Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
It has been estimated that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema. The first known film featuring Holmes is "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", a one-reel film running less than a minute, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1900. This was followed by a 1905 Vitagraph film "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom", with H. Kyrle Bellew and J. Barney Sherry in unlisted roles. It was long believed that the film starred Maurice Costello as Sherlock Holmes, but Leslie S. Klinger has written that the identification of Costello in the role is flawed. Klinger states that the first identification of Costello with the role was in Michael Pointer's "Public Life of Sherlock Holmes" published in 1975 but Pointer later realized his error and wrote to Klinger stating
Harry Potter influences and analogues
Chris Columbus, who directed the first two "Harry Potter" film adaptations, has cited the 1985 film "Young Sherlock Holmes", which he wrote, as an influence in his direction for those films. "That was sort of a predecessor to this movie, in a sense", he told the BBC in 2001, "It was about two young boys and a girl in a British boarding school who had to fight a supernatural force." Scenes from "Young Sherlock Holmes" were subsequently used to cast the first Harry Potter film. On 3 January 2010, Irish journalist Declan Lynch (writing in "The Sunday Independent") stated that "there's more than a hint of young Sherlock evident in Harry".