Often dubbed the nicest guy in Hollywood, Tom Hanks is unlikely to dent that reputation with his debut novel’s gee-whiz perspective on the production of a blockbuster film. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece insists there’s still soul somewhere within the machine. Bill Johnson, acclaimed writer and director, is considering a new project and plumps for the safe territory of comic-book franchises. Keen for a degree of creative freedom, he lands on an obscure superheroine yet to be wrapped into the rights owners’ mainline film series, and then stumbles on creative lightning in a bottle by introducing a sinister canon outsider with all-American roots as her new antagonist.
Hanks is aiming at an epic sweep of 20th-century America here – once the streaming deal is signed and Johnson gets to work, the story jumps back 80 years to postwar California, introducing Bob Falls, a US marine turned motorcycle drifter. He is idolised by his budding comic-artist nephew, Robby Andersen, who bonds with him over a two-fisted comic depicting of a marine flamethrower. Twenty years later, Robby immortalises his uncle as an undying universal soldier, Firefall, via a Vietnam-era underground comic. That’s the story Johnson lands on in a dusty box of source material in 2020 and makes the emotional centre of his intended blockbuster with heart, Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall. We even get to see the transmutation from war serial to underground zine and finally to film tie-in comic ourselves. And if you haven’t had enough by the end of the book, there’s a QR code link to Bill’s draft screenplay.
In outline, it’s an ambitious piece of non-linear storytelling. In practice, something refuses to spark all the way to life. Hanks’ perspective is affectionate but fatally undiscriminating, and the non-linear storytelling quickly becomes a muddle. There’s little sense of mood changing or time passing from the 40s to the 70s to the 90s to mid-pandemic, except for a crushing mass of everyday minutiae – quick, what kind of home air conditioner did Robby’s father install in 1950? – that feels like an easy pitch for nostalgia as a short-circuit to emotional resonance. The apple-pie effect diminishes as the story nears the present day. But in its place arrives a distressing slew of rights-free fictional versions of real-world companies, brands and services, most of which are clunky and unconvincing enough to throw the reader out of the flow of the story. Footnotes stuffed with “as you know” insider detail about fictional studios, directors and actors exacerbate the effect.
Hanks gets on to surer ground with his narrative once the film shoot is under way. The aura of misty reminiscence dissipates, and there’s some convincing energy and tension in the pulling together of the project, the dynamics between lead actors, and some serious production wobbles and confrontations (virtually the only elements of conflict in the novel).
The later sections also feature some of Hanks’ more successful experiments with non-linear storytelling, including quite elegantly summarising one character’s entire life on a page.
It’s hard to object to the obvious esteem that Hanks shows for the many people who make a movie, and he devotes plenty of time and characterisation to Johnson’s key collaborators and production people, some of whose backstories could have grown into a novel in themselves.
But none of it gets room to breathe and, in the end, there’s both too much and too little going on. Despite the huge cast of characters and the obvious stresses and pitfalls involved in large-scale film-making, Hanks passes up any real opportunities to throw a spanner in the works, and the success of the grand endeavour is never seriously in doubt. There’s no conventional antagonist of any kind in The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, only the ludicrous pressures of the film-making process itself, tackled through indefatigable we’re-all-in-this-together camaraderie.
But in a fictional world seemingly so benign towards movie magic, that’s less of a miracle of solidarity than the novel earnestly insists it is.
Hanks knows his subject matter, and he knows at least the trappings of a good novel, but we’ll have to wait until next time for the spark of alchemy that makes the story jump off the page. That’s show business.
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, by Tom Hanks (Hutchinson Heinemann, $37)
