Plus: Tom Hanks is lobbying hard for an old co-star of his to take on the coveted role of "Sophie":
Posted on 11/14/2004 11:55:11 AM PST by wagglebee
Tom Hanks has been pegged to play the lead role in Sony's upcoming film "The Da Vinci Code," the adaptation of author Dan Brown's best-selling thriller, Newsweek has learned.
Director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, the duo who helped make Hanks a star with their 1984 comedy "Splash" and rehired him 11 years later for "Apollo 13," cast Hanks as the globe-trotting scholar Robert Langdon, a decision based partially on the cerebral (riddle-solving, code-cracking) nature of the action in "Da Vinci," Newsweek reports in its Nov. 22 issue (on newsstands Monday, Nov. 15).
"Tom is an exciting actor to watch thinking," Howard tells General Editor Devin Gordon. "We probably don't need his status from a box-office standpoint" – by now, "The Da Vinci Code" sells itself – "but he gives Langdon instant legitimacy."
Howard and Grazer are taking their time casting "Da Vinci," but plan to hire foreign actors to play the book's foreign characters. "If there's any book that's supposed to be an international thriller, says Grazer, "this is it."
Grazer tells Newsweek that one recent Oscar winner inquired about the role of Parisian cryptologist Sophie Neveu, "and she could easily do it. But I think the audience would be let down a bit. They expect a French girl." As for the role of bullish cop Bezu Fache, Gordon reports that Jean Reno is on Grazer's short list.
Grazer first got wind of "The Da Vinci Code" early in 2003, when Joel Surnow – creator of the acclaimed TV series "24" – thought "Da Vinci" would make a terrific story line for the show's third season. Surnow asked his boss, Grazer, to look into acquiring the rights, Newsweek reports. But as Brown had no intention of handing over his book to a mere TV show, Grazer says that "it quickly became clear that we had no chance." A few months later Sony paid $6 million for the movie rights – and hired Grazer as the producer for the biggest film adaptation since "Harry Potter."
The 53-year-old Grazer, who also paired with Howard on the Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind," has several upcoming projects on his slate, including an animated "Curious George" film with Will Ferrell and "Fun with Dick and Jane" starring Jim Carrey. Grazer also is producing a documentary about the notorious skinflick "Deep Throat," Gordon reports. Due out in February, it may be the first NC-17 movie released by a major studio in years.
Great movie for Christians to stay away from.
Silly premise, shallow characters and worse dialogue. It isn't impossible to make a good movie out of an awful book though. Case in point is The Bridges of Madison County. The book was drivel. The movie was lots better. Of course it did have Clint Eastwood. ;)
"Philadelphia" was his worst anti-christian movie.
He doesn't get it.
Sadly, this story is an excellent story. It's a great read. However, I completely disagree with Brown's conclusions.
It's just a story. It's fiction.
Whats the premise of the book? How is it anti-christian?
I hadn't heard that Howard/Grazer were doing the DaVinci Code, they should make an outstanding movie. Tom Hanks is not the person I ever associated with the lead character though.
It basically says that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus Christ, and that they had children that eventually became the Merovingian line of Kings of France. It also says that the Holy Grail is actually not a cup at all but Mary Magdalene herself.
The book says that this is not accepted as fact today because of a far-reaching Church conspiracy to suppress women. Or something like that.
It's just fiction, not intended as a scholarly work.
However, it was clearly plagarized from the 1983 "non-fiction" book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", which has since been widely discredited as a complete hoax.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0440136482/qid=1100462553/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-1817270-5536101
Plus: Tom Hanks is lobbying hard for an old co-star of his to take on the coveted role of "Sophie":
I disagree on it being a great story. I had tried one of Brown's earlier books (Digital Fortress, maybe?) and found the writing downright juvenile, mid-grade to YA level stuff. I decided to give him another chance and bought the DaVinci Code. Took it with me on a Hawaiian cruise as my primary read. At first I was very impressed by how much his writing had improved, how well paced it was, how engaging. Then he gradually and cleverly slipped out of storytelling and into preaching his anti-Christian dreck, which he of course implied via the novel's introduction to be well researched fact. I threw it into the ocean and watched it disappear in the frothy wake of the ship.
MM
ok, call me a tard but is the da vinci code all about?
