Extract: The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks

This entry was posted on 12 May 2023.

Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,  from Academy Award-winning actor and bestselling author Tom Hanks, offers an insider's take on the momentous efforts it takes to make a film. At once a reflection on America's past and present, on the world of show business and the real world we all live in.

 


 

Another Franchise

 

“What would be wrong with another franchise?” asked Fred Schiller—a.k.a. the Instigator—of the Fred Schiller Agency. He had once again flown into Albuquerque for a dinner with his distinguished client Bill Johnson. As usual, they were at Los Poblanos—one of Albuquerque’s better restaurants.

It was July of 2017, and Bill was about to head into the shooting of A Cellar Full of Sound, for which he had also written the screenplay. As was their tradition, the client and agent met to talk about what would come after the present picture was done; the deep look into their future that kept a career going with forward momentum. There was no talk of the movie about to be made, just the options for future enterprises.

“Franchises are killers,” Bill said, speaking from well-known experience. The pressures to have Horizon of Eden match the quality and popular success of Border of Eden and then Darkness of Eden—all “written and directed by”—had been like holding on to political office. By the final day of shooting on Horizon, Bill had lost twenty-five pounds, stopped shaving to save time in the mornings, drank three shots of ZzzQuil every night to sleep, and had survived the last two weeks of Principal Photography running on the fumes of triple espressos. Bill Johnson, who once typed out this one sentence on his 1939 Smith-Corona Sterling—MAKING FILMS IS MORE FUN THAN FUN—had had none whatsoever completing that last chapter of Eden, which took nearly two years of his life.

In his three-decade run of films, Bill was firmly—to the envy of many—in the win column, save a couple of so-so performers and the one unmitigated disaster. Bill now developed his own material, turning down big works that would have replenished his coffers, and with his 10 percent made the Instigator happier, too. A Cellar Full of Sound had been a relative pleasure to write, a pain in the ass to prep, and could go any way in the shoot.

But since Pocket Rockets had brought Bill back from the disaster that had been Albatross, the Instigator saw that the filmmaker was at the top of his game, and he wanted that to remain the case.

“Franchises become cruel masters. I don’t want to work for a cruel master,” Bill said. “I don’t like being the cruel master, except in meetings with marketing.”

“Audiences have so many options for entertainment,” Fred said over grass-fed veal medallions and garden sunchokes. “They need a reason to exchange their money for a ticket to a movie. Bill Johnson is a reason. A superhero franchise is coin of the realm, like westerns were in the ’50s and ’60s and action movies in the ’80s. The Comic-Con fans go to see everything.

“If only to hate it. Just ask Lazlo Shiviski.” Bill leaned back. “I like the antiheroes, the flawed and haunted ones.”

“Marvel would give you the next Thor.”

“Tell them I’m Thorry, but no.”

“D.C. would give you anything on their slate.”

“The Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Boy, Green Giant, Lady Kick-Your-Ass . . . You don’t see a glut?”

“Dynamo will back up a truckload of cash and drop it on your driveway if you said yes to one of their Ultra movies.”

“Superheroes saving the galaxy and kitty cats stuck in trees. Hohum.” Bill finished his Blue Sky cola in the tall glass of ice, no straw. “I’m not against the genre, just the tropes in them. Evil lords from other galaxies who speak English. Super guys and girls that want to kiss but never do. Whole cities being destroyed, but we never see the corpses.” Bill waved to the waiter and pointed to his glass for another Blue Sky. “And Pat is on me to do a boy-meets-girl movie. A movie for her.

“What’s wrong with that idea?”

“A girl-meets-boy story depends on two things. The girl, the boy, and why they need each other. Three things.”

“The world is waiting for another Bill Johnson motion picture,” the Instigator said.

“It will be called A Cellar Full of Sound and should be in a theatre near them in twelve months, give or take.”

“The future is not next year. It’s three years from now.”

“I’ll ponder.” That had always been Bill’s process. He’d land on some source material by accident, which would spark an idea, which he would then turn into another major motion picture masterpiece.

 


“Everyone who had a look at Robby’s drawings—artwork, even at his age—saw a natural ability, an instinct for dimension, space, and movement.”


