A shocking murder …
But the clues of this mystery aren’t hidden in Paris beneath Mona Lisa’s smile. They’re right here in the good old U.S. of A., in paintings we’ve seen hundreds of times. Like the ones on mugs, Christmas cards, calendars and the covers of the old Saturday Evening Post.
Holy Secret Society, Andy! This isn’t that “Louver” museum movie by Opie who’s gone and growed up to be a Hollywood director.
It’s www.thenormanrockwellcode.com, showing now on a computer screen near you – a 35-minute takeoff on “The Da Vinci Code,” loaded with references to Aunt Bee’s pecan pies and Otis’ jug tipping.
The star of this film is not Tom Hanks’ Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, but a community-college snoop who graduated “magna cum latte” with a correspondence-school degree – a rubber-face, bug-eye, whiny son of “a deputy sheriff down in Mayberry, N.C.”
Get the picture?
More than 750,000 Internet viewers have. That’s how many visitors have been lured to “The Norman Rockwell Code” since a Dover, N.H., personal-injury lawyer, who’s also a filmmaker, launched it May 19 on a Web site. It happened to be the same day “The Da Vinci Code” debuted in theaters.
Last Sunday, “The Norman Rockwell Code” premiered at the museum dedicated to Rockwell and his homey works in Stockbridge, Mass. But lawyer/filmmaker Alfred Thomas Catalfo, who wrote and acted in “Rockwell,” hopes it will take his tiny Big Cannoli Pictures production company to a sweeter, more lucrative level. Already, he says, there have been inquiries from Hollywood production companies about taking “Rockwell” to a feature-film audience.
It started with an actor friend (who’s also a massage therapist) who does a dead-on Barney Fife. Add to that a much-hyped book and movie set in Europe and an idea: “I wondered what would happen if you infused “The Da Vinci Code’ with Americana,” said Catalfo, who charged the movie’s $5,000 tab to his Citibank credit card. “Forget low budget,” he said. “This was no budget.”
The problem was, Catalfo hadn’t seen the yet-to-be-released “Da Vinci” movie directed by the grown-up Opie, Ron Howard. Catalfo only had read the book, so he parodied it, hoping that its literary plot would hold true to the movie. He was right.
In “Rockwell,” a museum curator is found dead-by-harpoon in the Norman Rockwell Museum – a New Hampshire art gallery was its stand-in.
Catalfo added a bunch of campy one-liners. Langford Fife concludes the harpoon murderer is obviously “someone who hates Moby Dick.”
“I think you should bring in everybody named Ahab for questioning,” says Fife, who tells of honing his skills at Mayberry crime scenes with his dad. “You name it – purloined pies, jaywalking, even a moonshiner once. Well, truth be told, we knew it was Otis, so we just looked the other way.”
In “Rockwell,” museum curator Jacques Fromage is posed in death with a squeezed lemon half in one hand and a can of tuna in the other. (Hint to mystery solvers: Remember “Chicken of the Sea.”)
Enter beautiful Soffa Poisson of the Quebec Secret Service, an Ovaltine Secret Decoder Ring, a secret mermaid protection league, and an intricate tale worthy of gossipy Floyd the barber emerges.
Like other filmmakers without a big production company behind them, Catalfo gambled on “Rockwell” being seen – and liked.
But with the World Wide Web growing wider every second, was all this attention to Catalfo’s Mayberry parody completely serendipitous?
Nip such talk in the bud. Nip it, nip it, nip it, says Langford Fife.
“A great philosopher once said, “There are no coincidences.’ Well, actually, it was Goober, but it bears repeating.”
PH END CRUMP
(Sarah Crump is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at scrump(at)plaind.com.)
AP-NY-06-28-06 1435EDT
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