Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 25, 1993 TAG: 9310080344
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB THOMAS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Even as a surly baseball manager in ``A League of Their Own,'' when the actor is contorting his face like a wad of tobacco, you're waiting for the boyish grin that assures you he's the same sweet guy you rooted for in ``Big.''
``It's getting to be my curse,'' he says. ``They say that all the time. So now they don't fear me. You want them to fear you, just a little bit.''
He's kidding, of course.
In ``Sleepless in Seattle,'' Hanks again tests his fans. He plays Sam Baldwin, a young Seattle architect whose wife's death leaves him with an 8-year-old son.
When the son, Jonah, telephones a national radio show to talk about Sam's loneliness, Baltimore journalist Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) immediately falls for the widower.
Haunted by his late wife's memory, Sam initially is not interested in dating. Eventually, he begins going out, but does not find someone whom both he and Jonah love. The film's question is whether Sam and Annie are made for each other - even though they live 3,000 miles apart.
``You don't direct Tom Hanks,'' says Nora Ephron, who did so with ``Sleepless in Seattle.''
``You just sit there and say, `Action,' then you say, `Cut.' You just get lucky when he agrees to be in a movie. I'm not kidding.''
During a recent interview, Hanks confirmed his director's high regard.
``I'm a pretty naive team player when it comes down to saying yes to a movie. I'm kind of, `Go, team, go, man. Come on, we're here to do a job, so what do we need to get it done?'
``In the early going of `Sleepless,' Nora and I had spent a number of hours saying, `What the hell does this mean?' Why would he be doing this?' I take people to task. But once the agreement is made, man, you don't have a better friend on a movie set than me.''
Even when a movie is going down the tubes?
``You never know when it is going down the tubes. You never know when it's going to be great. You always have faith in the alliance, faith in the material.''
Even the infamous ``Bonfire of the Vanities''?
``That seemed big. That was the only thing about `Bonfire' that seemed out of the norm: It seemed huge. Every day there was something massive about it - the set, the number of people, the number of [script] pages you were doing, the shot itself. There was always this big chunk of moviemaking happening. You weren't intimidated by the size of it all. But sometimes you wondered, `Is all this stuff going to fit together?'
``At the same time, when we were doing another movie with a `B' in it and we were just dancing on a piano, I honestly thought: `How long are they going stand for us dancing on this piano?' You never know.''
``Big'' was a smash hit, earning Hanks an Academy-Award nomination as best actor. ``Bonfire'' was scorned by one and all. And did Hanks sink into a funk over the failure?
``Oh, no. The gods are against your making a good movie, anyway. To make a really good movie, you have defied an awful lot of the fates. `Bonfire' comes out, and it's unequivocally not any good, everybody tells you so repeatedly. You just say, `Well, I didn't quite achieve it on that one.' You shake it off and move on.''
Hanks, 36, credits his natural optimism to ``moving around too much as a kid.'' One of four children, he was born in Concord, Calif., and his parents divorced when he was 5.
His father remarried twice, his mother three times. Tom bounced from family to family and from town to town as his father changed restaurant jobs all over Northern California. The best way to survive was to be affable and funny.
Theater courses at the State University of California, Sacramento, led to summer work at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival near Cleveland, then more classics in New York City. His first important exposure was co-starring in the 1980 sitcom ``Bosom Buddies.''
``In repertory theater, there are not all hits there, either,'' he said. ``Out of five or six shows, you realize that one of them is really good, a couple of them are OK and one is really a dog.
``TV is another thing. You do six shows in a row, and one of them is pretty good, four are not that great, and one of them just stinks to high heaven. There's nothing you can do to change it. You can't alter it. It's there.
``What I learned was, it's good to be that naive team player. That means you just give 100 percent all the time. Even if you're feeling cranky or mad or you hate the person you're working with, you do the professional thing. You respect the material, and you go at it. Do the best job you're capable of doing, day in, day out.''
Since ``Splash!'' in 1984, Hanks has enjoyed his choice of scripts and received acclaim for ``A League of Their Own'' and ``Punchline'' among others.
He says he looks for ``an instinctive jolt; it's usually on the third page.'' With ``Sleepless in Seattle,'' he was attracted by the early scenes in which he is portrayed as a widower - ``It seemed a clean, honest way to present the material.''
How long will he stay in the movie trade?
``As long as they will write my name on a check.''
What could be nicer than that?
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