June 7, 2004

Voiceovers and alter egos  

Brad Neely has taken the original Harry Potter movie and created a whole new soundtrack with a completely different story:

As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues.
But the best part is this paragraph about the industry's response:
"The long-term strategic threat to the entertainment industry is that people will get in the habit of creating and making as much as watching and listening, and all of a sudden the label applied to people at leisure, 50 years in the making — consumer — could wither away," [Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School] said. "But it would be a shame if Hollywood just said no. It could very possibly be in the interest of publishers to see a market in providing raw material along with finished product."
It would indeed be a shame. Creating and making as much as watching and listening? This could be the perfect remedy for our passive, bloated, consumption-driven culture. I'm not vouching for the quality of this particular film (which I haven't seen), but the idea that the ease of digital capture might lead to a legal remedy that restricts creative production (speech) where it wasn't restricted before is extremely disturbing.

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