Hello again, everyone! I want to apologize for allowing this thread to fall into dormancy. There's nothing I can really say that can justify my absence, other than to reiterate that my
other thread has always come first, and over the last few months I got rather bogged down in my writing over there. However, I've recently decided to slow the pace of those updates, partly in order to dedicate more time to HPSS. But first, as always, for my long,
long overdue replies to your insightful comments...
I figured as much, but it fits with the character, stutterer as he is. But don't forget that Palin also did phenomenal work in
Brazil and
GBH, so he's no stranger to serious parts. I think he might be the best candidate thus far.
Our problem with Palin is Quirrell is that he's too old -
way too old. He's even older than Alan Rickman! The character is clearly intended to be relatively young - only been teaching for a few years, easily corruptible by Voldemort, and of course, more easily intimidated by Snape and even his own students.
I think that two trappings we talked about when considering possible Quirells apply here, too:
-too famous for the first season (Palin being out of budget unless being talked into the role by grandkids/nieces/nephews)
-name to big for the character (employing Michael "Pilatus" Palin on such a minor role might giveaway the main villain-character of Quirell by itself)
These are also very good reasons to exclude Palin.
Hörnla said:
I also agree that the Young marauders should be played by folks in the early 20s, but different actors than those who portray them in Harry's "present". American movies got us used to older actors playing High School Students anyways.
Also, if the flashbacks have a sort of "period piece"-feel (-> à la Chamber of Secrets), we more readily accept older faces because we feel that "people looked different then"
I think that's how we're going to approach the casting. The emerging cohort to play the adult Marauder generation was mostly born in the late 1950s, so casting actors who were born in the early 1980s allows for a full quarter-century of aging between them - which more than covers the gap depicted in the novels.
I also think, surprisingly enough, that Daniel Day-Lewis, in a moment of spontaneity, would want to get involved, too, if they approached him. He seems the kind of guy who'd keep his fee low just to be able to do something like this.
There are a few problems with Day-Lewis: he was on hiatus at the time that the series would commence production ITTL; granted, this isn't a problem in that we don't
need a full-time Voldemort actor until the fourth season (which would film in 2003), and by then, he had returned to acting with
Gangs of New York in the previous year. However, look at
his IMDb filmography: it is
very sparse, and seems to follow the "one all-encompassing project at a time, with breaks in between" philosophy of a man truly dedicated to his craft. I just don't see him making that kind of years-long, intermittent commitment to
The Adventures of Harry Potter.
Now, we still need to figure out some more of the main kid rôles, for sure.
This is the major stumbling block when it comes to the casting - no doubt about it. We've made some progress, as you're about to see when you scroll down to look at the updated list, but it has definitely been limited, with more than one "out there" placeholder candidate.
Dan1988 said:
I definitely agree on that.
Then consider it done
Dan1988 said:
The funny thing about that is that, if Wiki is believed, before 1952 all radio sets (and presumably any experimental TV sets as well, as 1952 is the year when CBFT/ch2, Montréal signed on for the first time) were licensed, and not so much for funding public broadcasting. After 1952, all "home-type" receivers were exempt from licensing. Now there's an easy POD waiting to be used for such a thing if one wanted to add a licence fee mechanism for the CBC or a CBC analogue.
It may or may not stop advertising from being found on the CBC, but at least it would give the CBC a dedicated funding stream.
That is fascinating, although of course not particularly relevant to this timeline. Perhaps some
other timeline project, with a much earlier POD?
Dan1988 said:
Not surprisingly so, though CBC and even CTV have had some good programmes, which with the CBC was even more evident with their all-Canadian primetime lineup as there were some decent programmes in there. The understatement here is that French-Canadians, by contrast, overwhelmingly prefer Canadian programming because most of it is home-made, so Radio-Canada - the CBC's French half, hence why the official corporate name is "Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio-Canada", or "CBC/Radio-Canada" for short - is far more likely to have huge hits than the CBC and hence retain more loyal audiences. What few non-Canadian programmes there are are largely steered towards either big-hit American programmes (far more common on TVA and TQS/V), European programmes (mainly on Télé-Québec, which is Québec's version of PBS, and on the cable channels TV5 Québec Canada, which is part-owned by the CBC, and TV5MONDE), or movies (which is all the French-Canadian terrestrial channels). So Anglophone Canadians and Francophone Canadians have long been accustomed to separate programming, so having HP air on two of the main networks in Canada - one English, one French - will be a big deal, for sure.
Well, I'm always happy to do my part to promote federal unity
Dan1988 said:
Who knows, a positive reaction in Canada would definitely help vis-à-vis its showing in the US. The French dub from Radio-Canada could also air on TV5's United States feed (yes, there's a dedicated feed of TV5 just for the US).
It makes for a nice reversal of American shows that can only be seen by checking out the US network feeds (or picking up their signals), as neither CTV nor Global decided to pick up the shows for simulcast. (Speaking from personal experience, most of the TGIF block on ABC in the late 1990s was left alone, for example.)
