Tom Hanks’s first novel shows the hard work behind movie magic
Against the tanned hordes of Hollywood grifters, cads, creeps, prima donnas, egomaniacs and nepo babies, Tom Hanks stands like a warrior clad in decency and girded in goodness. A twotime Academy Award winner whose films have grossed
$10 billion, Hanks is the embodiment of our hopes that nice guys finish first.
For more than 40 years – on stage, TV and big screen – Hanks has worked as an actor and producer. He can remember what it’s like to sweat for attention, and he knows what it’s like to run from the paparazzi. He’s partnered with the industry’s biggest movers and shakers, and he’s been attended to by the army of dressers, caterers and personal assistants who toil away in the shadows to keep the stars shining.
How easily Hanks could have published a memoir: Just imagine the anecdotes about Ron Howard, Sally Field, Meg Ryan, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers and more. Perhaps someday we’ll get that memoir, but it’s unlikely to be as charming or as spiritually revealing as his debut novel, which has the self-mocking title, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.”
As you might expect from such an amiable author, this is not a story set in Harvey Weinstein’s toxic Hollywood. So far as I can tell, Hanks’s book is not a roman à clef or a camouflaged tell-all or a sly act of disguised payback. Instead, it’s a novel shot in pastel tones, as though the movie trade were based in Lake Wobegon. Except for a few nods to entrenched sexism, the industry’s well-documented abuses are elided in favor of concentrating on the better angels of its nature. With any luck, Hanks’s next novel will be about Washington, D.C.
“The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” starts gently, even slowly, in the voice of Joe Shaw, a film professor in Bozeman, Mont. Through a series of unlikely turns – which is the trajectory of almost everything in this story – Shaw has attracted the attention of Bill Johnson, one of the country’s most successful writerdirectors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson invites Shaw to observe the filming of his next project to write “a book to explain the making of movies.”
Hanks knows a lot about the behavior of actors, but fortunately he knows very little about the writing of academics, so his novel is mercifully unlike anything a professor of film studies would compose. Shaw delivers the rest of this story as an omniscient narrator, deftly moving from scene to scene and, along the way, helpfully explaining production jargon for a lay audience.
But before we get anywhere near the movie set – or the present day – Shaw presents what is essentially a novella set in 1947.
We’re introduced to Robby Andersen, a sweet little boy living in the sweet little town of Lone Butte, Calif. Robby idolizes his errant uncle, who was traumatized as a firefighter in World War II. When Robby becomes a successful comic book creator, one of his stories is about his uncle’s horrific experience. Decades later, Robby’s comic book – cleverly excerpted in the pages of this novel – serves as the inspiration for a character in Bill Johnson’s new superhero movie, “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall.”
That lengthy opening section, titled “Source Material,” asks for a lot of emotional investment in people we will not see again for a very long time. One wonders if a less famous debut novelist would have been afforded so much runway.
The important thing to know is that “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” does eventually get around to making another major motion picture masterpiece. And it’s a thoroughly engaging tale, tightly tied to a propulsive 53-day schedule that must not be altered. “A halt in the shooting day is a disaster,” as everyone knows. “An unholy sin.”
The movie that Johnson and his team are creating – part of a billion-dollar franchise – never really comes into focus, except for a few isolated scenes. No matter. This is a story about what happens behind the cameras. Hanks is at pains to impress upon us that moviemaking is a circuitous process involving a vast network of people – some famous, most not – showing up and doing their best. This is most definitely not a novel about the magic of filmmaking; it’s a novel about the hard work of filmmaking. Indeed, any belief in magic – along with genius and destiny – is pretty well shredded by the end. Only three qualities matter: talent, determination and punctuality.
The marquee will blaze with one name, but in these chapters, there is no hierarchy: “At some point, and there’s no telling when that moment is, someone is responsible for the whole movie,” we’re told. “Everyone has the most important job on the movie.” Johnson, Hanks’s star-making director, is well drawn, but he gets less attention here than the staff members.
Allicia Mac-Teer, an African American producer known in the industry as Al, is the real power and planner behind the throne. But years ago, she was just a front desk manager at a Garden Suite Inn. There she impressed Johnson by making sure his favorite frozen yogurt was available late at night. That’s the kind of indispensable initiative that a great director notices. Somehow, Al knew in her bones that Hollywood isn’t about being the most beautiful or even the most talented. “Making movies,” she announces, “is about solving more problems than you cause.”
This gangster was no goodfella.
Other Mafioso lived by a code. There were certain things a man did not do.
Carmine Galante did them.
He muscled in on other mobsters’ territory. He sold dope. He even killed a policeman.
Finally, the mob had enough and had him whacked..
His story is told in “The Cigar: Carmine Galante, Mafia Terror” by Frank Dimatteo and Michael Benson. And even by gangland standards, it’s an ugly one.
“Galante once shot a kid, a little girl,” the authors write. “All right, it was an accident, he was aiming at a cop, but he shot a kid. One story has him throwing a plate of boiling spaghetti in a pretty girl’s face. … By all accounts he was born evil, bad to the bone from birth.”
Born in 1910, Galante grew up on East 101st Street when that part of Harlem was predominantly Italian. His schooling was sketchy, occasionally interrupted by stretches in reform school. At 15, he dropped out and started doing odd jobs for gangsters. A stocky 5-foot-5, his specialty was beating people up.
