In what may be the premiere case of trying to have cake and eat it, too, Hollywood wants to both film Dan Brown’s trashy anti-Christian novel The DaVinci Code and market it to Christians as a Christian-friendly film:
"Filming is not yet complete on Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, but the controversy is already raging. An association called the American Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property has called on Roman Catholics to boycott the film, saying: ‘It attacks everything that Catholics hold sacred.’
"They have the backing of the Archbishop of Genoa, who described the book as ‘a sackful of lies against the church and against Christ himself.’ And even enlightened Catholics [unlike, presumably, the Archbishop of Genoa?] such as the commentator Barbara Nicolosi, who runs Act One, a seminar for Christian film-makers in Hollywood, says: ‘The book is particularly repulsive. It says Jesus isn’t Divine and that the Church is basically evil.’
"Normally, such outrage would be all good clean fun at the box-office, but the re-election of George W. Bush on a wave of devout heartland votes and the phenomenal success of The Passion of the Christ have changed Hollywood’s thinking. The Christian moviegoer is now a recognised and lucrative demographic that Hollywood cannot afford to ignore.
"Columbia Studios, which is making The Da Vinci Code, clearly feels that it cannot count on divine protection [and should count itself fortunate not to be the target of divine wrath]. It has called on the services of Grace Hill Media to help to prepare the groundwork for the film, which is to be released next summer, and defuse controversy."
In a backhanded way, this whole plot substantiates the Christian assertion that Dan Brown’s novel is anti-Christian. There would be no need to spin the film as "Christian-friendly" were Hollywood unconcerned that the movie was offensive to Christian sensibilities.
This is sooooo foolish. The only way they could make DVC more pro-Christian is to show that it’s all a dream, hoax, or imaginary story: show what the protagonist thinks is going on, and then pull back and show that he’s really still in the asylum, or taking drugs while his college professors teach a church history class, or being subjected to an elaborate trick by conspiracy theorists with way too much time on their hands.
Usually I don’t like that kind of thing, but it’d be great for DVC!
My concern is that no matter how thoroughly they gut and emasculate The Da Vinci Code (or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) — and of course I hope they do — success onscreen translates into even more success at real and virtual bookstores. The film adaptation always sends lots more readers to the book.
Sales for Tolkien’s LOTR went through the roof thanks to Jackson’s films, so even if you don’t like Jackson’s films, you have to like the fact that Tolkien is being more widely read. By the same token, even if the Da Vinci Code or His Dark Materials films wind up loosely approximating harmless nonsense, the poison of the books would still be more widely disseminated.
OTOH, there is no getting away from the fact that the Da Vinci Code film is going to be a blockbuster success. We aren’t talking about The Last Temptation of Christ here, an arthouse film based on a relatively obscure novel with no major stars. We’re talking about a big-budget adaptation of a bestselling book with nearly Harry Potter level name recognition, starring Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard. This is as close to a sure thing as Hollywood gets.
There is no way to derail this train. And efforts to try will probably ultimately help the film at the box office, just as the controversy around The Passion of the Christ probably helped it.
So maybe it would be better not to try. Boycotts and protests are probably not going to be helpful here. Maybe the best strategy is to try to find some other way of working some kind of good in this deplorable set of circumstances.
Why can’t we boycott this film without all of the pomp and circumstance; much like I have boycotted the book?
Has anyone every heard of Caddyshack II? Let’s keep it that way.
Well, of course, I’m all in favor of not patronizing the film. It’s the organized protest, petitions, etc. that I think would be counter-productive.
What trash! This is stupidity at its highest level. Targeting this book towards Christians is similar to targeting “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to Jews.
Still, I have no doubt that this will probably be the most successful movie of the year, and that it will rise the sales of the book. I can only hope that Dan Brown loses the 2 file suits against him for plagiarism, and that the public in general see for themselves what a mediocre, hypocritical writer he is.
They shouldn’t be organizing boycotts. They should be making more books attacking the premise of the book.
People who hate the book will not see the film anyway. I think the success of the movie will be in proportion to the success of the book. If we stop feeding this monster through boycotts, the movie will not attract as many new gullibles as the producers might like.
