Book Details
| Title: | The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece | |
| Author: | Tom Hanks | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 12.09.23 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
| Date Read | Note |
| 12.09.23 | Tom Hanks wrote a book! Undoubtedly this was inevitable since he loves those old typewriters so much and it seems like he's a workaholic and he had to do SOMETHING during covid. But can he write anything other than memos and missives with those old machines? Yeah! There was a point, halfway through, where I wondered if the hole book was gonna be backstories of every minor character in this story, or that maybe the story itself WAS a series of backstories, but thankfully the second half actually has some progression. Mostly I'd guess that this book is filled with the things that Tom Hanks loves. There's a bunch of WW2 stuff, some 50s americana stuff, old typewriters, ice cold drinks, small towns, and somewhat clever send-ups of his industry. Plus as much backstory about each character as you could ever want. If this ever turns into a movie (which would be bizarre and probably not great), the actors don't have to worry. I guess if he's gonna do that it's good to front-load it all and get it over with so you know where everyone's coming from, but it's a lot. The "Backstory" chapter specifically felt like a novella unto its own and paid off in a minimally satisfying way. But the book is what it is, and I enjoyed myself while reading all of it even if I did wonder where, if anywhere, the book was going. The heart of the book for me was basically getting a rundown on how a movie is made from someone who's made a hundred of them. It's veiled with fake company names and fake franchises but I have to believe the on-set jargon and insights are 100% real. As with most almost-real names I find them pretty random, like it's hard to believe these fake movies would have such wordy titles or the subject matter would make award-winning masterpieces, but You can't really get away from that either when you're writing a book like this and you want to make it fiction. It's pretty cool that he includes a few comic / graphic novel sections here. I wonder if there are more formatting changes in the print version that the kindle can't translate. There's also the entire 78-page screenplay to the movie posted online which I suspect has more callbacks and references to the world in the book, but the fake movie with the fake superhero franchise was not captivating enough for me to sit down and read it. I liked the book well enough and think it's cool that Hanks wrote out the actual screenplay just to have a reference/prop to use in his narrative, but it's kind of like a special feature on a dvd. All in all I liked it pretty good. It had some... shall we say pacing issues? format issues? I dunno, but still pretty good. |
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