Last Gasps of DVC Hype Until Movie Comes Out

By Ron Hogan on March 21, 2006 8:33 AM

As the Da Vinci Code trial winds up, PW chief Sara Nelson asks, “So am I the only person around here who thinks this court case is bogus?” The way the proceedings have unfolded, with all the player haters dumping on Dan Brown, she’s intuited “a lot of commonality between the lionized Brown and the disgraced [James] Frey.”

It’s a comparison that’s sprung to the mind of Dan Brown biographer Lisa Rogak as well, and to capitalize on the brainstorm, she’s announcing her availability for interviews offering “insight and commentary into what makes the reclusive novelist tick.” And she doesn’t just discuss his “unusual work habits” and why he hasn’t come up with his next novel yet: She can also offer legal analysis and suggests he’ll be prone to similar lawsuits as time goes by. Well, let ‘em sue, Brown might say, given the tone of the trial coverage. Sarah Lyall wraps things up for NYT by noting the judge’s ” skepticism, even exasperation, toward some of the arguments put forward by the lawyer for the plaintiffs.” On the other hand, Observer columnist Viv Groskop sees the trial as a humilation for Brown and delcares “the intellectual police have finally got their chance to dance on the grave of the fastest selling book in history.” Maybe things are different over in England, but the situation Groskop’s describing—”it is difficult to find anyone at all who will admit to having enjoyed The Da Vinci Code“—doesn’t seem to bear much relationship to reality, and the defensive posturing just makes the argument sound worse. It’s like saying the Fake Writer scandal made people stop reading James Frey…after all, the facts would seem to indicate that the controversy actually slowed a perfectly normal declining sales rate, if not outright reversing it, and for all the public outcry against Frey, there’s been plenty of vocal support as well.

On another front, the European edition of Time pores through Brown’s witness statement to extract some trite writing advice (e.g., “keep chapters snappy”) and a dig at the author’s working relationship with his wife, echoing the accusations by the plaintiff’s counsel about her role in the research behind DVC.