#hooey!

[thewondermentofillustration]

"D'you think you boys could squeeze me in there?"

Ted Brodie-Mack - Hooey! back cover, published by NSW Bookstall Company, Sydney 1944

[surrexi]

Oh, God, that was a commercial enterprise. Yeah, those Robert Langdon sequels are hooey. “The Da Vinci Code” was hooey. I mean, Dan Brown, God bless him, says, Here is a sculpture in a place in Paris! No, it’s way over there. See how a cross is formed on a map? Well, it’s sort of a cross. Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage. But they’re as cynical as a crossword puzzle. All we were doing is promising a diversion. There’s nothing wrong with good commerce, provided it is good commerce. By the time we made the third one, we proved that it wasn’t such good commerce. Let me tell you something else about “The Da Vinci Code.” It was my 40th-something birthday. We were shooting in the Louvre at night. I changed my pants in front of the Mona Lisa! They brought me a birthday cake in the Grand Salon! Who gets to have that experience? Any cynicism there? Hell no!

Tom Hanks, in the NYTimes, about the Robert Langdon/DaVinci Code movies

i just really appreciate that when he was like 'i'm not cynical, i don't like doing cynical stuff' and the reporter was like 'um, you were in the davinci code my dude,' he was like 'they're too silly to be cynical, come on' because that's actually hella valid and maybe part of my problem with the books and the movies all along--that they were trying to present themselves as clever, incisive takedowns of major historical conspiracies, but they're just (as tom put it) HOOEY. nonsensical, ahistorical HOOEY.