Brown is MUCH worse than mediocre. Though not as bad as a certain conservative Catholic novelist I could name, Brown is a clumsy hack. This brutal analysis of Brown’s prose is absolutely dead-on.
Almost as bad as his preposterous narrative non-sequiturs (a man seen in “silhouette” at a distance of “fifteen feet” whose iris, pupil, hair, and skin color are all plainly visible and whose voice is “chillingly close”; a man who has fallen and gets up, then two grafs later gets up AGAIN) is the embarrassingly obvious egotistical fantasy in the author’s characterization of his protagonist.
The first time I picked up Brown’s book, I ran across a passage in the first chapter in which his hero is described as a “Harrison Ford” type in “Harris tweed over a black turtleneck,” and suddenly I knew beyond argument that if I flipped to the inner back flap I would see a photo of Brown wearing tweed over a black turtleneck, styling himself a Harrison Ford type. And darned if the photo wasn’t there and he wasn’t wearing tweed over a black turtleneck.
There’s almost nothing an author can do that’s more of a turn-off to me as a reader than that sort of thing.
Brown is a hack.
Making “His Dark Materials” a movie won’t make people read the books, though they might buy them. Right now the series is touted as a teen series, but most readers I’ve met abandon it after the first book, since the side characters are more interesting than the plot or the main characters. I was introduced to the series by an agnostic student who said that the first was good, but the rest were less and less good, with “a bizarre non-ending”. He was a well-read senior who didn’t understand the combination of Hades with harpies and Genesis. Other students who have read the first one said the first was “okay” but thought Lyra was a pretty unlikable main character – totally upstaged by the bear.
Steven,
There is ONE way to derail this train- another Hollywood blockbuster having even bigger names and more aggressive marketing should be released at the same time as DVC [maybe a Harry Potter sequel or The Hobbit? ;-)].
Someone call Mel Gibson and have him get to work on… um… The Resurrection of the Christ? The Nativity?
Y’know… my husband and I have stopped going to MOST movies. Because MOST of them are crawp. I think the biggest thing we can do to make the da vinci code go away is encourage our friends to not see things that’re dumb. Meanwhile… we dished out $20 last night to see Batman Begins at the imax. Because, y’know… it was GOOD. and worth seeing AGAIN. And the saddest thing–Batman Begins is also the LAST movie my husband and I saw together back in May. I think things like the da vinci code will have the widdle wind taken out of it’s widdle sails if we just raise our standards a little.
Excellent article on Brown’s language, SDG! Well done!
“Other students who have read the first one said the first was “okay” but thought Lyra was a pretty unlikable main character – totally upstaged by the bear.”
Jean, you mean that cute little bear in His Dark Materials that eats his dead best friend?
Yeah . . . that’s gonna play in Peoria! I’ve read all 3 of Pullman’s HDM books. It was like watchin’ a train wreck in slow motion; there’s just this strange beauty about it & you can’t turn you eyes away. Pullman’s a far, far better writer than Brown could ever imagine being in his tweed-and-turtleneck dreams. But the BBC’s reported (see URL below) that God references will be cut from the HDM films & – surprise! – they’re blaming “the climate of Bush’s America.” Um . . . yeah. At any rate, by removing religious references, those who do try to read the books after seeing the movie will be in for an electric jolt! ‘Specially when folks get to the part with the homosexual angels . . .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4077987.stm
“Meanwhile… we dished out $20 last night to see Batman Begins at the imax. Because, y’know… it was GOOD. and worth seeing AGAIN.”
Amen to that, Tammy! I’ve seen it 4 times, once in Imax, where it rocked out loud.
I don’t know why everyone is so pessimistic about derailing this movie. I have a very strong feeling that it will have one good weekend and then disappear forever — like everything else the evil hand of Ron Howard has touched as of late(never liked him, sorry Gumpers!)
The fact that they would even consider trying to market the movie to Christians is major crack in the armor, which I did not expect to see before release though I have been anticipating the movie’s demise for so long.
