Death Eaters swirl like wind devils around Harry Potter and his friends in a round chamber deep within the Ministry of Magic in the penultimate scene of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the movie based on the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful series. Shelves, stories high, collapse, sending thousands of crystal prophecies to shatter on the ground in an explosion of glass. The maelstrom culminates in a battle between the two most powerful wizards in the magical world. In an apocalypse of sound and fury, they shout ancient curses, shoot red veins of lightning from their wands, conjure monstrous infernos and explosions of water. The spectacle is dazzling and terrifying. And it does exactly what a film should do—lets you feel in your bones what you can only picture in your head when reading a book.
It’s also great fun to write an action-effect sequence, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg will tell you. With today’s production capabilities, anything he conjures up, filmmakers can make happen. Still, Goldenberg’s favorite moments are the quieter ones between Harry and his godfather, Sirius Black, the only adult Harry feels he can turn to for advice and understanding. “There are some moments in there that I am very proud of. A lot of that material is not in the book and was written to dramatize the connection between them,” says Goldenberg.
In 2004, he was picked to write the Harry Potter screenplay when the writer for the four earlier films, Steve Kloves, decided to take a break from the series. Goldenberg’s other screen credits include Bed of Roses (1996), a romantic drama he wrote and directed; Contact (1997), an adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel; and the live-action remake of Peter Pan (2003).
To write the Harry Potter screenplay, he read and re-read the novel, taking comprehensive notes and making outlines. But then, he says, you have to step away from the book and let the movie become its own thing. “You are translating from one language into a very different one,” he says. “The tools of a screenwriter are opposite to those of a novelist. In a novel, you have the luxury of digressing and exploring, and stopping to luxuriate in all the details. Screenwriting is first and foremost about compression—distilling, picking the one detail, the one telling image, or the dialogue that encapsulates what might have taken many pages in the book. We’re looking at it from the other end of the telescope.”
In any adaptation, he says, you start with what it’s really about: “This is a Mike Nichols question: What’s it about, and what’s it really about? Once you can answer that question, you cut away everything that’s not pertinent to that. You say, ‘We’re starting at A and we need to end up at Z. What do we absolutely need to get there?’ It’s all very intuitive. At its best, when you’re writing it, you’re seeing it in your head, and it starts to tell you what it wants to be.”
Oddly enough, Goldenberg says he finds parallels to screenwriting in musical composition, something he has done since he was a youngster. “When you’re writing music, it’s all about what you’re hearing,” he says, “rhythm, pace, the sculptural shape of it. I think movies are very similar to that because it’s taking place in time in the same way that the music is. You just sort of hear it.”
One of the moments that he “heard” when he read the novel is the scene in which Harry sees one of the memories of quasi-villain Professor Snape. Snape, then a young student, is being cruelly taunted by fellow student James Potter, Harry’s dad, just to make James’ friends laugh. In terms of the story, Goldenberg says, it wasn’t an obvious thing to keep. But it crystallized the movie for him.
“It’s a powerful moment when your parent—and especially a parent who Harry has idealized enormously because he never knew him—is revealed as a flawed human being. I remember that moment for me, and I know there is a similar moment for a lot of people—and not just your parents but that the people in charge are just as messed up and confused and uncertain as you are, and how terrifying that is. It’s the death of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and God all wrapped up in one.”
Author J.K. Rowling, who Goldenberg describes as the ideal collaborator, gave him a free hand in bringing the book to life on screen. “She sees the films as separate from the books,” he says. “She told us she just wanted to see a great movie.” In an early conversation, Rowling talked about Harry’s story being, in a sense, a quest for a father. “Jo pointed out that Harry always was secure in his mother’s love, but over the course of all of the books, he keeps coming up with flawed father figures,” Goldenberg says. “In Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore, who has been the overtly paternal figure, is suddenly radically absent from the story. Dumbledore had always been all wise and all knowing, but now he is revealed as just a man—a very smart man, but one who has, in this case, made a terrible mistake, a strategic error that has resulted in disaster, and he is admitting that to Harry—both because Harry deserves to know, but also because Harry needs to be disillusioned. He needs to realize that in order for him to grow up and take on the responsibilities that he needs to take on, Dumbledore has to come down from his pedestal.
“That’s very moving to me. I do think it’s one of the great themes—loss of innocence. I’ve always been attracted to coming-of-age stories that dealt with that. So that was my deepest connection to this story—and the reason I wanted to tell it. Life lessons happen, and he goes from being a kid who sees the world in fairly black and white terms to seeing just how complicated a place it is—and how complicated he is. I thought that was a really good story to tell, particularly now.”
