A summer reading pleasure from Tom Hanks

You would expect a book by Tom Hanks to be likeable, right?

Becuase Tom Hanks is pretty much likeable in everything he does. And folks like Tom Hanks in return. Maybe not in everthing, but at least in some things.

And he's been in so many.

A League of Their Own is one of my favorites. As a long-suffering White Sox fan, I often need to recall Hanks' declaration in that movie: "There's no crying in baseball!" Some nights I need to recall that several times an inning. Some nights I cry anyway.

I'm a big fan, too, of the movies Hanks made with Meg Ryan, even Joe vs. the Volcano. Imagine: There was once a time when "brain fog" was an obviously laughable diagnosis, not a recognized and dire consequence of long-COVID.

You probably have different favorites by Tom Hanks. That something-for-everyone appeal is no mean feat in our fractured society.

But it was one Tom Hanks movie in particular that made me look forward hopefully to The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, namely, That Thing You Do. Not just because it is a sweet, enjoyable movie, but because Tom Hanks directed that film and wrote it. If he could write a good movie, perhaps he might also write a good book.

And he certainly did. Although, obviously, I hate the book's title.

Who wants to type out The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece 15 times in a book review, right?

But that's about the extent of my criticism of Tom Hanks' new book.

That, and maybe the framing device didn't work well/ got lost or forgotten along the way/ wasn't really necessary.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is a book about the making of a movie and, along the way, about the making of movies generally, about acting and actors, and about history (Hollywood and otherwise). In my view, TMAMMPM rivals David Niven's Bring on the Empty Horses as an insider's guided tour of the Great American Dream Factory. Niven, like Hanks, was more than just an affable leading man; he was heavily involved as a producer during the early years of television. He knew how the business worked. Niven's book was largely first-person stuff, episodes about his interactions with others; only occasionally did he not name names. But, in a very real sense, Niven could probably be most truthful in those stories where he was not naming names.

The auteur at the center of TMAMMPM may have started out as Hanks' alter ego. He shares Hanks' well-documented, weird obsession with typewriters, for example. I don't understand the fascination. I used typewriters back when that was all we could use. In the early days of my practice, I could, when necessary, squeeze five and six letters into three and four spaces with an IBM Selectric. I could do wonders with correcting tape and Wite Out. I learned how to touch type in junior high. I made beer money in undergrad, typing other people's papers at a quarter a page (50 cents if someone was truly desparate) on an old, noisy portable manual typewriter. Allegedly portable. But my battered old typewriter is up in the attic these days, not in a shrine.

However much the writer-producer-director character may have started out as just a stand-in for Hanks in TMAMMPM, I think Hanks found a way to make him and all the other show business characters in the novel into believable, stand-alone characters, while still allowing Hanks to weave in truthful anectdotes, about real people, dishing serious dirt, without naming names, and still staying nice. As perhaps only Tom Hanks can. Tom Hanks knows the modern business from all sides, just as Niven knew the business in his time. Hanks has written, directed, produced, acted... I'd bet he could splice the film if it snapped in the projector; he could probably fix the popcorn machine, too, if necessary. Even in the almost completely fictional world of his novel, Hanks easily persuades you that he is telling you some serious truth -- without (apparently) dumping on anyone.

You may wonder how the first part of the book, about the troubles of a single family in post-WWII California, will fit into the movie-making part. It is not at all obvious. But you will expect that it will happen -- I'm not ruining anything for you by telling you that much -- and you will enjoy how it does.

Everybody likes Tom Hanks. You will like him even more after reading The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.