Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Experts were flown in. When Hoffman met Kim Peek and his father, the boy demonstrated his encyclopaedic memory churning out facts about baseball, the Bible, British monarchs, everything under the sun.

  Unfortunately Kim had been born with encephalitis and had an enlarged and slightly distorted head. The team did not want to make a film of the ‘Elephant Man’ variety, so Hoffman came up with the idea that his character should be an autistic savant with perfectly normal looks.

  Spielberg told Tom: “This film is basically a love story. And the most important thing in that to give it dramatic quality is that there have to be obstacles. If Raymond is a sweet, retarded man there are none. He must be difficult, he won’t let you touch his stuff, he won’t let you touch him, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  His instinct was to prove correct but he was unable to stay with the project as it would run into his obligation to George Lucas to make ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’.

  The search was on for a third director and Ovitz brought on board Sydney Pollack who had had something of a fraught time directing Dustin in ‘Tootsie’ (although that had brought them both Oscar nominations.)

  Unfortunately Pollack liked to work with his own writers so out went Ron Bass and in came Karl Luedtke and David Rayfiel. They decided the love story was actually between Tom Cruise and his American attorney girlfriend. This version did not appeal to either the actors or the studio so Pollack went off to make the ill-fated ‘Havana’.

  Ovitz did not become, for quite a few years, the most powerful man in Hollywood by failing to get his own way. He wanted this project made and it would be made. Completely undaunted by the fact that Barry Levinson (who had made a brilliant writer-director debut with ‘Diner’ and gone on to direct Robert Redford in ‘The Natural’) had turned down ‘Rain Man’ and gone off to direct ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ with Robin Williams, Ovitz tried to persuade him to change his mind over ‘Rain Man’. And Ovitz’s powers of persuasion are pretty formidable. So Levinson at last agreed to come on board with only seven weeks to prepare the movie and Ron Bass (a former lawyer – Stanford, Yale, Harvard - who is one of the few writers in Hollywood to employ a team of ideas people and researchers) came back to work with him.

  Hoffman and Cruise had not been idle in the meantime. Both avid researchers, they had visited savants and autistic savants. Joseph Sullivan of Huntington, West Virginia was able to multiply 341 by 927 without paper and pencil. Try it. The answer is 316107 and Joseph was able to arrive at that in fifteen seconds. They also borrowed his obsessive, ritualistic behaviour for the film. Joseph ate cheese balls with a toothpick – so now does Raymond Babbitt. Equally Raymond’s memorising of a phone book, license plates and even his fit when the kitchen fire alarm goes off are all taken from Joseph’s life. There was humour in the encounter, as well. When Hoffman asked him if he knew the Gettysburg address, Joseph replied: “4 Water Street.”

  The scene where a waitress spills toothpicks from a box onto the floor and Raymond immediately knows the number (246) did not come from Joseph; it was something that a pair of savant twins, known only as George and Charles, were able to do. Tom even went bowling with an autistic man and his brother.

  Now it was time to work on the Cruise character. Morrow had written him much older. Hoffman was pushing fifty and Cruise was only twenty-five. It is improbable to have a twenty-five year age gap between brothers. Initially Bill Murray had been approached but wanted the Raymond part. Spielberg had been anxious to customize the part for Cruise and imparted his wisdom to Levinson. “He debriefed me at a restaurant in Westwood and I gave him everything, all my notes, everything I had developed,” Spielberg says. “I just poured them out to Barry. What he used or didn’t use was his call. My last words to him were that the film would be a hundred million dollar winner.”

  Steven was wrong – the film grossed four hundred million worldwide.

  Charlie Babbitt was initially in Morrow’s version the bullying boss of a cold call centre. But Levinson wanted to move him further up market and deeper into debt so he awarded him a Lamborghini franchise – a far call from John Updike’s downtrodden Rabbit who had to make do with Toyotas.

  The trouble with Charlie was that he was inherently dislikeable, mean, mean to his staff, mean to his brother and, initially, swaggeringly solipsistic. Tom knew this was a tough call. “I enjoy pressure. When you come from a divorced family, you assume a lot of pressure at a very young age. I’m used to that. It’s going to challenging. But I wouldn’t have gotten involved if I didn’t think we could do it. This character is always five steps ahead and not thinking about what’s going on. It’s just move, move, move.”

  The art of getting audience empathy for someone who is fundamentally a nasty piece of work is to create a character on the screen who has been able to see through his shortcomings and find something to love in him. The American lawyer figure was too austere for this so Ron Bass changed her to a young Italian girl, innocent but instinctive. She was Charlie’s assistant and the verbal conduit to the Lamborghini factory back home - also his girl friend. Being foreign, she could also act as an audience within the film, giving vent to her emotions when Charlie is callous to his brother. The Neapolitan Valeria Golina’s biggest role to date had been as Gina Piccolapupula in ‘Big Top Pee-wee’, the second in a film series with Pee-wee Herman which was also to prove the last after the eponymous actor was found playing with himself in a cinema. She did not disgrace herself in the part.

