Tom Hanks, Novelist

 

[On 9 May 2023, publisher Alfred A. Knopf released The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, a novel by actor Tom Hanks.  On 12 May 2023, Jeffrey Brown, the arts correspondent for PBS NewsHour, interviewed Hanks about his book and making movies.   

[Below is a transcript of Brown’s conversation with the actor and author, followed by a review of the novel from the Washington Post.] 

“TOM HANKS ON HIS DEBUT NOVEL, ‘THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE’”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

You could be forgiven for not knowing about the blockbuster film, “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.” That’s because it’s a fictional film at the center of a new novel, "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece," written by Tom Hanks. Jeffrey Brown sat down with Hanks in New York to talk about his book and his love of making movies. It’s for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Geoff Bennett, “PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor: You could be forgiven for not knowing about the new blockbuster film "Knightshade." That’s because it’s a fictional film at the center of a new novel starring, or make that written by, Tom Hanks.

This is Hanks’ first novel. And, earlier this week, he talked with Jeffrey Brown in New York about it and his own love of making movies for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Tom Hanks, Actor and Writer [in a scene from “Saving Private Ryan”]: ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’

Jeffrey Brown: Take a blockbuster film, one starring, say, Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks [“Saving Private Ryan”]: ‘Sometimes, I wonder, if I have changed so much, my wife is even going to recognize me whenever it is I get back to her.’

Jeffrey Brown: We know Hanks and perhaps the famous director, but what of all those names in the credits? One day, Tom Hanks the author realized he had a story to tell about them.

Tom Hanks: My editor said: "You should write a novel next."

And I said: "You are right. I should. What should it be about?"

(LAUGHTER)

Tom Hanks: And he said: "You live in a pretty rarefied world that would be an interesting thing to read about. Everybody just assumes they like movies and they know how movies are made." He said: "Well, and isn’t that something to write about?"

And I said: "You are exactly right." And right at that moment, the book landed in my head.

Jeffrey Brown: The result? The making of another major motion picture masterpiece, part send-up, all love letter to an industry.

Where does your ambition come to write a novel like that?

Tom Hanks: Well, I can’t help it. I wake up with stories in my head and I wake up with questions that I want to ask of people.

I know this is new to everybody.

Jeffrey Brown: Hanks draws on what he knows from his storied career.

Tom Hanks [“Philadelphia”]: ‘An excellent lawyer.’

Jeffrey Brown: Two-time Oscar winner for "Philadelphia" in 1993 and "Forrest Gump" 1993 a year later, some 100 films, from the youthful "Big" [1988], through "Saving Private Ryan" [1998], to, more recently, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" [2019].

Tom Hanks [“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”]: ‘. . . my neighbor.’

Jeffrey Brown: Which brought us together in 2019.

Hanks is a world-famous star, but one who loves the process and the stories of people behind it.

Tom Hanks: I do this thing. Like, when I’m watching particularly an old movie, right, a movie made before 1959, and there’s a crowd scene, and it takes place at night, and they shot it on the back lot at Paramount, OK?

Jeffrey Brown: A place you are familiar with.

Tom Hanks: I am familiar with. I shot "Bosom Buddies" [ABC, 1980-82] on the back lot of Paramount.

Tom Hanks [“Bosom Buddies”]: ‘See, it’s all perfectly normal.’

Tom Hanks: If there is a taxi and a bus and pedestrians, every single one of those people showed up from their apartments, their houses.

Jeffrey Brown: They had to get there.

(CROSSTALK)

Tom Hanks: Had to get there. They had to be put in wardrobe. They had to be told what to do. They had to stand around and wait. They had to drive on the thing. They had to do all this stuff.

And at the beginning of every shot, there is a moment of controlled chaos. Quiet, quiet, quiet. We’re rolling, we’re rolling, we’re rolling. Background, and action. That has gone into every single shot in motion picture history.

The mechanics of that, to me, is as fascinating as those kind of like documentaries of how it is made. How is it made? Well, it’s made very — over a long haul with very particular tasks that have to be solved.

Jeffrey Brown: The novel follows the making of the making of a film in 2020 filled with rich characters, including director Bill Johnson, chapter headings direct from the film process itself, even pages from the fictional screenplay.

But Hanks goes further to give us a big story that begins in 1947 and a made-up comic book which would lead to the made-up film decades later.

Tom Hanks: Comic books were the original versions of storyboards for motion pictures, so that now, when you read storyboards for movies . . . 

Jeffrey Brown: Oh, you see it that way, of course, right.

Tom Hanks: Yes. Yes, exactly, and particularly the comic book at the end.

This would literally be like these storyboards that you would see closeups of eyes, something like that, somebody floating up like that. The script gives you a description of what you’re going to see, but the storyboards are actually what you are going to see.

Jeffrey Brown: And a novel is a form of telling us how that works.

Tom Hanks: Exactly. Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: In 2017, Hanks published a book of short stories titled "Uncommon Type" [Alfred A. Knopf, 2017].

