“It was very exciting”: when the most successful producer of all time taught Tom Hanks how to email
As unfathomable as it may seem to the younger generations, there was a time when you would sit someone down, ask them to send an email, and they’d have no clue what the fuck you were talking about. Fortunately, when it happened to Tom Hanks, he had help.
Some people still haven’t gotten to grips with the technological onslaught that’s defined the 21st century, and while you could get away with it for a while, things have continued moving at such a rapid pace that anyone who doesn’t embrace smartphones, the internet, and online existence will be left behind.
Obviously, things were moving at a much more leisurely pace in the late 1990s. The digital age hadn’t quite exploded into life and taken over every facet of society, so when Hanks agreed to star in a quaint rom-com that revolved around the sending and receiving of emails to drive its love story forward, part of his preparations for the role were to be given a crash course in how it worked.
There was plenty of hype for the reunion of the Sleepless in Seattle trio of Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Nora Ephron for 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, and it lived up to those expectations. Nobody would call it a masterpiece, but as a light and frothy romance that ticked every available box and displayed the effortless chemistry of the two leads as they fell for each other again, it did everything that its target audience wanted.
Since email was nowhere near as prevalent as it would become in the immediate future, Hanks and Ryan needed some tutelage. The person chosen to show them the ropes was a newcomer to the business, working on only their second movie. That person was producer Laura Shuler Donner’s assistant, carrying on from his first film credit in the previous year’s Volcano, and his name was Kevin Feige.
One of his duties was to log onto AOL and teach the two leads and the director how to send, receive, and generally navigate their way around the mystical world of email. “I just thought it was very exciting to be in a movie star’s house, teaching them how to use email,” he said, a quaint memory for someone who seems very unlikely to be dislodged as the most successful producer that Hollywood has ever seen.
Ten years after You’ve Got Mail was released, once he’d segued into the superhero business by assisting Shuler Donner’s husband, Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner, as an associate producer on Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Feige was hired by Marvel, named the company’s president of production, and changed the face of the business when the studio’s first movie, Iron Man, was released in the summer of 2008.
These days, he oversees one of popular culture’s most lucrative empires, with his list of credits as a producer amassing over $32 billion in ticket sales, making his filmography the most lucrative of any producer in history, and he’s so far ahead of the competition that if he quit today, he’d probably still never be caught.
Less than 30 years ago, he was a mere assistant, given the unique job of teaching Tom Hanks how to email, and it would be selling Feige pretty short to say that he’s come a long way since then.
