Posted on 02/26/2006 11:27:40 AM PST by Hal1950
The author of the blockbuster novel "The Da Vinci Code" faces an English High Court challenge Monday from two men who claim he stole their ideas.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing their own publishers, Random House, claiming Dan Brown's book draws heavily on their 1982 bestseller "Holy Blood, Holy Grail".
Brown's 2003 book has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and earned the American 45 million pounds (66 million euros, 78.5 million dollars) in one year, instantly making the writer one of the world's richest.
Baigent's and Leigh's book tackles theories that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child, and the blood line continues to the present day -- with the Catholic Church aware of the discovery and trying to suppress it.
A third author, Henry Lincoln, is not part of the lawsuit.
Brown's book, which combines thriller, detective and conspiracy theory genres, explores similar themes about the Vatican covering up the true story of Jesus.
The novel has been translated into 44 languages and drawn criticism from the Roman Catholic Church and historians.
If Baigent and Leigh are successful and obtain injunctions preventing the use of their material it could threaten the British release of the film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code".
The big screen version, costing 100 million dollars and starring American two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks, British veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen and French favourites Audrey Tatou and Jean Reno, is scheduled to open in Britain on May 19.
The case is expected to last up to two weeks, barring a settlement. It is also likely to clarify the extent to which an author can use other people's research under existing copyright laws.
Brown acknowledges the theories of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" in his novel. The villain is called Sir Leigh Teabing, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Baigent and Leigh's surnames.
May the blasphemers litigate themselves into bankruptsy.
What crap! You cannot copyright ideas...only the written word. The idea that Jesus was married is a very, very old one.
Brown wrote a novel. The other authors wrote a speculative piece of erstwhile nonfiction.
by ALAIN JOURDAN
Published on 16 September 2004
As masterstrokes go it was certainly quite a masterstroke. Since it first came out, sales of the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ have not dipped once. With a print run of 10 million copies worldwide, the French translation of the novel by American Dan Brown, which has been available in France and Switzerland since March, has already sold 400,000 copies. Behind this incredible literary success lies an esoteric intrigue which is itself a blend of fact and fiction. The book itself is a devilishly effective thriller which begins with the murder of the Curator of the Louvre. The victim is found lying in a strange position, completely naked, with his arms and legs spread out, and surrounded by pictograms. The disposition of the body is reminiscent of the Man of Vitruvius, the famous drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci. Columbia Pictures have already acquired the film rights, announcing that Ron Howard will be the director and that the leading man will be Russell Crowe. While we’re waiting for the film to come out we’ve got the book to be getting on with.
The descendant of Christ
Reviving the familiar theme of plots and conspiracies, Dan Brown has his heroes setting off in search of a forbidden truth, a profound secret of which the Templars were the guardians. To solve the puzzle they have to decode the messages sent by the initiates down the centuries. It’s a treasure hunt that leaves everyone breathless.
The austere walls of Westminster Abbey and the flagstones of the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris are presumed to hide precious secrets. In the novel the key to the puzzle is found in one of the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Beneath the master’s brush lies a face, that of Mary Magdalene, the sinner.
For the purposes of his novel, Dan Brown has exhumed the old story of the Priory of Sion, an order of chivalry created in 1099 by Godefroy de Bouillon. Its members alone knew the true story of Christ. If they revealed what they knew to the world then the whole edifice of Christianity would start to totter. It’s a myth that’s setting esoteric circles alight. After his crucifixion, Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene. The Merovingians were their descendants and the last ‘recognised heir’ was a certain Pierre Plantard who died in February 2000. For several months now, tour operators have been organising round-trips between Paris and London to satisfy the curiosity of readers exhilarated by the story. And what if it was all true? The details are certainly disturbing and the reasoning spellbinding. However, Dan Brown’s novel simply reworks a gigantic fraud that’s now already 50 years old.
Plantard, the prisoner of his past
To lift the veil on this mystery it’s not necessary to open the doors of the Vatican archives. The statutes of the famous secret society were actually lodged with the sub-prefecture of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois in June 1956. Pierre Plantard (the descendant of Christ!) created an association under the Law of 1901 (the Swiss equivalent of a non-profit-making organisation) along with a number of friends. A certain Pierre Bonhomme was listed as the President, with Plantard as Treasurer. The only thing is, it’s not a secret society at all, but a tenants’ association set up to defend the interests of council house tenants in Annemasse. The organisation’s title refers not to the Sion of the Bible, but to Mont-Sion between Annecy and Geneva. The association’s organisational structure is reminiscent of the boy scouts. The head of it is called ‘His Druidic Majesty’ and the rank and file are grouped around ‘phalanges’.
