Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Warner Bros had an especially good relationship with Clint Eastwood whose Mal Paso Productions had a small bungalow on the lot. Clint would drive on in his truck most days, modestly presenting his I. D. card to the security man on the studio gate. After the overwhelming success of ‘E.T.’ in 1982, Lew Wasserman and Sid Scheinberg who ran Universal built Steven Spielberg a beautiful three million dollar adobe complex on the corner of the lot. There Steven works to this day and where his company, Amblin’, has its staff. No written deal was done with Spielberg; Lew and Sid just hoped he would make a lot of films for them. And he did.

  Paramount, which is sited on the far side of the Hollywood Hills from the other two in an almost domestic neighbourhood east of Hollywood, was not having so much luck. In November 1992 they realised that they had only one movie ready for Christmas release. The chairman of the company, the exotically named Brandon Tartikoff, resigned. In his place came Stanley Jaffe who just happened to have produced ‘TAPs’ and also was represented by CAA, who brokered a deal whereby Cruise-Wagner would come on the lot and have an exclusive multi-picture deal with Paramount.

  Part of the bait was John Grisham’s novel ‘The Firm’. The Mississippi lawyer’s first novel, ‘A Time to Kill’ got some good reviews but was not a best seller. However Paramount had kept their eyes on the author and bought the film rights to his next book before it was even published. Their hunch was right: ‘The Firm’ became a number one best seller. And Tom was right for the part of Mitch McDeere, a young lawyer caught up in a web of corruption.

  John Goldwyn, who was president of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, went out of his way to stress: “This is not an actor’s vanity deal. Tom Cruise is an important asset to have at a studio and having teamed with Paula with her extensive filmmaker relationships, I’m confident in very short order there are going to be some very formidable projects in the works.”

  His confidence was well placed. Although not all his future films were for Paramount – the old studio contract system is long dead and stars will go where the property or the deal is most attractive – Cruise was to make more than a billion dollars for Paramount in the years to come.

  Variety observed: ‘Paramount is hoping that Tom will become their Clint Eastwood. Their hope is that he will star in, direct and produce films for them and become a franchise like Clint has become.’

  At the same time Nicole’s post ‘Far and Away’ drought came to an end in ‘Malice’ a film written by the ‘Few Just Men’ writer, Aaron Sorkin, produced by Castle Rock and directed by Tom’s ‘TAPs’ director, Harold Becker.

  The film suspends credulity right from the start when Alec Baldwin, a top surgeon, becomes a lodger in the New England home of a married couple, Bill Pullman and Nicole. What does he spend the other $190,000 of his salary on, one is given to wonder? But he is a confidence trickster in cahoots with Nicole which consists of him – believe it or not – wrongly removing her ovary so that she can sue his hospital. Some people will stop at nothing and this film certainly won’t. The acting is good: Alec Baldwin is bad, Nicole is sexy and bad, Bill Pullman is good and dull. But the plot twists a little too vertiginously to ever come down to reality. So it displeased the critics but not the public who put it into profit and Kidman back on the map in her own right.

  It was a mere blip on the career of writer Aaron Sorkin. He went on to write ‘The American President’, again for Rob Reiner and Castle Rock. Michael Douglas is the widowed president who falls in love with lobbyist Annette Bening. This political comedy found great favour with the critics but less so with the public, it’s US gross being on a par with its budget.

  Mr. Sorkin thought ‘Why do all that research into the White House and the daily routine and problems of the President and not put them to further use?’ Film enthusiasts may recall that Michael Douglas’s aide in ‘The American President’ was A. J. MacInerney played by Martin Sheen. Sorkin decided to promote him to President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett and – alacabam! – four years later he had created ‘The West Wing’ for Warner Bros Television which has left the writer like a pig in clover for the rest of his days.

  Paramount wanted Kevin Reynolds, who had made a huge box-office hit with ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’, to direct ‘The Firm’ but he wanted too much money. They were slightly edgy about offering up their second choice, Sydney Pollack, to Cruise since he had messed him about on ‘Rain Man’ but the star did not hold that against him. Pollack, although one of the most agreeable men in Hollywood, had a track record like a metronome. Having won an Oscar for directing ‘Out of Africa’ he went on to make the lacklustre ‘Havana’ which took less than $10m in the States. He had rewritten the female lead in ‘Havana’ especially for the Swedish actress, Lena Olin, which might be seen as a mistake. What his films did have in common was length. ‘Havana’ ran for two hours twenty minutes, ‘Out of Africa’ for two and a half hours and he beat his record with ‘The Firm’ – two hours thirty four minutes.

  Robin Wright Penn was inked to play Tom’s wife in the film but she found herself pregnant so the part went to Jeanne Tripplehorn, a difficult name for a star but she was known on the set as Trippy. She, herself, appears not to have thought her name career limiting – the old studio chiefs would have changed it overnight – since she named her child by ER’s Leland Orser, August Tripplehorn Orser.