We spoke then about the move to fiction, and now, with the more ambitious storytelling of a novel, about how it differs from his work in film.

As novelist, you are the storyteller.

Tom Hanks: A novelist, I get to do the whole shebang, and I get to get into the heads of the people and the motivations of the people and the weaknesses of the people, as well as the strengths.

A lot of time, actors are given way too much credit for the end result of the movie that they are in. But, in fact, we shot that one day. I mean, we twisted ourselves in a knot in order to give unto the camera something that was ephemeral only and logical only unto ourselves.

And then a director and a screenwriter and an editor and a whole phalanx of people ends up taking that and sometimes twisting it around just enough, moving it around, so it becomes something a little different than what you brought to it. And I could walk you through any of the movies that I have been in, in which, on the day that I shot it, I was just trying to carry an idea from one room into the next.

But in the final moment of the film, with the rest of the story, with the other performances, with the cut, with the score, it has become a much, much, much more important building block in the movie than I ever anticipated.

Jeffrey Brown: The making of a movie, as we see in your novel, looks like a series of plans and then accidents, right . . .

(LAUGHTER)

Tom Hanks: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . piled on top of each other.

When you look at the arc of a career, how much planned, how much accident, how much serendipity do you see?

Tom Hanks: Well, I’m going to say that, in the younger days, I actually thought there was a ton of stuff that you could control or you could make happen, that you could force, manifest into it, like, I’m going to wear it like this, I’m going to say it like this, and I’m going to make this decision, and this movie will impact that movie.

The fact is, you begin at square one every time. Nothing you have done up to that point warrants anything that you can assume is going to be in the palm of your hand going into it. You can only show up on time. You can only know the text to the — and I don’t mean just your own dialogue. I mean know the material that you’re making.

Jeffrey Brown: You still — you really feel that? I mean, after the success, Tom Hanks walks into — and that says something?

Tom Hanks: I will tell you this. Sometimes, there’s a number of people that can walk in and allow the thing to be made in the first chance.

I’m going to — I’m going to drop my own name like I’m a big shot.

Jeffrey Brown: OK.

Tom Hanks: OK. They get in and say, we got Hanks.

Jeffrey Brown: Right.

Tom Hanks: So, therefore, we’re going to get our — we will get our financing. Why? Because we got Hanks. We’re OK. We got Hanks.

And then I show up and we start . . .

Jeffrey Brown: That’s how I’m feeling right now.

Tom Hanks: OK. I’m glad.

Jeffrey Brown: I got Hanks. Yes. Yes.

Tom Hanks: OK.

But then, once you start doing that, you realize that, well, you got the financing, but that doesn’t guarantee you the output. It doesn’t necessarily warrant the theme of the movie that you make is good enough in order to withstand people’s attention for two and half-hours, better about 110 minutes.

(LAUGHTER)

Tom Hanks: I find the 110-minute movie is an awfully good movie, just under two hours.

Jeffrey Brown: You planning to keep writing?

Tom Hanks: Oh, yeah, yeah. I can — yeah. I don’t know what, but I like to consider myself to be a writer with a day job.

(LAUGHTER)

Tom Hanks: And the day job is pretty glamorous sometimes.

Tom Hanks [“Asteroid City”]: ‘Where are you?’

Actor [“Asteroid City”]: ‘Asteroid City.’

Jeffrey Brown: Tom Hanks returns to his day job in June in the film "Asteroid City" [directed by Wes Anderson; to be released 23 June 2023 by Focus Features].

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.

Amna Nawaz, “PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor: And there is much more online, where Tom Hanks talks about the writers strike and the changing economics of his industry.

You can see that on our YouTube page [Tom Hanks on the writers strike in Hollywood - YouTube].

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.

[Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
“TOM HANKS’S FIRST NOVEL SHOWS THE HARD WORK BEHIND MOVIE MAGIC”
by Ron Charles 

[Ron Charles’s review of Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, was posted on the Washington Post website on 2 May 2023 (Tom Hanks details a 'Major Motion Picture Masterpiece' in first novel - The Washington Post).]

‘The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece’ is an engaging story about a big crew putting together a blockbuster

Against the tanned hordes of Hollywood grifters, cads, creeps, prima donnas, egomaniacs and nepo babies, Tom Hanks stands like a warrior clad in decency and girded in goodness. A two-time Academy Award winner [Best Actor awards for Philadelphia (1994) and Forrest Gump (1995)] whose films have grossed $10 billion, Hanks is the living embodiment of our hopes that nice guys finish first.

For more than 40 years — on stage, TV and big screen — Hanks has worked as an actor and producer. He can remember what it’s like to sweat for attention, and he knows what it’s like to run from the paparazzi. He’s partnered with the industry’s biggest movers and shakers, and he’s been attended to by the army of dressers, caterers and personal assistants who toil away in the shadows to keep the stars shining.

