A PW Exclusive
The Magi Deception, the blockbuster novel that has outsold Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Dan Brown combined, is about to make film and political history as well. NextWorld Studios, the dark horse indie that optioned the book two years before it was published, has leased the Gaza Strip and twelve square miles of the Sinai desert for filming activities, drawing together Israeli, Egyptian, and Palestinian authorities in a joint venture to produce the film on location.
In a signing ceremony at its new film complex on a former Israeli settlement, NextWorld president Gerald Overby also announced the closing of its extras lottery yesterday after portions of the Israeli-built wall collapsed under the press of applicants. The drawing for lucky winners will be broadcast live on Friday by both cable and news networks worldwide, and the actual filming will be the subject of a year-long tv series.
Turning the making of the movie into a media event itself has become a hallmark of NextWorld’s involvement in the Magi project. Trailers for the book featured shots of presses and binders churning out finished books by the rail-car load, translators casting the text into hundreds of languages, and clips of its enigmatic author at his laptop, the screen flashing constantly from text to maps, ancient art, magic sites, and back to text, his fingers typing faster than camera or eye could follow.
“Long before the book appeared in print or e-text, a world-wide audience was conditioned not only to salivate at the very title, but also to believe uncritically in every word,” notes Martha Denby-Wilcox, professor emeritus of philosophy at Cornell University and author of The Public Mind: A Quintessential Oxymoron.
In a world poised on the brink of ecological, social, political, and economic collapse, a work of fiction being taken as gospel truth is not surprising, Dr. Denby-Wilcox adds. “Historically, in times of great stress or in the face of inexorable change, there seems to be an overwhelming public urge – amounting to desperation, really – to believe in unprovable, often reactionary and preposterous notions.” A case in point detailed in her book is the huge popularity of spiritualism, Theosophy, psychic phenomena, and the occult during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these were public reactions, she writes, to revolutionary changes wrought by the mysterious power of electricity, the First World War, the American Civil War, world-altering discoveries in chemistry, physics, and medicine, and not least of all, the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements.