Quote of the Day (Tom Hanks, on Squandering Time)

“I’m 68, and I must say, I view time differently. I used to think a day was 36 hours long, and now I’m convinced it’s only 18. I never get done what I want. I guess I’m aware of being on the back nine — that time is a very, very finite thing. And to squander it, I think it’s a sin.”—Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks quoted by Melena Ryzik, “A New Age For Some Old Friends,” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post, of Tom Hanks at the premiere of his film Elvis, was taken June 6, 2022, by Eva Rinaldi from Abbotsford, Australia.

Quote of the Day (Tom Hanks, on How He Does Crying Scenes)

"Crying scenes are tough. Personally, onions make me cry. So when I have to cry, I think of a dead onion." —Actor Tom Hanks appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Apr. 21, 2016

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Nothing in Common,’ As Father and Son Face Off)

Max Basner (played by Jackie Gleason): (snarling): “Why don’t you get yourself a regular car?”

David Basner (played by Tom Hanks): “It’s a jeep, Dad. I look good in it.”

(They climb in, Max doing so uneasily.)

Max: “This goddamn car. You have to be a mountain climber to get in it.”

(David puts on the radio to fill the silence. Max thrusts a big, fat, smelly cigar toward him.)

Max: “Want one of these? They’re Honduran.”

David (sullenly): “No.”

Max: “You can’t get the Cubans anymore.”

David (hoping to put this to rest): “No, thank you.”

(The silence resumes, finally broken by Max.)

Max (morosely): “I lost my lines. They fired me.”

[David gets out of the Jeep and walks around angrily for a minute, then gets back in.]

David: “What are you gonna do?”

Max: “I know you hate me. But you have to help me.”— Nothing in Common (1986), screenplay by Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, directed by Garry Marshall

When Garry Marshall passed away a week and a half ago, the director-producer-writer-actor was recalled most often for several TV series (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple, Mork and Mindy) and films (Pretty Women, Runaway Bride, The Princess Diaries). But for me, the work that lingers in my memory the longest is the dramedy Nothing in Common, released 30 years ago this week.

Although only Marshall’s third film to that point, he demonstrated a sure touch with a variety of actors: an insecure model unsure if she could establish herself as an actress (Sela Ward), an up-and-coming star (Tom Hanks), and an aging legend who needed to be treated with care (Jackie Gleason). He needed all of this skill in serving a script that threaded together a romantic comedy and deeply serious drama.

On one level, the film can be enjoyed as one of the best screen treatments of the creative exhilaration of the advertising world, focusing on how Hanks’ David Basner woos clients as easily as women. It’s breezy and insouciant, a throwback to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It takes a long while for the yuppie David to realize that life is not that easy. That recognition arrives courtesy of what he has not bothered to notice—has not really wanted to notice—on his headlong path to success: that the marriage of his parents (played by Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) has come apart.

The beginning of the above exchange between David and Max hints at part of the reason for the crumbling marriage: Max’s irascibility. But David’s resentment at being drawn into the parental quarrel, we’ll soon learn, increases because of guilt over traits shared with his father: lack of commitment and a wandering eye.

In his cinema swan song, Gleason employed none of the attributes that had endeared loud-mouthed Ralph Kramden to audiences in The Honeymooners, such as his helpless, inept dreaming and constant sheepish begging of forgiveness from wife Alice. Even in this scene, when we realize the extent of Max’s emotional extremity—getting fired from his job, like another used-up salesman, Willy Loman—we know that this not-very-good father was temperamentally unsuited for his sales specialty: children’s clothing.

And Max's cigar: It sums up an awful lot about the attitudes and appetites that have brought him to his current pass, one so desperate that he has to beg help from the son he really has never communicated with. Within the immediate context of this scene, it signals both his in-your-face personality and his half-hearted, clumsy attempt to ingratiate himself with David. Before long, though, the gesture says even more about the self-indulgence that imperils first his marriage, then his health.

How much of himself an actor brings to a part is a complicated question, and Gleason’s role in this movie is a case in point. He ate and drank to excess, cheated on his wives, was an absentee father, and could be cruel to others involved in his shows. It was as if he felt bound to inflict on others the hurt he experienced when his father abandoned the family. If it sounds familiar, it should: Max seems an awful lot like him, but without the transcendent acting talent. (In fact, the screenwriters of Nothing in Common, Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, drew on much of this unhappy background when they created the 2002 TV biopic Gleason, starring Brad Garrett.)

Yet that talent is impossible to discount, and perhaps, at some level, Gleason understood all too well how Max must feel. In his 2012 memoir, My Happy Days in Hollywood, Marshall noted that Gleason was thoroughly professional and uncomplaining during shooting, despite considerable physical frailty. (He died of cancer a year after the film’s release.) The actor concentrated on his work and did an exemplary job in humanizing without sentimentalizing this most difficult of men. 

When Nothing in Common was filmed in the mid-1980s, “selfish” was associated so frequently with “yuppie” that it might as well have been a barnacle stuck to the noun. If Hanks’ David is not outright selfish, he is certainly self-absorbed. While the film initially earns comic mileage from his attitude (“Does self-involvement count?" he responds when a lover asks if he’s involved with anybody), a reckoning will be in order.

