Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  The gorgeous woman was twenty-one-year old Rebecca De Mornay and this was only her second film. Although born in Southern California, she had had an unusual upbringing having attended the unconventional Sommerfield School in England where pupils were free to choose whether or not to attend classes and would meet weekly to decide on the school rules. It did Rebecca no harm; she graduated ‘summa cum laude’ – but in German from Kitzbuhl School, high in the Austrian Alps.

  Back in the States she studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute and then served an apprenticeship as Francis Coppola’s still solvent Zoetrope Film Studio where she was co-opted as an understudy in the ill-fated ‘One From the Heart’. (A Zoetrope incidentally is one of those nineteenth century horizontal spinning wheels that made images seem to move; ominously it was known as the ‘Wheel of the Devil.’

  Beautiful and intelligent, De Mornay was ripe for stardom and the part of Lana, the tart with the heart, was ripe for her.

  ‘Risky Business’ was an original, clever and amusing script, a subtle satire on capitalism, honed by the writer/director’s experience as a story analyst at Paramount and Warner Bros. It addresses all the angst of teenagers in their last year at high school: the future, pleasing their parents, getting into university and, most important of all, getting laid. Joel’s parents are going away for a few days from their house in an affluent Chicago suburb and he manages to achieve the last when he calls up a hooker and the dream-like Lana arrives, the answer to all his prayers. Unfortunately the cost of all his prayers is $300 which he sadly lacks and it is not long before he is being pursued by her pimp, while managing to plunge his father’s Porsche into Lake Michigan. Such factors, as you might imagine, have an adverse affect on his academic work, as well as landing him in debt. Much emphasis at school is put on the Future Enterprise Scheme and the alert Lana, being a youthful member of the world’s oldest profession, shows him the way by rounding up her fellow harlots and turning his home into a brothel for the night. His trust fund chums turn up in their droves, the house gets fifty percent of the take giving Joel a net profit $8000. Does he get into Princeton, as his father wishes, and does he get Lana’s love? In the version we see he does; in the script Paul Brickman wrote and shot he doesn’t.

  Tom recalls: “Instead of the of the scene outside where Rebecca says ‘Do you want to come over?’ she sits on my lap in a restaurant and it just ends on the sunset background coming up and me stroking her hair with her head on my shoulder. I say ‘Isn’t life grand.’ It was really nice. They thought it was too sardonic. Geffen Fims felt it was a bummer. So we made it more specific and upbeat.”

  Brickman initially refused to shoot this and ending with Joel being admitted to Princeton. He failed to get in in the original script. This might have been more logical since the admissions officer, improbably, arrived at Joel’s house the night of the hookers. But whether it was Joel’s unique Business Enterprise or the fact that the academic might have been pleasure by one of Lana’s colleague’s is open to interpretation.

  The director eventually succumbed to the pressure from the producers and Warner Bros to have a feel-good finish. Just as he did in the casting of Tom as Joel. The part had been offered to Timothy Hutton who turned it down in favour of playing the title role in Sidney Lumet’s film of E. L. Docttorow’s ‘Daniel’ – an unwise move as it transpired; his career never soared back to the heights of ‘Ordinary People’.

  Although he didn’t know it at the time, Tom had some tough competition in getting the part. Tom Hanks and Nicholas Cage were among the actors who had auditioned. But once he got it, he nailed it down perfectly playing a young man who was nearly innocent, nearly naïve but with an instinct for survival. The script owed not a little to the style of ‘The Graduate’, with the camera viewing Joel’s parents through the boy’s eyes, and Tom’s performance had the endearing, supplicant passivity of Dustin’s – although both players proved pretty nifty behind the wheel of a sports car. Both men were to act together five years later in the Oscar-winning ‘Rain Man.’

