Harry Potter Comes Alive

As any 8-year-old can tell you, it's a bit more than that. Stone begins with Harry Potter as a 10-year-old orphan living with a cruel aunt and uncle who've long told him that his parents died shortly after his birth. In truth, Harry's mum was a witch, his dad was a wizard, and both were murdered by a dark mage named Lord Voldemort. When the villain tried to kill Harry, too, he instantly vanished in a mysterious green flash that left Harry with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. Upon his 11th birthday, all this is revealed to him when he discovers he's been admitted to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a 1,000-year-old institution located in a realm kept hidden from non-magical folk (that's "Muggles" to you). Once there, Potter is assigned to one of Hogwarts' four houses (Gryffindor), makes friends with classmates Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, becomes the star "seeker" of his intramural Quidditch team (a soccer/rugby hybrid played in the air on broomsticks), and learns in true Luke Skywalker fashion that he's destined for great things.

Heyman was immediately enchanted. "It's such a human, moving tale," says Heyman. "Harry is such an 'everybody.' He comes from a damaged home. He's not a great academic. Moreover, Hogwarts is a school that all of us would have wanted to go to. The book wasn't sentimental. It had an edge. It was wickedly funny. It was fiercely imaginative. Those were all of the reasons that I liked it." Soon Heyman was cultivating a relationship with Rowling, and after the U.K. publication in 1998 of Stone's first sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Heyman pitched Potter to Warner Bros. Together, they reportedly optioned both books for a bargain-in-retrospect $700,000 and began hunting for a screenwriter. By that time Pottermania was well established in Britain and primed to explode in the U.S. It was still flying far enough below the mainstream radar, however, to merit only this appraisal from Warner's president of production, Lorenzo di Bonaventura: "These books have a terrific following in Great Britain."

Enter Steve Kloves, best known as the writer-director of 1989's The Fabulous Baker Boys. In early 1999, Kloves got a packet from Warner Bros. containing descriptions of books the studio had optioned that needed adapting. "I almost never read them," says Kloves, Oscar nominated for his Wonder Boys script. "But there was this something called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone...." Kloves loved it, laid claim to it, and was soon lunching with Heyman and studio execs. By then he had become a blushing Potter fanboy. "I was probably the most nervous for any meeting I've ever had," says Kloves of his first encounter with Rowling. "I was excited to meet her, but I also didn't want her to think I was going to be in the business of destroying her baby."

Funny—that's exactly what Rowling was thinking. "I was really ready to hate this Steve Kloves, actually—this was the man who was gonna butcher my baby," says Rowling. "The first time I met him, he said to me, 'You know who my favorite character is?' And I thought, You're gonna say Ron. I know you're gonna say Ron. But he said 'Hermione.' And I just kind of melted." Says Kloves: "We ended up spending the day together, just talking. We hit it off."