26 Million Dollars and a Dream
As for what he can and cannot do, well, it should be pretty clear by now that Tom Hanks can do whatever the hell, uh, heck he wants. Your average kid with a dandy script might be lucky to score a handshake and a free lunch at the Ivy. But when he polished off That Thing last year, Hanks — with back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, six box office bonanzas in a row, and the official title of Most Beloved Actor in America — found himself with a $26 million budget from Twentieth Century Fox and a helping hand from Jonathan Demme's acclaimed production house, Clinica Estetico.
Hanks rates only a few minutes of screen time in the film, playing the band's benevolent Svengali, Mr. White, but That Thing bears heavy traces of his touch. He wrote the script. He handpicked the cast. He commandeered the soundtrack. He even penned four of the movie's dippy faux chestnuts. If a man as modest as Hanks can claim a manifesto, this is it. ''Any movie is going to be some sort of a vanity project,'' he admits. ''There's no getting away from that. I did say: 'Jeez, I'd really like to do this. Will you let me?' And they let me put my fat ass in the fire.''
Now, however, he's put that ass — and his track record — on the line for a cautionary fable about celebrity. The story came to him during the delirium that followed Gump, when everyone from the Nation of Islam to the Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to give him a gold statuette and a box of chocolates. ''It was the beginning of the Oscar-run, trophy-season, Pulp Fiction-versus-Forrest Gump dynamic that of course had the nation in its thrall,'' he says. ''It's a time when all you're doing is talking about yourself, and that's a very unhealthy thing to do. Not only that, it's not very enjoyable. It ends up being hotel rooms and cars, and the glamorous aspect can no longer fuel your desire to get up in the day and do it.
''So I needed some sort of an outlet that had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I was going to win anything that year — and what that would mean to my place in the cosmos.''
Even so, it doesn't take a Jungian analyst to see how That Thing You Do! does wind up exploring the galactic status of its star. Consider the plot: Four regular guys form a band, write a radio smash, and cruise across the country on a post-Beatlemania gravy train that carries them to a promised land of Playboy pinups and candy-colored convertibles. Where, naturally, things fall apart. Some survive with their hearts and haircuts intact; some don't.
So yeah, Hanks concedes that That Thing deals, in its own mirthful way, with the meat grinder of the star-making machine. ''If you just give yourself over to it, you're gonna lose touch with reality,'' he says. ''The '90s, to me, have been — it seems like I've rarely been able to get out of this white-hot spotlight. Which is really fun, for a period of time. Then after a while it becomes just white-hot. It gets to be a little bit uncomfortable. If you're not analyzing why you're there, then you will just assume that it's never going to go away — or that you deserve it in the first place. And no one deserves this much attention. No one does.''
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