  The movie is replete with fun moments such as Joel eating his frozen TV dinner – frozen, or when dad’s Porsche is in the garage being emptied of Lake Michigan fish swim onto the floor. And droll lines that address the central dilemma of the schoolboys. “I’ve got a mid term tomorrow and I’m being chased by Guido, the killer pimp,” wails Joel’s chum Miles. The young men are persuaded to loose their various virginities because “College girls can smell innocence.” When Joel complains to Lana that her co-harlots are wearing his mother’s clothes, she calmly replies: “What’s wrong with that?” He shouts back: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in analysis.”

  But the scene that marked Cruise out for stardom was when he danced around the living room clad in his shirt and Fruit of the Loom underpants miming to Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock and Roll.’ This was seen by a vast audience as it was used on the television advertisements for the film and canonized when Ron Reagan Jr did it on ‘Saturday Night Live’.

  In fact the music sound track cleverly enhanced the film’s appeal to the young and not-so-young generation. David Byrne and Tangarine Dream did the original music and there were accompanying tracks from Prince, Phil Collins and Tom Jones 11. The hand of David Geffen was visible on the tiller.

  Tangarine Dream proved the perfect background to one of the other highlights of the movie: the love scene between Tom and Rebecca on the famous Chicago L-train. It wasn’t in the original cut. They had previously made love against a blue screen background. “It just didn’t work,” Cruise recalls. “It just wasn’t erotic. I remember it was just uncomfortable.” So Brickman had to beg for more money to do the revised version. It was worth it.

  Tom’s interpretation of the movie also has a serious side to it. “It’s about today’s capitalistic society. Do the means justify the ends? Do you want to help people or do you just want to make money? Joel is questioning all of that. The movie is Joel’s exploration of society, how he gets sucked into this wild, capitalistic ride.”

  The film was widely praised by the critics, the local Chicago one, Roger Ebert, putting his finger on precisely why it worked. ‘Risky Business is a movie about male adolescent guilt. In other words, it's a comedy. It's funny because it deals with subjects that are so touchy, so fraught with emotional pain, that unless we laugh there's hardly any way we can deal with them … I became quietly astounded when I realized that this movie was going to create an original, interesting relationship involving a teenager and a hooker. The teenage kid, in what will be called the Dustin Hoffman role, is played by Tom Cruise, who also knows how to imply a whole world by what he won't say, can't feel, and doesn't understand. This is a movie of new faces and inspired insights and genuine laughs. It's hard to make a good movie and harder to make a good comedy and almost impossible to make a satire of such popular but mysterious obsessions as guilt, greed, lust, and secrecy. This movie knows what goes on behind the closed bathroom doors of the American dream.’

  It is not at all unusual for the male and female leads in a romantic move to translate their relationship into real life and, after initial hesitation, so it was with Tom and Rebecca. Not, of course, while they were making the movie. “During the film, we did have a strong affinity for each other,” Rebecca conceded, “but it was, like, not the time. Tom seemed to be looking for somebody to love and somebody to love him back. He really is a pure person. There’s something that’s earnest and virtuous about him that is quite rare.”

  Risky Business was made for $6 million and grossed nearly $65 million at the box-office. So by the end of 1983 Tom’s asking price had shot up and he had embarked on his first serious public relationship which was to last more than two years. His stardom was to last for thirty - and more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In terms of box-office, ‘Risky Business’ was the tenth most profitable film of the year, some way behind ‘Star Wars V1: The Return of the Jedi’ which grossed more than $300m and ‘Terms o
f Endearment’ which grossed $100m and an unaccountable number of Oscars, but not far behind ‘Octopussy’ or ‘Staying Alive’ or ‘Mr Mom’ (with Tom Hanks).

  In terms of quality, Hollywood had not then surrendered to popcorn movies to feed the multiplexes and mature thoughtful films were being written and made: Lawrence Kasdan’s ‘The Big Chill’ about a university reunion; ‘The Right Stuff’, based on Tom Wolfe’s perceptive book about selecting the pilots who would go to the moon; and ‘Silkwood’ starring Meryl Streep – Mike Nichols’ film about the plutonium plant activist, Karen Silkwood, who possibly died for her commitment.

