The unsung hero of the ‘Harry Potter’ series?

Screenwriter Kloves’s credits include all but one of the 8 films

July 24, 2011|By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Among Steve Klovess screenwriting credits are (clockwise from above):… (Jaap Buitendijk/Warner…)

With “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’’ breaking box-office records, the most lucrative film saga this side of the James Bond pictures finally concludes. That saga has had one constant throughout - the near-demented fecundity of J.K. Rowling’s highly Dickensian imagination - and two near-constants. The first has been the identity of the actors in recurring roles. (Really, it’s the beard and hat you notice with Dumbledore, not whether it’s Richard Harris or Michael Gambon.) The other has been the screenwriter. Steve Kloves did the scripts for seven of the eight movies, all but “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.’’

Simply on the level of craft, this is a remarkable achievement. As an example of ingenuity and sheer staying power, it doesn’t rank with Jim Dale’s coming up with literally hundreds of different voices for the “Potter’’ audiobooks - if there’s a hall of fame for the human voice, Dale’s plaque there is in close proximity to Mel Blanc’s and Dan Castellaneta’s - but what does? You may or may not think the “Potter’’ movies are a great cinematic accomplishment. You may quarrel with what did or did not get retained from the novels. But think of how many beloved books have been bollixed by the movies. The “Potter’’ series wasn’t.

Also think about the sheer mass of material that needed to be dealt with - let alone the burden of meeting the expectations of millions of “Potter’’ fans and the expectations of the famously demanding Rowling. It’s a miracle any screenplays got written at all, let alone that seven were by the same writer. It’s a Hollywood truism that the writer gets no credit. In the five-star hotel that is a major motion picture, the writer is the washroom attendant. But if you’re a fan of the “Potter’’ pictures, you should wave your wand warmly in the direction of Kloves (pronounced KLO-vis) and his word processor. You owe him. Writing for the screen is even more architectural than it is literary. Kloves, it’s no exaggeration to say, provided the screen blueprints for building Hogwarts.

It’s been an unusual career. Kloves was just 24 when his first script was made into a movie, “Racing With the Moon’’ (1984). A young Sean Penn and a young Nicolas Cage vie for the love of Elizabeth McGovern in 1942. Nobody could have predicted at the time how those careers would turn out (Kloves’s included) almost 30 years later.