‘I make movies because no other labour satisfies my quest to capture an unspoken truth,” says the visionary director at the heart of Tom Hanks’s debut novel. “One so pure and undiscovered that the audience will slap themselves upside their heads for not having seen it long ago.” The director is giving a motivational pep talk to his beautiful young star. He possesses Solomon’s wisdom and Napoleon’s tactical nous. He’s an inspirational boss; he’s a dynamite kisser. While Hanks has played his fair share of American movie heroes, he’s never played one as head-slappingly awesome as this.
Bill Johnson, we learn, is in town to shoot a superhero blockbuster called Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece duly chronicles its production, chivvying the reader from its 1940s conception through its first iteration as a countercultural comic book all the way to a star-spangled premiere in 21st-century Times Square. In the hands of a lesser mortal, Knightshade would be big, dumb franchise fodder. But Johnson’s an auteur. He means to tear up the rulebook and make the sort of superhero picture no one’s ever seen before. “No capes,” he declares, like Archimedes in his bathtub.
