Now Playing: Marche Funebre - what else would fit?
Topic: Rambling Rumminations
..to go back to the bookstore, another whopper lands on your preferred news page. Right on the heels of the James Frey versus Oprah debacle, The Da Vinci Code and its author, Dan Brown, are appearing before the powdered wigs of a London court. The charge: plagiarism!
The hugely successful Mr. Brown, whose intrigue-laden opus is about to hit the silver screen, is accused of having lifted the idea from an early work by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", who sued Mr. Browns publisher, Random House. Which, incidentally, also published their book. Naturally, Random House denies the claim.
It all centers around the idea, certainly put forth in Mr. Baigent's and Mr. Leigh's book, that Jesus went ahead and married the foot fetishist, namely Maria Magdalena, the gist of which also provides a center piece in The Da Vinci Code. And thus the battle begins. And while the available jackpot was already huge prior to the sale of the movie rights, the two gentlemen's timing coincides nicely with Sony's imminent cinema release (starring none other than Tom Hanks), thus making the ensuing court battle all the more pecuniary.
Of course, there is really nothing new here: the literary battles focused on Shakespeare's alleged copyright infringements are already legendary (though not yet litigated); Art Buchwald once successfully extracted half a million dollars from Paramount's coffers for their "borrowing" his ideas for the making of "Coming to America". And who could forget Kunta Kinte of "Roots" fame, whose author, Alex Haley, had not just copied ideas but entire paragraphs from an earlier book. He apparently settled out of court.
Almost makes you wish you had something in print, never mind how obscure or obtuse, so Hollywood or some hack on his way to the publisher could steal it and thus make you rich.
I wonder, though: will Yahoo sue me for copying part of my second paragraph above straight from their news page? Or for getting the idea for this entry from one of their horribly construed headlines?
