Small cameras and fake tourists: how Angels and Demons flouted Vatican ban

How do you film a movie set largely in the Vatican when the Holy See itself has banned you from shooting within its walls? If you are the producers of Angels and Demons, the prequel to the church-baiting worldwide blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, you send in cameramen posing as tourists to take more than 250,000 photographs and shoot hours of video footage.

The team behind the new film, which is based on an earlier book by Dan Brown, used the surreptitiously-gathered material to digitally recreate many of the famous papal buildings, Tuscan colonnades, fountains and monuments within St Peter's Square.

Special effects supervisor Ryan Cook told Italian film magazine Ciak: "The ban on filming put us in serious difficulty because we were not able to carry out the photographic surveys necessary to reconstruct the setting. So for weeks we sent a team of people who mixed with tourists and took thousands of photos and video footage."

The move was necessary because leaders of the Catholic church, still smarting from The Da Vinci Code's assertion that Christ married and fathered children with Mary Magdalene, had banned the film-makers from filming in or around any of Rome's churches. Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, said at the time: "Normally we read the script, but this time it was not necessary. The name Dan Brown was enough."

Angels and Demons director Ron Howard hinted in an interview in December on US TV show Shootout that his team had been forced into unusual measures by the ban. "We didn't shoot at the Vatican officially. But cameras can be made really small," he said.

Opies and Demons: Dark Secrets of the Opie Code

The Opie Code

At first we thought it might all just be coincidence. Mystical and arcane clues left in the symbolism of jerkwater towns are not always easy to decipher. There was that episode in which one of Sheriff Andy's slick glad-handing fishing buddies invites him - with a nudge-nudge and a wink - to join the pretentious and elite "Esquire Club" - an exclusive gentlemen's club in Raleigh, clearly a front and outpost of the Illuminati. They offer Andy membership but Barney is blackballed. It looked perhaps like Mayberry might be a center of esoteric gnosticism.

We weren't sure. But then another online poster reminded us of Barney's coded shibboleths:

Andy: This is good, Roger. What is it?
Roger: It's Baked Alaska.
Andy: I don't believe I ever heard of it.
Barney: Sure you have, Andy! You just forgot.
That's Baked Alaska. It's that new dessert that
come out since it became a state.

Mhmmm. The ol' "Baked Alaska" cipher. Yesiree. It started looking clearer.

Raising the kundalini of his chakras with Aunt Bee.
Aunt Bee and Opie summoning Lucifer through incantations in a gnostic Albigensian ritual

But not just the blackballing Esquire Club skullduggery.
Oh, no. The trail did not end there.

We were also informed, by alchemist gnomes in Zurich, Switzerland, that it is well known in elite occult circles that Aunt Bee was a high-ranking theosophical Blavatsky adept and highly-skilled Tantric gymnosophist, who introduced Opie to the crackpot Priory of Sion Illuminist lore, instructing him in Enochian incantations, occult yoga, and Ozark ritual magic in the secret tunnels beneath Floyd's unctuously suspicious barber shop. But did it end there in the circus-tent occult carnie lore of a disturbed woman and a fantasy-prone boy with posture issues in a jerkwater small town or would it lead all the way to the Ishtar Gate of the Kodak Theatre to the occult salons of Europe? We couldn't be sure. But he's been around weirdness for a long time.

No, no. That poor Ron Howard, being painted, wrongly, as a Catholic hater. Why, where do they come up with these false accusations? /major sarcasm

How slimy, sneak in with 'fake tourists' armed with tiny cameras and, voila!, he's free to bash away. Break the rules, make it tougher for real tourists, but hey he got his pictures despite their efforts to thwart him. I guess he feels quite full of himself.

Oh, that's right, it's yet another fictional book by Brown, movie by Howard. They're shameless.

> Brown’s books are great.

To each his own, I guess. I think Brown’s books are puerile and unedifying.

> And, oh by the way...
>
> IT’S A MOVIE!!

More’s the pity. A puerile book is going to be made into a puerile movie, resulting in yet more puerile “entertainment” from Hollyweird. Given that movies are seldom as good as the books that inspire them, somehow I don’t think the cause of Western Civilization will have been advanced much as a result of introducing “Angels and Demons” to the silver screen.

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