Gambling with Facts or Fiction?

Yet again, one has to be amused at Hollywood and more so, at the larger so-called uneducated readers as they lead themselves into gambling with facts and fiction. Sony Pictures online site is a legacy to the marketing leaps and bounds it takes to promote and push a film, produced according to a book, The Da Vinci Code, written by Dan Brown. Mr. Brown has been nicely placed into a forefront that previous, far more educated authors had already gone more than a decade ago.

Dan Brown must be celebrating with lots of wine and dine; we won't yet assume that women are involved. He has taken good threads of books already written by, most famously, the italian Umberto Eco. Umberto's books - The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and others have gone where Dan Brown could not go and have formed the foundation of his own thriller, now celebrated by millions.

A fine concoction of other books such as 'In God's Name' and 'The Messianic Legacy', 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' have also lent good background information to allow Mr. Brown to weave an almost believable (well, by the uneducated, believable) story of Roman Catholic Church and Vatican intrigue, suspense and murder.

If people would only read more books instead of watching MTV, ETV and the likes of Hollywood, then they would know that the fanfare belongs to other writers who made these foundations for a smart Dan Brown to build an empire upon. No-one can be angry with Dan, he's just being a true commercial democrat who had the full freedom to create a concoction of his own, more likely to be read by his fellow countrymen. The lucky fact that his fellow countrymen are 'All American' just makes his day and with Hollywood backing him up; what exposure!

Umberto Eco, however, weaves far more real history and facts into his fiction than Dan Brown ever would.