Andrew Risse, 8, left, was among 800 Washington area youngsters to see "Harry Potter" at its first public showing, at 6 a.m. Friday morning, in Alexandria.

By Michael D. Shear and Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 17, 2001; Page A01

They didn't pass notes. They didn't tease each other or giggle or chatter or poke or make fun or do any of the things that 10- and 11-year-olds usually do. For 2 1/2 hours, sitting in place, contained in a single room, not one of the more than 190 children got up to go to the bathroom.

For the first time in their young lives, a world they had created first in their own imaginations had been re-created on the big screen. And in this Herndon movie theater yesterday, as in theaters from Wheaton to Woodbridge, that world sucked them in and rendered them something their parents might never believe.

Harry Potter made them quiet.

Yes, they burst into applause when Harry, as a Quidditch seeker, captured the golden snitch. They gasped when evil Lord Voldemort appeared, and they shrieked in delight at the slime and booger scenes.

"The slobber was scary, omigod!" squealed Vicky Novak, who is 10.

Yet for most of the movie, they sat in silent rapture, their eyes glued, their minds silently comparing every cinematic detail to the narrative ones they remembered from the blockbuster book. For that was the essence of the experience for many children yesterday: "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" was not just a movie. It was the transformation of their greatest fairy tale.

"The way the castle looked, I envisioned a taller castle," said Ricky Lane, a 10-year-old critic in Rockville. "And I imagined Hagrid's house different. I thought it was going to be square. . . . And at the end, in the chamber, Quirrell's spirit doesn't go through Harry in the book, it just slips right over."

He was enthralled nonetheless. "Thumbs up!" Ricky exclaimed, motioning with both.

After months of anticipation -- and months of practically unprecedented cross-Atlantic promotional hype -- the Potter film phenomenon officially got underway just after midnight yesterday with special showings up and down the East Coast. Some of the region's locals who were too sleepy-eyed for such late, late night hours instead rose before dawn to stand in line (in Alexandria) or were lucky enough to have parents sanction midmorning hooky from school (in the District and Gaithersburg, to name just two spots) or were luckier still to go with their classes (in Herndon), lesson plans giving way to the magic of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

"I am so excited I didn't sleep last night," announced 11-year-old John Pantazis, who has read each of the four Harry Potter volumes 10 times. ("He has," confirmed his father, standing outside a Bowie theater.) John deemed getting to see the movie "better than the first time I went to King's Dominion, better than the first time I got on a scooter" -- even better "than my birthday."

For any newspaper reader who at this point is completely lost, having foolishly missed or stubbornly ignored the serial books by British author J.K. Rowling that have become the greatest success in publishing history, the fantasy is such:

Harry Potter is a sweet-faced, kind-hearted orphan living with a repulsive set of relatives, until, that is, he learns on his 11th birthday that he is a wizard destined for greatness. He is whisked off to Hogwarts, England's premier wizard prep school, to learn the magic of wand-cast spells and turbo-charged flying broomsticks.

Once there, Harry and two newfound friends realize that Voldemort is lurking from the dark side and likely working in cahoots with a Hogwarts professor. Their grail? The Sorceror's Stone, which conveys immortal powers and is hidden somewhere on campus.

Few things are more treacherous than attempting to take a children's story with a worldwide, cultlike following and put it on the big screen. Much less a story that fans can recite scene for scene, line for line. Much less a story with creatures, adventures and even a lexicon concocted vividly from the author's own whimsy.

"Bewitch the mind, ensnare the senses,"conjures a Hogwarts potion. And so the movie attempts to do. Its greatest risk is that the young readers who love Harry most will come away feeling let down by the visual version.

One day does not a judgment make. But many among yesterday's audiences gave the edge to Rowling's pen, not Hollywood's camera.

"They left out tons of the good parts, the better parts," said Breanna Eskridge, who attended with her fifth-grade class from Hutchison Elementary in Herndon. "I really like the movie a lot. But I didn't exactly imagine the characters as they were."

The critique was stronger from older viewers, such as the cluster of high school girls who freely exchanged opinions after the final credits rolled in Bowie.

"The book was better," decided Helene Hedian, as those around her nodded seriously. "Like the way J.K. Rowling uses her words. It makes you just love certain characters and hate others. And the movie didn't do that."

"They did Snape very well, but Quirrell wasn't as trembly as I thought," another girl said.

"And Hermione wasn't gawky enough," added a third. "They did a good job, but they could have done better."

"The book had so much more to offer," Aleshia Harding declared.

After mulling it a bit more, the group came to the surprising conclusion -- theirs is, after all, a generation less enthused by verbiage than by video -- that they have yet to see a movie based on a book that actually surpasses the book.

"Like, we read 'Jane Eyre' in class, and then watched the movie," Elizabeth Bradley explained.

And again, "the book was better."

Staff writers Darragh Johnson and Susan Levine contributed to this report.