New York, April 27, 2009 – It was difficult for everyone at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s tribute to Tom Hanks.  Finding anything to say about the movie star is almost impossible.  “It’s going to be tough tonight,” John Patrick Shanley warned us early in the evening.  “Because he is sort of uniformly a great guy, does his work, never freaks out,” Shanley said. “Anecdotally, he may fall a little short.”

Of the multiple projects they’ve worked on together, Steven Spielberg says Hanks never so much as showed up late or hung over.  Charlize Theron insists that while directing her in That Thing You Do, Hanks never once lost his cool.

Tom Hanks really is that nice guy he seems to be. 

Nora Ephron summed it up: “It’s pretty depressing because then what are you going to say?”  Ephron said if she had a funny anecdote, she’d be saying it in her speech later in the evening. 

Instead, Ephron invented an alternative life story, telling the crowd that Hanks was actually born Pinchus Greenblatt on Long Island, and spoke only Yiddish.  “He realized that since there were already too many Jewish actors – Dustin, Paul Newman, Cary Grant, Whoopi Goldberg – he would have to find another way,” Ephron said in her tribute speech.

So you get the drift – Hanks is a great guy, and roasting him is not easy.  So Julia Roberts solved this dilemma, taking the stage with: “All right, it’s late and I’m paying my babysitter overtime and I have to pee, so...everybody f---ing likes you.”