The stench of anti-Semitism
Employed as a draughtsman at the Chamorin works in Annemasse, Pierre Plantard, a mythomaniac with a keen interest in esotericism, amused himself by rewriting the history of Christianity and inventing a genealogy implying divine descent. To give some credibility to his story he argued that the treasure discovered by the Abbé Saunière at Rennes-le-Chateau was an apocryphal document precisely establishing the genealogical tree of the Merovingians since the death of Christ. The only thing was, the document he produced to support this claim was actually a forgery.
Author Jean-Luc Chaumeil was the first to uncover the fraud at the end of the 1970s. He found that Plantard was a prisoner of his past.
The grandmaster of the Priory of Sion was also the founder of a much more controversial organisation known as Alpha Galathe [sic]. Its statutes stipulated that Jews were not admitted to membership. Plantard was not just a mythomaniac. During the German Occupation he published, under the name of ‘Pierre de France’, an anti-Semitic periodical called ‘Vaincre’. Some English researchers, fascinated by the myth of the Priory of Sion, discovered during their investigations that on 17 December 1953 Pierre Plantard was sentenced by the magistrate’s court in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois to six months imprisonment for breach of trust. Before the success of the novel, CBS had already broadcast a documentary. The subject is apparently inexhaustible, and certainly promises literary and cinematic success to other people as well. Since the end of the Second World War all the investigations into the Priory of Sion have focused on Switzerland, where the majority of the Neotemplar orders are based.
‘The myth has grown to terrifying proportions’
French journalist and author Jean-Luc Chaumeil (1) is extremely familiar with the story of the Priory of Sion. His books on the secret of the Templars and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château brought him into contact with the mysterious Pierre Plantard on several occasions. Chaumeil was the first to dispel the myth and show it for the lie that it really is. The polemics concerning the authenticity of the documents attesting to the existence of a secret society charged with guarding the secrets of Christianity have had the esoteric world in turmoil for more than 30 years.
The controversy took a new turn in 1982 with the appearance of ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ by English authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, a staggering investigation into the presumed links between the Priory of Sion and the Order of Malta, the First National Bank of Chicago, the Vatican, the Masonic Lodge P2, the CIA, President De Gaulle and President Mitterrand! It served only however to deepen the mystery still further. Today there are about a dozen secret societies laying claim to the title of Priory of Sion.
‘A fantasist of genius’
Since the appearance of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ several newspapers have exhumed the troubled past of Pierre Plantard. For Jean-Luc Chaumeil, Pierre Plantard was first and foremost ‘a fantasist of genius’. ‘The truth’, he explains, ‘is that he was a megalomaniac and a mythomaniac. He’s only been overtaken by other people because he started the whole thing. I was the first person to interview him, in 1972. I had been following this affair for a long time to see what lay behind it. This led me to investigate the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and the origin of the treasure discovered by the Abbé Saunière. In fact it’s a rather ridiculous story, which only really got off the ground when Plantard met the three English authors of Holy Blood. The lie then assumed quite different proportions. With this new book, Plantard became not just the grandmaster of the Priory of Sion but also the last descendant of the Merovingians, and therefore of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. He protested limply during a programme broadcast on France Inter with Jacques Chancel when I revealed that the statutes of the Priory of Sion lodged in the subprefecture of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois were actually those of a tenants’ association in Annemasse. With ‘The Da Vinci Code’ the myth has assumed even more terrifying proportions – global ones in fact. This guy is now clearly revealed as an accomplished, mischievous and dangerous forger’.
I've read their book. Non fiction is not what I would describe it as. Your first two words in your post are more appropriate.
Perhaps these guys are smarter than we think and they're real purpose in suing is to boost their own book sales on Brown's back..
Brown's whole book is a fiction full of enough historical errors to make any art historian cringe. That these guys want in on it is no credit to them.