  Tom pretty well starts off this film where he left ‘A Few Good Men’ as he does a court room cross examination of a partner in the Memphis law firm who wish to hire him. They are, as we immediately glean from the menacing presence of Hal Holbrook, a corrupt bunch and Tom soon finds himself caught between the devil of Gene Hackman and the deep blue eyes of FBI man, Ed Harris. He is compromised by being set up with a girl in the Cayman Islands but after the 154 minutes of gripping Grisham intrigue (it would have been even more gripping if more economically told) he and Trippy move on to a less fraught existence. After 501 pages of Grisham’s novel the young lawyer was washed up and left a fugitive in the Caribbean but Hollywood movies don’t end like that.

  Filming went smoothly but after the wrap there were a couple of problems. Cruise had a contract that said his would be the only name above the title in trailers and posters. Gene Hackman wasn’t too keen on this so he had his name removed altogether. Also Karina Lombard, the Tahitan actress who played the bait for Tom to have sex-on-the-beach (see ‘Cocktail’) with, complained that he didn’t discuss their love scene before they did it. She may be right: it is one of the most tepid sex scenes in cinema history. But neither of these prevented ‘The Firm’ from being the fourth biggest draw of 1993, after ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ and ‘The Fugitive’.

  Karina was less generous in moaning about the continual presence of Nicole Kidman. In retrospect it is apparent that the Cruises were trying to have a baby and this had proved unsuccessful. During the film’s Christmas break, Tom flew down to join Nicole in a condominium in Florida they had bought a couple of years earlier. It was largely used by his mother and step-father but it provided them with a residency in the state which was a precondition of adoption. Also Florida law held that once a mother had promised her child for adoption she could not, on birth, change her mind. Few states were as strict as this. So on 22nd December 1992 a young mother who already had two children but didn’t have the resources to rear a third gave birth to a girl and, after Christmas, the Cruises returned home with Isabella Jane Kidman Cruise.

  “I was twenty-five when we adopted her,” says Nicole, “and for a week I thought; ‘I’m terrible. I can’t do any of it right. It’s terrifying being responsible for this tiny being.’ Then, suddenly, it all clicked. It was so weird.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nicole Kidman gave birth in the spring of 1993, sweating her way through prolonged pain to ultimate pleasure in a most convincing way. She was playing Gail Jones in the film ‘My Life’ written, produced and directed by Bruce Joel Rubin who had made his mark in commercial cinema by writing ‘Ghost’. T
o simulate giving birth on screen may have been a cathartic act for an actress in Nicole’s position - but maybe that’s just bar-room psychology.

  Here again Rubin was dealing with a man who dies, something of an obsession of his as we know from ‘Ghost’ and ‘Jacob’s Ladder.’ But this time there are no trips into the hereafter. It is a solidly earthbound construct.

  Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) has only months to live and fears he will never see the son that his pregnant wife is carrying. So he makes a video about himself which has its good and bad moments. Good when he turns the camera on himself and shows his son how to cook and play sport, less good when we discover he is not who he says he is but is thankfully reunited with his Ukranian parents.

  There is much spirituality in the film but it is not helped by the fact that Keaton’s career has been on something of a downward spiral since his two Batman films. Kidman, on the other hand, is wholly convincing as the wife who must hold his hand on his journey out of this world. Sadly it didn’t give the needed fillip to her career, only just covering its costs.

  Tom, having wrapped on ‘The Firm’ and knowing that it was likely to be big, was presumably at home holding the baby. He and Nicole attended the Golden Globes (the awards from the obscurely constituted Hollywood Foreign Press Association) in January and, naturally there was considerable press interest in Isabella.

  “Seeing Nic with Isabella I see a whole different side to her. Sometimes Nic forgets to turn the baby-speaker off and I’ll just sit there and listen to them. Those are the little moments in life when you stop and think: ‘I want to make sure I’ll remember this forever.’ I’m a daddy. Being a father is what I have always dreamed of only a hundred times better. She has changed my life.”

  One of those changes was to make him less driven. He was happy to turn down movies such as ‘Indecent Proposal’ since it involved gambling of which Scientologists disapprove (Woody Harrelson heads to Las Vegas to make his fortune and ends up having to rent out his wife, Demi Moore, to Robert Redford at a million dollars a night) and Quentin Tarrantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ since it involves drugs which they also disapprove of. Fellow Scientologist John Travolta was not similarly inhibited and took the part.

  Tom was awarded a star in Hollywood’s Walk of fame – rare for one so young, he was only thirty-one – and rented a large boat to sail with his family down the coast of Italy.

  It would take something more than playing another eager lawyer to lure him in front of the camera again since his deals on his last two films had brought him tens of millions of dollars.

  Did his old friend and mentor, David Geffen, sense this? Had the time come for Tom to stop playing the, frequently redemptive, hero and essay an anti-hero. It was too soon and would be harmful to his image if he were to portray a truly evil man. But what if he were to play a character who was not a man?