What could make such a person snap out of this emotional constriction? Ties of family so strong they override years of distance, misunderstanding and wariness. Until the 2007-09 financial crisis, probably nothing forced baby boomers out of their careerist zone so much as the need to care for their aging parents.

Nothing in Common was Marshall’s attempt to execute the same kind of change in direction that Neil Simon was performing around this time with Chapter Two and his Eugene Jerome autobiographical trilogy: comedy not merely shot through with one-liners, but filled with rue. Audiences did not respond as enthusiastically as they did to his preposterous prostitute-as-Cinderella tale, Pretty Woman.

But, in addition to providing Gleason with a memorable fadeout and Ward with a good career launching pad, the film served notice that Hanks—not unlike Jack Lemmon in The Apartment—could master drama as easily as comedy. Moreover, in depicting the discomfort and agony of a Me Generation forced to choose between career aspiration and unwanted personal responsibility, it still rings today with powerful truth.

Prime Time for John Adams (And About Time!)

As long as we’re on the subject of Presidents, let’s turn to another that’s going to getting a whole lot more attention soon…

I don’t have HBO, so otherwise I’d be glued to the set tonight for the premiere of HBO’s John Adams mini-series starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Rest assured, though, that the second I have the chance to see it on DVD, I’ll certainly do so.

Kudos to producer Tom Hanks for putting his financial muscle and prestige behind this seven-part, 8 1/2 –hour miniseries at a time when the major networks have given up the struggle to peddle anything other than reality shows or Law and Order derivatives. He’ll probably take at least some heat from historical purists about dramatic liberties taken with the patriot’s life. (And truth be told, if the offenses are particularly egregious, I’ll be one of those complaining the loudest.)

But if even only a tenth of his audience is tempted to go out and read a book about our nation’s second President, more power to Hanks, I say.

Five years ago, when I visited the house Adams owned for nearly the last 40 years of his life, I had heard that this project was in the works. But for several years afterward, I heard nothing more, and presumed that it had gotten sucked into the development hell into which most things in Hollywood (especially most things historically related) disappear. I’m all the more delighted that Hanks persevered with his dream—or that, at least at first glance, the casting of the leads looks so inspired.

I doubt that, even with so much time, the miniseries will cover all the fascinating facts about this President who lived into his nineties. But one incident I heard about at his Quincy, Mass. estate, Peacefield (an unbelievably ironic name for the home of such a contentious man), says much about why for so long he took such an underserved backseat to the other Founding Fathers.

A portrait of Adams in his home depicts him in the short, pudgy, middle-aged form that led his critics as Vice-President to call him “His Rotundity.” His eyes, flashing quickly beneath a pair of thick dark eyebrows, are matched with a scowling mouth, as if he’s beside himself that you can’t see what’s so perfectly obvious to him.

Forget about the charisma quotient of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, JFK, or other politicos of relatively recent vintage—Adams is not even in the same league as contemporaries from his own less mediagenic age, the calmly impressive Washington or the amiable Jefferson.

As you might expect, Adams loathed this picture so thoroughly that his descendants hung it in an unlit corner of the butler’s pantry.

No doubt, Adams and his descendants would have withered in the glare of 21st century cameras and the 24-hour news cycle. Sometimes, as in the case of the portrait, their own willfulness has pushed them into history’s shadows.

But these days, the family is getting its day in the sun. With his best-selling biography, David McCullough performed for Adams what he did for Harry Truman—inspired a serious reevaluation of a politician constantly underestimated even in his own lifetime.

For an age grown cynical about the constant spinning and occasional dalliances of politicians (Eliot Spitzer, come out of hiding, you steamrolling fool!), the blunt Adams, who lavished no endearments on opponents but many on his wife and soulmate Abigail, finally looks ready for prime time.

Peacefield—affectionately known as “The Old House” by later generations of the family—sustained not only John Adams but his John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States; grandson Charles Francis Adams, the congressman and diplomat who persuaded the British government not to recognize the Confederacy during the Civil War; and great-grandsons Henry and Brooks Adams, who won fame not by participating in history but by writing about it.

The family needed whatever serenity they could find in this house. For all the high intelligence, integrity, and unswerving patriotism that enabled the Adamses to achieve greatness, they also suffered unrelenting, even puritanical pursuit of perfection, overwhelming depression, and tragedy when they couldn’t measure up to the near-impossible standards they set for themselves.

The Old House is just one part of the Adams National Historic Park, which is administered by the National Park Service. The “park” consists of six buildings, located within a five-minute drive of each other. The other buildings consist of a visitors center, an adjacent parking lot, the adjacent birthplaces of the two Presidents, and United First Parish Church, where father and son are laid to rest with their wives. It’s a bit hard to transport yourself mentally from the bustling inner-suburban feel of Quincy today to the more serene, pastoral setting of Adams’ time, but it’s worth the effort.

Adams had his moments when he acted insanely (standing up on a table and hurling his wig at Cabinet members who enraged him, as related by biographer Joseph Ellis in the “American Experience” episode “John & Abigail Adams,” would probably count as one of these).

But he deserves to be taken out of the dark corner where he’s been hidden for so long and placed in the American pantheon where his devotion to principle, honesty and courage entitle him. With any justice, the HBO series will help in the effort to do so.