The business behind the show

I met Tom Hanks once. I was in Los Angeles for the press junket for his film A League of Their Own and at the opulent Four Seasons Hotel we journalists were being rotated like a human bottling plant. The “Talent” (Madonna and Geena Davis co-starred) sat in their suites before a camera and every five minutes, to the second, a new journalist would be marched in and sat down before them. The camera rolled. Best you have your questions ready, don’t ramble, don’t prevaricate. The producer called cut, even mid-sentence, and out you’d go. It was exhausting for everyone, not least the actors, who answered the same questions over and over.

So, in I went to Hanks’s room, where he was fidgeting and drumming his fingers, clearly frustrated with having to sit still all morning. Then, as I sat down, the camera miraculously broke down. As the assistants flapped and fretted, we began to chat about South Africa and Mandela, then the darling of the Western world. The movie was about a women’s baseball team and when I confessed that I didn’t know much about baseball because we play cricket, he leapt to his feet, grabbed a baseball bat, and asked me to show him how to play it.

My enduring memory is of standing next to Hanks and guiding him in an approximation of a cover drive. He was genial and merry, every bit the nice guy he’s reputed to be. He had a sort of aw-shucks, all-American Ted-Lasso likeability. This quality comes through in his first novel, The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece (Hutchinson), which tracks a movie from its earliest inspiration to its opening night.

In the late 1940s, five-year-old Robby Andersen is growing up in small-town California. It’s a tender, Norman-Rockwell-like setting of porches and drugstores, dinners at the Chicken Shack and treats of Little Dot comics. Into his life comes his uncle Bob Falls, a demobbed Marine veteran, glamorous on his motorbike. Little Robby, artistically gifted, is enthralled by his stories of war and draws a crude story of Bob, the superhero flamethrower. Cut to the 1970s, when Robby is a fully-fledged cartoonist in San Francisco who draws a comic book about his uncle’s gung-ho experiences in the Pacific. Decades later, this forgotten comic (wonderfully reproduced in the book) is discovered by the great director Bill Johnson (think Steven Spielberg) and serves as inspiration for his new blockbuster superhero movie Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.

Here Hanks tips us into the giddy, actually ludicrous, world of making movies. In often bewildering detail he rolls out the process: not a systematic, rational operation but a concatenation of elements and stop-start action. The star of the show is a vain dolt who gets fired three days in because he’s late to set and holding up filming by arguing with the director about his sunglasses and his “motivation”.

“A halt in the shooting day is a disaster,” Hanks writes. “An unholy sin.”

The film itself never really comes into focus — it’s the behind-the-scenes that interests Hanks, and the “little people” who make it all happen. Here are the makeup trailers and the Teamster trucks, the carpenters, the special effects team, the art department. The set swarms with people, grips and technicians and fight choreographers, all dedicated to what they call “The Business of Show”.

He sets out the catering in minute detail — the morning buffet with waffles off the iron, but if you prefer goat-milk kefir it will be sourced for you. He lovingly describes the “quartered chickens, Flintstone-sized ribs, burgers and bratwursts grilled on open-flamed BBQs”. Movie sets clearly march on their stomachs.

Hanks foregrounds these soldiers and builds backstories for them: the rideshare driver Ynez who becomes a fixer, keeping the production on track and caffeinated. And Allicia, once a motel receptionist who managed to find frozen yoghurt for the director in the middle of the night and who has since risen in the ranks to become an assistant producer.

“Making movies,” she announces, “is about solving more problems than you cause.”

At one point, Bill’s agent warns him that his script has “too many scenes, too many characters, too many pages and not enough conflict”. The same could be said for this meandering novel, but it is so immersive one forgives the absence of a strict editor. At the end Robby, now in a wheelchair, sees his uncle Bob looming up on the big screen in his old hometown and begins to weep. Incidentally,

Hanks’s son Colin is currently on the small screen in a wildly good series on Showmax called The Offer. It’s about the making of The Godfather and it, too, shows the thousand moving parts required to get a film made. The central character is the famous producer Robert Evans, a flamboyant god of the Business of Show. He also understood that a movie is “a billion shards of glass that have to be assembled piece by piece into a mirror”. Brilliant stuff.

• From the July edition of Wanted, 2023.