There 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.
