“I tried to make that movie for a long time”: how the sands of time crushed Tom Hanks’ passion project
It’s easy for an outsider to assume that when the biggest stars in the business start banging on doors with movies they want to make, studios would be foolish not to let them make it. They don’t come much bigger than Tom Hanks, either, but even he couldn’t will his passion project into existence.
He wasn’t quite so big of a name in the early 1990s, though, but Hanks still had plenty of clout. After all, this was a period in the immediate aftermath of his evolution from a popular comedy star into a genuinely bankable leading man, with Big landing him the first Academy Award nomination of his career.
Sensing there was a perfect part he could play, the actor optioned the rights to a biography of a musician he was a fan of, with his eyes on playing the lead role. He wasn’t willing to let anyone else circle the part, but the sands of time continued turning in a direction he didn’t care for.
Fast-forward a few years, and Hanks is now the two-time Academy Award-winning figurehead of Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, a certifiable A-list phenomenon, and even showcased himself as an assuredly talented director with his debut musical comedy That Thing You Do! And yet, nobody was willing to bite.
Even when Hanks set about playing more real-life figures than the majority of his contemporaries, his dream production continued sitting on the shelf, gathering dust. Here was one of the best in the business, desperate to tell the story, but for whatever reason there wasn’t a studio in town willing to back him on it. A strange situation, sure, and one that left Hanks understandably bitter.
Who was the object of Hanks’ affection, then, the person with such a fascinating tale he spent more than a decade persevering and jumping through hoops for absolutely no reason? It was Dan Reed, the musician nicknamed ‘Red Elvis’, who became one of the best-selling recording artists in communist countries in the 1970s.
He was virtually unknown in the United States and only saw one of his songs enter the charts in his home nation, but overseas, he was a sensation. He sold millions of albums in the Eastern Block, spent years living in East Germany, starred in more than a dozen movies, and toured Europe extensively to capitalise on his unexpected rise to fame.
Even his death was mysterious, giving rise to several conspiracy theories. Six weeks previously, he’d appeared on American television to defend the Soviet Union’s presence in Afghanistan and the construction of the Berlin Wall and compared then-president Ronald Reagan to Joseph Stalin.
History is littered with rumours and speculation surrounding the governmental assassinations of public figures, and Reed was no different. His cause of death was officially ruled as an accidental drowning in the lake near his East Berlin home, but many of his friends suspected he’d committed suicide, while several others voiced concerns that he’d been murdered.
“I tried to make that movie for a long time, and quite frankly, I just got too old to see it through,” Hanks lamented at Rome Film Fest. “You come across these projects that you are passionate for, and when they just slip out of your fingers like so much sand, it’s a bit of a bitter disappointment.”
Reed was 47 years old when he died, and to illustrate just how long Hanks was trying to make the biopic, the actor optioned the rights to Reggie Nadelson’s biography when he was 35. The book wasn’t even published until he was 50 and he remained as keen as ever, with a little makeup and some favourable lighting capable of compensating the slight age difference between the two.
The only way Reed’s life story will make it to the screen is with somebody else in the lead, which would sting Hanks considerably, looking at how long he tried and failed not even to get it anywhere close to the finish line but position it on the starting block. It’s either that or de-ageing, but nobody needs to see that.