  Rain Man was nearly called ‘No Man’. Barry Morrow went through a list of childish pronunciations of male names – Charlie was a baby when his brother was institutionalised - and that was the one for ‘Norman’. But his children didn’t like it. However they did approve of the one for Raymond.

  After four years, six writers and four directors they finally had a story acceptable to all. As Tom humorously observds: “You know what they say – the fourth guy up is the home-run hitter.” The father whom Charlie hasn’t seen since he left home in his teens dies in Cincinatti, Ohio. All he leaves Charlie are some rosebushes and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible. Three million pounds have been left to an unnamed beneficiary who, it transpires, is the brother he never knew he had, Raymond. He pretty well kidnaps him from the institution, Wallbrook, he has been in since Charlie was two in order to hold him to ransom for half the three million. Raymond, an autistic savant, refuses to fly or take major highways or travel in the rain. There is a rapport in Las Vegas when Raymond’s savant skills earn Charlie enough to pay his debts and Charlie realises this is the ‘rain man’ whom he always thought was an imaginary friend. Back home he wants to try to care for Raymond but realises this is impossible. Raymond cannot exist in the outside world. But Charlie will visit him at Wallbrook.

  Cruise had always been in awe of Hoffman as he had with Newman. “I think ‘What are they going to be like?’ Just in terms of rejection, because I’ll be working with them. But Hoffman and Newman both make you feel good about yourself and confident in your work.”

  Hoffman had a reputation for intense perfectionism on set – he did warn Cruise that he was not going to look him in the eye when in character – but, there again, so had Tom.

  “At night, Tom was constantly knocking on my door. He’d say ‘why don’t we do it this way? And he’d do my lines so well he could have played my part as well. He would have been terrific as Raymond.” Hoffman recalls. “I started out by being his mentor but, in the end, Tom was as much directing me as I was directing him. He’s such a moment-to- moment actor. He’s in the moment. He doesn’t have an intellectual idea of what he wants to do. He’s coming off the gut and that makes him a pleasure to play ping-pong with. He’s a Christmas tree, lit from head to toe.”

  He was also, post ‘Top Gun’, a bigger star than Dustin. On street locations the older actor observed: “It was the first time I was ever acting on a set where I was just anonymous. As far as the crowd was concerned it was ‘Tom! Tom!’ It w
as a nightmare.

  Ron Bass had to finish the final draft before the Writers’ Guild of America called a strike. He talks dramatically of pushing the final hand written pages through Levinson’s door hours before the strike began. It did mean there was no writer on call for rewrites which are commonly necessary on a film of this order. There was great debate regarding why the two brothers just didn’t get on a plane and fly back to Los Angeles. The audience would probably have accepted the fact that Charlie wanted to get the 1949 Buick Roadmaster back home. But the perfectionists on the film wanted something more specific. It was one of the film crew who pointed out that the Australian airline, Qantas, was the only one in the world never to have crashed which led to this memorable exchange:

  CHARLIE: Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn't mean that they are not safe.

  RAYMOND: Qantas. Qantas never crashed?

  CHARLIE: Qantas?

  RAYMOND: Never crashed.

  CHARLIE: Oh that's gonna do me a lot of good because Qantas doesn't fly to Los Angeles out of Cincinnati, you have to get to Melbourne! Melbourne, Australia in order to get the plane that flies to Los Angeles!

  In fact Qantas had had several crashes in its propeller days but not its jet service which remained safe until the 23rd September 1999 when a jumbo jet crashed on landing in Bangkok. The airport exchange, incidentally, was removed from the in-flight version by all airlines – except one.

  It is almost impossible to say which man had the more significant part. Hoffman adopted the clenched body and cocked head that many autistic savants have and developed the tidy, short stepped walk and jerky gestures that almost made his character more puppet than person. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker dismissed it as a ‘one note performance.’ She presumably had seen autistic people who changed completely and became healthy, open humans. They don’t.

  Cruise’s Charlie, as Barry Morrow noted: “Drives the car and dramaturgically drives the movie.” He also had to give it all its energy as Raymond’s clockwork progress through the story has little or none. In this Cruise splendidly transmutes his innate intensity into steaming frustration. Valeria Golina’s character Susanna, very shrewdly written by Bass, appears to be – and is – emotionally distraught by what is taking place between these two brothers – such a chilly fraternity could never happen in Italy – while she is, subtly, slipping the audience the plot points.

  The actress could see the merit in Cruise. “He’s protective and strong and still innocent. His most attractive feature is his eyes. Not their colour; their ‘regard.’ They way he looks with them. They’re very alive.”