At 15, he did his first stint in jail, a few months for petty larceny and assault. By the next year, he graduated to armed robbery. That earned him more than three years in Sing Sing. When he got out, he was 20 and a rising star in the rackets. They called him “Lilo” – cigar – for the stogie always stuck in the corner of his mouth.
One of his first crimes out of prison was knocking over the Martin-Weinstein Shoe Company in Brooklyn. But something seemed to go wrong. When Galante and his gang left, more than $7,000 in payroll was still on the table – and patrolman Walter O. De Castillia was shot and bleeding to death on the floor.
Was it simply a botched robbery? Or had the heist only been a cover for the assassination of a cop?
No one was talking – including the eyewitnesses interviewed by police. It remains “the oldest ‘unsolved’ cop killing in NYC history,” the authors write. “Everyone knew who did it – they just couldn’t prove it.”
Soon after, Galante hit the Lieberman Bushwick Brewery with three accomplices. “The men, $4,000 richer, didn’t immediately attempt to get away but instead broke out the back of a truck outside the brewery to snatch some free beer.”
Their thirst and sloppiness gave Detective Joseph Meenahan time to spot them and call them out. The crooks decided to make a run for it – but first, they turned and emptied their guns. “Eat lead, copper,” Galante reportedly snarled. A 6-year-old bystander, Shirley Hershowitz, caught one slug in the leg. Meenahan was shot five times.
Remarkably, four of the bullets never got past his bulky winter coat. The fifth hit him in the thigh, but that didn’t stop Meenahan from giving chase. Galante was quickly caught and, 15 days later, was returned to Sing Sing
– this time for 12 1/2 years.
Clearly, armed robbery was not Galante’s forte.
Released in 1939, he decided to find steadier. He became the hit man for mob boss Vito Genovese. Although the authors judge the number of Galante’s victims as “unaccountable,” at one point, the NYPD linked him to 80 murders.
The most famous was Carlo Tresca’s in 1943. A journalist, labor leader, and committed anarchist, Tresca spoke out against Stalin and Hitler. As an Italian immigrant, though, he particularly despised Mussolini.
Unfortunately for Tresca, that dictator had a powerful friend in Genovese.
And so, one night, as Tresca stepped off the corner of Fifth Avenue and 15th Street, he took a fatal bullet to the back of his head.
Witnesses saw the short man who calmly walked up and plugged him. They also saw the getaway car. Police later found a suspiciously similar one abandoned. And the plate even matched one on an automobile Galante had been seen getting into earlier. The cops picked him up.
But, typically, Galante wouldn’t admit to anything. Witnesses wouldn’t talk.
The crime was never solved.
By the 1950s, Galante had moved up in the mob, acting as consigliere advisor to crime boss Joseph Bonanno. They formed a partnership with Sicilian mobsters – and exiled gangster Lucky Luciano – to bring heroin to America.
It was an ugly, highprofile business other mobsters usually avoided, and with good reason. Drugs attracted the Feds and constant surveillance.
Yet, despite the wiretaps, keeping tabs on Galante proved to be complicated. Over the years, he not only married and had children but had a common-law wife and a second batch of kids he kept stashed in New Jersey.
He was finally indicted on dope charges in 1958 and released on bail. Additional charges followed a year later.
Justice was slow, delayed by a mistrial when the jury foreman suffered a near-fatal fall down a flight of stairs. What the elderly man had been doing walking around an abandoned building was never satisfactorily explained.
But in 1962, Galante was convicted of conspiracy to evade narcotics laws. He received 20 years and did the time. He spent a lot of it playing handball in the yard.
“I am to win all the games,” Galante instructed fellow convicts.
“When one opponent disobeyed the rule, Galante walked up to him and slapped him across the face,” they write. “I rule everything,” Galante said. “And when I get out of this prison, I will show this to everyone.”
He sure tried. Released in 1972, Galante informed cronies that he was taking over as boss of the Bonanno crime family. He made it clear: Resistance wasn’t just futile. It was fatal.
One of his longtime rivals, Frank Costello, died while Galante was in prison. Costello’s widow had him interred in an elaborate mausoleum. Galante had his boys blow up the tomb to show everyone who was really the boss.
Galante moved quickly, becoming involved in everything from pornography to mozzarella. You wanted a dirty movie for your theater, cheese for your pizzeria? You had to talk to Galante’s people and pay his price. Soon he would be, he bragged, “the Boss of Bosses.”
The other bosses ordered a hit.
On July 12, 1979, Galante was in Bushwick, enjoying lunch at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant. Sitting on the patio, he was lighting a cigar when three men in ski masks burst in. The first shotgun blast caught Galante full in the chest.
When the news photographers arrived, the mobster was cold on the floor. The cigar was still clenched between his teeth.
There weren’t many mourners when he was buried in Queens. They included his lawyer, Roy Cohn, his wife and his daughter from his second family. (Her mother stayed home out of respect for the widow.)
The Catholic Church refused to approve a funeral Mass, so a priest was found who mumbled a few words over the grave. It was a sad, cheap send-off – and totally fitting.
“Galante was so bad,” reported the FBI agent sent to surveil the scene, “no one wanted to be around him even when he was dead.”