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America’s dad might be coming to a city near you.

Actor, writer, director, author, ten-time “Saturday Night Live” host and two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is currently on tour promoting his new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

At all shows on the tour, Hanks will sit down with moderators and discuss the new novel which tells the story of a huge Marvel-like superhero flick called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” and the comic book it’s based on.

There’s only one problem — Hanks has only two Q&A’s remaining on his tour schedule.

The “Cast Away” star is set to appear at San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday, May 16 and Portland, OR’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday May 18.

Thankfully, if you’re hoping to catch Forrest Gump/David S. Pumpkins/Woody/Mr. Rogers/Walt Disney himself IRL, you can still pick up relatively affordable last-minute tickets .

At the time of publication, prices for the May 16 show start at $119 before fees on Vivid Seats.

Should you hope to attend in Portland, tickets can be snagged for $63 before fees .

Not a bad deal considering you’ll get to see the guy who starred in “Big,” “Captain Phillips,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elvis,” “The Green Mile” and you get the idea — Hanks has been in a lot of movies.

Plus, all audience members will receive a signed copy of Hanks’ new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

We’ll see you at the theater.

All prices listed above are subject to fluctuation.

Tom Hanks 2023 tour schedule

A complete calendar of all remaining Tom Hanks tour dates, venues and links to the cheapest tickets available for each section below.

(Note: The New York Post confirmed all above prices at the publication time. All prices are subject to fluctuation and include additional fees at checkout .)

Vivid Seats is a verified secondary market ticketing platform, and prices may be higher or lower than face value, depending on demand. 

They offer a 100% buyer guarantee that states your transaction will be safe and secure and your tickets will be delivered prior to the event.

About “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”

Hanks’ debut novel follows “the ‘making of’ the making of a film in 2020 filled with rich characters, including director Bill Johnson, chapter headings direct from the film process itself, even pages from the fictional screenplay,” according to an interview Hanks conducted with PBS .

That’s not all though.

Hanks’ story kicks off in 1946 with a made-up comic book that inspires the made-up film nearly a century later.

Want to read it now?

You can buy the showbiz satire here .

Upcoming Tom Hanks projects

Hanks, who has acted in 94 (!) projects over the course of his illustrious career has two movies on the horizon.

Here’s a quick synopsis of his as-yet-to-be-released films coming soon.

“Asteroid City” (2023): Wes Anderson’s love letter to the 1950s stars Hanks along with Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johannson, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton and more in a story about “a Junior Stargazer convention (that is) spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.” The flick hits theaters on June 23.

“Here” (TBD): Robert Zemeckis’ latest takes place in a single room and follows the many people who inhabit it over years and years, from the past to the future. Rounding out the cast are Kelly Reilly, Paul Bettany and Robin Wright aka Hanks’ beloved Jenny” from “Forrest Gump.”

Want to see what else Hanks is up to? Check out his IMDb .

Other unique tours in 2023

Malkovich isn’t the only star from the silver screen hitting the stage this year.

Here are just five of our favorite actors mounting tours these next few months.

•  John Malkovich

•  John Cusack

•  Kristin Chenoweth

•  Mandy Patinkin

•  Tina Fey with Amy Poehler

Want to see a concert? Check out our list of the 52 biggest concert tours in 2023 here .

Share this article:

Tom Hanks has two shows remaining on his 2023 book tour. Get tickets now

America’s dad might be coming to a city near you.

Actor, writer, director, author, ten-time “Saturday Night Live” host and two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is currently on tour promoting his new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

At all shows on the tour, Hanks will sit down with moderators and discuss the new novel which tells the story of a huge Marvel-like superhero flick called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” and the comic book it’s based on.

There’s only one problem — Hanks has only two Q&A’s remaining on his tour schedule.

The “Cast Away” star is set to appear at San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday, May 16 and Portland, OR’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday May 18.

Thankfully, if you’re hoping to catch Forrest Gump/David S. Pumpkins/Woody/Mr. Rogers/Walt Disney himself IRL, you can still pick up relatively affordable last-minute tickets .

At the time of publication, prices for the May 16 show start at $119 before fees on Vivid Seats.

Should you hope to attend in Portland, tickets can be snagged for $63 before fees .

Not a bad deal considering you’ll get to see the guy who starred in “Big,” “Captain Phillips,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elvis,” “The Green Mile” and you get the idea — Hanks has been in a lot of movies.

Plus, all audience members will receive a signed copy of Hanks’ new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

We’ll see you at the theater.

All prices listed above are subject to fluctuation.

A complete calendar of all remaining Tom Hanks tour dates, venues and links to the cheapest tickets available for each section below.

start atMay 16 at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, CA $119 May 18 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, OR $63

(Note: The New York Post confirmed all above prices at the publication time. All prices are subject to fluctuation and include additional fees at checkout .)

Vivid Seats is a verified secondary market ticketing platform, and prices may be higher or lower than face value, depending on demand. 

They offer a 100% buyer guarantee that states your transaction will be safe and secure and your tickets will be delivered prior to the event.

Hanks’ debut novel follows “the ‘making of’ the making of a film in 2020 filled with rich characters, including director Bill Johnson, chapter headings direct from the film process itself, even pages from the fictional screenplay,” according to an interview Hanks conducted with PBS .

That’s not all though.

Hanks’ story kicks off in 1946 with a made-up comic book that inspires the made-up film nearly a century later.

Want to read it now?

You can buy the showbiz satire here .

Hanks, who has acted in 94 (!) projects over the course of his illustrious career has two movies on the horizon.

Here’s a quick synopsis of his as-yet-to-be-released films coming soon.

“Asteroid City” (2023): Wes Anderson’s love letter to the 1950s stars Hanks along with Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johannson, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton and more in a story about “a Junior Stargazer convention (that is) spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.” The flick hits theaters on June 23.

“Here” (TBD): Robert Zemeckis’ latest takes place in a single room and follows the many people who inhabit it over years and years, from the past to the future. Rounding out the cast are Kelly Reilly, Paul Bettany and Robin Wright aka Hanks’ beloved Jenny” from “Forrest Gump.”

Want to see what else Hanks is up to? Check out his IMDb .

Malkovich isn’t the only star from the silver screen hitting the stage this year.

Here are just five of our favorite actors mounting tours these next few months.

•  John Malkovich

•  John Cusack

•  Kristin Chenoweth

•  Mandy Patinkin

•  Tina Fey with Amy Poehler

Want to see a concert? Check out our list of the 52 biggest concert tours in 2023 here .

Vivid Seats is the New York Post's official ticketing partner. We may receive revenue from this partnership for sharing this content and/or when you make a purchase. 

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Tom hanks has two shows remaining on his 2023 book tour. get tickets now.

America’s dad might be coming to a city near you.

Actor, writer, director, author, ten-time “Saturday Night Live” host and two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is currently on tour promoting his new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

At all shows on the tour, Hanks will sit down with moderators and discuss the new novel which tells the story of a huge Marvel-like superhero flick called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” and the comic book it’s based on.

There’s only one problem — Hanks has only two Q&A’s remaining on his tour schedule.

T... [Short citation of 8% of the original article]

• Literature & Fiction
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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece: A novel Hardcover – May 9, 2023

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Knopf
• Publication date May 9, 2023
• Dimensions 6.51 x 1.26 x 9.39 inches
• ISBN-10 052565559X
• ISBN-13 978-0525655596
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (May 9, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 052565559X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525655596
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.71 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.51 x 1.26 x 9.39 inches
• #116 in World War II Historical Fiction (Books)
• #349 in 20th Century Historical Fiction (Books)
• #1,584 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

TOM HANKS has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type, and the forthcoming novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.

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Tom Hanks returns to the moon with 'The Moonwalkers,' a new visual experience

Tickets are now on sale for the new immersive experience that runs from Dec. 6 to April 21, 2024 at the Lightroom in London.

What do you get when you combine the production house that converted the Washington Monument into a Saturn V rocket, the recently reworked imagery of "Apollo Remastered" and the actor who made "Houston, we have a problem" a household phrase? An immersive, nearly hour-long experience offering a unique new perspective on humanity's past and future voyages to the moon . " The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks " will take over London's Lightroom showspace to tell the history of the Apollo missions, as well as NASA's plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the coming years. Set to debut on Dec. 6, "The Moonwalkers" includes new interviews between Hanks and the Artemis 2 crew , who for the first time in over 50 years will launch to a celestial body beyond Earth. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 American astronauts voyaged to the moon, with 12 landing on and exploring the surface. With the Artemis missions , NASA and its international partners are planning to take advantage of water trapped as ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole to establish a sustainable presence on the moon and to prepare for sending astronauts onwards to Mars .

Related: NASA's Artemis 2 mission: Everything you need to know

Hanks co-wrote "The Moonwalkers" with Christopher Riley, the writer and director behind many of the space-themed documentaries and television shows that have run on the BBC, Netflix and PBS. Hanks, whose own credits include the 1995 film " Apollo 13 " and the 1998 HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," also narrates "The Moonwalkers." The 50-minute-long production features an original score by Anne Nikitin (Apple TV+'s "Hijack") and is directed by Nick Corrigan and Lysander Ashton of 59 Productions. In 2019, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum collaborated with 59 Productions to project a full-size, 363-foot-tall (111-meter) Saturn V rocket on the side of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC. The resulting show, "Apollo 50: Go for the Moon," attracted an audience of half a million people watching from the National Mall and areas around the city as the Apollo 11 mission was restaged as a 17-minute performance. The visuals in "The Moonwalkers," which are projected across Lightroom's floors and walls, were pulled from archival and newly shot film, as well as the images from Andy Saunders' 2022 book, " Apollo Remastered: The Ultimate Photographic Record ." Although the photography captured by the Apollo astronauts has been publicly available for half a century, Saunders was able to apply the latest in digital remastering techniques to bring out previously hidden details.

