If anything good came of my experience with "The Ultimate Film Fanatic" it was walking away with a tidbit of knowledge I could share with friends. Sitting down to dinner with Chad DeMassi, he asked me if I ever noticed how often Tom Hanks pees in his movies. "Why no... but now that you mention it..."
Urine has played a major role in Hanks’s oeuvre. From his classic "I gotta pee" line in Forrest Gump to the gravity-free floating urine in Apollo 13, Hanks and pee go together like peas and carrots. Sometimes Hanks just goes to the bathroom in movies and it doesn’t add much of anything to the plot (getting ready in the morning in Road to Perdition) but other times it’s the source of humor (his overlong urination in A League of Their Own, his ocean micturation in Castaway) or a major plot point (his urinary infection in The Green Mile). Ironically, Hanks remains pee-free in the movie that would best capture this motif, Splash.
Special thanks to Chad and the "Pee Movie List" at www.patches.net.
Back to Issue 14