  Films like these were manna for the critics and adult cinemagoers alike, but presented twenty-year-old Cruise with a problem. His avowed intention to work with the best was thwarted by the fact that the best were occupied with preparing films like ‘The Killing Fields’, ‘A Passage to India’, ‘Romancing the Stone’, or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ which had no place for a juvenile lead.

  So he settled for second best. Which was a mistake. ‘All The Right Moves’ was based on an article by Pat Jordan, who co-wrote the screenplay (her first and last) with Michael Kane whose provenance was ‘Jaws 111D’ and ‘The Legend of the Lone Ranger’. The director was Michael Chapman who had been nominated for an Oscar as cinematographer for Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’ but had none of his master’s magic at the helm. This was, in every way, a wrong move and the wrong movie.

  The film, a predictable story of a high school football player who needs to get a college scholarship or else he faces a lifetime in the steel mills, was shot in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. There was a poignant irony here: the Bethlehem Steel Corporation had recently laid off two-thirds of its workforce so there were abundant unemployed men to act as extras, especially in the stadium scenes.

  Tom may have received his first million dollar pay day for the movie, but it was a poor investment for Lucille Ball Productions and Twentieth Century Fox, making only a quarter of the gross that ‘Risky Business’ did. But Cruise’s acting reputation was enhanced. I used to have a drink with the American critics in the bar of the Majestic Hotel during the Cannes Film Festival and both Kathleen Carroll of The New York Daily News and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times told me he was the rising star to watch out for.

  On January 9th 1984 his father, Tomas Cruise Mapother 111, died of cancer. He was only forty-nine. With the exception of one meeting, he had been estranged from his children for nearly a decade since that midnight flit. It seemed that he had become something of an itinerant hippy in California, hoping to earn a living as an inventor. Certainly his appearance – long grey hair and beard – did nothing to belie that when Tom and his sisters visited him in a Louisville hospital when his condition became terminal. But he refused to tell them about himself, promising Tom that when he got better they would go out for a steak and a beer and then he would reveal all.

  But that was not to be. He did reveal that he had followed Tom’s rise in the film firmament as was evidenced by the pictures of his son on his hospital wall. But he had never actually seen one of his movies.

  A writer from the London magazine, Time Out, asked Tom what effect his fractured upbringing had had on him. The actor was unsure. “Would I have liked a happier childhood and a loving father? Would I have had it differently? Maybe I wouldn’t be here today if it had been. There are no accidents. I don’t know. But I don’t like pain just like anybody else doesn’t. I feel it.”

  1962 had been a vintage year for the procreation of film stars. Matthew Broderick was born in March of that year, Emilio Estevez in May, Ally Sheedy in June, Tom Cruise in July, Demi Moore on 11th November and Andrew McCarthy on the 29th.

  Twenty-two years later four of them went off to Washington to make ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ for Joel Schumacher, a benchmark eighties youth film about a club of recent graduates who are finding their materialist ambitions hard to fulfil in the real world and drown their sorrows in St Elmo’s bar, occasionally abandoning their drinks for pot or sex or both.

  Not enlisted were Matthew Broderick and Tom Cruise who, having established themselves as leading men (Broderick in ‘War Games’), did not want to get lost in ensemble pieces.

  Unfortunately leads in 1984 were primarily going to another generation: Robert Redford in ‘Out of Africa’, Michael Douglas in ‘The Jewel of the Nile’, Harrison Ford in ‘Witness’. And an older generation: ‘Cocoon’ starred Hume Cronyn who was 74 and Jack Gilford and Don Amerche, both 77.

  But there was work in the overseas fantasy world for the younger stars. Broderick ended up in ‘Ladyhawke’ as Phillipe Gastone, a medieval Italian who has adventures with a pair of lovers, the male one of which becomes a wolf at night, while the female is a hawk during the day. Quite an incompatibility problem there.

