Review | Tom Hanks’s first novel shows the hard work behind movie magic (2024)

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 like Hanks, I digress.

The important thing to know is that “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” does eventually get around to making another major motion picture masterpiece. And it’s a thoroughly engaging tale, tightly tied to a propulsive 53-day schedule that must not be altered. “A halt in the shooting day is a disaster,” as everyone knows. “An unholy sin.”

The movie that Johnson and his team are creating — part of a billion-dollar franchise — never really comes into focus, except for a few isolated scenes. No matter. This is a story about what happens behind the cameras. Hanks is at pains to impress upon us that movie-making is a circuitous process involving a vast network of people — some famous, most not — showing up and doing their best. This is most definitely not a novel about the magic of filmmaking; it’s a novel about the hard work of filmmaking. Indeed, any belief in magic — along with genius and destiny — is pretty well shredded by the end. Only three qualities matter: talent, determination and, especially, punctuality.

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.

By Tom Hanks; comic book illustrations by R. Sikoryak

Knopf. 417 pp. $32.50