Perhaps informed by his own method as an actor, Hanks takes us back to the human story behind his novel’s screen epic, the visit of a US marine after the second world war to his impressionable young nephew, a budding comic book writer. That tale starts, of course, with backstory, that real-life prequel to any two-hour cinema experience. His story begins with a call to a freelance writer and film buff, Joe Shaw, from a renowned Hollywood film-maker, Bill Johnson, which ends in the former being co-opted to tell the full tale of the latter’s latest movie, a big-budget fantasy called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall. He writes well enough – there are many artfully constructed scenes here – and what he doesn’t know about the world of this book you’d imagine is not worth knowing but that quality that he possesses in so much range and depth on screen – the ability to make you care deeply about lives not your own – is quite often elusive on the page. His screen agent might have had something to say. On that occasion his publisher ventured that “the two-time Oscar winner is as talented a writer as he is an actor”. Hanks, a famous collector of typewriters, has put them to use once before, in a short story collection that came out in 2017.
This novel, if nothing else, gives you a sense of that experience in real time.
Part of its motivation appears to be to give a proper flavour of that truism of movie making: that so much of it is waiting around three days sitting in a trailer for a minute or two of drama that might end up in a digital suite trash can. Reading it is to be reminded that Hanks, one of the greatest of all movie stars, must have had a good deal of time on his hands during lockdown. Or as Tom Hanks observes in this ambitious addition to the genre: “making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times”. T here is probably a good reason why it is hard to compile a list of decent novels about the making of films (I can think of one, Terry Southern’s Blue Movie): nothing much happens.
0 kommentar(er)
