J. K. Rowling

Is that right? And with what results would you say?

I would say so with the Harry Potter community specifically, you know, the author, Joe Rowling's personal views, have kind of killed that community.

A lot of people don't engage with it anymore, but so it's been a tough time for a lot of fandom activism, but we have particularly as branched out into other fandoms.

So now we're becoming a multi, we've become a multifandom nonprofit.

sorcerer's...

Tolkien and Rowling were contemporary.

Ozzy.

They had a fling.

So manifestors, they are very spontaneous.

They feel like they... king and queen and conqueror in history has been a manifesto basically so they're real like when they do something they just go off and they're just brave enough to go and do it somehow people just follow and then they end up creating movements so you have like Gloria Steinem and JK Rowling and they just like create worlds within worlds other people want to like follow into but they're not supposed to carry everyone there they're just supposed to go because they want and then other people end up doing it with them type

of thing he's carried everyone that's where his problem's been

Classic, classic manifesto.

Yeah, well, like any writer, I'm always reading.

I've just finished the Robert Galbraith novels.

Right.

I greatly admire what she's done, actually, in those.

It's just to rattle off a few of the influential figures standing in Crowley's shadow.

You have Alfred Kinsey, Timothy Leary, The Beatles, Jimmy Page from Zeppelin, J.K. Rowling, Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Alan Moore, and the list goes on and on and on.

but we don't have to get into the full story of how Crowley received his book of the law from the entity called I was in Cairo in 1904, although it's a really fascinating story in a sinister way.

But what I'm hearing, what I'm interested in hearing you comment on is just how incredibly predictive Crowley and spirituality, his religion of Thelema is for 20th and 21st century spiritual trends.

The other thing that I like to think about is this idea of authorship.

And, you know, with authors, you know, Paulo Coelho, JK Rowling, these are people who, you know, they wrote their stories themselves, but there's so many more people involved in creating, you know, the actual works.

I mean, if you think about Harry Potter, I think that most people, putting aside even the films, I think that most people can remember when they were growing up, they can remember seeing the covers.

you know, of these books.

That's where I dealt with David.

And I was always just so impressed with how he... guided this massive undertaking, this marshalling this army of people and dealing with high expectations and being the conduit to J.K. Rowling, who was offered a lot of say in how the films were made, cast, even marketed.

but I never met JK Rowling because she really left it to David to guide this film adaptation.

The only decision that she insisted upon was that she hoped Warner Brothers and David and Chris Columbus would cast an all British cast of English and Irish actors.

And they held to that, that that's exactly what happened.

And then it was up to David Heyman and the directors that he hired like Chris Columbus, um, to bring it to the screen.

And those of us who toil in this part of the business are sometimes very fortunate to get films with a huge ready-made audience.

And of course, Harry Potter and the success of J.K. Rowling's books made the series, created extremely high expectations at Warner Brothers to turn those books into great stories on the big screen.

But small movements still count.

There's another quote from JK Rowling that says, it is impossible to live without failing at something.

And she goes on to make the point that the only way to avoid failure completely is to live so cautiously that you may not really be living at all.

I think there's a lot of truth in that.