How easily Hanks could have published a memoir detailing those decades of experience: Just imagine the riotous anecdotes about Ron Howard, Sally Field, Meg Ryan, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers and anybody else who is or was anybody in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps someday we’ll get that memoir, but it’s unlikely to be as charming or as spiritually revealing as his debut novel, which has the self-mocking title “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

As you might expect from such an amiable author, this is not a story set in Harvey Weinstein’s toxic Hollywood. So far as I can tell, Hanks’s book is not a roman à clef or a camouflaged tell-all or a sly act of disguised payback. Instead, it’s a novel shot in pastel tones, as though the movie trade were based in Lake Wobegon. Except for a few nods to entrenched sexism, the industry’s well-documented abuses are elided in favor of concentrating on the better angels of its nature. With any luck, Hanks’s next novel will be about D.C.

“The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” starts gently, even slowly, in the voice of Joe Shaw, a film professor in Bozeman, Mont. Through a series of unlikely turns — which is the trajectory of almost everything in this story — Shaw has attracted the attention of Bill Johnson, one of the country’s most successful writer-directors. During the coronavirus pandemic, Johnson invites Shaw to observe the filming of his next project to write “a book to explain the making of movies.”

Hanks knows a lot about the behavior of actors, but fortunately he knows very little about the writing of academics, so his novel is mercifully unlike anything a professor of film studies would compose. Shaw delivers the rest of this story as an omniscient narrator, deftly moving from scene to scene and, along the way, helpfully explaining production jargon for a lay audience.

But before we get anywhere near the movie set — or the present day — Shaw presents what is essentially a 70-page novella set in 1947.

We’re introduced to Robby Andersen, a sweet little boy living in the sweet little town of Lone Butte, Calif. Robby idolizes his errant uncle, who was traumatized by serving as a firefighter in World War II. When Robby eventually becomes a successful comic book creator, one of his stories is about his uncle’s horrific experience in the Pacific. Decades later, Robby’s comic book — cleverly excerpted in the pages of this novel — serves as the inspiration for a character in Bill Johnson’s new superhero movie, “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.”

That lengthy opening section, titled “Source Material,” asks for a lot of emotional investment in people we will not see again for a very long time. One wonders if a less famous debut novelist would have been afforded so much runway.

But before we get anywhere near the movie set — or the present day — Shaw presents what is essentially a 70-page novella set in 1947.

We’re introduced to Robby Andersen, a sweet little boy living in the sweet little town of Lone Butte, Calif. Robby idolizes his errant uncle, who was traumatized by serving as a firefighter in World War II. When Robby eventually becomes a successful comic book creator, one of his stories is about his uncle’s horrific experience in the Pacific. Decades later, Robby’s comic book — cleverly excerpted in the pages of this novel — serves as the inspiration for a character in Bill Johnson’s new superhero movie, “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.”

That lengthy opening section, titled “Source Material,” asks for a lot of emotional investment in people we will not see again for a very long time. One wonders if a less famous debut novelist would have been afforded so much runway.

The marquee will blaze with one name, but in these chapters, there is no hierarchy: “At some point, and there’s no telling when that moment is, someone is responsible for the whole movie,” we’re told. “Everyone has the most important job on the movie.” Johnson, Hanks’s star-making director, is well drawn, but he gets less attention here than the staff members who do everything from casting actors to schlepping sandwiches.

Allicia Mac-Teer, an African American producer known in the industry as Al, is the real power and planner behind the throne. But years ago, she was just a front desk manager at a Garden Suite Inn near the Richmond airport. There she impressed Johnson by making sure his favorite frozen yogurt was available late at night. That’s the kind of indispensable initiative that a great director notices. Somehow, Al knew in her bones that Hollywood isn’t about being the most beautiful or even the most talented. “Making movies,” she announces, “is about solving more problems than you cause.” A star is born.

That lesson is so important to this novel — and presumably to Hanks — that it’s essentially repeated in the success story of Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz. She’s struggling to make ends meet as a taxi driver when she happens to pick up Al for a ride to the location for “Knightshade.” Recognizing Ynez’s attentive, problem-solving spirit, Al hires her as her permanent driver, then as her personal assistant. If you’ve been paying attention, you know where this is going, but that doesn’t make it any less gratifying.

Although this novel is a love letter to the industry, it’s not entirely toothless. Even the most glamorous stars in this universe are subject to the ordinary laws of physics. Indeed, the pompous actor playing Firefall, a young man named O.K. Bailey, gets hilariously skewered. He demands banana pancakes, “not pancakes with bananas”; tells his gorgeous, repulsed co-star that they shouldn’t sleep together until after the shooting; refers reverently to his “process”; and announces to the exasperated cast, “I’ve got no ego.” After decades of enduring such irritating artistes, Hanks seems to have somehow typed this wickedly funny section entirely by eye-rolling.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” will survive O.K. Bailey — and stalkers and jealous spouses and even the untimely death of a cast member. But blockbuster status is not preordained. After all, in the months before Opening Day — or streaming — a movie is just “a billion shards of glass that have to be assembled piece by piece into a mirror.” The longer you watch Hanks create that glittery surface, the harder it is to look away.

[Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post.]