Dan1988 said:
How about Thursday? Traditionally, Thursdays were when the CBC aired its arts programming.
Thursday would be a big gamble, even in ordinary circumstances. But in the 2000-01 season, we're looking at one of the most celebrated nights in television history.
Survivor and
Friends at 8:00 (and
Whose Line on ABC, for the record - no wonder that show never stood a chance).
Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?,
Will & Grace,
and the first season of
CSI at 9:00. (And
ER at 10:00.) The only viable timeslot for that evening is, fortunately, the one you recommend at 7:00 (against
Wheel of Fortune and
Jeopardy!).
Dan1988 said:
The featurettes could work, or even alternating between those and airing more or less the same version as the BBC (with suitable breaks for the commercials). Of course, were it not for the failure that was
Prime Time News, I'd have suggested a small (say, about 5 minute) news update, but that honestly wouldn't work well as
Prime Time News demonstrated. So the featurettes it is (produced at the Maison de Radio-Canada so that we can get a single cross-community team working on them
).
I think the optimal solution here is importing the raw footage shot by the BBC for the featurettes, and re-cutting and then dubbing it (both the French
and the English versions) to emphasize desired aspects of production which casts the CBC in a better light. We can certainly have both teams working in tandem for that.
Dan1988 said:
OK, so based on the 1998-1999 schedule we could place
The Adventures of Harry Potter on Thursdays, still. On the CBC, it would be at 19:00 (that's 7pm to the rest of us), replacing OTL's
Riverdale. At 21:00 (9pm), it could air on Radio-Canada, replacing the game show
Tous pour un, which could air when
Les aventures d'Harry Potter is on break (even as a New Year's tradition, akin to the "Bye Bye" specials). To emphasize the cross-community thing, the 9pm slot could be hyped up as "Missed it when it aired at 7pm? Want to watch it again? Switch to your local Radio-Canada station at 9pm!" In this case, CBC/Radio-Canada will be a heavy user of both closed captioning and SAP (
secondary audio programming) to emphasize the cross-community aspect, mainly so as to make the programme accessible to both Anglophone and Francophone audiences (so in that case I could see HP be used as much of a language-learning tool as the books allegedly are). In that case, in terms of audio, the main language of the service (English for CBC Television and French for Télévision de Radio-Canada, obviously
) will be the one everyone hears, but if you switch it to SAP mode you can get the "other" language. As for closed-captioning, it would be the same way - as per FCC recommendations in the US (and which is borne out in practice by the Spanish-language stations actually implementing it, prominently Telemundo), CC1 would be for the closed captioning in the original language, whilst CC3 would be for the "other" language (CC2 would not be used due to bandwidth problems).
This is all very good stuff, Dan! I really appreciate you working out the technical details like this. Your arrangement seems both plausible and mutually beneficial.
And some thoughts and a question, which has to do with the US. Now, as it stands HP would definitely be on cable TV in the US, more likely a premium movie channel, most likely HBO. Now, someone had mentioned TBS instead of HBO as the partner. That I find problematic, because at the time TBS was largely made up of reruns, Atlanta Braves games, and classic movies - in other words, your typical independent TV station schedule - and even in the late 1990s they were making the big push to comedy. A case could be made for having it on TNT, but most TNT programmes were either produced in-house or commissioned anyway (the few Canadian programmes TNT aired were largely from CTV, anyway).
No, HBO is definitely going to be our network in the United States - I remember TBS in the late-1990s as well, and the idea of
them airing it is positively ludicrous. That said, a possibility worth mentioning (not that I find it particularly likely either) is the Disney Channel - they aired
Road to Avonlea, after all, and we're still at just before the point where they morphed into their present format (which most credit to the success of
Lizzie McGuire, premiering in 2001).
Dan1988 said:
That leaves two possible options - A&E and HBO. HBO, to me, would be more likely because as it's a separate subscription channel they could air the episodes as is (using the BBC feed, which fits HBO well as they do not air commercials in the middle of shows like the networks), maybe with the featurettes or not. This ties into two trends with HBO - one, its involvement with children's programming on one hand, and on the other HBO has long broadcast dramatic series, in 1997 exemplified with Oz. Having HP along with Oz and, later on, The Sopranos would give HBO a strong lineup. A&E is possible here, either instead of HBO or alongside it though with HBO having priority with first-run episodes and A&E airing reruns. A&E is interesting here as they've had a bit of a history co-producing with the BBC, and this is still whilst A&E is still "the PBS of cable TV", which in TTL would probably become more the case instead of the "channel drift" it has experienced. In this case, though, A&E would use the CBC feed as it allows for commercials and even then would slightly edit it a bit. Why is that? That's because of a little piece of legislation Clinton signed, called the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Not only was the V-Chip introduced to American households, so too were TV content ratings. Depending on your POV, in this case HP on A&E would either fall under TV-Y7-FV or TV-G in the beginning, probably towards the end being given ratings of TV-G or TV-PG. HBO could schedule HP any time it wants, but A&E I'm not sure - I'd have to see an A&E schedule from the late 1990s.
