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.
“The frightening aspect of this is how vulnerable the public thus becomes to mush-brained fanatics, charlatans, frauds, and tricksters at the very times that clear-headed rationality is most needed,” Denby-Wilcox concludes.
Alastair McManus, investment analyst at Megatherium Trust and a significant backer of the film, puts it another way. “Wholesale willingness to believe in a two-thousand-year-old conspiracy to suppress the truth reflects not only people’s disillusionment with established religion, but also generalized mistrust of all authority,” he says.
Whether Fassil Munn, the reclusive author of The Magi Deception, had this phenomenon in mind is unknown, as he has never appeared or been interviewed in public. The only comment attributed to him, however, suggests otherwise. Speaking to a librarian in Terre Haute, Indiana, during a research expedition for the book, he reportedly said he was writing a story modeled on the old Hardy Boys adventures that he devoured as a youth.
There is, indeed, a Hardy Boys quality to The Magi Deception. Stripped of its religious and historical implications, the story is predictable and verges on pulp fiction. Shortly after the midnight visit of an elderly theater manager bearing a mysterious package, the teen-aged, mixed-race Steadman brothers are alarmed by the sudden disappearance of their father, a professor of linguistics and ancient languages. Seeking clues to his disappearance, the boys hack into their father’s computer and discover – after defeating numerous firewalls and encryption codes – his translations of ancient scrolls long hidden in Gaza caves. The scrolls had been found by Australian soldiers in World War I, and through a series of misadventures ended up buried in the prop room of the university theater.
The brothers’ adventures in pursuit of their father and the original scrolls are pure Hardy Boys, threatened at every turn by a sinister, powerful financial-religious cabal willing to murder to prevent the scrolls’ revelations from ever seeing daylight. What the scrolls contain, of course, is far more world-shattering than the genealogical banalities of The DaVinci Code. The scrolls, it turns out, are records kept by an ancient magician’s assistant whose master is none other than Jesus of Nazareth, a failed carpenter turned prestidigitator. Jesus, the apprentice boasts, is so skilled in illusionist and mesmeric arts that his huge public following believes he can walk on water, raise the dead, and turn water into wine, his ultimate performance being to stage his own death and resurrection. His “posthumous” career, reports the apprentice, was to rename himself Simon Magus and challenge his own disciples to illusion contests and withering philosophical arguments.
What the boys learn from their father’s translation and notes is that Magi is the plural form of Magus, an ancient word for magician, sorcerer, wizard, holder of arcane knowledge and power. The Magi who followed the star to Bethlehem were in fact not kings, they were magicians, and their famous deception of King Herod was not their only deception. Their mission was to herald the birth of one of their own, bringing traditional gifts as well as gifts of magical knowledge (the tools of the trade, so to speak). The true Magi deception was the knowledge of how to trick the multitudes, and Jesus honed this one to perfection.
Further muddying the line between fiction and reality, NextWorld has signed Chriss Angel, the famous Las Vegas magician, to play Jesus. Angel himself is already well known for his Vegas and street-side acts of walking on water, levitation, and other tricks attributed to Jesus. “We all want to believe,” he says, “and I’m all about belief.”
Predictably, the Vatican ban of both book and movie has reinforced public belief in Magi’s fictional conspiracy, and orchestrated mob book-burnings in the U.S. along with effigy lynchings of its author have catapulted sales beyond all previous publishing records.
How an unfinished novel by an unknown writer became a hot property overnight seems as miraculous as its publishing success.
“It was serendipity,” says Gerald Overby, NextWorld president. “We were riding the success of our Zombies in Congress series, when I ran into Fassil at the dentist’s office, of all places. I hadn’t seen him since third grade, but you don’t forget a name like Fassil Munn…. So we’re catchin’ up with each other, and he drops that he’s writing this book and can’t find a publisher, and when he tells me what it’s about I wrote him a check on the spot, right there in the waiting room. Not that I thought it would be such a hit, I just liked the warped logic of it, but the option gave him an edge – and the rest is history.”
History indeed. Invented or otherwise, it’s all about belief.