In their relentless hyping of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (or HP1, as they refer to it) Warner Bros might be said to have created a monster more terrifying than anything Joanne Rowling has so far come up with in the first four stories of Harry Potter's adventures as an apprentice wizard.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that arch-villain Lord Voldemort is even now rubbing his hands with glee as these corporate recruits push through the scariest attack yet on the purity of our young hero. Who needs the innocent blood of a unicorn, when the innocent cash of schoolchildren flows through the tills? Harry Potter merchandising is projected to bring in $1billion worldwide - £40 million in Britain and Ireland this Christmas alone. And that's not counting ticket sales to the movie itself.
In the summer of 1998, I interviewed Joanne Rowling. Her second book had just been published and although Pottermania hadn't yet hit the UK, let alone the US, she was in tentative negotiations with Hollywood for the first of the series.
In those early days, half a million dollars for doing nothing except signing on the dotted line must have felt truly intoxicating. Now, sitting on a fortune of around £67 million, it seems like taking sweeties from a baby.
What concerned her most at the time was the risk that it would be turned into a cartoon, or Americanised. But the girl done well. She stuck fast and brokered a deal with a major studio that no other author has ever achieved: total control over the finished film and merchandising parameters, a strait-jacket that must have made sponsors wrestle with demons before putting their names to it - namely a blanket ban on any advertising involving Harry Potter actually drinking/eating/playing with/wearing in/sleeping under the product.
The deal with Coca Cola alone ($100 million but no picture on the cans or of Harry himself imbibing The Real Thing even for that) was enough to pay for the film ($90 million) leaving a good-sized tip to cover press coverage for the launch - when 500-odd journalists were flown in for a 60-seater press conference with the stars of the film at an estimated cost of $2 million.
Over four days, Knebworth Castle, a privately-owned and cash-hungry gothic pile an hour's drive north of London, best-known for its annual pop festival, played host to an even more bizarre event - that of stand-in film set. The movie itself was shot at various ancient and far-flung locations in England, including Alnwick Castle, Lacock Abbey and Durham and Gloucester Cathedrals. Not that this was a point driven home to the merry throng who were taken on a tour of said castle, "dressed" with props from the film.
When questioned as to the purpose of bussing hundreds of journalists up to Knebworth, for a meet-the-stars press conference that could more easily have been held at a central London hotel, a wired and head-setted Warners PR operative (Spanish, no name-tag) said she thought the exercise (involving a 7.45 am start) was mainly directed at foreign journalists: "To give them a taste of a real English boarding school". It was, she said, Warner Bros' largest international press operation since The Mission. "We have had journalists coming from all over the world: the US, Canada, Asia, South Africa, South America, Europe." At this point, she turned to a colleague (Scandinavian) for help. "Ja, 22 territories worldwide."
What the film correspondents from Bolivia or Latvia made of it all, as they were propelled through castle rooms that had been set-decorated with "original props", is anybody's guess. Highlights included broomsticks (for playing Quidditch, Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry's sport of choice) spell books and giant chess pieces. Many of these things, it appears, will eventually be housed in a soon-to-be-completed Harry Potter themed zone in an under-used part of the castle. (So much more convenient for London-based tourists than Alnwick, in Northumberland - the fact that the connection is entirely spurious will soon be forgotten.)
The press conference - billed as a round-table discussion (six journalists and one star to each table, then move on) turned out to be nothing of the sort. Although muttering was much in evidence among the British/Irish contingent it can have been nothing compared to journalists who had flown from Thailand or Buenos Aires. Banal questions ("what was your favourite scene in the film?"; "what do you want for Christmas?") were matched with bemused answers from the three children ("Can't remember" and "Don't know"). Nor were the adult stars, as represented by Richard Harris and Robbie Coltrane, much more forthcoming. Given this was the eighth such performance they had given in four days, it's perhaps not unexpected.
While Mr H lambasted Andrew Lloyd-Webber for daring to criticize the film, Mr C (whose performance as the motor-bike riding, dragon-loving, gentle giant Hagrid is worth the ticket price on its own) did his best to make it fun for the kids.
Movie merchandising really took off in the 1980s with Star Wars, but in fact Warner Bros (who continue to battle it out with Disney who led the way in dedicated own-brand emporia) were doing it in the early 1970s.
Through some quirk of fate, I was then working in the London office of Warner Bros, focusing on "women's angle" publicity for Lucchino Visconti's Death in Venice: a fashion tie-in for a middle-market range of Edwardian-style bathing suits, based on the drawings of the film's designer Piero Tosi. It all fell apart when Tosi refused to let his original drawings be used for promotional purposes and the Daily Express pulled out and my brief career as a Tinseltown PR came to an abrupt end.
Much has been made of Joanne Rowling's insistence on probity in the merchandising, but the reality is frankly horrific. A trip to Hamley's ("the biggest toyshop in the world") reveals something far darker. Forget good old magic sets. Try Harry Potter's electronic lights and sound effects (£29.99) or an inflatable bed (£34.99). And for the younger fan, what about a soft-toy baby dragon (18.99), Hogwarts schoolbag and lunch box (£12.99 and £8.99 respectively) or a tasteful boxed set of knife, fork and spoon with the heads of our three young heroes on the handles (£6.99)? (The "booty bag" given to the press as a prize for sticking the course was a leatherette briefcase-cum-satchel - and is clearly destined to become a collector's item.) Lower down the price scale and available at a sweetshop near you, we have have chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. One British newspaper has calculated that a full set of Harry Pottermobilia would set a parent back £270.
Nor is this a flash in the pan. HP1 is only the first. HP2 (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) starts shooting later this month, for release next Christmas. HP3's script is finished and HP4 may ultimately turn out to be HP4a and HP4b - the latest Rowling oeuvre being deemed too long by director Chris Columbus (American) to make just one film.
From the outset, Joanne Rowling planned seven books in the series - one for each year of the young wizard's school career. Each brings in new characters, new plotlines, new gags and - not that she realised it at the time - new marketing opportunities. Or perhaps she did. The title of the first book shows unnerving perspicacity with Harry Potter himself as the Philosopher's Stone bringing eternal life to the marketing men who sup at his o'er brimming cup.
Non-HP veterans can be forgiven for simply not getting it, even if they pay the price of a ticket and see the movie. To understand the forces involved in Pottermania you have to look at the text.
The English do not take kindly to other people's success and Joanne Rowling - the single mother who wrote the first book sitting in a neighbourhood caff - has been accused of wholesale plundering of children's literature from C.S. Lewis to Dickens. Certainly the school story (which is what Harry Potter essentially is) has been a staple of English children's literature since 1857 and Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays which was soon followed by Rudyard Kipling (Stalky and co) Frank Richards (Billy Bunter and Greyfriars) Angela Brasil and Enid Blyton.
Like its predecessors, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry inhabits a self-contained world in which boys and girls are full citizens, where the young hero must stand on his own feet, hold his own among his contempories and be responsible for his own actions. Rowling has been accused of looking backwards to a bygone age, yet the solid framework of the school story allows a range of difficult issues faced by young children to be dealt with in the safety of the familiar, from the personal (odd-one-out, rivalry, competition, bullying and sneaking) to great moral dilemmas entirely relevant to the post-September 11th world.
The orphan succeeding against the odds on his own terms and the battle between good and evil are universal themes not limited by the boundaries of the English-speaking world, hence the books' (and, if Warner Bros hopes are to be realised, the film's) extraordinary success across totally disparate cultures and traditions. Harry Potter succeeds by combining two key elements of children's literature as identified by children's literature historian John Rowe Townsend: Just-Like-Us and Imagined-Lands.
Within this seemingly over-grazed landscape, Rowling has constructed a world of rich cultural reference and detail that gives up its secrets the more often you read it.
Rowling grew up in the Forest of Dean, a geographical appendix to mainland England that lies west of the Severn estuary, east of Wales (the Forest of Dean's sole other literary export being that other Potter of note, Dennis), which has retained a unique folklore and dialect that she has pillaged for many of the names of her characters.(Dumbledore, the God-figure played by Richard Harris in the movie, is the local dialect name for Bumblebee.) Where possible, she told me when I interviewed her, local dialect is used in translation to echo her original intention.
One reason for Rowling's extraordinary success is that parents positively enjoy reading Harry Potter to their children - not something that could be said of most children's authors, whose attractions begin to pall at the second time of reading. At Exeter university, Rowling read French with Greek and Roman history - as a result, her books are a dizzy kaleidoscope of myth and classical references that keep older readers on their toes and younger readers constantly questioning.
So then, after all the hype, what of the movie itself? So far, it has been greeted with universal praise. It is indeed a faithful adaptation of the book. Even with a running time of nearly two and a half hours, there's little or no padding. And herein lies a problem. For hardcore fans, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone barely skims the surface of Rowling's original as the script sacrifices depth to narrative breadth. Few of Rowling's rich panoply of characters fail to put in an appearance, but often it's just that - a couple of lines and goodbye. John Cleese wafts eerily as Nearly Headless Nick; Julie Walters is marvellous as Mrs Weasley, hard-up mother of five little wizards; Fiona Shaw sharpens her battle-axe in the wicked-stepmother role of Harry's non-Wizard aunt. But with only a couple of lines each (literally) fans of the books - from eight year olds to grannies - are left feeling strangely cheated.
"When I read the book, I saw the film," director, Chris Columbus (Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire) admitted at the Knebworth press conference. The problem is that every other reader did too, and in treble the detail.
The recent disaster of Captain Corelli's Mandolin shows just how precarious the translation from book to film can be. In children's literature, we only have to think of Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows to be thankful Joanne Rowling held firm for no animation (except when magic is involved, and here the film succeeds magnificently) and an English-only child cast, including the splendid trio of young actors - Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermoine) - none of them over the age of 12.
So will Harry Potter survive this latest attack on his innocence by Lord Voldemort? Will he survive with his integrity intact? If the film sends people back to the books, then, in spite of the hype and the marketing men, the answer will be a resounding Yes.
Harry Potter and the Philosophers' Stone opens on Friday. The Warner Bros website: www.harrypotter.com Potter fans website: www.harrypotternet.co.uk The website of the Internet-based campaign organised by the Center for Science in the Public Interest which "urges Rowling to stop allowing her literary creations to be used to sell junk food", such as Coca-Cola: www.saveharry.