Tom Hanks’s Debut Novel is Sweet, Dull, and Weirdly Reassuring

The story of a behind-the-scenes look at the production of a superhero blockbuster doubles as a love letter to Hollywood's past while offering an optimistic view of its future.

Shortly after shooting begins on Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, the blockbuster at the center of Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, the production suffers a major setback, the sort of major change that could send any movie careening off the rails. Fortunately, it’s helmed by Bill Johnson, a veteran who’s experienced acclaim and financial success on a scale most filmmakers could only imagine. (Think Spielberg, though, like all the characters in the book, he doesn’t seem to be a direct analogue for anyone.) Johnson reassures some key players with a story he trots out for such occasions, one about Casablanca. “The movie was for Warner’s,” he tells them as the story begins, “and like all of them had a schedule of only a few weeks—they cranked them out factory style.” 

Then Johnson continues with some key details about the uncomfortably hot set and a chaotic production in which four screenwriters were churning out new pages on the day they had to be shot, and not always making their deadlines. It was on such a day that director Michael Curtiz, realizing he had to shoot something if he didn’t want to get in trouble, told Humphrey Bogart to walk into frame, hit a mark, and nod gravely, figuring he could use the moment somewhere. That somewhere would become, in the final cut, the film’s pivot point, the moment when Rick Blaine agrees to let the house band of Café Américain play the “La Marseillaise” in defiance of the Nazi officers who’ve broken out in their own patriotic song. Bogart didn’t know what he was doing and, in Johnson’s telling at least, neither did his director. But it all worked out anyway because movies, the good ones anyway, are miracles. And movies, as an art form, will always prevail.

That sentiment hangs over every word of The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece and helps explain some of its more curious choices. The title may sound ironic, and the words bear a trace of sarcasm when they turn up as dialogue, but it’s completely in earnest in this most earnest of novels. By its final page, Johnson has (no spoiler, really) made a movie whose artistic merit is lauded by all who see it, one that’s well on its way to being a hit. It’s a distinctive writer/director’s personal expression that’s also part of the movie machine of a Marvel-like company called Dynamo produced by a Netflix-like streaming service called Hawkeye. If Curtiz could make a masterpiece by cranking it out, factory style, in 1942, who’s to say it couldn’t be done under equivalent contemporary conditions?

In many ways it’s an unexpected argument for Hanks to make. Though no stranger to big budget productions, he’s thus far avoided being drawn into the world of superhero movies. (He might have aged out of donning tights, but there are always other roles.) In fact, in recent years Hanks seems to have gone out of his way to appear in the sorts of movies made with depressing infrequency since the superhero ascendance: a downbeat, post-apocalyptic science fiction film (Finch), a revisionist Western (News of the World), a World War II naval drama (Greyhound), and so on. Not everything has worked, but Hanks hasn’t played it safe, sometimes delivering one of his best-ever performances (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), other times the sort of performance even those who don’t like won’t forget soon (Elvis).

That’s Tom Hanks the actor, though. Tom Hanks the novelist wants to make a case for mainstream Hollywood being as healthy and relevant as ever, even if it’s now reached a transitional phase. Apart from a stretch dedicated to the excesses of an obnoxious young star named O.K. Bailey (OKB for short) and some mild jabs at studio interference, Hanks’s novel resists every opportunity for satire. Instead it offers a step-by-step(-by-step-by-step-by-step) description of how a superhero movie gets made, down to the golden rule of the craft services table: take what you want but eat what you take.

Appropriately enough for the genre, that begins — after a prologue establishing the novel as the work of Joe Shaw, a journalist and professor at a small Montana college asked to cover the production by Johnson — with an origin story. The Firefall of the title isn’t a superhero exactly, at least not in his original conception. He’s the creation of Robby Anderson, an underground cartoonist working in 1970 who draws on the story of World War II veteran Bob to create a faceless, immortal flamethrower-wielding soldier for a feature that confuses his counterculture audience. (It’s recreated in one of three comics sections illustrated with impressive mimicry by R. Sikoryak.)

In the novel’s opening stretch, we meet Robby as a boy, Bob as a veteran-turned-motorcycle gang burnout, and then follow their stories over the years that follow, as Robby finds his voice as a cartoonist and Bob, though trailed by demons, settles down with his boss at a Chinese restaurant in New Mexico. Filled with detail of post-war American life, it’s the best stretch of the novel. It also seems like the set-up for a story of how distinctive creations born of specific historical circumstances and turbulent lives can become cogs in an intellectual property machine. It never does. Firefly is swept up into the Dynamo universe and reinvented as a tortured, Winter Soldier-like antihero who first battles then later allies with the heroine Knightshade. And that’s, the novel suggests, just fine.

Or maybe it’s just the way it is. What eventually emerges from The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is a vision of good, hard-working people doing their best to make something worthwhile under the conditions available to them at their particular moment in time. Knightshade star Wren Lane (depicted as a kind of Gallant to OKB’s Goofus), for instance, watches Bette Davis movies, then does her best to create a 21st century version of Golden Age magnetism. Hanks wants to pull back to take in the big picture. Movies may have changed, but have they changed that much? One character, in a familiar argument, likens superhero movies to the westerns and crime films of past eras. They’re just what’s wanted now, and can be as worthwhile as what their creators invest in them. Like the rise of streaming, it’s a change, but movies have undergone changes before. They’ll be fine.

It’s a nice thought and a nice book filled with nice people. Wearyingly nice, even. As an author, Hanks makes for amiable company. He knows how to put a scene together with snappy banter and comedic pop. But the characters trading the poppy banter never really come to life and if Hanks wants to convey that making movies involves a lot of dull planning and coordination, he succeeds all too well. Hanks continues to challenge himself as an actor, but his novel reads less like a passion project than a recreational activity. It feels less like a major motion picture than a talk show anecdote that never ends.