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.
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