Senseless miracles

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

by Tom Hanks

Hutchinson Heinemann $32.99 pb, 416 pp

It’s an old adage but an accurate one – making a movie is like going to war, with an army of strangers enduring endless hardship for the sake of a common goal. Hollywood legend Tom Hanks is an expert on both films and warfare, having made his fair share of one about the other, and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (following his bestselling 2017 short story collection, Common Type) is an affable ode to Hollywood and a broad reflection on both personal and national legacy, jam-packed with many of the actor’s welldocumented preoccupations.

The book tells the story not of a person but of an intellectual property, beginning in 1947 in Lone Butte, California. Bob Falls, a US Marine flamethrower turned shell-shocked drifter, motorcycles into town after a run-in with the authorities (he jokes that he would ‘rather punch a cop than a clock’), and leaves a lasting impression on his young nephew, Robby. Flash-forward to 1971: Robby Andersen is now a pot-loving comic book artist in Oakland, penning a counter-culture one-shot based on distant memories of his uncle. Flash-forward again to present day, and Hollywood writer–director Bill Johnson, along with his crack producer Al Mac-Teer and a band of trusted collaborators, is combining the IP from Andersen’s comic with that of a sprawling superhero cinematic universe (clearly based on Marvel’s Avengers franchise). Johnson’s film, Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, is the ‘masterpiece’ of Hanks’s title, and the ins and outs of its making form the bulk of his novel.

Second-hand knowledge of a celebrity as ubiquitous as Tom Hanks can’t help but colour the experience of reading his début. We know that he is an avid collector of both Zippo lighters and typewriters, that he had a close working relationship with Nora Ephron, and that he was one of Australia’s, and the world’s, first high-profile Covid-19 cases. Masterpiece is replete with characters who exchange Zippo lighters, and others who use and repair old typewriters. There is a character named Nora, and another who meets the same ill-health as the late, great writer–director. There are multiple references to Covid and its enduring effects on the film industry. Knowingly or not, these nods to Hanks’s real-world profile endanger what his industry calls the ‘suspension of disbelief’, as our inclination may be to try to sniff out memoir in the makebelieve. In this sense, Hanks faces a greater challenge than most authors in fashioning his fictionalised world (a minor occupational hazard for one of the most recognisable artists of his time).

We also know that Hanks has a near-fetishistic fascination with the trappings of mid-twentieth-century America. In That Thing You Do! (1996), his début as writer–director, the opening credits play over a glamorous montage of a 1960s small-town appliance store, stocking clock radios, white goods, and His Master’s Voice televisions sets. Similarly, in the early chapters of Masterpiece, we are barraged with brand names: Smith-Corona, Maxwell House, Pyrex, Norge, Hastings, Westinghouse, Bakelite, Packard, Hamm’s, Palmolive. These trademarks, and the archaeological specificity of the descriptions of the era, occasionally threaten to overwhelm the story; what should be background is too often foreground.

While the plot progresses to the modern day, Hanks’s sensibility does not. The narration has the cornball quality of an over-earnest uncle, and his contemporary characters interact with a sort of forced 1950s laconicism. The director is ‘Boss Man’ or ‘Skipper’, a young actor is ‘Slugger’, eyes are ‘soul-windows’, cinema screens are ‘walls-of-magic’, San Francisco is ‘Baghdadby-the-Bay’, golf is the ‘Goofy Game That Is Good to Play to Get Away’, and filmmaking is ‘the Cardboard Carnival’, then ‘the Carnival of Cardboard’, then simply ‘a carnival made of cardboard’ (supposedly after Fellini). The film-within-a-film’s twentysomething lead actress refers to her ex-boyfriends as ‘knotheads’ and flies a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air C90B to meetings –more Veronica Lake than Anya Taylor-Joy. While it is clear that Hanks’s characters aspire to the craft and culture of Hollywood’s heyday (an extended anecdote about the making of Casablanca is used to exemplify the magic of movie-making), the fact remains that they are shooting a superhero flick for a streaming service in the 2020s, and the verbal anachronisms and strong-arm nostalgia pile up to the point of distraction.

Even the film shoot itself gravitates back to Lone Butte (‘a marvel of All-American Anytown-ness’), though this is where Hanks’s story finally hits its stride. A true villain emerges in the shape of a vainglorious lead actor. Rivalries and on-set romances flare and fade. The writing switches deftly between modes: prose to oral history to screenplay and back again. This is also where the dialogue feels the most authentic, and every description, aside, and footnote is enriched by Hanks’s considerable industry experience (‘Fake movie raindrops have to be as thick as chickpeas’). This is why legal thrillers written by lawyers and medical dramas written by doctors prove so irresistible – they inject the narrative with a level of professional veracity and clinical detail that would take any other writer a lifetime to acquire.

In the end, it’s difficult to say what Tom Hanks actually thinks of superheroes, streaming services, franchise entertainment, legacy IP, or their collective stranglehold on the industry that made him a household name. Are we supposed to take the book’s title at face value, or is ‘masterpiece’ meant sarcastically? Hanks’s deep affection and respect for every person on every rung of the movie-making ladder is palpable, so his point may be that the completion of any movie, regardless of its pedigree, is something of a miracle. Every movie, in its own way, is a ‘masterpiece’. Much as in war, its participants should be forever celebrated, no matter how senseless their mission. g