 

2 SOURCE MATERIAL

1947

 

Bob Falls

On the morning of the seventh of July, the sun, a full disk in a bald, cloudless sky, was beginning to sear Lone Butte, California—population 5,417, officially—a rural town in the North Valley, not far from the capital of Sacramento, less than a day on the road from the city of Oakland, a bit longer to the Babylon that was San Francisco. In the heat of summer, with temperatures always hovering at the century mark, the place was more akin in pace and temperament to the small towns in Kansas or Nebraska or Ohio, in Iowa or Indiana. Few of its citizenry chose to live in Lone Butte; many left and never came back. Granted, the town was the county seat, but by default, because of its location on the Big Iron Bend River, which had been the main route of commerce during the gold rush. In 1947, there wasn’t even a train depot in Lone Butte.

Like most boys his age, Robby Andersen, who would be celebrating his fifth birthday on the eleventh of September, greeted every morning, especially those on another hot summer day, as twenty-four hours of ripe, carefree living. He would start his kindergarten schooling after the Labor Day holiday, but already knew his ABC’s, and his father had explained to him the differences between uppercase and lowercase letters. So, he would surely spell living with a capital L.

He knew to make his bed first thing every morning right after going potty. Then he’d change out of his pj’s and into his playclothes, before coming downstairs. His father would already be off to the shop when his mother set a breakfast down for him—usually toast, milk, and a fruit, often the plums picked off the trees in the backyard. Robby wanted to taste coffee, to find out why grownups drank the stuff all the time, but he was told he was too young. His morning tasks were to put his own dishes on the counter, see if the trash pail needed emptying, give a good sweep to the floor of the screened-in porch and, outside, the back steps that led to the gravel driveway and, just beyond it, those four plum trees. His chores done, he would get out his crayons, coloring pencils, coloring books, and newsprint tablets and, lying on the braided rug in the living room, lose himself in drawing whatever was in his head.

Everyone who had a look at Robby’s drawings—artwork, even at his age—saw a natural ability, an instinct for dimension, space, and movement. There was abandon in his drawings, too; there was joy. The boy drew for fun.

At 10:00 a.m. on most days, he would put his drawings and supplies away in a drawer of the living room cabinet—the chifforobe—and leave the house through the screened-in porch, having learned

to keep the spring-closing door from slamming behind him. Beyond the plum trees was a short hedge with a small gap worn through it, a passageway used by Robby to cross into the Burns family’s backyard, which also had a quartet of plum trees; the property line had split what had been a small orchard. Their daughter, Jill Burns, was already six years old and the best friend Robby Andersen had in his life. The two played together almost every day, with neither kid bothered nor hampered by Jill’s slight clubfoot. At lunchtime, Jill would come home with Robby to eat—a routine agreed upon by both sets of parents. Then, they kept themselves busy until the three o’clock snack time when the radio could be turned on for the shows meant for kids. At four Jill passed back through the gap in the hedge for home.

 

***

 

Robby’s mother, Lulu Andersen, had worked out this routine with Mrs. Burns and loved the arrangement, for it allowed a slow windup to her long day of work work work. Her mornings were calm, unlike those of so many of her gal pals, young women (still) who all had kids and working husbands and the never-ceasing regimen that was homemaking and housekeeping and child-rearing. Work work work and work. Some of those women were raising monsters, little hellions, so Lulu thanked God and the rhythm method for Robby, who did his chores and kept himself busy with crayons and, too, for the baby, Nora, who had been a colicky infant but was turning a year old in two days. It seemed that Nora just might be settling into a female version of her contented, easy-natured older brother. Who in Lone Butte had two kids who caused such little hassle?

Lucille Mavis Falls was called Lulu right from the get-go, after her father had first laid eyes on his daughter and hollered, “What a lulu of a baby girl!” from the other side of the maternity ward window. Twenty-plus years later, Lulu Falls became Lulu Andersen on January 18, 1942, just weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Second World War had ruthlessly, finally ensnared America. Every house in California was blacked out at night against the next air attack, including those in Lone Butte should enemy bombs be dropped on the rural towns of the North Valley of California.

