We Are Wizards

We Are Wizards

We Are Wizards (2008), directed by Josh Koury

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Credits

Director: Josh Koury. Producer: Gerald Lewis. Editor: Myles Kane. Original score: Stan Oh. Animation: Gaia Cornwall. Released 2008, 79 minutes, Brooklyn Underground Films.

Featuring Melissa Anelli, Paul DeGeorge, Joe DeGeorge, Henry Jenkins, Heather Lawver, Matt Maggiacomo, Caryl Matrisciana, Bradley Mehlenbacher, and Brad Neely.

The film premiered at SXSW in March 2008 and had its theatrical release that November.

Description

A documentary on Harry Potter fans and the musical acts the novels produced. Koury's entry point is wizard rock, the scene built around bands whose entire repertoire concerns the books. The film covers Harry and the Potters, who originated the genre and perform as two Harrys of different ages, along with Draco and the Malfoys, The Whomping Willows, and The Hungarian Horntails, a band made up of brothers Darius and Holden Wilkins, aged four and seven.

From there the film moves to fans who became producers in other forms. Heather Lawver ran a Potter fan site and organized the Potter War, a boycott of Warner Bros. after the studio threatened fans over use of copyrighted material. Brad Neely made Wizard People, Dear Reader, an unauthorized alternate audio track written to be played over the first film. Melissa Anelli built a fan site into a career.

A counter-thread follows Caryl Matrisciana, who describes the books as an occult danger to children and has made her own film on witchcraft. Koury included her to widen the range of voices rather than to set up a target.

Koury told Filmmaker Magazine that he and producer Gerald Lewis deliberately avoided making a Trekkies-style film that pokes fun at its subjects, and instead selected a small number of participants to follow closely.

Relevance

The film documents the point at which fan communities stopped being audiences and started being producers, and the collision that followed when a rights holder tried to enforce ownership over material its own customers were building on. The Potter War is a usable case study in that conflict, occurring in 2000 and 2001, before user-generated content had a name or a business model attached to it.

Henry Jenkins appears in the film. His work on participatory culture and textual poaching supplies the theoretical frame for what the other subjects are doing.

Reception

Reviews divided on whether the film had a structure. Joel Brown in the Boston Globe wrote that it draws attention to how human creativity transforms what it touches. Kim Voynar at Cinematical identified the absence of an arc as its main weakness, with the bands and fan sites presented as blocks of information. Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters called it meandering and amiable, and read it as showing that resistance to consumer culture is largely futile. Mark R. Leeper rated it 5 out of 10, objecting that Koury let the camera run without shaping the material. It holds a 5.4 user rating on IMDb.

Related Reading

• Critical Play: Radical Game Design
• Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators
• The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

External Links

• Brooklyn Underground Films
• IMDb
• Interview with Josh Koury, Filmmaker Magazine