The entire premise of the book is that everything we have been taught about Christ's life, death and resurrection has been a lie. It alleges that the Catholic Church has conspired throughout the past 2000 years to hide the truth.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504209/qid=1100462725/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-1817270-5536101
Oh... wait. Wait. "... Jean Reno," he said. JEAN Reno. :)
It makes sense that Hollywood would want to turn that premise into a movie.
IMHO with the exception of "Philadelphia," Hanks has kept his personal politics out of his movies, which I think has helped his popularity.
Thanks
Too bad, I kind of liked Tom Hanks.
I saw the book as more anti-Catholic than anything. I am not a Catholic, but certainly the author of this simple minded fiction is not either. He conveyed a real attitude about the Roman church from my perspective.
It involves ciphers and clues to a secret which has been held for centuries by covert groups. Leonardo Da Vinci was a member of this cult supposedly.
I felt that the book stole ideas from a number of other works. It is really was a pretty shoddy piece of work in my opinion.
Yeah...nothing like a movie about infidelity.
Yeah, right.
Try telling that to an ex-girlfriend of mine who used this book to make me denounce my Christianity. Her gambit didn't work. Thus, she's an ex-girlfriend.
You may think it's harmless, but people are using it for purposes beyond mere entertainmnet.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Hollywood would make a movie out of this trashy book!!
Yeah, I think it's anti-Catholic, too. So is one of his other books, "Angels and Demons", IMO.
Hanks has made a few duds lately.
Get ready EVERY bad guy is going to be from a christian background in any hollywood movie. Look for more anti-christmas movies this year.
Sophie "Wilson" Neveu!
Recall that Hanks came out and spoke against Slickster Clinton when he disgraced the office. Then, after his Hollyweird friends pressured him, he withdrew his criticism within a couple of days. Not much of a backbone.
Well, he did get his start playing a crossdresser on TV.
Unfortunately, there are claims that the book was based on historical evidence which is completely false. A lot of people are anxious to believe anything that diminishes Christianity. The book and the movie should be boycotted by Christians IMO.
Oh great! A wackjob irrational blasphemy brought to the big screen. Here's hoping it flops.
I am so sick of these anti-American, leftist, out-of-touch, perverted, Hollywierd atheist freaks!
I have a policy on books that I read. Reading takes a lot of time, part of a finite amount of time I have in my life. Life is much too short to read a bad book. Therefore, in order to minimaze the chances of me wasting valuable time on a bad book, I read only books that are more than 50 years old. If a book can hold up under the duress of time, and still be admired, I think it lessens the risk. I made an exception, however, for Atlas Shrugged, based on the brilliant Fountainhead.
Agreed.....but the author pretends it is more than fiction and a lot of readers believe it.
Like the Bible, the De Vinci Code is just a book. Some people will choose to believe what they want and to be influenced by whatever. Some folks are stupid. Some folks are ignorant. And some folks are both stupid and ignorant.
Real faith is stronger then any book.
I'm sorry that that happened to you.
Yep. I know on one college girl who dropped her Christian faith because she read "something higher"... The Da Vinci Code. It is true, obviously, that she is a moron, but it is still evil to mislead a moron out of her faith.
So therefore, I believe that the Koran is nothing more than an evil work of fiction. And I see the damage that this book has done to each and every one of us just in the past few years. "The Da Vinci Code" is one of the bestselling novels ever written, so yes I believe that this book can certainly be damaging to our culture.
Interesting policy.
I am not certain but 50 years ago it might be possible to have actually read every book ever written. I have heard it said that in the 18th century it was literally possible to have read everything!
Nowadays, there is a lot of trash out there. As far as I am concerned, best seller lists are no better than political polls.
I was given Da Vinci Code as a gift, and it was simple enough for me to read in just a couple of days. I never would have actually paid for such a book with my own money.
Blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder, preacher.
Yes, it's fiction.
It's also in fiction a direct assult on the diety, sanctity and holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's a movie that won't see my money.
It was a really lousy book, and the movie can't be much better. It had a transparent plot line based on stupid theories that a lot of uneducated people took as fact. Add to that the fact the characters were poorly developed with not one person in the book that the reader could actually grab a hold of and identify with. I found the first sixty pages to be fairly good, but after that used the book to help me sleep. I finally took the book on an airplane with me, on a red eye flight and left the book when I finished it. It wasn't worth passing on to anyone. It did make interesting conversation with people that would ask me about it, though. I found that the inquiries ran about 50/50 for or against.
