Fug File: Harry Potter

The first thing that Lifetime wants you to know is that MAGIC BEYOND WORDS is an unauthorized biography, which might make you think that it’s going to be full of salacious, semi-true details and tales of saucy romantic entanglements with inappropriate people. This is basically a total lie. I mean, no one reveres JK Rowling more than I — I love the Harry Potter books madly, and I think they are a miracle of plot structure — and I don’t necessarily think that there NEEDS to be a movie made of her life, and I certainly am not advocating going out there to rustle up some dirt on her, because that would be gross, but if someone makes the decision to Unauthorized Biography it up, then they should UNAUTHORIZE IT UP, you guys.

ANYWAY. We open with B-roll of people losing their shiz at a Harry Potter premiere. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but apparently it’s a very successful franchise.  A newswoman breathlessly narrates, “JK Rowling will be here this afternoon,” and we cut to Poppy Montgomery hesitating before getting out of a limo. A) How weird it must be for Rowling to know that Lifetime made a movie about her life without her authorization, and b) It’s probably kind of flattering to be played by Poppy Montgomery.

“What do I talk about with the Duchess of York? Honestly?”  JK says to this perky person:

I can think of several things: weight loss, Prince Andrew and whether or not they’ll ever really get back together, if the Queen is actually really mean or not, crumpets. Perky Dude tells her, super perkily, that they’ll talk about “whatever it is Famous People talk about” – so, weight loss is a go — and that she’ll be great. They then clunkily establish that he is her fiancé, which is interesting because I totally assumed he was her Sassy Gay Friend, who would implore her to look at her life/choices when she got drunk at the premiere party and sloppily confessed that she was a little bit in love with Voldemort.

After a deep breath, JK looks thoughtfully out the car window at a woman carrying a child. They’re both wearing witches’ hats and holding copies of Harry Potter: Not Without My Owl: The Hedwig Q. Potter Story (it’s Lifetime, after all), the sight of which flashes us all back to 1973, where some childish uniform-wearing prat teases Wee Jo and her sister Diana about…something that I didn’t really follow, mostly because I was bored, and she comes back with some very serviceable scary story to shame him, and — listen, basically all you need to know is that Rowling has always had a very good imagination, likes witches, is very invested in The Power of Friendship, and was basically Hermione Granger in a blue coat:

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