— The best space movies of all time

— The Apollo Program: How NASA sent astronauts to the moon

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Between the clarity of Saunders' images and the scale of Lightroom's projections, "The Moonwalkers" promises to not only re-introduce visitors to the wonders of the moon, but transport them virtually to the lunar surface. Or, as Hanks described it, produce "the most visceral and enthralling story to date of humanity's journeys beyond our Earth." "The Moonwalkers" runs from Dec. 6 through April 21, 2024 at the Lightroom, located in King's Cross on Lewis Cubitt Square, adjacent to Coal Drops Yard and Central St Martin's in London, England (United Kingdom). Tickets for "The Moonwalkers" are now on sale for £25 per adult (about $31 USD), with discounts available for children, students and wheelchair users.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @ collectSPACE . Copyright 2023 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

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Robert Pearlman is a space historian, journalist and the founder and editor of collectSPACE.com , an online publication and community devoted to space history with a particular focus on how and where space exploration intersects with pop culture. Pearlman is also a contributing writer for Space.com and co-author of "Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space” published by Smithsonian Books in 2018. He previously developed online content for the National Space Society and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, helped establish the space tourism company Space Adventures and currently serves on the History Committee of the American Astronautical Society, the advisory committee for The Mars Generation and leadership board of For All Moonkind. In 2009, he was inducted into the U.S. Space Camp Hall of Fame in Huntsville, Alabama. In 2021, he was honored by the American Astronautical Society with the Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History.

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Buy Tickets for Tom Hanks Talks with David Remnick

Symphony Space / Literature

Tom Hanks Talks with David Remnick

• Date | Tue, May 09, 2023
• Prices | Tier 1 (with book) $125 Tier 2 (with book) $95 Tier 3 (with book) $75 Livestream (no book) $25
• Theater | Peter Jay Sharp Theatre

Expected Run Time is 75 minutes

Description

Masks are encouraged and appreciated, but not mandatory for this event.

The actor and writer Tom Hanks will join the editor of The New Yorker , David Remnick, for this spring’s installment of The New Yorker Live at Symphony Space. They’ll discuss Hanks’s début novel, “ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece ,” and his path from film to fiction.

Each ticket holder will receive a copy of "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece." There will not be a book signing at this event.

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for Best Actor for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” He has starred in, among many other films, “Big,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Apollo 13,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Green Mile," "Cast Away,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Captain Phillips,” “Bridge of Spies,” “Sully,” “Toy Story,” “The Post,” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” He published “ Alan Bean Plus Four, ” a short story in The New Yorker, in 2014, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Vanity Fair . He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, “ Uncommon Type . ” “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” is his début novel.

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998. He joined the magazine in 1992, after ten years with the Washington Post , where he was a Moscow correspondent. He is the author of several books, including “ The Bridge ,” a biography of Barack Obama; “ King of the World ,” about the life of Muhammad Ali; and “ Lenin’s Tomb ,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine, garnering fifty-five National Magazine Awards. In 2016, it became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and to date has won six Pulitzers, including the gold medal for public service.

Peter Jay Sharp Theatre

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How Tom Hanks Became Tom Hanks

The actor—and now novelist—reflects on how he got here, and the other lives he might have lived instead.

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There is a particular circumstance deep in Tom Hanks’s past that he thinks may explain something significant about the person he is now. One that suggests how, before all of this—before everything he would achieve and come to represent in the world, before he had even begun to work out what talents he might have and how he might best use them—he was already well on the way to becoming who he would be.

Explore the June 2023 Issue

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As a child, several times a year, Hanks would take a long journey on a Greyhound bus, heading to and from the small Northern California town of Red Bluff. He was often alone, and he always sat by the window. In Red Bluff, Hanks would stay with his mother, Janet; after his parents’ marriage ruptured when he was 5, he never lived with her, but on holidays he’d visit. And so, from when he was 8 until he was 17, four or so hours each way, he’d take this ride.

Those journeys, they released something within him. Sometimes he read a little, maybe a comic, maybe a book, but mostly he’d stare out into the passing world. He’d watch the broken sine wave of the telephone lines, looping on and on and on for miles, then veering away, then rejoining the bus’s path. He’d see a barn, wonder what was on the other side. A house would flash by; he’d imagine who lived in it. Some figures standing outside: What were they doing? A plane up in the clear sky: All those people, where were they going and what were they thinking? The couple in that car as the Greyhound passed, the guy by himself in the truck, that station wagon loaded up with kids in the back, that locomotive on the train tracks …

In his mind, all of these questions and thoughts would mix with what was already sloshing around—the movies he’d seen, the stuff he liked to read about space exploration. Sometimes it would coalesce into a narrative. He’d see himself flying a jet, being an explorer, winning the day, gaining revenge, getting into a fistfight. Sometimes it would just flow and flow, as the day’s light faded and his destination edged nearer. A boy by a window, imagining what was and what could be.

Half a century later, Tom Hanks meets me in the lobby of Claridge’s hotel in London, clutching the rectangular stick of a negative COVID test in one hand. When he and his wife, Rita Wilson, contracted COVID in the anxious early days of the pandemic, it made Hanks, in his words, “the celebrity canary in the coal mine.” Back then, his infection seemed disproportionately unsettling . If he describes being a little taken aback by the attention it drew—“When your name appears in a chyron on CNN as breaking news: ‘Oh, I guess we’re a bigger part of the zeitgeist than we anticipated’ ”—well, perhaps he is not as invested as the wider culture is in the idea of Tom Hanks as some kind of cherished symbol, benignly treasured in a way few public figures are. “An avatar,” as The New York Times put it last year , “of American goodness.”

Looking back, we might imagine that this idea of Hanks built up gradually, emerging through the years as he accrued status and dignity. Not really. Here’s a representative sample of ways he was already described in the 1980s: “a funny and vulnerable Everyman,” “an affable soul without a visible speck of vanity in his makeup,” “more like the nice neighbor next door than a movie star,” “regular guy as star,” “the everyguy,” “an unshakable nice-guy image.” By 1988, he was delivering a Saturday Night Live monologue that morphed into an extended skit satirizing the cliché of how relentlessly nice he is. How he is seen now is pretty much how he has been seen for a very long time.

Hanks, who is 66, appears lithe and sprightly, almost as though he has too much energy for such a slip of a body. He is in town to shoot a movie, Robert Zemeckis’s adaptation of Richard McGuire’s Here , a graphic novel in which every frame takes place in a single living room in a house. This will be the fifth collaboration between Zemeckis and Hanks, an irregular series that began with Forrest Gump and Cast Away . But the occasion for our talk is something more immediate: the publication of Hanks’s first novel.

He’s keen to talk about that, and plenty else besides. Hanks is at his most animated when the words coming out of his mouth are something along the lines of “I just learned recently why there’s so many covered bridges in America. You know why there’s so many covered bridges in America?” And he’s off. A while after we sit down, he declares, “I’m not on any schedule,” and more than four hours of conversation pass before he suggests that perhaps he should spend some time with his family.

Whenever Hanks walks around New York City, he says, there are certain kinds of things he finds himself curious about. “Like, you know the guys that are running the soda stands?” he says. “I always want to ask, ‘Dude, you got to go to the bathroom at some point. How do you do it? Where do you do it?’ I’m literally interested in: How do you do your job? What time do you show up at work? When do you have to start loading this stuff? Who drives you here and drops you off? How long have you been doing it?”

What do you think it is, I ask him, that your brain wants to understand?

“You know, I’ve never had any real other job than being an actor,” he tells me. “I mean, I was a bellman on weekends ; I washed dishes for a while.” And so, he says, he’s always wondered: If he weren’t making movies, what might he be doing instead? “What skills do I have? What service could I render? And I always think, What if that was it? What if I was the guy who did that ?   ”

A cab driver, for instance. “I would want to be the most entertaining, fabulous cab driver on the planet Earth. I’d want to be the tour guide and everything.” This reminds him of the way his late friend Nora Ephron once summed him up. “She said something that was really true: I would have made the greatest park ranger in the history of the national parks. I would have loved the uniform. I would have run the campfire talks. I would have known the history of it all, and I would have weaved the perfect story … I would have loved going to work.”

Read: Nora Ephron: prophet of privacy

If that’s all sounding just a little too tidy and wholesome, this might be a good moment to point out that one of the fascinations of a Tom Hanks story is that it’s sometimes rather different than you might expect a Tom Hanks story to be. Later, he expands on his spell as a hotel bellman (at the Hilton Oakland Airport when he was a teenager), a story offered not as early-life biography but as an illustrative tale about effective problem-solving. “I had a guy who I checked into a room,” Hanks says, “and he had pictures in his wallet, and he showed me a picture. He said, ‘Does anything like this go on in this hotel?’ And it was a guy giving another guy a blow job. This guy was saying, ‘You want to come up later and give me a blow job? I’ll pay you.’  And I said, ‘No, actually, I don’t think anything like that does.’ I solved the problem, gave the guy an honest answer, and left him to his own.”