 


“Ernie had taken up smoking Lucky Strikes, so Lulu did, too, giving her something to do as she reversed her journey away from Camp Desperation, returning to Lone Butte a married woman with a husband in the service.”


 

Lulu’s husband, Ernie Andersen, had been one of her half dozen boyfriends in high school despite his going to Saint Philip Neri (she was a Union High Yankee and a Presbyterian). He worked at the Flying A filling station at Main and Grant Streets and, over time, Lulu found herself volunteering to drive the family Chevrolet over to have Ernie fill ’er up and check ’er oil. One thing led to another, and, as Lulu said herself, “That was that.” Ernie was the most fun of all the boys her age in Lone Butte, though, at times, as serious a young man as the era had created. And, oh, his eyes . . .

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland and war was declared, he talked seriously about going to Canada to learn to fly planes for the Canadian wing of the Royal Air Force, but his father talked him down from going as “there were plenty of Canuck boys to do that.” He knew the United States would, when needed, enter the war and “start doing our fair share.” But not able to wait to become a part of the history that was raging up on-screen in black-and-white newsreels shown at the State Theater, Ernie enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in June of 1941 so he could be ready to fly American planes. As Fate or God or Saint Philip Neri would have it, he had a color blindness that washed him out of flight school. Still, Ernie had a sense of all things mechanical, so his enlistment helped keep the planes of the AAF flying, ready for the coming war. He was sent to an aerodrome in Texas—a place he called Camp Desperation in his many, many letters to Lulu.

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. On the night of January 10, 1942, at 11:17 p.m., the California Limited stopped at a siding near Welles to take on passengers bound for Los Angeles. Lulu was one of them, riding through the night and most of the next day as the Limited made many stops. At Union Station in LA, she almost missed her coach seat on the Texas Special. After what seemed like a million miles over two nights of knotted-body semi-sleep, she transferred to the Katy Special for a half-million miles more. Then a cold, drafty bus dropped her smack at the main gate of Camp Desperation, where Ernie was waiting for her with a bouquet of what he thought were bluebonnets. They weren’t, but Lulu didn’t care.

For eleven nights, the bed of a dollar-a-day hotel room allowed Lulu and Ernie, when he had a pass, the best sex of their lives, since they were no longer fumbling in the back seat of a car, on a blanket in the Gum Tree Grove, or finding each other at night in the Little Iron Bend River Public Park. They wanted each other with the bursting passion that spills from the hearts of the young when, separated by time and distance and a global upheaval, they are young no more. Ernie had his duties during the day, but at night he and Lulu downed ice-cold beers and danced to a raucous band at a genuine Texas honky-tonk. They enjoyed cheap meals of Mexican-style food and more ice-cold beer. On their fourth night of great passion, lying naked in sheets damp with sweat, enveloped by the dark of the hotel room, and with only an hour remaining before he had to return to the base, marriage was discussed, agreed on, settled. “And that was that.” Their wedding was held at the base chapel with an army chaplain and witnesses whom Ernie knew but Lulu didn’t. Outside, a Texas hailstorm threw down stones the size of peach pits.

Ernie had taken up smoking Lucky Strikes, so Lulu did, too, giving her something to do as she reversed her journey away from Camp Desperation, returning to Lone Butte a married woman with a husband in the service. When Ernie was sent to the B-17 air base on Long Island, New York, a plan was hatched for Lulu to get to the East Coast, but by then train travel was limited for civilians, especially pregnant women who suffered from weeks of morning sickness. Ernie and other Air Corpsmen were flown to England in new weaponless and seatless B-17s by way of Greenland, then Ireland. As passengers, they simply lay in the naked fuselage of the unpressurized, unheated, heavy bomber. Ernie never felt as cold as he did during that days-long flight, despite his fleece-lined clothes and multiple wool blankets. He never claimed to have seen Greenland, though his plane was grounded there by two days of ice storms, wind, and a ceiling of heavy clouds.

When the war ended, his son, Robby, was two years old and worth twelve demobilization points, according to the Department of War, so Ernie was discharged ahead of the childless servicemen. He needed a full week to make his way across postwar America, back to Lone Butte, and the best sex of his civilian life.

 

Extracted from The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks, out now.

 

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