Goldenberg’s own story of how he rose to the upper echelon of screenwriters is a pretty good one to tell, too. He still thinks of himself as a relative newcomer to Hollywood, but his artistic roots go back to childhood. “I think all drama is a heightened form of play,” he says. When he was a first-grader, he wrote what he grandiosely called a novel. “It was probably three or four pages long—a science-fiction story about a spaceship that was coming home to Earth and missed, an odd sort of lost-in-space story.”
His precocity extended to music as well. Ask him, back then, what he wanted for his birthday, his answer was always the same—a piano. He got his wish when he was 11 and his family moved into a furnished home that had a piano. “I was glued to it, and I started writing music big time,” he says. He took about a year of piano lessons but, as many children do, found learning to play the pieces tedious. “I figured out if I actually wrote something, that by the time I figured out what it should be I could play it. It made it more interesting.” The first musical he remembers seeing was what he says was a bad high school production of George M! The dull performance didn’t keep him from being amazed and inspired. So he tried out for his sixth-grade play, got cast in the lead as the glib emcee of a game show, and fell in love with the theater. Later, after his parents separated and his mother moved the family from California to Colorado, he found refuge in a theater group in a Boulder junior high school. “A lot of other drama geeks from dysfunctional families …,” he says. “It just felt very much like home.”
His interests in drama and music began to come together when he met a high school student who, with Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar as influences, had thrown himself into writing rock operas. “I was amazed that someone could actually do that,” says Goldenberg. Inspired, he wrote a 10-minute composition he called Armageddon. He was 12 years old. “It’s actually sitting on my piano right now. For years it was on my grandmother’s piano.” He played it for his one and only recital.
“What was interesting about it in retrospect, and it never occurred to me to tell anybody at the time, but that music told a very specific story. I could tell you at every moment what was happening in the images in my head during the music. It was about these two brothers who had been separated after a nuclear apocalypse, and they were trying to find each other across the wasteland.”
His interest in acting brought him to the drama department at Carnegie Mellon, where he made an important discovery. “I was a terrible actor,” he says. “I can probably count on one hand the times that I have had really connected, authentic moments as an actor. I remember them really well, but I just didn’t have the talent. I was too in my head and over-controlled. That was always sort of the note I would get back from the professors.”
It was a different story in the graduate-level playwriting classes he took in tandem with his drama studies. “That’s where I felt that sense of connection and those moments of flow. That was when it suddenly became effortless.”
Goldenberg graduated in 1986 and headed to New York City, determined to make a career as a serious writer. To pay the bills, he found a 50-hour-a-week temp job as a word processor. In the off hours—and when he could get away with it at work—he wrote musicals for up-and-coming artists, which were workshopped at impressive venues, including the Circle Rep Lab and ASCAP workshops. A turning point came when he wrote the music and lyrics for Down the Stream. “It was a trippy, surreal take on childhood and growing up. It came from a more intuitive, less strategic place as a writer, and something broke through in that piece.” Down the Stream was developed at the Eugene O’Neill Center and won a Richard Rodgers award. “I can pretty much trace everything I’ve done since, back to that piece in a way. That was when I got my voice, as raw as it might have been.”
Finding voice is a seminal moment for any writer. But there are still the realities of making a living—which became more challenging for Goldenberg. The temp job came to an abrupt stop. To make money, he was dog sitting for playwright Craig Lucas, a mentor from the O’Neill Center. Dog sitting for a sweet but neurotic shar-pei might cause anyone to reevaluate his life. In Goldenberg’s case, that was when he decided “to actually try to make a living writing.” He wrote a screenplay. Within weeks of sending it out, he got a thumbs-up and was moving to Los Angeles.
“To be honest, my skills are probably better suited to writing for film. I’m willing to bet that when I wrote that screenplay, it came as easily as anything I’ve ever written because I could just see it. All I was doing was transcribing what I was seeing. I think I have a visual imagination. When I started writing screenplays in earnest, I really fell in love with film and was like a kid in a candy store.”
For Order of the Phoenix, he received noteworthy praise in The New York Times movie review: “The nearly 900-page source has been elegantly streamlined by Michael Goldenberg, the screenwriter (who replaces Steve Kloves).”
More Goldenberg work is coming soon to a theater near you, including an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze. He is also working on an original story he’s calling Uncertainty, which he hopes to direct.
For book six of the Harry Potter series, screenwriter Kloves returns, which is just fine with Goldenberg. “The kind of journey Harry goes on emotionally in Order of the Phoenix is one of isolation to finding connections within the community. That resonated deeply with me. I got really lucky that it was this particular story they wanted me to do, because I don’t think I would have felt nearly as connected on any of the other ones.”
