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My New Favorite Thing:
Wizard People, Dear Reader

at www.illegal-art.org

By Carrie McLaren | Issue #22

Heads up, Harry Potter fans (and foes). Stay Free! was recently fortunate enough to sponsor a screening of Wizard People, Dear Reader at the NY Underground Film Festival, and we're so taken with it that we have made it available for download on the Illegal Art Exhibit site. To experience this, you'll need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie and watch it with the sound off, replacing the original soundtrack with the Wizard People MP3s.

But first, some background: Wizard People, Dear Reader--a retelling of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone--is nothing short of brilliant. Its creator, Brad Neely of Austin, Texas, is a comic-book artist, but you won't find any of his images here. Instead, Wizard People uses the entire visual portion of the first Harry Potter movie, stripping out the sound and replacing it with Neely's own gravelly-voiced narration. That the movie is two and a half hours long should indicate that the guy is a little, well, obsessive (which for me was one of the lures). But novelty alone does not a movie make; even Neely's friends--his intended audience--would probably have a hard time sitting through this if it weren't so stunningly crafted.

The characters in Wizard People are much like those in Harry Potter, and in the end, the key parts of the story are essentially unchanged. But Neely's creation is of course a different version, and, despite a few "fuck words," it's an affectionate take on HP. As such, Wizard People owes less to Mystery Science Theater than to the musical cover song. Some will want to call this a parody, but to do so oversimplifies its art. Neely has taken a film widely considered to be a faithful rendering of a book and made it inescapably literary, a story in the old-time sense. Broken into chapters, Neely's words create images that flesh out the ones on screen. Harry's obnoxious cousin "Roastbeefy" is rendered "a mean little puke who is borderline retarded and must shout moistly every stupid sentence he manages to piece together."

When Harry selects his first magic wand, the narrator clues us in:

Ed Vanders rushes into Harry's view like a scarecrow carcass, a dreadful visage indeed.... Master H is beginning to feel animosity toward his own celebrity. Harry gazes at the man's skin, a ketchupy callus of a face. ‘I will make spells that save me from looking like him.' Harry [notes]... The mental notes are stacking.

In a way, Wizard People almost seems to be a throwback to oral story-telling. The soundtrack makes a certain kind of sense without the accompanying movie, but that's like listening to a teacher read a picture book without the pictures. Wizard People is bookish but not quite a book, movie-like but not quite a movie. Neely has, one imagines, hit upon something entirely new.

And that, dear readers, is a roundabout way of saying that you simply must check this out. We've posted the audio portion of Wizard People, which you can download and burn onto two CDs. You'll also need a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which you can rent or buy as you choose. See the Illegal Art Exhibit website for full instructions.

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