Tag Archives: Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks Typewriter Movie

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Thanks to Hollywood, typewriters are going to be making a big comeback soon. Tom Hanks and John Mayer recently made a movie discussing their love of typewriters. Called California Typewriter, the movie is a documentary about the antiquated writing machine.

The movie also features comments from historian David McCullough and playwright Sam Shepard. Both men claim the typewriter “is still their go-to writing device.”

Most people don’t know it, but Hanks owns more than 250 different typewriters. He says most of them are in working order.

Hanks passion about typewriters is real.  He recently launched a typewriter app named Hanx Writer which provides the sounds of the keys banging, hard returns and the chimes that sound when you reach the end of a line.  

Hanks, plus millions of other people, miss that.

The movie, California Typewriter, will hit theaters on August 18th. Thank you Rolling Stone for the story.

I can’t wait to see it.

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Tom Hanks Debuts iPad Typewriter App

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Apple image

Years ago, when our PR agency worked for Casio, we sent out a bunch of new digital watches to well known personalities, hoping to grab a photo op of one of them wearing the timepieces. Tom Hanks was one of the recipients. Several weeks after the watches were sent out, I received a personal thank you note from the super star.

Two things surprised me at the time. One was that the actor actually took the time to compose the note. The second, was that Tom Hanks had his own personalized stationery engraved with “THanks.” Get it? Tom Hanks used the T of his first name combined with his last name to spell out “thanks.”

I thought it was so clever that I stared at that note for years. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized there was something else that was very special about the document. It was written on a manual typewriter. I never thought much about it until I learned today that Mr. Hanks collects manuel typewriters. To celebrate his passion, he recently introduced an iPad app that functions as a typewriter.

Hanks wants to give iPad writers the feeling and sound of using a manual typewriter. He worked with hitscents.com to create the Hanx Writer app. Hanks claims the app “provides the ease and speed of an iPad with the sound and pace of a manual typewriter.”

Hanks is providing a free typewriter app for all, the Hanx Prime Select. USA Today did a comprehensive description of the upgrades.

Meet the Press

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lucky guy 1lucky guyLast night I was transformed back to my newspaper days, long before the Internet was born. We went to see Tom Hanks in Lucky Guy on Broadway. He plays Mike McAlary, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist who worked at the New York Daily News for 12 years. He became larger than life for his expose’ on Abner Louima, the victim of unspeakable New York police torture in 1977. The play was written by the late Nora Ephron, (May 19, 1941 – June 26, 2012) who wrote Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleep in Seattle, and Julie and Julia. The star-studded cast, Maura Tierney (his wife Alice) , Christopher McDonald, Peter Gerety, Courtney B. Vance, Peter Scolari, and Richard Masur all portrayed well-known reporters and editors who worked with him.

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