Michael Goldenberg

How do you take an almost 900-page book and make it into movie that's just over two hours long?

That was the task in front of Michael Goldenberg when he signed on as the screenwriter for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (Fun fact: this movie was actually the only one in the series not written by Steve Kloves, who passed on the fifth movie.)

Basically, Goldenberg approached this screenplay like the ones he'd written before—Bed of Roses, Contact, and Peter Pan. That meant lots of cuts to get the story just right for the big screen. Goodbye, Dobby! Goodbye, Ron's Quidditch subplot! Goodbye, Rita Skeeter and Harry's Quibbler interview! Goodbye Marietta Edgecombe!

Do those cuts make you mad? Well, Goldenberg had this to say about the difference between writing a book and crafting a screenplay:

Jo and I actually spoke about that. It was interesting, in that our processes are kind of the opposite, in a way. The joy of the books is that you can stop. You can just linger and pay attention to all of these wonderful details, and spend as much time as you want just immersing yourself in this world. But in the film, you really are translating it into another language. First off, you get an enormous amount of information just looking at one frame of the film in terms of mood and tone and detail. It really is a translation process, where what you may, in the book, take a dozen pages or hundred pages to explore in a way you never really can on film. My job becomes to find the one moment or the one image or one line that crystallizes it and distills it, so we can get the essence of what that was in the book. It really is like translating into another language. (Source)

Fair enough. But we still miss Dobby.