And then he’s off again, spelling out the career trajectory that a young bellman good at fixing problems might have had ahead of him: next step, working at the front desk; then sales; then management, until “next thing you know, you’re running the International Garden Suites in Coral Gables, Florida”; then, further down the road, “move to the Bahamas.” Spinning one more story about one more life he might have lived if he hadn’t turned out to be Tom Hanks instead.

Hanks’s public image is so entrenched that it can eclipse who he really is, and the far scrappier tale of how he came to be. As a boy, Hanks had a disorderly home life. One go-to quip in old interviews was that his parents, who both divorced multiple times, “ pioneered the marriage-dissolution laws for the state of California .” He found some kind of solace, and maybe latent possibility, in the stories that filled his head on those long bus journeys to and from Red Bluff. “I was the third kid,” he says. “I was just like a leaf blowing in the wind. No one did anything because I wanted it. I wasn’t in control of nothing. Somebody else was always telling us what to do.” Focus and ambition came gradually. He was well into his high-school years before he discovered drama class and with it one possible shape of a life ahead.

At first, a very modest one. Not long after college, Hanks took his father, Amos “Bud” Hanks, who worked as a restaurant cook, to a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties staged by a repertory company that the younger Hanks admired. “I said, ‘I want to show you the thing that I’m aiming for’ … And when it was done, I said, ‘If I can work at a place like this in a few years, this is the apex of it all for me—to be in something this good, in a repertory company, that means I’d really be a true artist and an actor.’ ”

Hanks never had that repertory-theater career. Instead, after some struggling and a two-season sitcom, Bosom Buddies , he ascended into movie stardom. Maybe only two of his early films, Splash and Big , were truly memorable or impressive, but even the misfires didn’t seem to break his momentum or dent the sense that Hanks’s face fit. Notably, the one person who felt that something was awry was Hanks. He met with his people, and told them that he wasn’t happy with the kinds of stories he was telling.

Hanks felt typecast, forever some fantastical, hapless man-boy looking for love. He wanted to play adults who were complicated, who understood the bitterness of compromise. If need be, he’d wait until the right roles came along or until he could proactively nudge them into existence. The six movies he released from 1992 to 1995, his imperial phase, may have satisfied this requirement in very different ways, but every one of them— A League of Their Own , Sleepless in Seattle , Philadelphia , Forrest Gump , Apollo 13 , and Toy Story —was a critical and commercial triumph; for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump , he won back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards . (Steve Martin once joked that Hanks “took a shortcut to becoming a movie star—he only made hits.”)

One itch palliated, others emerged. As an antidote to the seemingly endless and repetitive promotional demands of Forrest Gump , Hanks began to write a screenplay: a sweet tale of a one-hit-wonder band in the ’60s, That Thing You Do! , which he would direct and star in as well. He also started a production company in 1998, and since then he has spent much of his time developing projects, most distinctively prestige-TV series on subjects that interested him: the history of space exploration, the birth of America, World War II. But the stream of movies with Tom Hanks on the marquee has never sputtered. Just in the past two years, he’s been a stranded postapocalyptic survivor who builds a robot for company ( Finch ), a suicidal misanthrope who finds his better self in modern-day Pittsburgh suburbia ( A Man Called Otto ), a grieving old-world wood-carver ( Pinocchio ), Elvis Presley’s duplicitous manager ( Elvis ). This June, he appears in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City .

What I have just related is a condensed version of Tom Hanks’s rise, as it is generally understood. But there is a document—an early example, in fact, of Hanks’s writing—that allows for the possibility that far earlier, when he was still in school, a different side of Hanks already existed, one that was much more gung-ho about this movie-star world and the place he might find in it.

George Roy Hill was the director of such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting . Hill died in 2002, but many of his papers are in the collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Among them is a two-page, handwritten letter in blue ink from a teenage schoolboy, who, as the letter explains, is friends with two of Hill’s nephews and his niece; it swerves from praising The Sting into an impudent proposal:

It is all together fitting and proper that you should “discover” me. Now, right away I know what you are thinking (“who is this kid?”), and I can understand your apprehensions. I am a nobody. No one outside of Skyline High School has heard of me, but I figure if I change my name to Clark Gable, or Humphrey Bogart, some people will recognize me. My looks are not stunning. I am not built like a Greek God, and I can’t even grow a mustache, but I figure if people will pay to see certain films (“The Exorcist”, for one) they will pay to see me. Lets work out the details of my discovery. We can do it the way Lana Turner was discovered, me sitting on a soda shop stool, you walk in and notice me, and—BANGO—Im a star. Or perhaps we could meet on a bus somewhere and we casually strike up a conversation and become good friends, I come to you weeks later asking for a job. During the last few weeks you have actually been working on a script for me and—Bango!—I am a star.

I hand Hanks a printout of the letter. “Oh my God—that’s my bad handwriting,” he says. He reads the final section aloud, offering commentary as he goes:

“ All of these plans are fine with me, or we could do it any way you would like it. It makes no difference to me! Exclamation mark! But let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Hill. I do not want to be some big-time, Hollywood superstar with girls crawling all over me, just a hometown, American— Oh dear. This is a little too accurate, ain’t it? Just a hometown, American boy who has hit the big time, owns a Porsche, and calls Robert Redford ‘Bob.’ ”

“All right! All right!” he says, laughing. “Guilty!”

Hanks explains that after The Sting won an Academy Award, in 1974, everyone in his drama class wrote letters to Hill, congratulating him. “I just wrote a jokey one, you know.”

But was a part of you thinking, Maybe this will work  ?

“Yeah, a little bit. I mean, you know.”

What do you think when you read it now?

“Well,” he says. “There’s something to it.” He doesn’t own a Porsche. He’s never, he says, “had girls crawling all over me.” But he thinks he can see what he calls his “work ethic” in that letter, for one thing: “Am I wrong? I’m, ‘Hey, we can do it any way you want it.’ ” A hometown, American boy who has hit the big time. An irreverent kid riffing funny, or someone imagining what could be?

Hanks flashes the kind of smile that is almost a shrug. “And by the way, I met Robert Redford, and I called him Bob.”

When Hanks reads something he likes, he is known to reach out to the author. Here in London, he tells me that he just finished Blitz Spirit , a book about everyday Britons’ lives during World War II, and has written to the author, Becky Brown, informing her, “You wrote the most fascinating book I’ve ever read.” The writer Ada Calhoun says that she and Hanks have periodically corresponded on literary subjects ever since she received a typewritten letter from him praising her book St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street  . Hanks wrote, “You made me feel like I belonged to the neighborhood. I envy your growing up days.” ( Growing was mistyped gorwing , but Hanks, known for both his typewriter collection and his keen advocacy of their use , had hand-corrected it in pencil, indicating that the o and r should swap places.)

Even though Hanks had occasionally written movie and TV screenplays, and a bit of nonfiction, until about 10 years ago he’d sidestepped fiction. But after immersing himself in some New Yorker anthologies and reading uncollected early J. D. Salinger stories he found online, Hanks was struck with an idea for his own story about some people who launch themselves from a suburban driveway in a rocket that loops around the moon, then return to Earth. He wrote a draft “in a fevered two and a half days.”

What to do next? Hanks had been in the habit of sending his nonfiction to Ephron—a characteristic response: “Voice, voice, voice”—but she was no longer around. In her stead, he sent what he had written to Steve Martin with a single question: “Is this a thing?”

“There’s always a dread when a friend sends you something,” Martin tells me. Once, he says, a friend of his asked for feedback on something that he didn’t think was particularly good. “I said, ‘I think you should work with an editor’—that was my comeback on something I didn’t think was up to snuff.” To his evident relief, this story was different. “It was a surprising piece,” Martin says. “It was well written, it was charming, and it had flair.” The New Yorker ended up publishing the story, called “ Alan Bean Plus Four, ” and Hanks went on to publish a collection of short stories, Uncommon Type , in 2017.

After that, Hanks began to think about a novel. As he remembers it, his editor, Peter Gethers, was the one who suggested that he write about what he did for a living, and his first instinct was to resist the idea: “I said there’s nothing worse than hearing an actor talk about being an actor.” Then it occurred to him that there might be a broader story he did want to tell, one set in the world of moviemaking. Because, he says, “I have found that absolutely everybody assumes they know how movies are made, and nobody does.” Or, as he puts it to me more grandiosely: “Like all cumulative endeavors that require a collaboration among artists who are all operating at the absolute top of their game, making a movie is exactly like starting a business, waging a war, getting to the moon, figuring out how to treat a disease, or coming up with public policy in order to make a city work better … Making a movie is as unknowable and as complex as any great saga or odyssey that is wrought with many turns of fate.” Early on, he came up with a title. It would be called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece .

In 2019, while working on the Reconstruction-era movie News of the World in New Mexico, Hanks began writing. As he proceeded, he would periodically send new fragments to those whose opinion he trusted. Title notwithstanding, the novel would evolve into something far more ambitious and expansive—weirder and more interesting, too—than the mere chronicling of a film’s creation. When Ada Calhoun received a first installment, about a boy in Northern California in 1947 being visited by his errant war-veteran uncle, she had no idea it was from the “movie novel” Hanks had told her about.

