Depending on your view of public relations, evangelism and apologetics, this fascinating New Yorker article about how Sony created a website for evangelical scholars to debate the demonstrably spurious assertions of The Da Vinci Code could alternately anger, astonish or intrigue you. When the studio bought the film rights to Dan Brown’s novel three years ago, it was seen as a smart property for a thriller. But then reaction set in to it’s heretical content and then, the bomb–Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ ‘s huge box office–brought a reality check to Hollywood- there was a huge segment of conservative Christian moviegoers out there who could see The Da Vinci Code as the anti-Passion–after all, the book posits that Christ was never crucified, but married Mary Magdalene and produced a lineage two thousand years old.
To blunt the impact of such a tale, the studio recruited Jonathan Bock’s Grace Hill Media a publicity firm that works with studios to promote their films to the Christian community. Past success stories have included The Lord of the Rings, Signs, and Walk the Line. Now the firm is selling its most challenging film, which denies the central tenets of Christianity as a grand fraud, by creation of a website with the ostensible function of stimulating “debate” and “dialogue.”
This sounds like what Phillip Morris did to blunt criticism of it’s marketing of cigarettes–create a program to help parents talk to their kids about not smoking–in other words to seemingly work against the creation of a new generation of customers in order to deflect criticism of irresponsible nicotine marketing. So, the studio sees this as a public-relations ploy intended to insure long-term sales (of at least three to four weeks, a long time in today’s theatrical runs). What some see as a cynical coopting of various Christian experts and groups to publicize a movie, others might see as letting your enemy give you the means to correct the lie he is trying to sell.
