There’s no real misdirection or surprise. But every question ends up with the cleanest possible answer. For portions, as his titular character, a CEO of a mining company, tries to manage a hostile takeover attempt while tracking a strange coin made of otherworldly material and its owners across the world, there’s a propulsive tension. Poitier’s novel, “Montaro Caine,” is undone by an inability to leave anything in his mystery mysterious. It is a nice thing for Hanks to do but better material for an acceptance speech than a novel.īut these are claustrophobic books, every millimeter of ambiguity vacuumed out. Personal assistants, producers, teamsters, actors, directors, writers, the hair and makeup teams, the location scouts, and more all get their due. Stylistically a straightforward third-person omniscient novel (save for dozens and dozens of dreadfully boring footnotes), it’s mostly an ode to how competent and hard-working everyone in “the business of show” is. Hanks writes with no regard for what a journalist might plausibly know or how a journalist might plausibly convey information. Unfortunately, it’s not convincing for even a second.
And Hanks, over his decades-long career, surely has a better sense than most about what actually happens on a movie set. The constructs and cliches are ripe for satire. It’s a cool idea: Making-of books are often illuminating and juicy. Take “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” which is mostly an account - written by a journalist named Shaw - of the making of a production by a famed director.
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