Another early reader was the novelist Ann Patchett. She had entered Hanks’s orbit after receiving an advance copy of Uncommon Type . Initially she ignored it—“It was just like, ‘Movie star … no’ ”—but, with a minute to spare at the end of a day, she figured she might as well read one story. To her surprise, she was captivated. “I fell into it. I immediately stopped thinking about him and who he was and what he was doing.”

Patchett, who owns a Nashville bookstore , later counseled Hanks when he was considering opening a bookstore himself; eventually, she offered to take a look at his novel in progress, reading each new section as it was completed. “I know I said at one point, ‘Okay, you’ve got to tone down the number of times you say ka-ching ,’ ” she tells me.

From the December 2012 issue: Ann Patchett’s bookstore strikes back

In one section, involving a character called Wren Lane, the female lead of the movie being made in the novel, Patchett advised that Hanks might need another character to interact with her. Hanks’s solution was to give Wren a twin brother, rather than what seemed to him the more obvious option. “I didn’t want to write a romance thing about a couple not getting along,” he says, “because I always think that story can be told in seven words: ‘He was an asshole.’ ”

You’ve got three words left, I point out.

Hanks liked the process of writing a novel. One thing that helped, on days when he was free to concentrate on this project, was a productivity trick he’d read about in The New York Times called the Pomodoro Technique , based on a discovery made by an Italian student: If he set a timer for 25 minutes and focused totally on work for that period, then broke for five minutes, then repeated it all, he would get far more work done.

Hanks also discovered, along the way, that a different kind of writing exercise would be required. The putative “motion-picture masterpiece” in the book is a superhero movie titled Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall  ; Hanks realized that to tell his novel’s story, he had to know exactly what happened in that movie, and he could see but one good way to do that. So he paused writing his novel for a couple of months in order to write a real script for the fake movie whose filming his novel would document.

Prospective readers might presume that a book with a title like The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece would be a sly, satirical dissection of filmmaking: Come see what grand folly it is to throw together so many millions of dollars and so many hundreds of talented people under intolerable pressure to create some fragile sliver of entertainment. Even more so when they learn that the particular sliver under examination has a name like Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall . But Hanks’s book is not that at all.

Hanks seems perfectly capable of seeing the world through a sardonic lens—this is a man who has barely sat down when we meet before he tells me, “The truth is, we’re a business full of assholes”—and there are certainly moments, within his novel’s more than 400 pages, when he skewers some foibles and calls out some foolishness. But at its core, what he has written is a hymn to movies and those who make them. It’s a book written in the spirit Hanks invokes when he tells me that “the making of a movie is the same exact process of solving problems, dealing with assholes … or what have you. But the end result is something akin to the Brooklyn Bridge that you help make … And that’s where the noble endeavor—I might get a little weepy on it here—that’s the noble endeavor that you get to be a part of.”

Likewise, people might expect that a novel from a big mainstream movie star like Hanks would be one where everything is in thrall to a propulsive narrative. Again, far from it. Hanks’s story has a through line, and a certain amount of drama and tension and resolution, but it rarely feels as though plot is what matters most. The novel’s strength and distinctiveness—and maybe its weakness, too, for anyone expecting a breezy, streamlined surge of pure entertainment—lie in the way it is guided by Hanks’s relentless curiosity, and his apparent fervor to share what he knows or has seen or experienced. The book is not so much full of digressions as it is a compendium of overlapping digressions. Meet someone, and their rich backstory is usually only seconds away—often less because it’ll be necessary to know any of this later on than because it feels like Hanks just wants to know and generously assumes that you’ll feel the same. This extends beyond characters. There are no covered bridges in his novel, but if there were, odds are he’d tell you, in engrossing detail, that they were originally designed to avoid spooking horses by keeping the animals’ eyes on the road.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece also hews to significant parts of Hanks’s life in ways that might be less immediately apparent. Much of the book takes place in and around the fictional town of Lone Butte. Early in the story, it is where a boy named Robby, who ultimately writes the comic-book source material for Knightshade , grows up. Later, it is the filming location for the superhero movie, where the bulk of the book’s narrative takes place. Hanks confirms my suspicions that Lone Butte is a stand-in for Red Bluff, the destination of all those youthful bus trips to stay with his mother.

“Small towns in Northern California, essentially those were my summer camps,” Hanks says. “I had this kind of William Saroyan take on a small town at a time when living in a small town was not necessarily the same as being poor … Red Bluff, it had a Christmas tree in the middle of the crossroads at Christmas. It had department stores and local drugstores. It had a full Bedford Falls–ish kind of life: courthouse, State Theatre. And the life that little Robby has there, those were my summers … The house that is the basis of the house, that’s really a place that my mom rented for a while … Robby, growing up as he did in Lone Butte, that’s me playing on the porch.”

There is another story buried deeper in the same tangle of Northern California geography and history. This region was also where Hanks’s father spent his own childhood. Later in life, Hanks came to realize that his father had once wanted to be a writer—when Bud came home after serving in the Navy during World War II , he went to college on the GI Bill, and there, as his son understands it, he took a few courses as an English major. “My dad came out of the war with a desire” to write, Hanks says. And he thinks he knows why.

Hanks tells me that, when Bud was very young, he witnessed his own father get killed in a fight with another man; that Bud had to take the stand three times in court, but in the end “he did not get a sense of justice from it all, and he was darkened by that.” Hanks thinks the root of his dad’s desire to write was to have an “outlet for an expression that he never really got.” Hanks tells me that his dad never spoke with him directly about what had happened back then; he heard about it from his older brother, Larry.

I was already aware of the bare bones of this story before I met Hanks, after stumbling across a podcast interview he’d given a couple of years ago. There, Hanks said that the fatal fight his father saw took place in a barn with a hired hand. After listening to that, I spent some time searching local California newspapers from the 1930s, during the period of the murder and the subsequent trials. I was surprised by what I found. Is it strange—or, looked at another way, is it not strange at all, and maybe somehow telltale—that for all of Hanks’s deep interest in the stories of strangers, he seems never to have focused that same gaze on his own history?

I explain to Hanks that the story I found was rather different from the one he has told.

“To what Dad remembered?” he asks.

Yes, I say.

I ask him if he wants me to tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah.”

It seems a very unusual role that I have somehow placed myself in, but here I am: sitting in a lavish London hotel suite one Friday morning in March 2023, telling Tom Hanks about how his grandfather was killed. It’s a story that not only diverges in key ways from Hanks’s version, but describes a tragedy of a more nuanced kind. According to newspaper accounts of the trials, the killer was not a hired hand; he was an old friend of Ernest Beauel Hanks—at 67, he was more than 20 years’ Hanks’s senior. The two of them had been hauling hay together, and the dispute—over some horses—took place in a field, not a barn. The older man testified in court that Ernest Beauel initiated the violence; the friend struck back twice with a pitchfork handle in self-defense. The misfortune of it all multiplied. Ernest Beauel was still well enough to begin driving the wagon home; when he was unable to continue, his friend took over, and eventually called a doctor. Ernest Beauel died later from a blood clot in the brain—according to one report, in his friend’s arms. The other man was charged with murder but ultimately acquitted. Although Bud Hanks did take the stand, he didn’t see the fight.

Hanks listens attentively as I sketch out this story’s arc, only occasionally commenting. “Yeah. The pitchfork was a big thing,” he says at one point. “Oh, is that right?” he says at another, surprised to hear that his father didn’t witness the actual violence. “Wow,” he says when I finish. After, he shares something he remembers his father saying—how much his dad hated that he was supposed to forgive the man who was responsible. Then Hanks relates something else he heard about the aftermath of it all:

“My brother told me this story—I didn’t hear it from my dad—that after the war, or sometime after all of that, my dad decided he was going to kill [his father’s attacker]. And showed up at his house with a shotgun, pounded on the door. The guy’s wife answered. And he says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ She says, ‘Yes, yes, you’re Bud Hanks.’ He said, ‘Well then, you know why I’m here.’ And he had a shotgun. And she says, ‘Look, my husband is very sick. He’s got cancer. He’s going to be dead very soon. Why don’t you just …’ And my dad left.” Hanks pauses. “That’s a lot of stuff to carry around, you know.”

Hanks doesn’t seem resistant to discussing any of this. But I get a sense that he’s talking about it at a distance, almost as though he’s found himself in a conversation about an author he’s never read or a country he’ll probably never visit. These are the kinds of extraordinary biographical details that you feel would fire his rapacious curiosity if he heard them about someone unconnected to him: He’d want to know all the minutiae, backwards and forwards, and he’d be thrilled to tell you about what he’d learned. Maybe he’s just deftly hiding his reaction to someone blundering into a topic too awkward or private or painful, though I do find myself wondering whether it could reflect something else. Perhaps, to develop into a person with a broad curiosity about the world that stretches far beyond one’s own experience, it can be useful to shut oneself off from the messy specificity of one’s past. But then again, maybe he’s just saving it for his next novel.

In considering the cultural mythology around Hanks—the nice guy, the avatar of American goodness, and the rest—it’s only natural to wonder how he feels about being routinely spoken of in these ways. At an event promoting Uncommon Type , he’d once mimicked interviewers talking to him about the book: “Tom, Tom, Tom … short stories … You present a vision of America that is so … American.”

