dan author the da vinci code crossword clue

“Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,” one of the book’s main characters declares. Brown’s puzzler plot proceeded from a thesis that Christianity as we know it is history’s greatest scam, perpetrated by a malignant, misogynist, and, when necessary, murderous Catholic Church. Reviewers had generally praised the novel, calling it a brainy entertainment and, as sales piled up, marvelling at its broad appeal somehow, the provocations at its heart were almost uniformly overlooked.

If, in retrospect, Hollywood seems to have been oblivious of the risk of the film’s arousing religious ire, it was only reflecting the attitude that had greeted the publication of the book. The article in Daily Variety announcing the deal suggested no hint of possible religious controversy in the “Da Vinci Code” story, describing it as a murder mystery with “clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy encoded in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.” John Calley, the Sony executive who made the deal, described the book as a “page-turner” and a “thrill ride” that seemed to have been written for the screen. When Sony acquired the rights to the book, in June of 2003, it was the property that Hollywood most dearly coveted, a certain blockbuster with sequel potential, and the reported six-million-dollar deal that Sony made with Brown was seen as a triumph. What is striking about these assertions is that they are part of a marketing project paid for by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio that has invested more than two hundred million dollars in producing “The Da Vinci Code” and distributing and marketing it worldwide. Prospective moviegoers who have spent time at a Web site called The Da Vinci Dialogue, the most polished of these efforts, have been informed that the story is deeply anti-Christian, a pseudo history “fraught with inaccuracies” and “spiritual tripe.” They have been offered the opinion that, of its type, the book was only “moderately engaging,” attracting fans who were easily gulled and perhaps just a bit dim. The Internet, intrinsically hospitable to such a purpose, has grown a busy marketplace of “Da Vinci” debunkers, anticipating the big-budget film version of Brown’s tale, now arriving in theatres. In the three years since the publication of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” a best-selling suspense novel with pretensions to serious scholarship, the work has inspired a vast literature of refutation, including dozens of books and numberless essays disputing the story’s core contentions.

The “Da Vinci” phenomenon cuts across both Christian and Hollywood orthodoxies.

Dan author the da vinci code crossword clue