One form of protest I have been considering is making my own puppet robots, and sit in the front row with them while watching the movie. We talk through the whole thing from opening to end credits savaging this pearl of Hollywood wisdom. Pretty original, doncha think? -_^
Intimidation is also a good idea. Wait until the movie goes to bed and then put the severed head of a horse in there. When the movie wakes up — whamo! It’s priceless! And all my own idea…
In the long run, though, we do not need to wait for our Mel Gibsonses riding on their white horseses, precious no. We need to spread the word that the book itself is insanely stupid from every conceivable angle.
I once met a sister who said the book was a “good read.” Then I asked her how the ending was — because it has to be good if the plot involves Christ being a fraud and mankind being doomed to an eternity in Hell for our sins! Some ending, that!
I could tell that the idea never crossed her mind in the first place. She never mentioned the book again.
Education, people!
And horse heads!
And puppet robots!
I read the first book in the trilogy. Was unimpressed. And then I couldn’t get into the second.
(I got a story idea from it, but that’s not a comment on quality. 😉
Im waiting for the Chronicals of Narnia. Before that and after Batman Begins, everything else this past year has been complete crap.
We aren’t talking about The Last Temptation of Christ here, an arthouse film based on a relatively obscure novel with no major stars.
The Last Temptation of Christ was obscure when compared to DVC but it was enough to get Nikos Kazantzakis excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. And while “LTC” doesn’t have any major stars like Tom Hanks, many of the actors in it are well-known (Harvey Keitel, Willem Defoe, Barbara Hershey, David Bowie, Harry Dean Stanton).
It is an entertaining novel. We did a seminar in our parish and it was well attended and I doubt very much anyone was led astray by it. It stimulated some good discussions and raised some people’s interest in reading something more reliable, which is good. The diocese did one as well. Our pastor and one of the nuns (a professor with a Th.D.) said the same thing as the nun quoted above, perhaps the same nun(?). It was a lot of fun figuring out where he got his strange ideas from. For a real trip read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. It really is idiotic and it is the primary source for Brown’s entertaining but (factually) silly book.
I read in Daily Variety (a trade publication for Hollywood) that suggested DVC was a potential “billion dollar” industry unto itself. Sorry to be any bearer of sad news, but that kind of hoped-for green is too good for most show biz types to pass up. If it has a boffo weekend, expect to see an announcement the following week, touting a sequel, or another adventure with Robert Langdon. I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio hasn’t already hired a writer to start hammering out the next installment. Can anyone say franchise (ala James Bond, or Indiana Jones)?
Ha, Gene! Yes, the big ol’ bear that ate its buddy. But that was in the second book, I think, and most of the readers didn’t get that far. In fact, most of them were repulsed by Lyra’s evil parents. Personally, I thought that the 12-year-old female protagonist smoking, throwing rocks at other kids, and taking a 17-year-old lover wouldn’t play well in North America period. Maybe if they raised his age to 52…
I agree there’s not much out there in movieland. I saw “The Incredibles” last fall, and that’s been it. I thought maybe I’d see “Cinderella Man”, but it left the cheap theatres already.
like everything else the evil hand of Ron Howard has touched as of late(never liked him, sorry Gumpers!)
Forrest Gump was directed by Robert Zemeckis.
But I don’t really like Ron Howard’s movies, either, especially since his hatchet job on A Beautiful Mind.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio hasn’t already hired a writer to start hammering out the next installment.”
If so, then I think it’s really funny that National Treasure beat them to it! 😉
Brown was supposed to be working on the next Langdon book, THE SOLOMON KEY, and it was supposed tohave been published this summer. But no MS in sight and Random House has stopped talking about it.
Note that Tradition, Family, and Property is a strange RadTrad group (find their website http://www.Traditioninaction.org and see). Nobody I’d care to work with, even in a good cause.
Brown was supposed to be working on the next Langdon book, THE SOLOMON KEY, and it was supposed tohave been published this summer. But no MS in sight and Random House has stopped talking about it.
One wonders what the hold up is. Brown is such a *hack* writer that it should be no sweat cranking out a manuscript in a timely manner.
It’s not like he’s aiming to do real literature or anything.
Yhanks you
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