Read: The joy of David S. Pumpkins

As for the most used word of all? “I might take nice as almost a pejorative now,” he says. At the same time, he clearly knows that people appear to detect something in him, and when I float the idea that he has become some kind of symbol of rectitude, he doesn’t entirely push the thought away.

“Rectitude?” he muses. “Fairness? Yeah.”

Nearly as old as the “Tom Hanks is the nicest guy in Hollywood” trope is the determination to search for Hanks’s “dark side.” The quest has typically borne little fruit. Nonetheless, in a recent, unfortunate turn of events, Hanks has become one of the key celebrity targets of QAnon conspiracy theories, and, in what seems to be a toxic inversion of his beneficent public persona, has been smeared with the usual parade of repugnant grotesqueries.

Asked how unpleasant this is for him, at first Hanks affects complete indifference.

“It’s not unpleasant at all,” he says. “It just is. You know, I don’t care.” A soft chuckle. A little later, though, he shares the slightly more nuanced reaction he had upon first learning what was being said about him. At some point he’d heard, he says, that “it was Hillary Clinton—I won’t say the other names—other famous people, me, involved in some sort of satanic thing. And for a moment, I said, ‘Oh my God, we have to do something about that.’ And I’m going to say for about 45 minutes, I was undone by this. And on the 46th minute, I said”—he laughs—“ ‘Oh, fuck. I’m going to fight this ?’ ”

But there was worse to come. Last October, a man who had posted about QAnon conspiracy theories online broke into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband, Paul. The assailant told police he had a list of other targets. One of them was Hanks.

“Oh yeah,” Hanks acknowledges, and then exclaims, almost as though remembering something funny, “I got a call from the FBI!”

What happened?

“They had to do it on a Zoom, and they had to show me their credentials, and they just informed me: My name was on that list. And that’s all they were doing. They said, ‘You should know this.’ And I said, ‘Wow.’ ”

And that was all?

“That’s it. I said, ‘Really? Hey, wow.’ I thought, I’ll let everybody I love know. But again, what are you going to let control your life, for crying out loud?”

Hanks offers a corollary from wartime history, something he read in the William Manchester book Goodbye, Darkness —how General MacArthur, aware of huge pockets of Japanese forces and arms on various Pacific islands, deliberately decided not to attack them. “And so these Japanese soldiers essentially sat out the war doing nothing.” MacArthur just left them there. “And I thought, That’s friggin’ brilliant. You’re really smart in the battles you don’t fight. ”

Hanks realized long ago that he has no interest in a particular kind of story: those with a protagonist and an antagonist. “I always gravitate towards things where there is no antagonist,” he explains. In the stories that interest him, humanity can’t be so easily divided up; what distinguishes characters is that “some people have an opinion that doesn’t win the day.”

Yet you work in movies, a storytelling medium addicted to protagonists and antagonists.

“Even as a young kid, I never bought it. I never found it to be satisfying.”

Hanks remembers an observation that Gethers, his editor, made while he was working on Uncommon Type  . “Peter said, ‘I’ve noticed something about these stories of yours,’ ” he recalls: that they’re “ ‘always about people helping people who might not have helped them normally.’ ” He asks whether I’ve ever read the “Metropolitan Diary” in the Times , with its quotidian tales from regular lives. “They’re almost always about some pleasant little moment, even if it’s just somebody saying the right thing.”

And you like that?

“Oh God, I can’t get enough of it.”

Sometimes, he wonders what it would have been like to be a different kind of person altogether. If, say, he’d turned out to be a quiet guy, like Larry, his older brother. L. M. Hanks is a respected entomology professor (a representative academic-paper title: “The Role of Minor Pheromone Components in Segregating 14 Species of Longhorned Beetles”), and also is, Tom says, “the funniest human being I’ve ever met.” But his brother “is dry and he is bashful … I’m loud; I’m totally different.” He tells me about his brother’s insect-collecting field trips in their youth—at a place near Red Bluff called Hogsback, Tom in tow—and how Larry’s bedroom was full of carefully mounted bugs. “And I wish I would have had that kind of specific focus,” he says, “as opposed to some sort of attention deficit disorder for me that is always jumping from one story to the next.”

At one point in our conversation, pressed into another way to explain himself, Hanks begins a thought with “In my writing—” then stops himself.

“I don’t like to say ‘In my writing.’ ”

“Because it makes it sound as though I’m”—he assumes a pompous voice—“ ‘Well, in my writing …’ ”

Which makes you sound like what?

“Like people who do it in order to say, ‘Well, you know, in my writing …’ I just do writing. I write because I’ve got too many fucking stories in my head. And it’s fun.”

I ask him what he thinks his talent is.

“Holding people’s interest? Does that make sense? In warranting their investment in listening to me.”

Don’t be misled by the modesty of Hanks’s language. I think he’s well aware that one downside of a graceful affability is that it can make what you do look effortless; it can tempt people to take you for granted.

One evening nearly 30 years ago, Hanks was eating with his wife, his mother-in-law, and a friend at a restaurant called Coco Pazzo when the maître d’ asked for a word. He said that Joe DiMaggio, who was dining alone, wondered whether Hanks might come over to his table. Naturally, Hanks jumped at the chance. They chatted for a while—it turned out DiMaggio knew that Hanks was from Oakland—and DiMaggio told Hanks, “I like your pictures.” Hanks told DiMaggio in turn that when reviewers said that Hanks made it look easy, he often thought of what people said about DiMaggio—that he’d made playing center field look like it was easy.

“And,” Hanks remembers, “he said, ‘Yeah, it looked easy on the outside, but’ ”—and Hanks imitates how DiMaggio clutched his hands over his heart—“ ‘not in here.’ ” Hanks repeats DiMaggio’s words: Not in here . “I’ll never forget,” Hanks says. “His hands—his hands were huge.”

And you’ve felt the same feeling, I say.

“I think that is one of the deep reasons why I wanted to do the book in the first place,” he says. “If I was going to say ‘What’s the theme of this?,’ it’s that doing this is not as easy as it seems. That doing this is so difficult that it breaks people wide open. You can look at all sorts of people that had the ability, had the credit, and then took the deep-throw shot, it didn’t work, and they were gone … It’s hard, man. It’s hard … And the joy and the fun have to come in spite of the fact that it’s difficult.”

The hotel suite we’ve been talking in is so big that it has rooms I never even see. On our way out, toward the door, is a baby grand piano. I guess that “Tom Hanks,” as the world imagines him, would reach out with both hands for the keys as he passed, almost without breaking stride, and release a ripple of discordant notes—just enough, maybe, to feel like it was a nod to Big ’s magical keyboard scene, or as though it simply needed to be done because it would be such a waste if you could have, but didn’t. And—given that the Tom Hanks you want him to be is, more often than not, the Tom Hanks he is—this is exactly what he does.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Making of Tom Hanks.”

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Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks

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Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for forty years. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor two years in a row. Now in his sixties, Hanks has added another line to his résumé: novelist. “ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece ”—an overstuffed, often funny work of fiction—touches on everything Hanks learned from forty years in the business. He describes the process of moviemaking as equal parts chaos and monotony. “If anybody who we call a noncombatant, or a civilian, wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they will be bored out of their skull,” he tells David Remnick. “You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.” Plus, the staff writer and historian Jill Lepore talks about gardening, a certain heirloom strain of apple admired by Henry David Thoreau, and how history informs her love of seed catalogues.

Download a transcript.

Hanks’s début novel, “The Making of a Major Motion Picture,” is out now. He kicks off his book tour live onstage with David Remnick.

Jill Lepore on the Joy of Gardening

The staff writer and history professor finds time to pursue gardening passionately. She talks with David Remnick about heirloom beets, and Henry David Thoreau’s favorite apple tree.

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Turns Out Tom Hanks Isn’t Just a Stellar Actor — He’s a Great Novelist, Too

His new book, ‘the making of another major motion picture masterpiece,’ is a fun read that will delight movie buffs.

Christina Ianzito,

So you know how  Tom Hanks  is considered a (the?) top actor of his generation — winner of two Oscars, seven Primetime Emmys and eight Golden Globes; the star of beloved films like  Sleepless in Seattle,   Big,   Forrest Gump . Well, guess what? He’s also a darn good novelist.

His first novel,  The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece  (May 9), is an entertaining, often humorous story that jumps from 1947 to 1970 and on to the present-day creation of a splashy superhero action movie based on an old comic book series — written for the novel by Hanks and drawn by R. Sikoryak.

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Essentially, it’s a heartfelt homage to filmmaking, which the seasoned, famously good-natured actor portrays as a wildly unpredictable, utterly exhausting, periodically dull but ultimately exhilarating mix of the magical and mundane.

Movie lovers will eat it up.

The story begins in 1947, when a boy named Robby Anderson, growing up in the sleepy town of Lone Butte, California, first meets his troubled Uncle Bob after he returns from the war. Robby is dutifully impressed by his mom’s hard-drinking, motorcycle-riding brother. Cut to the Bay Area in the early 1970s: Robby is a young artist working for Kool Katz Komix and writing a comic book about a heroic World War II soldier based on Uncle Bob.

Then the tale jumps to 1990, when the moviemaking begins. The film, a Marvel-style blockbuster called  Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall,  is based on Robby’s old comic book characters. And where do the producers decide to shoot it, after scouting possible locations? Lone Butte, due to its decline through the decades into “a marvel of All-American Anytown-ness, a time capsule, inside a snow globe without the snow,” empty of life, and therefore “a cinch to shoot in.”

