Tom Hanks: The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

I picked this one up on Audible because it sounded interesting, and I thought it was nonfiction before. Turns out, it was fiction, but it ended up being an interesting read.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece follows the story of the development of a fictional (but I think based off of a real) film. From the creation of the source material, to the writing of the script by director Bill Johnson, to the casting of Wren Lane and others, the book follows the entire production until a screening of the final film in New York. The film is based on a series of comic books. These comics were a fictionalized story of his uncle who was a flamethrower in World War II. The character, Firefall, becomes a villain in a new installment of a blockbuster super hero franchise.

This is another complex story with a lot of moving parts. It has a very large cast of characters and sometimes it's difficult to keep them separated. There's also not a whole lot of development on many of these characters. Oddly, this is a story that doesn't really feel like it has a "main character." It doesn't follow one perspective, but it also doesn't rotate. Sometimes, you're following director Bill Johnson. Sometimes his assistant, Al, and other times the driver-turned-assistant Ynes. I found it hard to buy in or really get to know any of the characters because we were switching so often.

The plot is also often disjointed. The book is split into very distinct parts, but it was really hard to understand how they connected. I kept waiting for the back story to connect into the main story. When it finally did, that was really satisfying. There are a lot of moving parts in the story, and it drifts through time in a way that is really confusing. Maybe it would have been easier if I'd had time to spend looking through the PDF that was provided with the book. There were several points where the story absolutely dragged, and that was frustrating, but there were other parts that were really fascinating.

I rated this book ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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