Actor makes funding plea for Solano College Theatre troupe

Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks' plea was simple and heartfelt. Essentially, it was this: If you can afford $100 tickets to two separate fund-raising events for Solano College Theatre, then buy a season subscription to help the cash-strapped troupe.

To do so "would make the biggest difference" in SCT's ability to weather the state's continuing steep cutbacks of higher education budgets, he told an audience that filled the Fairfield community college's dining hall on Saturday evening.

Some 300 people paid for a sit-down dinner with Hanks, the star of such films as "Philadelphia," "Forrest Gump" and "Saving Private Ryan;" and 375 more paid to pack the main campus theater afterward for the actor-director-producer's presentation of film clips, including some from his newest project, "Pacific," a 10-part HBO miniseries that will air next month.

Proceeds from his appearance, which SCT spokeswoman Amy Lenahan estimated to be $60,000, will augment the Tom Hanks/Rita Wilson Endowment Fund, which, through a seed funding of $25,000, was established last year.

Anyway the money is tallied, it will make a significant contribution toward support of SCT students and programs, said George Maguire, whose longtime friendship with Hanks led to the star's booking at SCT. The two met at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, 32 years ago and have maintained a close relationship since.

"I am a lucky man," Hanks, smiling and sounding congenial, said just before the catered dinner began. He added, as he acknowledged Maguire and fellow actors seated at nearby tables, that his storied career has been filled with "wonderful people and great friends."

He said his success, which includes back-to-back best actor Academy Awards in 1994 and 1995, was due, in part, to a chance "to go to a junior college and get an education."

And, no surprise, Hanks, who was instrumental in the creation of the National World War II Monument in Washington, D.C., and the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, took a moment to recognize a pair of aging decorated World War II veterans and a Japanese detention camp internee who were among the dinner guests.

As the presentation began in the main campus theater, the troupe's pop art-inspired set for "Bye Bye Birdie" had not been struck since the musical closed Jan. 31. A video projection, with a quote from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," to hold "as twere, the mirror up to nature," filled a screen in the deepest recess of the stage. The line, from "the player's scene" in the tragedy, served as a springboard for Hanks' nearly two-hour presentation, themed around the artist's creative process, specifically, taking a factual account of history and finding "the truth" in it.

After being introduced by Maguire, Hanks, dressed in a stylish black suit jacket, a black shirt over denim jeans, showed a clip from Ken Burns' "The Civil War," with the haunting "Ashokan Farewell" soundtrack. He called the PBS documentary "the best movie ever made."

He then showed clips of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Ron Howard's "Apollo 13," asking rhetorically, "How do you hold a mirror up to nature? How do you create something that's true but that's a lie?"

Clearly relaxed, pacing left and right on stage and gesturing as he spoke, Hanks followed up with clips from HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon," and another HBO miniseries that he executive-produced, "John Adams," starring Paul Giamatti.

In his study of history, as evinced in the historical dramas he has directed or starred in, he said history is "by and large, one dumb thing after another." The remark drew one of many laughs during the evening.

He called "The Best Years of Our Lives," the 1946 William Wyler film, "the best war movie ever made," noting that it, curiously, lacked combat scenes. It concerns three World War II veterans who return stateside, trying to readjust to civilian life.

In yet another salute to World War II and the so-called "greatest generation," Hanks showed clips from "Pacific" before pausing for a question-and-answer segment.

He discounted the notion that his films tend to glamorize war, suggesting the death of humans in combat is, of course, horrifying.

Toward the end of his presentation, he said, "I wish I was good with tools, fixing plumbing and screen doors. But being an actor is more fun than fun should be."

Richard Bammer