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Kloves is talking to me on the phone from Los Angeles about the hottest property in Hollywood -- his adaptation of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," the first in the British children's fantasy series that has swept to the top of adult bestseller lists.

Rumors have long linked Kloves' "Harry Potter" adaptation to Steven Spielberg -- and indeed, Kloves has met with Spielberg -- but Kloves told me last week he never thought it was likely that the man who made "E.T." would tackle this instant classic. Spielberg, after all, is the sort of moviemaker who keeps several projects germinating -- and Kloves guesses Spielberg will return to directing (after an unusual, for him, two- to three-year hiatus) with "Minority Report," the sci-fi crime epic the director has been developing with Tom Cruise. (In a statement released Tuesday, Spielberg said, "I have every certainty that the series of 'Harry Potter' movies will be phenomenally successful. J.K. Rowling's vision of Harry Potter is modern genius. Warner Bros. and [President] Alan Horn have been more than generous in the time they've allowed me to make a decision. However, at this time, my directorial interests are taking me in another direction.")

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Unlike Spielberg, Kloves, whether as a writer or a writer-director, is a one-picture-at-a-time kind of guy. After 19 years in the business, he has all of four credits. He wrote the beautifully acted Sean Penn-Nicolas Cage coming-of-age movie "Racing With the Moon" (1984). He wrote and directed the classic contemporary romance (but box-office fizzle) "The Fabulous Baker Boys" (1988) and the peculiar Texas-noir-cum-Greek-tragedy "Flesh and Bone" (1993), which gave Gwyneth Paltrow a career boost.

And he's written a marvelous new comedy, "Wonder Boys," from Michael Chabon's spiky and enchanting novel. Kloves' tenacity at doing films he wants to do is a trait he shares with Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential"), who directed "Wonder Boys." Indeed, Kloves quips that he's never attracted much attention because "tenacity is the only card I have to play. I never charged a movie on my credit card, and I didn't learn how to direct by stealing videos in Thailand."

Tenacity pays off once again with this film, which stars Michael Douglas as a ganja-smoking novelist and creative-writing prof with the opposite of writer's block -- "writer's diarrhea." Frances McDormand co-stars as his college chancellor and lover (who is married to the Douglas character's boss, the head of the English department), with Tobey Maguire as his spooky protégé and Robert Downey Jr. as his editor. It's a virtuoso performance for the entire cast and crew. But in its free spirit and avalanche of blending tones, it feels more organic than virtuosic. And though the movie is drenched in the atmosphere of a Pittsburgh college in winter, the director never finished high school -- and the screenwriter never finished college.

"I remember when I started 'Wonder Boys,'" says Kloves, "that's one of the things I was a little daunted by, because Michael Chabon is clearly an educated person -- he's incredibly well-read. I think of Michael in his spare two hours going through 'Finnegans Wake' while I would be in the jazz section at Tower Records."

Yet thanks to Kloves' and Hanson's fresh look at campus subjects, the story offers a tragicomic slap-and-tickle that's brand-new. Its lovable uniqueness comes not just from its dead-on satire of literary and academic types but from its fully reimagined and emotional milieu. The oddball precision of the moviemaking makes you feel as if you're laughing in a dream -- and you don't want to wake up. Combining psychological specificity and wacky fantasy, "Wonder Boys" is both wonderful in its own right and, for Kloves, perhaps the best preparation for "Harry Potter."

Kloves was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Sunnyvale, Calif., at a time when the local industry was aerospace, not computers. His father worked for United Technologies, but Kloves "always wanted to write." In high school, he penned short stories and collected New Yorker rejection slips. Kloves calls his early inspirations "curious." Rod Serling heads the list, not only because Kloves loved "The Twilight Zone" (and one chilling episode of "Night Gallery") but also because Serling was the only writer who introduced his own work on TV.

"He was a compelling presence," says Kloves. "When you watch entertainment as a kid you don't even think that someone wrote it. I thought Steve McQueen just made his stuff up and they turned the camera on. But Rod Serling put it right in front of you: 'I'm the guy who wrote what you're about to see.' He made being a writer real for me." Kloves was also drawn to the fables of Jerzy Kosinski, from brutal parables like "Steps" to the relatively gentle book and film "Being There."

At the same time, Kloves felt the inchoate, fantastic tug toward movies that many of us shared in the pre-video era. He remembers looking at the movie ads in newspapers and wishing he could go; he recalls begging his parents to take him to "The Dirty Dozen," although "that might have been because I was a sports fan and I knew it starred Jim Brown." It "killed" him at age 9 that he couldn't see "Easy Rider" (1969).

After high school, he made what he calls a "cameo" appearance at UCLA (the college itself, not the film school). "At UCLA, I was really just working at the North Campus Deli. By the second year I was taking minimum units and working 30 to 40 hours." Then he woke up, and dropped out. "But going to UCLA made me grow up. And it got me to Los Angeles." He took an internship with a talent agent -- "basically an excuse for him to get me to work for free, delivering scripts around town."

But the job compelled Kloves to familiarize himself with the studios. It also landed him a well-connected reader for his scripts. "I was spending the holidays up north with my family, in 1980 or '81, when I got a call from the agent saying 'I read that script of yours and a guy at Paramount wants to meet you.'" The screenplay, an "'80s version of 'Diary of a Mad Housewife' called 'Swings,'" opened doors for Kloves. "It was about women in the suburbs; after all, I grew up in the suburbs. What caught people's eyes was that it was written by a 21-year-old man." It got him a meeting for "Racing With the Moon," which he pitched, simply and successfully, as the story of two kids before they go off to World War II. (One of Kloves' favorite films was "Summer of '42.")

Kloves had seen "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and urged the director of "Racing With the Moon," Richard Benjamin, to cast Penn as the goodhearted gravedigger's son who falls for the pretty new gal in town (Elizabeth McGovern) and helps his oldest friend (Cage) get the money for a girl's abortion. "Richard, to his credit, as an actor himself, knew that it was remarkable" for Penn to go from the cadet he'd played in "Taps" to the space cadet he played in "Fast Times."

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