  Every film has to revolve around an axis, a turning point, and in ‘Rain Man’ it takes place in Las Vegas, a city of endless optimism. Barry Morrow intended to test his idea of a savant counting cards and beating the table by taking Kim Peek to Reno in Nevada. Morrow was not a gambler himself but bought a book on beating the system. He started to explain the technique to Kim but the boy stopped him. “I know how to do it,” he said. Morrow protested that he didn’t but it transpired that while he had gone to the bathroom and then to the motel shop. Kim had digested the ninety-seven page volume. He tested him and it was true. But Kim, despite much persuasion, refused to play cards in the casino since he knew he would win and felt this was unfair.

  He did however slip a quarter into a slot machine – that was fair – pulled the lever and won eighty dollars on his first attempt. “There must be a design to this,” Morrow muses, “but I won’t know it in my lifetime.”

  Raymond has no such morality. Not only does he count cards for Charlie until the casino bans them, but he makes an assignation with a hooker. Not that he is aware of her profession. But something has stirred inside him and he permits Charlie to touch him and dance with him in preparation of the date. It is another memorable moment in a film rich with memorable moments and the onset of comprehension and compassion on Cruise’s face is the stuff of artful movie acting.

  Further proof that Raymond is opening up, just a little, comes as Susanna gives him a kiss in a lift. “What was it like?” asked the lawyer who is deciding whether he should go back to the institution. “Wet,” he replies. The lawyer was played by the director, Barry Levinson. When the actor who had been cast in the part didn’t finish his previous picture in time. Hoffman suggested to Levinson that he give it a go. It was another piece of the good fortune that graced the shooting of the movie. Since Levinson, unlike an actor coming in, carried the whole story and back-story in his head, he was able to improvise with Hoffman and Cruise. Tom becomes visibly and verbally incensed by accusations that he cannot look after his brother. Levinson says that he was provoked into this by unexpected questions. It might just have been good acting.

  At the end of the film, when Raymond is leaving to return to the institution, it is apparent that one of the brothers has changed. But it is not the autistic one. Cruise’s Charlie has learnt that making money and treating people like shit is not the best way to exist; responsibility, compassion and love are greater virtues. “Charlie learns how to live life through Raymond,” says Tom. “That’s beautiful.”

  The preview audiences were cool on the film and icy on the ending. So was the studio. Levinson was prevailed upon to shoot a happy ending with the two brothers living harmoniously in Los Angeles, maybe going to the odd baseball game. That, after all, is the correct way to end a Hollywood movie. But the director and his cast obdurately resisted this. They had learned enough about autistic savants to know that Raymond had zero capacity to live in the outside world.

  The person who wrote on his sneak preview card “I was hoping the little guy would snap out of it” was perhaps more representative of the easily corralled preview audience than the discerning cinemagoer. There are a lot of them out there and, to quote Kevin Costner, “if you build it they will come.”

  The reviews were more than ninety per cent positive and the word travelled that ‘Rain Man’ was something different – but also something the same. Sometimes a screen male pairing can be greater than the sum of its parts whether its Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, or Newman and Redford, the audience loves the chemistry. So it was here – hence the vast international box-office.

  Hoffman, of course, won the Oscar. In an Academy tradition stretching back to John Mills in ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ and beyond, whether its Cliff Robertson in ‘Charly’ or, later, Geoffrey Rush in ‘Shine’, anyone playing a mentally disturbed role tends to be preferred.

  ‘Rain Man’ also won Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay for Barry Morrow and Ron Bass. There was no nomination for Cruise.

  But, Barry Morrow remembers well, when he came off the stage at The Shrine, Tom was the first person to be there to congratulate and embrace him.

  Barry Levinson won for Best Director. He has a hook on why Cruise is somewhat overlooked on such occasions. “Tom is at a disadvantage. He’s got such a pretty face his abilities are underestimated. And he’s not working a rebel image which is associated with being a good actor.”

  At the time no man under the age of thirty had ever won the Best Actor Oscar. (Later Adrian Brody was to do for ‘The Pianist’ – 22 days short of his 30th birthday.)

  But then, time was on Tom’s side. Time and talent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Although it may be heresy to say so, especially in a film book, there are some more important things in life than show business people giving each other prizes; in fact, most things are more important. So to put the Oscars for ‘Rain Man’ in context, one of the most powerful consequences of the film was to open people’s eyes to Raymond’s illness and kindred conditions. Dr. Darold Treffert, the Clinical Professor of Psychiatry reports: “That 1988 movie, in its first 101 days, accomplished more towards bringing Savant Syndrome to public awareness than all the efforts combined of all those interested in this condition for the past 101 years following Dr. Down’s 1887 description of this disorder.

  John Landon Haydo
n Down was a Cornishman, a brilliant physiologist who, to the amazement of his peers, in 1858, became resident physician at the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey. He devoted himself to the hitherto gravely neglected mentally retarded children. After ten years research he identified Down’s syndrome – also known as mongolism – and similar infant mental illnesses.