MEDIA GEEK: WHEN HARRY MET DIE HARD

The idea for this one came from my love for both the Die Hard and Harry Potter films. Pretty early on in my journalism career I had the opportunity to attend the press screening and junket for the original Die Hard. Seeing that film in 70mm and six-track Dolby Stereo was pretty mind-blowing, and I don't think I'd ever walked out of a movie as exhausted as I did from that one. Talk about a movie that defined the phrase "roller coaster ride"...
   The other part of that junket was actually meeting cast and filmmakers. Fortunately, I ended up sitting just to the left of Bruce Willis, who had become a star thanks to Moonlighting, which was still on the air at the time. While that show's David Addison had turned him into a star, John McClane launched him into the stratosphere. Whatever people may want to say about Willis and his supposed-ego, he certainly came across as the quintessential every man during that session.
   Shifting back to the comic strip, the fact that Alan Rickman had plays Hans Gruber in Die Hard and was also playing Snape in the Harry Potter films, made the blending of these two franchises seem pretty natural to me (though one can only imagine J.K. Rowling's reaction).