I’ve figured out why Ron Howard was exactly the wrong choice for the Da Vinci Code movie. Everything the critics have hated about it is in the book–the preachiness, the dopey plot, the stupid dialogue. Ron Howard is an expert at bringing a story to life in exactly the right way to let the story tell itself: think of Apollo 13, for example. When you do that with a stoopid book, you get a stoopid movie, expertly done.

So who would have been the right choice? I can’t really think of any living directors who would have done the job well. But I can think of two dead ones.

The first is Alfred Hitchcock. He would have thrown out most of the book and made it into a story of a wrongly accused man fleeing both the criminals and the authorities–in other words, the same plot as every other really good Hitchcock film. He could have made something worth watching out of it.

But a better choice by far would have been Edward D. Wood, Jr. He could have remained faithful to the book and given it exactly the treatment it deserved–a treatment that would have earned the movie a place at midnight film festivals for decades to come. (And while we’re playing fantasy movie producer, how about casting Bela Lugosi as Sir Leigh Teabing?)

Dan Brown, I have decided, is the Edward D. Wood of suspense novelists. He has the same sincere faith in the overwhelming importance of his theme, the same notion of using a threadbare suspense plot to get it across, and the same self-confident incompetence that made Wood an artist for the ages.

Meanwhile, for purely selfish reasons, I think the Ron Howard movie is absolutely ideal. Everybody hates it, and everybody sees it. They wander out wondering why they hated it so much, and then they buy our book. If everyone had loved it, our book might still have sold well, but only to disgruntled believers like us. If no one had seen it, our book might not have had much of a market. We couldn’t have asked for a better Da Vinci Code movie.