The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

By Tom Hanks, 2023, Knopf, 417 pages
Reviewed by Tom Vogt, Aug. 18, 2023

“Put that ladder down!” The shout stopped me in my tracks.

A few years ago, three members of our family worked as extras on an episode of “Nowhere Man,” with Bruce Greenwood starring in a series filmed around Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Wash.

After one scene was finished, the actors walked over to the site of the next shot. Crew members followed, lugging cables and lights and other gear. Just pitching in, I grabbed a small step ladder. I had taken only a couple of steps when a guy – a grip? a gaffer? – shouted: “Put that ladder down! That’s a union job!”

OK, not all that exciting. But it summed up my inside knowledge of the Hollywood magic factory, until I read Tom Hanks’s novel. In “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” Hanks has penned the biography of a fictional superhero film.

He guides us through an 80-year story arc. It starts with a flamethrower-packing Marine who came home from World War II and entertained his young nephew with tales of combat in the Pacific. Years later, the nephew turned those stories into an underground comic. Even more years later, writer/director Bill Johnson turned the graphic novel into a script featuring Firefall, the spirit of a flame-flinging Marine killed in combat, and female superhero Knightshade.

The book has a lot more exposition than action, but get used to it. The book was not a page-turner. A library zealot, I had to renew it, and then I renewed it again.

Even a very favorable review in The Washington Post acknowledged that it starts “gently” and wonders whether a less-famous author would have been granted such a slow liftoff.

I did stick with book, though, even if it spent nine weeks on my night stand. After all, Hanks has been a beloved figure on America’s TV and movie screens for more than 40 years. It would be hard to find someone with more knowledge of the film industry.

The depth of that background is why the book can bog down. There is just so damned much that goes into making a movie, and Hanks wants to reveal it all. Through the voice of a supporting character, Hanks insists that even a bad movie is great art: “Movies are too hard to make to warrant hatred, even when they are turkeys.”

Another take comes from Bill Johnson: “To make a movie is to stumble around the lab and accidentally invent vulcanized rubber or Post-Its.”

Johnson illustrates his point with the only bit of real movie lore in the novel, featuring one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in one of Hollywood’s greatest films.

Michael Curtiz, director of “Casablanca,” doesn’t have the new script pages he is supposed to shoot, and Humphrey Bogart wants to go home.

“But Curtiz needs to shoot something, anything, so he tells Bogie to walk up, stop, look off to his left, and nod,” Johnson says.

Bogie delivers a serious nod – to whom? to what? – and exits scene left.

“I will use this someplace,” Curtiz says, and tells Bogart to call it a day. When the film comes out, Bogart is nodding to the band, giving the startled musicians the OK to play “La Marseillaise” and drown out a Nazi sing-along.

“The whole picture turns on that nod of Bogie’s,” Johnson says, describing it as “a shot taken for no reason other than to kill time, to roll film.”

It made a motion picture masterpiece.