‘The Next Harry Potter’ Ignites the Next Hollywood Freak-Out

How to create a Hollywood panic attack in three easy steps:

1. Write a children’s book.

2. Get your publisher, the man who discovered Harry Potter, to call your book the next Harry Potter.

3. Wait.

That’s all it took for every book-to-film person in Hollywood to fly into a tizzy this week, trying desperately to find and cover a copy of Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s YA novel Tunnels, to be published next month in the U.K. by Chicken House. The book was a success when self-published by the authors, but Hollywood didn’t notice until Chicken House publisher Barry Cunningham — who, as an editor at Bloomsbury, first signed J.K. Rowling — agreed to republish the book and told reporters, “I knew from page one that Harry Potter was magic. Reading Tunnels gave me the same thrill.� A Reuters story got picked up by Yahoo! News, and the frenzy began.

Rumors are flying that a studio — possibly Disney — is about to make an offer to the agent, Stephen Moore at the Paul Kohner Agency, for the film rights to the book, first in a projected series about a 14-year-old boy-archaeologist who discovers a hidden world populated by a cult-like group below London. Other readers are telling us they’ve passed, finding the religious themes a little too weird: “I kept waiting for David Koresh to show up,� said one.

“It’s so predictable,� another Hollywood source sighed. “Any time someone drops the H.P. bomb, Hollywood collectively shits its pants.�

Could boy archaeologist be next Harry Potter? [Reuters, via Yahoo]