  Tom found himself in England in an enchanted forest full of unicorns, fairies and goblins. The British director, Ridley Scott, had himself enchanted Cruise with a magical pitch about this battle between good and evil, backed up by four hundred and eleven storyboards of how sumptuous it would look.

  “It’s not a film of the future or the past,” Scott said. “It is not even a story of now. The conflict between darkness and light has been with us since the creation and will be with us until eternity.”

  If the story had been as good as the storyboards then ‘Legend’ itself might have proved enchanting but Scott was enamoured by an American writer, William Hjortsberg – especially a novella he wrote called ‘Symbiography’ about a man who dreams for a living – and they cobbled their fairy tale inspired by sources as rich as Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ‘Tristan and Isolde’. Unfortunately it measured up to none of them.

  Had he made ‘Tristan and Isolde’, as he had initially intended to, the British director would have found the essential emotional essence that ‘Legend’ lacked. Scott had long wanted to make ‘Tristan and Isolde’ – Tristan escorts Isolde from Ireland so that she can marry his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall but falls fatally in love with her. Tom would have been excellent in the part. Scott commissioned a screenplay from Gerald Vaughn-Hughes and Parmount green-lit the project. He was going shoot it in the Dordogne in France and give the characters a roughened cowboy look. But when he and his producer, David Putnam, saw ‘Star Wars’ in 1977, he felt that George Lucas had beaten him to it in character design and, surprisingly, abandoned the idea.

  But the character Ridley wanted Tom to play was the less exotically named Jack O’The Green Forest. Cruise had a great admiration for the English director’s work. ‘Alien’ had been a visual breakthrough in space films with the arresting design of the planet and the monster by the Swiss artist, H. R. Giger. Even ‘Blade Runner’, which appealed to few people in its first incarnation, had dazzled him with its design. Scott, bruised by this rejection, retreated into his original profession of directing television advertisements and stunned the States with a two minute version of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ which filled the coveted January 1984 Super Bowl slot.

  Cruise recalls that the first thing the director did when he arrived at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire was to take him to Theatre 7 and show him a 1970 Francois Truffaut film, ‘L’Enfant Sauvage’ – The Wild Child. It was based on a true story, the memoir of Dr Itard, played by Truffaut himself. In 1798 a child aged about ten or twelve emerged from a forest in central France. He was unable to speak or even walk but moved in a feral way on all fours as if he had been raised by animals, as Romulus and Remus were allegedly brought up by wolves. Itard confounded expectations by turning him into a verbal human.

  So it was with Jack; although human he was a child of the forest and Tom evolved movements, jumps, alert gestures of the head that belonged more to the animal kingdom. It was a lovely performance.

  While he was a natural in the part, they had to find an ingénue who could dance and sing to play Princess Lili, his love interest. Scott wanted an unknown and after a pro
longed search settled on seventeen-year-old Mia Sarapocciello, a Brooklyn girl who had never acted professionally. Prudently she shortened her name to Mia Sara.

  The plot, for what it’s worth, revolved round the quest of the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ – red skin, huge horns and cloven hooves) to kill all the unicorns in the forest and destroy daylight. He fails.

  To be fair, the film was ahead of its time judging by the reception fantasy films like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ have recently received.

  The English crew really liked Tom. He was charm incarnate, giving Mia as much help as he could. Geoff Freeman, who was unit publicist on the movie, says he was rather reluctant to go out and about too much as he had had to grow long hair for the part and felt self-conscious about it. His relationship with Rebecca de Mornay continued but she was only able to visit him a couple of times since she was making no less than three films that year – ‘The Trip to the Bountiful’, ‘Runaway Train’ and ‘The Slugger’s Wife’. Other than that, it appeared that he lived a fairly monastic existence with none of the entourage he has today. Geoff said that he would come into his office, ostensibly to go through the stills over which he had sufficient status to have approval, but really for a chat about the movie or sport or what was happening back in Hollywood.