Best-seller 'The Da Vinci Code' is based on a deception
Dan Brown's esoteric thriller, which has now appeared in a French translation after selling 6 million copies in its original English version, is a work of fiction that acknowledges the truth of just two established facts: the existence of Opus Dei and the existence of the Priory of Sion. The problem is that the latter organisation was invented fifty years ago by an anti-Semitic oddball in neighbouring France...
by Luc Debraine Monday 15 March 2004
The Chief Curator of the Louvre, Jacques Saunière, is found murdered in the museum's main gallery. He is stark naked. His corpse is found inscribed within a circle just like that of the famous drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci known as the Man of Vitruvius. An anagram, as well as a mysterious sequence of numbers, is inscribed on the inlaid parquet floor. Informed of the murder while on a visit to Paris, an American friend of the curator, Robert Langdon, rushes to the scene of the crime. That proves to be a big mistake by this Harvard Professor of Art History: he immediately becomes No. 1 suspect and is forced to flee.
In his flight from the police Robert Langdon, who bears an uncanny resemblance to actor Harrison Ford, takes with him a beautiful young French police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu, who has also been accused of being involved in the violent death of Jacques Saunière. Pursued by a strange police superintendent and an albino monk from Opus Dei, the couple are forced to solve one by one the puzzles left behind at the scene of the crime by the curator just before his death in an effort to shed some light on the truth. And the truth of the matter is that Jacques Saunière is the director of the Priory of Sion, a secret society that, down the centuries, has jealously guarded the secret location of and, above all, the true nature of that relic of all relics: the Holy Grail.
That - in rough outline - is the plot of the 'Da Vinci Code', Dan Brown's fourth novel. A former English teacher, this American author was completely unknown until last spring. Then, after its appearance in the USA in March 2003, his esoteric thriller remained firmly at the top of the best-sellers lists, to the extent of becoming a publishing phenomenon that transcended the usual limitations of its genre: six million copies sold, translated into forty languages (the French version has just been published), not forgetting the film adaptation currently being prepared by director Ron Howard.
Like Mel Gibson, who is raking in tens (soon to be hundreds) of millions of dollars thanks to the runaway success of the 'Passion of Christ', the success of the 'Da Vinci Code' has made Dan Brown a rich man. And, similarly, the novel has triggered seemingly endless controversies as, like Gibson's film, it is based on Apocryphal Biblical texts that undermine Catholic orthodoxy from within. In the USA, the Church is concerned about the best-seller's influence on readers who might forget that it's just a work of fiction – it's a far-fetched story certainly, but it's also well-paced and is far from being stupid (I speak from experience, having read it at a single sitting). The Cardinal of Chicago, Francis George, has accused Dan Brown of exploiting - 'under the cover of erudition' - the taste of the general public for 'conspiracy theories'.
Theologians and art historians have also criticised the author for allowing himself to be inspired by questionable religious sources, and for suggesting that Leonardo Da Vinci scattered secret esoteric codes throughout his works.
The fact is that Dan Brown makes only two real claims in the book: that Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion actually exist. There's no problem with Opus Dei, even if the way it's described in the novel as a murderous organisation prone to scarifying mortifications prompted a lively response from the organisation itself, which demanded - unsuccessfully as it turned out - that Dan Brown's publisher withdraw the reference to the Opus Dei from the thriller's factual prologue.
The other 'fact' is more problematic. The American author says he believes in the existence of the Priory of Sion, that it was founded in 1099, that its archives are kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and that its most eminent members have included Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, Da Vinci and even Jean Cocteau.
A simple Internet search after reading the book suggests a very different line of enquiry: that of a clever deception that, in inspiration, is half-religious and half-Royalist. A farrago created in the 1950s by an anti-Semitic oddball, the Priory of Sion has never actually existed outside the imaginations of a small group of devotees of bogus esotericism. It's also a piece of mystification incidentally that first saw the light of day near Annemasse, and whose crazy meanderings pass through the centre of Geneva. Now being used to lend an air of credibility to an international best-seller, the Priory of Sion has never guarded any secrets other than that of its true identity: a gigantic lie.
"The Da Vinci Code" is a masterpiece of accuracy and dedicated historical research compared to Dan Brown's previous novel "Digital Fortress."
Hey, ya make your $78 Million on one book ... and I can understand the desire for deep research going down a bit on the follow-ons.
Deception Point was a lot of fun, though.
This happens all the time. Some ideas occur to different people. There are four episodes of the original "Twilight Zone" that were not rebroadcast for 40 years because hack writers no one had ever heard of claimed that Rod Serling "stole" their ideas. THey had the episodes tied-up in litigation for decades.
I did not want to read the Da Vinci Code, because I don't like hearing about those things. But I did when everyone in my family did, and it is definately a page turner. It's sucess is due to the writing skill, not the old ideas. It perpetuates myths better left to die.
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