A&E is an interesting choice - their work with the BBC (most famously on the celebrated
Pride and Prejudice miniseries) makes them a prime candidate, as does their "classy" reputation (before the horrifying network decay it experienced in the 2000s). The one problem is that, unlike HBO, they don't really have experience with children's programming. As to your question about ratings, I would suspect that the two pre-hiatus seasons of
The Adventures of Harry Potter would probably be awarded a TV-Y7-FV rating.
Dan1988 said:
Which leaves open a question - how many episodes/seasons are necessary for a programme to go into syndication? If we scrape by with just the first three books, then that should be enough for it to be in syndication, right?
By the late-1990s, the "magic number" had been revised down from 100 to 65. However, "limited series" (which would only be re-aired on special occasions) could get away with 13 episodes - which is one season of
The Adventures of Harry Potter. The last five seasons of 45-minute episodes would equal exactly 65.
...way to bulldoze past my post,
Dan.
Don't worry, Stolengood; believe it or not, I
am capable of going back to the previous page and reading
those posts as well
I'm sorry.
I'm just so excited about the Canadian end because this could be the programme the CBC would be hoping for in TTL, like how Canada: A People's History and Little Mosque on the Prairie (even The Tudors, to a degree) were in OTL.
And since
The Adventures of Harry Potter is going to last for about a decade, and since it's taking up an hour's worth of timeslots, that means I can butterfly shows like
Little Mosque, simply because there's no room for them! Isn't the scheduling process fun?
(A double-edged sword to the limited space for timeslots; it's a zero-sum format.)
Imagine this part of the Harry Potter lore turning into a TV show?!!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WhhS2maFEs
Well, surely there
must be Aurors in the United States as well as in the UK, though they probably use an entirely different name for them
So... one more pic of Day-Lewis as Voldemort for the road:
Seriously, Stolengood, thanks for all of your illustrations - they look amazing. When we
do decide on Voldemort, I hope you'll give
him the same treatment as well
---
Now, obviously, I would not have resuscitated this thread merely to reply to everyone's comments, though they were most insightful and helpful. With the assistance of my story editor (and an outside consultant), I've taken all of the casting suggestions made on this thread and integrated them into a list of viable nominees (trimming only the obvious outliers). At the same time, we solidified the possibilities for some of the core kids, though the roster remains
very shaky there and could use additional suggestions.
Remember that our tentative timetable for the first season is 1999 (to be aired the following year). The casting directors do not want any first-year boys born before 1985, nor first-year girls born before 1986. There will likely be a year-long break between the second and third seasons (to be filmed in 2000 and 2002, respectively).
Selected Candidates for the Roles of Characters in The Adventures of Harry Potter
Note that, though I'm reasonably sure about most of these candidates, I will continue to accept additional suggestions only if
you believe them to be truly exceptional.
Harry Potter
Draco Malfoy
Rubeus Hagrid
Peter Pettigrew
Filius Flitwick
Argus Filch
Peeves the Poltergeist
Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic
Mr Ollivander
Gellert Grindelwald
Potential Candidates for the Roles of Characters in The Adventures of Harry Potter
For these candidates, please choose between the nominees given (unless otherwise stated), and do not revive rejects, who have been deliberately removed from contention.
Ron Weasley
No preference, input eagerly accepted:
Hermione Granger
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
- Jenna-Louise Coleman (b. 27 April 1986)
- Caveat: not a child actress... but performed in plays at school
Neville Longbottom
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Ginny Weasley
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
- Karen Gillan (b. 28 November 1987)
- Caveat: not a child actress... but strong interest in dramatic arts from early age
Percy Weasley
No preference, input eagerly accepted:
Albus Dumbledore
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Severus Snape
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Sirius Black
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Remus Lupin
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Lord Voldemort
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Tom Riddle
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Bellatrix Lestrange
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Quirinus Quirrell
Rough order of preference, but up for discussion:
Gilderoy Lockhart
No preference, input eagerly accepted:
Viktor Krum
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Cuthbert Binns
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, aka “Nearly Headless Nick”
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Ludo Bagman
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Igor Karkaroff
No preference, alternate suggestions accepted:
Young Gellert Grindelwald
No preference, input eagerly accepted:
Required Candidates for the Roles of Characters in Harry Potter
Note: This is obviously and by no means an exhaustive list of candidates for whom we have received no suggestions.
Seamus Finnigan
Dean Thomas
Lavender Brown
Parvati Patil
Luna Lovegood
Vincent Crabbe
Gregory Goyle
Fred and George Weasley
Cho Chang
Cedric Diggory
Oliver Wood
Minerva McGonagall
Pomona Sprout
Madam Hooch
Vernon Dursley
Petunia Dursley
Dudley Dursley
Arthur Weasley
Molly Weasley
Bill Weasley
Charlie Weasley
Fleur Delacour