But the shooting is not a cinch. In fact, each day (there’s meant to be only 53 of them) brings new crises and quandaries, including the frustrations of dealing with a wildly self-absorbed leading man, a weirdo stalking the leading lady and last-minute casting changes. Most of the kinks end up being smoothed out by a few uber-capable and efficient crew members with quietly powerful roles — the real heroes of filmmaking, Hanks seems to suggest, even if they remain invisible to movie fans (and maybe many movie stars).

They include two of the most interesting characters in the book: the preternaturally competent Al Mac-Teer, the director’s right-hand woman; and Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, a ride-share driver from Sacramento whom Al takes under her wing and ushers into the movie biz.

The reader views the filming through the eyes of Ynez as she’s introduced to this magical new world — and falls in love.

“I feel kind of sad,” she says to Al toward the end of filming. “After we started shooting? Everywhere my eyes landed, every word I heard taught me something I didn’t know. It’s hard work, but it’s fun, too.”

Al says, with a smile, “That’s making motion pictures.”

A bit corny, but, hey, that’s Hollywood for you.

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The bottom line

Is it worth reading? Yes, particularly if you love movies. It’s a fun, smart whirlwind of a story, a lively look at how big-budget films go from the germ of an idea to the big screen.

That said, one critique of the book might be that Hanks’ descriptions of the process get rather granular, maybe unnecessarily so. We learn that for breakfast, for instance, the crew is fed a morning buffet “heavy on the high-calorie comfort foods — porridge by the vat, waffles off the iron” (he goes on to list a menu of other dishes here), but “ask for a bowl of loganberries and goat-milk kefir and you’ll find it available the next day.”

A few pages later he offers an even more elaborate description of lunch. I actually got hungry reading it.

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And Hanks includes slightly distracting footnotes throughout, including definitions of moviemaking lingo (“FG” means “foreground”), funny asides and lively riffs on a character’s quirky backstory.

But it all rings true. In a quote shared with the media by his publisher, Knopf, Hanks said that “every character in the book does something I’ve experienced while making a movie, as well as discovered a philosophy or learned an important lesson. Even the foolish moments are some kind of stunt I’ve pulled or mistake I’ve survived.”

The book tour

Hanks, whose other work of published fiction is his 2017 short story collection,  Common Type,  hits the road this week for a book tour that starts tonight (May 9) at New York’s Symphony Space, where he’ll talk with David Remnick for The New Yorker Live. He’ll be at Nashville’s Parnassus Books for a talk with the store’s owner, author Ann Patchett (he narrated the audiobook of her 2019 novel,  The Dutch House ), on May 11. And he’s scheduled to appear in at least  six more cities .

The audiobook

Hanks narrates the audiobook along with a group of actors that includes Peter Gerety (who appeared in  Charlie Wilson’s War  with Hanks), Natalie Morales and Rita Wilson (Hanks’ wife).​​

​Christina Ianzito covers scams and fraud, and is the books editor for aarp.org and AARP The Magazine . Also a longtime travel writer and editor, she received a 2020 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation.​

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Tom Hanks “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” Author Talk

Join Tom Hanks to discuss “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” AUTHOR TALK DETAILS 5/16/2023 at 7:30 PM CITY ARTS AND LECTURES AT THE SYDNEY GOLDSTEIN THEATER 275 HAYES ST SAN FRANCISCO, CA [read more]

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Order a signed book May 2023 Knopf (May 9, 2023) Tom Hanks “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece: A novel”. Thomas Hanks is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic [read more]

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Tom Hanks, Oscar winning actor, will be signing copies of “Uncommon Type” at the following locations during October and November. Signed copies of UNCOMMON TYPE – If you are not able to attend any of [read more]

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Tom Hanks has two shows remaining on his 2023 book tour. Get tickets now

America’s dad might be coming to a city near you.

Actor, writer, director, author, ten-time “Saturday Night Live” host and two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is currently on tour promoting his new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

At all shows on the tour, Hanks will sit down with moderators and discuss the new novel which tells the story of a huge Marvel-like superhero flick called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” and the comic book it’s based on.

There’s only one problem — Hanks has only two Q&A’s remaining on his tour schedule.

The “Cast Away” star is set to appear at San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday, May 16 and Portland, OR’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday May 18.

Thankfully, if you’re hoping to catch Forrest Gump/David S. Pumpkins/Woody/Mr. Rogers/Walt Disney himself IRL, you can still pick up relatively affordable last-minute tickets.

At the time of publication, prices for the May 16 show start at $119 before fees on Vivid Seats.

Should you hope to attend in Portland, tickets can be snagged for $63 before fees.

Not a bad deal considering you’ll get to see the guy who starred in “Big,” “Captain Phillips,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elvis,” “The Green Mile” and you get the idea — Hanks has been in a lot of movies.

Plus, all audience members will receive a signed copy of Hanks’ new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

We’ll see you at the theater.

All prices listed above are subject to fluctuation.

Tom Hanks 2023 tour schedule

A complete calendar of all remaining Tom Hanks tour dates, venues and links to the cheapest tickets available for each section below.

(Note: The New York Post confirmed all above prices at the publication time. All prices are subject to fluctuation and include additional fees at checkout .)

Vivid Seats is a verified secondary market ticketing platform, and prices may be higher or lower than face value, depending on demand. 

They offer a 100% buyer guarantee that states your transaction will be safe and secure and your tickets will be delivered prior to the event.

About “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”

Hanks’ debut novel follows “the ‘making of’ the making of a film in 2020 filled with rich characters, including director Bill Johnson, chapter headings direct from the film process itself, even pages from the fictional screenplay,” according to an interview Hanks conducted with PBS.

That’s not all though.

Hanks’ story kicks off in 1946 with a made-up comic book that inspires the made-up film nearly a century later.

Want to read it now?

You can buy the showbiz satire here.

Upcoming Tom Hanks projects

Hanks, who has acted in 94 (!) projects over the course of his illustrious career has two movies on the horizon.

Here’s a quick synopsis of his as-yet-to-be-released films coming soon.

“Asteroid City” (2023): Wes Anderson’s love letter to the 1950s stars Hanks along with Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johannson, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton and more in a story about “a Junior Stargazer convention (that is) spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.” The flick hits theaters on June 23.

“Here” (TBD): Robert Zemeckis’ latest takes place in a single room and follows the many people who inhabit it over years and years, from the past to the future. Rounding out the cast are Kelly Reilly, Paul Bettany and Robin Wright aka Hanks’ beloved Jenny” from “Forrest Gump.”

Want to see what else Hanks is up to? Check out his IMDb.

Other unique tours in 2023

Malkovich isn’t the only star from the silver screen hitting the stage this year.

Here are just five of our favorite actors mounting tours these next few months.

• John Malkovich

• John Cusack

• Kristin Chenoweth

• Mandy Patinkin

• Tina Fey with Amy Poehler

Want to see a concert? Check out our list of the 52 biggest concert tours in 2023 here.

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Tom Hanks’s first novel shows the hard work behind movie magic

‘the making of another major motion picture masterpiece’ is an engaging story about a big crew putting together a blockbuster.

Against the tanned hordes of Hollywood grifters, cads, creeps, prima donnas, egomaniacs and nepo babies, Tom Hanks stands like a warrior clad in decency and girded in goodness. A two-time Academy Award winner whose films have grossed $10 billion, Hanks is the living embodiment of our hopes that nice guys finish first.

For more than 40 years — on stage, TV and big screen — Hanks has worked as an actor and producer. He can remember what it’s like to sweat for attention, and he knows what it’s like to run from the paparazzi. He’s partnered with the industry’s biggest movers and shakers, and he’s been attended to by the army of dressers, caterers and personal assistants who toil away in the shadows to keep the stars shining.

How easily Hanks could have published a memoir detailing those decades of experience: Just imagine the riotous anecdotes about Ron Howard, Sally Field, Meg Ryan, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers and anybody else who is or was anybody in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps someday we’ll get that memoir, but it’s unlikely to be as charming or as spiritually revealing as his debut novel, which has the self-mocking title “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”

As you might expect from such an amiable author, this is not a story set in Harvey Weinstein’s toxic Hollywood. So far as I can tell, Hanks’s book is not a roman à clef or a camouflaged tell-all or a sly act of disguised payback. Instead, it’s a novel shot in pastel tones, as though the movie trade were based in Lake Wobegon. Except for a few nods to entrenched sexism, the industry’s well-documented abuses are elided in favor of concentrating on the better angels of its nature. With any luck, Hanks’s next novel will be about D.C.

Tom Hanks, Ann Patchett and the man in her basement

“The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” starts gently, even slowly, in the voice of Joe Shaw, a film professor in Bozeman, Mont. Through a series of unlikely turns — which is the trajectory of almost everything in this story — Shaw has attracted the attention of Bill Johnson, one of the country’s most successful writer-directors. During the coronavirus pandemic, Johnson invites Shaw to observe the filming of his next project to write “a book to explain the making of movies.”

Hanks knows a lot about the behavior of actors, but fortunately he knows very little about the writing of academics, so his novel is mercifully unlike anything a professor of film studies would compose. Shaw delivers the rest of this story as an omniscient narrator, deftly moving from scene to scene and, along the way, helpfully explaining production jargon for a lay audience.

