If you think that the title of Tom Hanks’ debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Hutchinson Heinemann, 448 pages, Rs 799), is bigger than it needs to be, imagine reading it. Imagine turning the pages of this brick and the number of hours you’ll be spending on it in order to reach its end (if that’s the ultimate goal). It’s tiring, isn’t it? Well, fiction doesn’t have too many restrictions. It can be as long as the author desires, or as short as the attention span of a goldfish. It can also be somewhere between the two.
Hanks’ Masterpiece, unfortunately, overstays its welcome. And since there’s nothing that I can do about it other than pour my disappointment here, I’ll do just that. The novel is divided into seven sections, ranging from “Backstory” to “Post”, and each of them describes the making of a motion picture named Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall. Even though the title sounds like it’s been coined by a middle-school student, it fits the theme of the novel perfectly because it’s a superhero movie based on a comic book.
Hanks’ narrative jumps out of the knowledge that he has acquired over a period of four and a half decades. Isn’t he picking fruits from his own backyard? But that’s not something he needs to worry about at all. In fact, the thread regarding the problems that are faced by the cast and crew while they are in the middle of a hectic shooting schedule is spot on. When an actor gets fired for needlessly improvising and rubbing the director, Bill Johnson, up the wrong way, another actor (Ike Clipper) is asked to step into his shoes to keep the ball rolling.
Later, when Clipper’s wife expresses jealousy due to his increasing proximity to the star of the movie, Wren Lane, it doesn’t feel out of place. It just goes on to demonstrate how professional duties can snowball into home troubles. But the frequent arguments that they get into, however, do not spin out of control.
The most important aspect of the novel is that it appears to have been written with the intention of registering the drama that happens behind-the-scenes. Actors aren’t depicted as faultless, and directors aren’t equipped with the power to stumble upon instant solutions. Filmmaking, Hanks seems to say, is a collaborative process, and it shines through in his lines in every possible manner. The only major problem, then, is what he chooses to invest his time and energy in.
He gives even minor characters grand introductions and wraps the proceedings with footnotes. Some of them are really useful, such as this one: “A temp score is music, any music, slotted into the movie until the final score is composed. Temp scores are usually musical cues from previous films.” But for every cool pointer, there are at least three unnecessary digressions. And the sad part about wading through them is that they sometimes occupy nearly a quarter of the page.
I don’t think they add any value to this particular novel. There are many American authors who regularly work on big novels. Honestly, the length of a book, or a movie, for that matter, doesn’t get ridiculed if it keeps the reader (or the viewer) engaged. Stephen King does that with almost every other book of his. But I can’t place him alongside Hanks in this debate because his fiction usually focuses on building tension and mystery. Hanks is not interested in that.
Nevertheless, there’s a sense that Hanks is fascinated by the idea of telling tales. In the chapter “Source Material,” he writes about a young boy who is taken on a motorcycle ride by his uncle and later abandoned at a store that sells comic books. This uncle, so to speak, is not a bad guy at heart. But he definitely does the unthinkable for reasons that even he probably doesn’t grasp properly.
“Source Material” is the only section that pulled me in without a doubt. This is the area that Hanks should have thoroughly concentrated on. Of course, it would have been a different novel in that case, but it would have been truly better.
Hanks is not a terrible writer. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, along with his short story collection, Uncommon Type, should be the beginning of another long journey for him rather than a pitstop; however, he should look for traffic signs every now and then if he wants to stay on the course and not get lost in the endless maze of details.
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