s) since 2003, more than twice as long as Pottermore's site has even existed. So why in the world do you imagine I'd have any trouble understanding it?

 

^ Pottermore is less "annotations" and more a Canonical "wiki" structured like an Encyclopedia, but some people dismiss the site and its contents as non-Canonical because there's stuff on there that "wasn't in the book".

My attempt and light-hearted humor also apparently failed, despite the smiley.

 

I don't know, I didn't see anything too excitng here.

 

One thing stood out: Thestrals!!

 

Looks good to me. I'm curious how they're going to end up bringing Jacob back into play after the way the first one ended.
Looks like we get some cool new locations in wizarding Paris.

 

Yes it does look good and old-school Hogwarts should be a blast.

He gets his memory back, which wasn't fully erased anyway.

 

Yeah, Hogwarts should be fun. Do we know if any of the other professors from Harry Potter's time would be around then?

Yeah, that seems clear, I'm just wonder how/why he gets his memory back, and why Newt thinks it's necessary to bring him with to Paris.

 

Horace Slughorn seems like a decent candiate, one of the exam proctors - Griselda Marchbanks - is known to be active in this period (she examined Dumbledore decades earlier) but the other established characters are too young.

 

Known Hogwarts professors besides Dumbledore as of the 1920s:
Armando Dippett, Headmaster
Galatea Merrythought, Defense against the Dark Arts


We know of two other professors, Herbert Beery and Silvanus Kettleburn (mentioned in Prisoner of Azkaban) who taught at the school during Armando Dippett's tenure as Headmaster, but we have no information about whether or not they would've been teaching at the school during or after Newt's time there or at the time of this film (1929).

Cuthbert Binns is another professor we know of who taught at the school, but we don't have enough information to say for certain whether or not he was teaching there - alive or dead - during Newt's time at the school or during the events of this film.

One person that we know who was not yet teaching at the school, though, is Horace Slughorn, as his tenure didn't begin until 1931.