But before we get anywhere near the movie set — or the present day — Shaw presents what is essentially a 70-page novella set in 1947.

We’re introduced to Robby Andersen, a sweet little boy living in the sweet little town of Lone Butte, Calif. Robby idolizes his errant uncle, who was traumatized by serving as a firefighter in World War II. When Robby eventually becomes a successful comic book creator, one of his stories is about his uncle’s horrific experience in the Pacific. Decades later, Robby’s comic book — cleverly excerpted in the pages of this novel — serves as the inspiration for a character in Bill Johnson’s new superhero movie, “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.”

That lengthy opening section, titled “Source Material,” asks for a lot of emotional investment in people we will not see again for a very long time. One wonders if a less famous debut novelist would have been afforded so much runway.

But like Hanks, I digress.

The important thing to know is that “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” does eventually get around to making another major motion picture masterpiece. And it’s a thoroughly engaging tale, tightly tied to a propulsive 53-day schedule that must not be altered. “A halt in the shooting day is a disaster,” as everyone knows. “An unholy sin.”

The movie that Johnson and his team are creating — part of a billion-dollar franchise — never really comes into focus, except for a few isolated scenes. No matter. This is a story about what happens behind the cameras. Hanks is at pains to impress upon us that movie-making is a circuitous process involving a vast network of people — some famous, most not — showing up and doing their best. This is most definitely not a novel about the magic of filmmaking; it’s a novel about the hard work of filmmaking. Indeed, any belief in magic — along with genius and destiny — is pretty well shredded by the end. Only three qualities matter: talent, determination and, especially, punctuality.

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The marquee will blaze with one name, but in these chapters, there is no hierarchy: “At some point, and there’s no telling when that moment is, someone is responsible for the whole movie,” we’re told. “Everyone has the most important job on the movie.” Johnson, Hanks’s star-making director, is well drawn, but he gets less attention here than the staff members who do everything from casting actors to schlepping sandwiches.

Allicia Mac-Teer, an African American producer known in the industry as Al, is the real power and planner behind the throne. But years ago, she was just a front desk manager at a Garden Suite Inn near the Richmond airport. There she impressed Johnson by making sure his favorite frozen yogurt was available late at night. That’s the kind of indispensable initiative that a great director notices. Somehow, Al knew in her bones that Hollywood isn’t about being the most beautiful or even the most talented. “Making movies,” she announces, “is about solving more problems than you cause.” A star is born.

That lesson is so important to this novel — and presumably to Hanks — that it’s essentially repeated in the success story of Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz. She’s struggling to make ends meet as a taxi driver when she happens to pick up Al for a ride to the location for “Knightshade.” Recognizing Ynez’s attentive, problem-solving spirit, Al hires her as her permanent driver, then as her personal assistant. If you’ve been paying attention, you know where this is going, but that doesn’t make it any less gratifying.

Although this novel is a love letter to the industry, it’s not entirely toothless. Even the most glamorous stars in this universe are subject to the ordinary laws of physics. Indeed, the pompous actor playing Firefall, a young man named O.K. Bailey, gets hilariously skewered. He demands banana pancakes, “not pancakes with bananas”; tells his gorgeous, repulsed co-star that they shouldn’t sleep together until after the shooting; refers reverently to his “process”; and announces to the exasperated cast, “I’ve got no ego.” After decades of enduring such irritating artistes , Hanks seems to have somehow typed this wickedly funny section entirely by eye-rolling.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” will survive O.K. Bailey — and stalkers and jealous spouses and even the untimely death of a cast member. But blockbuster status is not preordained. After all, in the months before Opening Day — or streaming — a movie is just “a billion shards of glass that have to be assembled piece by piece into a mirror.” The longer you watch Hanks create that glittery surface, the harder it is to look away.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

By Tom Hanks; comic book illustrations by R. Sikoryak

Knopf. 417 pp. $32.50

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Tom Hanks has two shows remaining on his 2023 book tour. Get tickets now

15.05.2023 - 21:11 / nypost.com

America’s dad might be coming to a city near you.Actor, writer, director, author, ten-time “Saturday Night Live” host and two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is currently on tour promoting his new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”At all shows on the tour, Hanks will sit down with moderators and discuss the new novel which tells the story of a huge Marvel-like superhero flick called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” and the comic book it’s based on.There’s only one problem — Hanks has only two Q&A’s remaining on his tour schedule.The “Cast Away” star is set to appear at San Francisco’s Sydney Goldstein Theater on Tuesday, May 16 and Portland, OR’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Thursday May 18.Thankfully, if you’re hoping to catch Forrest Gump/David S. Pumpkins/Woody/Mr.

Rogers/Walt Disney himself IRL, you can still pick up relatively affordable last-minute tickets.At the time of publication, prices for the May 16 show start at $119 before fees on Vivid Seats.Should you hope to attend in Portland, tickets can be snagged for $63 before fees.Not a bad deal considering you’ll get to see the guy who starred in “Big,” “Captain Phillips,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elvis,” “The Green Mile” and you get the idea — Hanks has been in a lot of movies.Plus, all audience members will receive a signed copy of Hanks’ new book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”We’ll see you at the theater.All prices listed above are subject to fluctuation.A complete calendar of all remaining Tom Hanks tour dates, venues and links to the cheapest tickets available for each section below.(Note: The New York Post confirmed all above prices at the publication time. All prices are subject to fluctuation and

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Tom Hanks reveals he hates some of films he’s starred in

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It’s tool time all over again.For the next few months, outspoken comedian and “Home Improvement” star Tim Allen is back on the road performing stand-up comedy all over North America.From May 19 through Aug. 19, the conservative performer — who recently got in trouble for flashing his co-star Pamela Anderson on the “Home Improvement” set in the ’90s — will bring his brazen brand of humor to six venues in Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois.The 69-year-old comic isn’t afraid to cross the line with his material onstage either.“I tell them ‘There’s a whole lot of s— I’m going to say tonight that you’re going to get pissed at,” he told Hour Detroit.

‘Impractical Joker’ Joe Gatto is going on a solo tour. Get tickets now

Joe Gatto surprised the world and announced he was leaving the popular prank series ‘Impractical Jokers’ to spend more time with his family.Now, a little over two years later, Gatto has found a few new comedic outlets that allow him to raise his kids and continue his career as a professional entertainer.These days, the former ‘Impractical Joker’ spends his time hosting the podcast ‘Two Cool Moms’ with fellow comic Steve Byrne and touring his stand-up act all over North America.The family man/funny man currently has 41 huge shows lined up for the rest of 2023 from May 19 all the way to Dec. 30.And while he’s on the road, the Staten Island native will make five New York stops.First up, he’ll perform at Syracuse’s Mulroy Civic Center on Thursday, Oct.

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May 13, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome Academy Award winning actor and bestselling author Tom Hanks for an exclusive in-person event to celebrate the release of his first novel,  The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece  on Saturday May 13, 2023 in the Chapman Theater of the Tulsa Performing Arts Center (3rd and Cincinnati in downtown Tulsa).

• The lobby opens at 5:00 and doors to the theater will open at 6:15 pm. The program begins at 7:00pm and no late seating will be permitted.
• There is a small bag policy for this event. Only small purses/clutches will be allowed into the theater. Please inform all the guests in your party and plan accordingly.
• You will pick up your copy of  The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece at the event when you enter the theater.
• Please consider carpooling or using a ride share service (such as Lyft or Uber) for this event. Saturday May 13 is a very busy night downtown with Mayfest happening in the Arts District and an event happening at the BOK Center.
• If you drive to the event, consider parking south or east of the PAC and please factor in additional time to get to the building from your car

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film…and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.

This event is sold out , each ticket includes one (1) hardcover copy of The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece  by Tom Hanks and one (1) seat at the event at 7:00 pm on May 13. Guests will receive their copy of The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece at the event after scanning in their ticket.

All tickets are being sold through the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, https://tulsapac.com/ , and all seating is reserved for this event . Please do not purchase tickets from third party vendors as they can not be guaranteed to be valid tickets for the event.

For information about the Tulsa PAC including directions and information about accessible seating visit https://tulsapac.com/plan-your-visit .

About The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

From the legendary actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film…and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.

Part One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years.

Cut to 1970:  The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero.

Cut to the present day:  A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie.

Cue the cast:  We meet the film’s extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera.

Bonus material:  Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story–all created by Tom Hanks himself–including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel’s “major motion picture masterpiece.”

Tom Hanks has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films,  Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post,  and  It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.  His writing has appeared in  The New York Times, Vanity Fair,  and  The New Yorker.  He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories,  Uncommon Type.

Praise for The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece  is its own universe, complete with a sun, a cast of circling planets, and a limitless number of stars. Its gravity pulls you in and its far reaching, multi-layered, rollicking exuberance holds you in place. I would have been happy to live inside this book forever.” —  Ann Patchett, best-selling author of  These Precious Days “This is a wild, ambitious and exceptionally enjoyable novel. A story about how stories happen, with a swirling kaleidoscope of characters across the best part of a century, and a real beating emotional heart. It has a lot of astute and fascinating things to say about comic books, movies, show business, America and human beings. I loved every page.”  –Matt Haig; author  The Midnight Library, The Humans  and  Reasons to Stay Alive “An extravagant, buoyant, joyfully sprawling book, bursting with affection for its characters, for the intricate lore of the movie business, and for the many ways in which human beings are one another’s greatest opportunity.”  –Tana French, award-winning novelist of  In The Woods  and  The Searcher

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Nice Guy Meets Iron Man in the First Novel by Tom Hanks

Whimsically chronicling the creation of a Marvel-style movie, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” sags under a deluge of detail.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE , by Tom Hanks. Illustrated by R. Sikoryak.

Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “ Imagine .” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid , bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson .

Titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” the book arrives at a crossroads for Hollywood. The Writers Guild of America went on strike this past week, seeking pay increases in an age of streaming and protections from that thundering Godzilla, artificial intelligence . The consequent halt of film and TV production deprives not only audiences, but also the vast number of workers required to get stories onscreen: extras, editors, costume and lighting designers, makeup artists, caterers, drivers, gofers, key grips.

“Masterpiece” is a loving homage to those workers, a true insiderly ensemble piece in the vein of “ The Player ” (written by Michael Tolkin in 1988, directed by Robert Altman in 1992), or Quentin Tarantino’s eventually self-novelized “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”

Minus the murder and gore, of course — this is Tom Hanks.

The novel also acknowledges a fading time when leading actors, even avatars of Everyman decency like the author, were royalty: their work shown not in living rooms but red-velvet-swagged “palaces.”

It’s framed by one of the outlying courtiers of the industry: a fictional former freelance journalist and reviewer named Joe Shaw. Now teaching creative writing at a minor Montana college, he has been granted access to the set of “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” — a movie based on a comic from a Marvel-like company — along with the Gay Talese-like superpower of narrative omniscience. He recedes after a foreword, like John Ray Jr. from “Lolita.”

“Masterpiece” then pans very slowly — with lots of emphatic italics, arch ellipses and a few footnotes — over the full arc of the fake movie’s development. So we begin with the back story of the comic’s writer, Robby Andersen (pen-name TREV-VORR), who had been inspired by an uncle, Bob Falls, a Marine in World War II, and follow a very long yellow brick road through the seemingly triumphant release of “Knightshade” at a fancifully imagined 1,114-seat theater, the Grand Cinema Center in Times Square, where “a fellow in a tuxedo” plays “New York, New York” on a house organ.

Charm abounds — again, this is Tom Hanks — but “Masterpiece” is too often a maddeningly excursive endeavor that made me think, more than once, of a Richard Scarry book without the drawings. Alternate titles: “Hollywood: Busy, Busy Town” or “What Do Movie People Do All Day?” (Actually, it does have drawings, by R. Sikoryak: an old-timey comic the boy Robby reads at the corner drugstore, then another he created while working at Kool Katz Komix as TREV-VORR, and then a movie tie-in for “Knightshade,” all fine places to rest one’s detail-wearied eyes.)

The novel’s multitude of characters includes Bill Johnson, the writer-director of “Knightshade” (a film more “Iron Man” than “Avengers”); an obnoxious leading man named O.K. Bailey (OKB for short), who’s cast as Firefall; and Wren Lane, who wins the part of Eve Knight, the alter ego of Knightshade, a heroine who like many modern women has trouble sleeping.

“Sure, she wants to make her bed with a decent chap when the time is right, but the time is never right!” Lane tells Johnson’s assistant, Allicia Mac-Teer, anachronistically (Hanksishly). “Nor is the chap.”

Advised to go by “Al” because of sexism, the assistant gets hired after mastering a time management system at community college, “L.I.S.T.eN.,” short for “Let It Settle, Then eNact,” and using it to order Johnson his favorite frozen yogurt. ( Pomodoro technique , move over.) Then there is Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, driver for a Lyft competitor, PONY, whose ingratiation into the “Knightshade” base camp will eventually get her an office of her own and, after years of struggling in the gig economy, a salary that’s “a joke of abundance.”

Moviemaking, Hanks would remind us, can be a rising tide, not in the depressing new climate change way, but the old optimistic American lift-all-boats way.

He also conveys successfully that this “Business of Show” in the “City of Angles,” as Johnson nicknames it, is thoroughly exhausting, a realm where everyone is Wren Lane, waiting for the golden hour shot, showing up to get fake blood applied at 2 a.m. The word “coffee” appears, by my count, on 85 pages: triple espressos from a Di Orso Negro machine with frothed half-and-half for Mac-Teer; HaKiDo with oat milk for OKB; Pirate drip for a Teamster named Ace Acevido. Highly specific smoothies are fetched; catering tables are lovingly inventoried.

“The offerings are both substantial, healthy snacks and stuff that is horrible for you but so very, very much appreciated,” our omniscient narrator shares. Sometimes “Masterpiece” reads like the thank-you speech Hanks, consummate nice guy, would give if granted unlimited time at the Oscars. You might admire its rah-rah spirit, yet still want to press fast-forward.

A note on the type: Hanks has spoken and written extensively before, including in The New York Times, about his obsession with typewriters. A different antique model was featured in each of the 17 stories contained in his last book, a collection called “ Uncommon Type .” Encountering a vintage Smith-Corona Sterling, Johnson’s chosen instrument, on Page 96 of “Masterpiece,” I rolled my eyes tolerantly.

After turning 50 pages more and finding a minor character selling “Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Hermes, Olivettis, all in working order,” as if in an Etsy shop, I had to fight a strong urge to close the book, fire up a triple espresso and see if anything was happening in the tiny palace of my iPhone.

THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE | By Tom Hanks | Illustrated by R. Sikoryak | 499 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $32.50

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece review – Tom Hanks’s ambitious, myth-busting novel

The actor’s tale about the creation of a fantasy film captures the humdrum of Hollywood but lacks his on-screen ability to breathe life into characters

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. Or as Tom Hanks observes in this ambitious addition to the genre: “making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times”. 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. 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. This novel, if nothing else, gives you a sense of that experience in real time.

Hanks, a famous collector of typewriters, has put them to use once before, in a short story collection that came out in 2017. On that occasion his publisher ventured that “the two-time Oscar winner is as talented a writer as he is an actor”. His screen agent might have had something to say. 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 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 .

That tale starts, of course, with backstory, that real-life prequel to any two-hour cinema experience. 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. The marine’s history as a flamethrower at Guadalcanal eventually finds its way, through a series of mythologised expressions, into a comic book that Johnson, seeking inspiration, picks up from a junk shop box.

The thread of the novel is the way that 75-year-old emotion comes to be repackaged for a 21st-century attention-deficit screen audience. There is a promising vein of dramatic irony in that elevator pitch, but along the way Hanks is also determined to give a full account of all the lives devoted to bringing that story to life. Thus: Allicia Mac-Teer, who has swapped her job on the front desk of a hotel to be an assistant producer for Johnson. (Her initial duties involve getting bottled water, some ice cold, some at room temperature, to the talent; and sourcing the most likely venues, in the small-town set location, of Neapolitan rather than thick-crust pizza. She evolves to providing insight into the labour-intensive Ps of the “carnival of cardboard”: prep, principal photography and post-production. We are, for better and worse, beside her all the way.) Likewise, Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, a cab driver who becomes the fixer who keeps the haphazard progress of the movie – and the novel – just about on track; and a roll call of others.

There sounds in this a leading-man’s-acceptance-speech-acknowledgment that there is no “I” in the teamwork of Hollywood. Still, as drama, the book mostly gathers pace when starrier egos eventually land on set. Hanks has particular fun with Johnson’s male lead, OK Bailey, who introduces himself to his co-star with a text message reading: “Let’s not ***k till we’re done.” OKB’s anarchic presence prompts gossip, no doubt based on Hanks’s insider knowledge of other car-crash behaviour: “BOLDFACE NAME NUMBER ONE, reported to be microdosing heroin in his trailer”… and “BOLDFACE NAME NUMBER TWO who was getting a divorce, banging the gaffer and hitting on [his love interest]”. Those tales are not, however, the substance of this movie or this book. Knightshade never threatens to become Fitzcarraldo .

Write what you know, the famous rule of fiction demands. Hanks does not waver from it. You learn, in sometimes entertaining fashion, plenty of things about how films get made: that the first day of shooting is always Wednesday (so those hired hands who don’t cut it can be fired before the weekend, after three days’ trial). That the props trailer is a kind of Amazon warehouse in miniature. That there are a thousand different kinds of delay. Some of this detail also serves to emphasise, however, that the real magic of films shares something crucial with novels: what you leave out is at least as important as what makes the cut.

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An Evening with Tom Hanks

An Evening with Tom Hanks at the Prince Edward Theatre has now finished.

Join actor, director, and writer  Tom Hanks  live in conversation to celebrate the publication of his debut novel,  The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece:  a wildly ambitious story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film, and the humble comic book that inspired it all.

Exploring why he wanted to capture the changes in America and American culture over the past 80 years, Hanks will share the inspiration behind his colourful cast of characters. Taking the audience behind the scenes and offering a glimpse into how a story becomes a finished film, Hanks will also touch on how he drew on his own career in Hollywood.

Funny, touching, and thought-provoking, don’t miss the incredible opportunity to see one of the greatest film stars of our time live on stage.

"Affectionate and endlessly entertaining." Richard Osman

Each ticket holder will receive a copy of  The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece  (RRP £22).

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