Dan Brown - the author - actually creeps around (and has a home) in New Hampshire - a couple of months ago he had a autograph part in Concord - our state capital and bastion of liberals - before the party he responded to a lot of the criticism of the 'invented' wisdom in the book saying it was a merely fiction and he didn't know why anyone would be upset with him. At the autographing event - he all but swore that everything in the book was the absolute truth and he had carefully researched it all.
Of course, he benefit$ enormou$ly from any and all controver$y over the book. Another $leazy immigrant we could do without in this once honorable $tate.
Dismantling The Da Vinci Code, by Sandra Miesel http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=5342
“The Grail,” Langdon said, “is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)
The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup. While the original Grail—the cup Jesus allegedly used at the Last Supper—normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s recent mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away to the realm of esoteric history.
But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail—he wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. In doing so, Brown inverts the insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing his children.
Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a material vessel. Therefore Brown claims that “the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene,” a conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last Supper.
The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter, burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. Together with crippled millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei “monk” named Silas who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the “Grail.”
But despite the frenetic pacing, at no point is action allowed to interfere with a good lecture. Before the story comes full circle back to the Louvre, readers face a barrage of codes, puzzles, mysteries, and conspiracies.
With his twice-stated principle, “Everybody loves a conspiracy,” Brown is reminiscent of the famous author who crafted her product by studying the features of ten earlier best-sellers. It would be too easy to criticize him for characters thin as plastic wrap, undistinguished prose, and improbable action. But Brown isn’t so much writing badly as writing in a particular way best calculated to attract a female audience. (Women, after all, buy most of the nation’s books.) He has married a thriller plot to a romance-novel technique. Notice how each character is an extreme type…effortlessly brilliant, smarmy, sinister, or psychotic as needed, moving against luxurious but curiously flat backdrops. Avoiding gore and bedroom gymnastics, he shows only one brief kiss and a sexual ritual performed by a married couple. The risqué allusions are fleeting although the text lingers over some bloody Opus Dei mortifications. In short, Brown has fabricated a novel perfect for a ladies’ book club.
Brown’s lack of seriousness shows in the games he plays with his character names—Robert Langdon, “bright fame long don” (distinguished and virile); Sophie Nevue, “wisdom New Eve”; the irascible taurine detective Bezu Fache, “zebu anger.” The servant who leads the police to them is Legaludec, “legal duce.” The murdered curator takes his surname, Saunière, from a real Catholic priest whose occult antics sparked interest in the Grail secret. As an inside joke, Brown even writes in his real-life editor (Faukman is Kaufman).
While his extensive use of fictional formulas may be the secret to Brown’s stardom, his anti-Christian message can’t have hurt him in publishing circles: The Da Vinci Code debuted atop the New York Times best-seller list. By manipulating his audience through the conventions of romance-writing, Brown invites readers to identify with his smart, glamorous characters who’ve seen through the impostures of the clerics who hide the “truth” about Jesus and his wife. Blasphemy is delivered in a soft voice with a knowing chuckle: “[E]very faith in the world is based on fabrication.”
But even Brown has his limits. To dodge charges of outright bigotry, he includes a climactic twist in the story that absolves the Church of assassination. And although he presents Christianity as a false root and branch, he’s willing to tolerate it for its charitable works.
(Of course, Catholic Christianity will become even more tolerable once the new liberal pope elected in Brown’s previous Langdon novel, Angels & Demons, abandons outmoded teachings. “Third-century laws cannot be applied to the modern followers of Christ,” says one of the book’s progressive cardinals.)
Where Is He Getting All of This? Brown actually cites his principal sources within the text of his novel. One is a specimen of academic feminist scholarship: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The others are popular esoteric histories: The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine and The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, both by Margaret Starbird. (Starbird, a self-identified Catholic, has her books published by Matthew Fox’s outfit, Bear & Co.) Another influence, at least at second remove, is The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.
The use of such unreliable sources belies Brown’s pretensions to intellectuality. But the act has apparently fooled at least some of his readers—the New York Daily News book reviewer trumpeted, “His research is impeccable.”
BTW, Hanks was great in The Ladykillers. The movie started slow and had too much gratuitous cursing, but after the first 10-15 minutes it was great.
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