Features
Tours de Farce: The Trouble With Harry
With an opening weekend gross of nearly $95 million dollars, you would think everyone loves the movie, Harry Kotter & The Promoter’s Stone. However, there are those who are not quite so enchanted with the big screen treatment of the young lad who goes to concert school to fulfill his dreams of becoming a booking agent.
“It’s the black arts,” says Samantha Stephens, founder and president of the Children’s Media Research and Condemnation Center. “The movie clearly shows incidents of booking agents bargaining with promoters for Lucy Kaplansky, corporate sponsorship negotiations for Aerosmith and artist managers picking support acts for Kevin Montgomery. There’s even one scene where an agent gets his asking price without any bickering from the promoter. If that’s not witchcraft, then I don’t know what is.”
Accusations of witchcraft have long plagued the popular series of books featuring the young junior agent and his companions, the Sweat-hogs, as they struggle to work their way out of the mailroom and into positions where they can earn commissions by booking such acts as Bruce Springsteen, The Bellamy Brothers and Jeff Lang. Some critics even claim that Harry Kotter acts as a recruiting officer, luring children to the black arts. “Anything that encourages children to read must be evil,” says Stephens. “Books cause children to miss out on the experiences of growing up, like TV, sports and X-Boxes.”
But are stories about performance contracts, artist entourages and chainsaw-wielding tour bus drivers necessarily evil? Or are they simply the latest in a long line of concert tales for children? “Children’s concert stories have long incorporated fantasy,” says the film’s producer, Max Bialystock. “The Agent Of Oz, Willy Wonka and The Product Endorsement Factory, even How The Ticket Scalper Stole Christmas had its elements of wizardry and magic. But there’s no witchcraft or devil worshipping involved in the Harry Kotter series. Instead, it’s merely a new twist on the behind-the-scenes actions that comprise the booking process for bands like The Icarus Line and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Besides, as we all know, the concert industry is hardly the epitome of evil.”
Of course, when a movie grosses as much as Harry Kotter and The Promoter’s Stone, there’s only one question on Hollywood’s collective minds. Will there be a sequel?
“You can bet on it,” says producer Bialystock, “Next year, we’ll be releasing Harry Kotter and The Chamber of Groupies, with cameos by Hootie & The Blowfish as well as John Travolta reprising his role as William Morris Barbarino. Mark my words, come next Thanksgiving, fans all over the world will be saying, ‘Welcome back, Kotter.'”