You may remember that at the 84th Academy Awards Ceremony, Tom Hanks showed up on stage wearing a pin representing the number 6. At the time he tweeted that we would hear about this later during the year.

Well, the time has come. The newly Got Your Six campaign has been officially launched. It aims at improving the image of America’s military veterans and helping them successfully reintegrate into civilian life.
“Got your six” is an expression used by people in the military which means, “I’ve got your back, and you’ve got mine.” The six o’clock position is the designation of the rear of a military formation.

Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Michael Douglas, Tracy Morgan, Milla Jovovich, Bradley Cooper, Sarah Jessica Parker, Brian Williams, Pharrell Williams and Wendy Williams are among the stars who will participate in the first wave of public service announcements that will start airing this Friday.
You can see the first two PSAs in our videos.

Tom Hanks has supported numerous actions to help and remember the veterans and the military forces over the years.
He has already narrated various PSAs for the Welcome Back Veterans and the Joining Forces campaigns. He also helped build the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, as well as the WWII Memorial in Washington, DC.

According to an article from Michael Riedel in the NY Post, Tom Hanks has signed on to play tabloid newspaper columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, a play that will open in Broadway in January for a limited run at a Shubert theater.

Lucky Guy is a new play written by Nora Ephron, with whom Tom Hanks has worked on Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, and that will be directed by George C. Wolfe.
It will captures the end of the era of newspaper dominance, when one last of the great NYC newspaper columnists, Mike McAlary, sold papers, drove stories and had the pulse of the city.

A tough guy who drank with cops, McAlary covered the major crime stories of the ’80s and ’90s, most famously the sodomizing of Abner Louima by the police. McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for his aggressive coverage of the case in 1998, just a few months before he died of colon cancer at 41.

McAlary didn’t always get it right. Some of his editors suspected he “piped,” or made up, quotes for dramatic effect. And he screwed up spectacularly in 1994 when, in the Daily News, he accused a woman of making up a rape charge to promote a feminist rally.

The woman, a lesbian, claimed to have been raped in Park Slope. McAlary wrote that the police doubted her story. His column ran under the incendiary headline “Rape hoax the real crime.”

The next day Police Commissioner William Bratton held a press conference to announce that, in fact, there was evidence of rape. He also apologized to the victim.

The woman hit McAlary and the News with a $12 million libel suit.

Ephron’s play deals with both the Louima case and the libel suit — the high and low points of his career.
Source : NY Post

Tom Hanks has been looking to do a play in New York for several years. He’s been offered many scripts but reportedly chose this one because of its compelling lead character and his own friendship with Nora Ephron.

We'll let you know when we learn more about this.

Tom Hanks is currently filming the movie Captain Phillips, directed by Paul Greengrass. We added some photos of the shooting a few weeks ago and now we have seven more to our gallery, that were also taken around April 18th, so there are not really "new". Since a lot of the scenes are shot at sea, it's pretty difficult to get more photos.

On April 8, 2009 Somali pirates approached the American cargo ship Maersk Alabama. The pirates and American crew members exchanged fire.
The pirates gained access to the ship as their boat sank due to the gunfire exchange. As the pirates searched the ship, Americans overcame one pirate and took him captive.
After 13 hours of negotiations, Captain Richard Phillips agreed to board a lifeboat with the pirates. The plan was for the two groups to exchange prisoners at sea. However, Phillips ended up captive on the lifeboat for three days and was tortured by the men who held him. He attempted one daring escape and failed before being rescued by the Navy SEALs on April 12, 2009.