The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

1 Backstory

A little over five years back, I had a message on my voice mail from one Al Mac-Teer which I heard as Almick Tear from a number in the 310 area code. This no-nonsense woman asked me to call her back regarding a thin little memoir I had written called A Stairway Down to Heaven about my years of tending bar in a small subterranean club that played live music way back in the 80s. At the time, I was also, sort of, a freelance journalist in and around Pittsburgh, PA. And I wrote movie reviews. These days I teach Creative Writing, Common Literature, and Film Studies at Mount Chisholm College of the Arts in the hills of Montana. Bozeman is a gorgeous if stark drive away. I get very few voice mails from Los Angeles, California.

My boss read your memoir, Ms. Mac-Teer told me. He says you write like he thinks.

Your boss is brilliant, I told her, then asked, Who is your boss? When she told me she worked for Bill Johnson, that I had reached her on her cell as she was driving from her home in Santa Monica to her office in the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood for a meeting with him, I hollered, You work for Bi-Bi-Bi-Bill JOHNSON? The movie director? Prove it.

Some days later, I was on the phone with Bi-Bi-Bi-Bill Johnson himself, and we were talking about his line of work, one of the subjects I teach. When I told him I d seen his entire filmography, he accused me of blowing smoke. When I rattled off many salient points from his movies, he told me to shut up, enough already. At that time, he was noodling a screenplay about music in the transformative years of the 60s going into the 70s when bands evolved from matching outfits and three-minute songs for AM radio to LP side-long jams and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The stories from my book were full of very personal details. Even though my era was twenty years after what he was noodling our club booked unheralded jazz combos and Depeche Mode cover bands the stuff that happens in live-music venues is

TOM HANKS has won Academy Awards for best actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He has starred in, among many other films, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies, Sully, Toy Story, The Post, and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type.

R. Sikoryak is a cartoonist and an author based in New York City. His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

"The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is its own universe, complete with a sun, a cast of circling planets, and a limitless number of stars. Its gravity pulls you in and its far reaching, multi-layered, rollicking exuberance holds you in place. I would have been happy to live inside this book forever."  Ann Patchett, best-selling author of These Precious Days

"This is a wild, ambitious and exceptionally enjoyable novel. A story about how stories happen, with a swirling kaleidoscope of characters across the best part of a century, and a real beating emotional heart. It has a lot of astute and fascinating things to say about comic books, movies, show business, America and human beings. I loved every page." Matt Haig; author The Midnight Library, The Humans and Reasons to Stay Alive

"An extravagant, buoyant, joyfully sprawling book, bursting with affection for its characters, for the intricate lore of the movie business, and for the many ways in which human beings are one another's greatest opportunity." Tana French, award-winning novelist of In The Woods and The Searcher

"Do you want to go on an adventure? Who doesn't? This was a joy to read in that certain kind of way that only happens when it was a joy to write. Tom Hanks is such a natural storyteller that everything feels like he's telling this story just for you, at a dinner table, and you don't want the night to end." Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove

With a unique insight and a rare eye for detail, Tom Hanks delivers a stunning, emotionally satisfying tale about the art of storytelling. I never wanted the lights to come up. I could not put it down. Graham Norton

"Vibrant, jazzy, witty, snazzily written, with a great sense of time and place, this novel-cum-comic book is one of those rare, unique, pieces of fiction. Loved it."
Kate Mosse; author of Labyrinth

"A thoroughly engaging