  Vampire movies have been a cinema staple since Fredriech Wilhelm Murnau’s silent ‘Nosferatu’ in 1922. Vampires were part of Hungarian peasant folklore in the eighteenth century but the Irish author, Bram Stoker, established the template for the breed in his novel ‘Dracula’ in 1897 with all their recognizable or, rather unrecognizable characteristics – they cannot see themselves in mirrors nor cast a shadow. Bela Lugosi, appropriately an Hungarian actor, established himself as Count Dracula in Hollywood in 1931 and variations on the tale have surfaced annually right up to the bloodsuckers who annoy Buffy in the present day. Young Tom Cruise-like lawyers joining the legal department of Twentieth Century Fox are taught the ‘Buffy Clause’ on their first day at work. This is because the writer, Joss Whedon, who had made the studio a mint with ‘Angel’, was offered carte blanche to do what he wanted next. He had never cared for the film he wrote made by Franny and Kaz Kuzui (whose associate is a friend of the author – hence this story) starring Kristy Swanson, so Joss foisted on a willing world Sarah Michelle Geller and the rest is television history. Except for one thing, vampires, since they do not exist, are not subject to copyright. But the character of Buffy is. And Fox found they had to pay the Kuzuis a sum not unadjacent to $50m for using the character. Not a mistake their lawyers are likely to make again.

  No such problems curbed the fertile imagination of the New Orleans writer, Anne Rice, whose novel ‘Interview with the Vampire’ sold more than ten million copies in 1976. Her original take on the traditional theme was the story would be told from a vampire’s point of view. Her tragic inspiration had been the death of her daughter, Michele, from leukaemia at the age of five. In the book little Claudia becomes a vampire and thus obtains eternal life – or did in the first draft.

  So David Geffen suggested to Tom that he might be interested in playing the evil vampire, Lestat, and his timing was absolutely right. Curiously, for a such a huge best seller, Rice’s book had been kicking around Hollywood for sixteen years with various writers having a crack at the screenplay. Geffen, when he obtained the rights, handed it back to Rice and suggested she do it herself, which she did. She had based the character of Lestat on the Dutch actor, Rutger Hauer, who did the ‘Pure Genius’ Guinness commercials.

  When the producer told her about the casting of Lestat, this is what she said: “I’m puzzled as to why Cruise would want to take on the role. He’s a cute kid, on top of the world and on his way to becoming a great actor but I’m note sure he knows what he’s getting into. He should do himself a favour and withdraw. He’s too mom and apple pie.”

  The words gift-horse and mouth certainly spring to mind. Miss Rice was as good a judge of film casting as she was at writing screenplays. In adapting her novel she had managed to achieve the near impossible: a vampire film without any thrills. No wonder pre-Cruise many Hollywood A-list directors – from Spielberg to Polanski - passed on it. The job went to the Irish director, Neil Jordan who had done well in the States with ‘The Crying Game’, the ‘chick-with-a-dick’ movie, earning himself an Oscar for the screenplay. However his last excursion into the supernatural, ‘High Spirits,’ with Peter O’Toole in a haunted castle had been something of a catastrophe.

  Jordan recalls finding Cruise pretty special. “I had never met Tom. I went to his house and got this guy-is-really-good feeling. We discussed it and played with it a little bit. I could see the extraordinary power that he would bring to it and I could see how he would approach that icy place with tremendous authenticity.”

  The main cast was completed with Brad Pitt as the nicer, narrator vampire, Louis. He was not nearly so big a star then but had made his mark by sleeping with either Thelma or Louise in a motel room and doing a bunk with their purse. Eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst who had had a small part in ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ was Claudia and River Phoenix should have played the non-vampire interviewer, Daniel, but, tragically he died of an overdose of drugs in Johnny Depp’s club, the Viper Room, a month into shooting. He was only twenty-three. Christian Slater who took on the part gave his fee to Depp’s favoured charities.

  In present day San Francisco Louis tells his life story to Daniel. Two hundred years ago he had a plantation in Louisiana. Lestat, who, according to Neil Jordan finds Louis ‘a beautiful creature he wants as a companion’ bites him to make him eternal. The two became companions – in a memorable scene Lestat squeezes the blood out of a rat into his wineglass – and Lestat bites little Claudia who becomes their vampire daughter. Louis and Claudia take off for Paris where the little girls is murdered by a vampire called Santiago – the same name as the marine who is murdered in ‘A Few Good Men’. On his return to present day America, Louis remeets an injured Lestat who gets a much needed injection of new blood by biting Daniel.

  If this sounds like the plot of an opera, that is not too far wide of the mark. It has been turned into a musical by Elton John and Bernie Taupin with songs such as ‘Crimson Kiss’ and ‘Make Me As You Are’. It closed on Broadway on 24 May 2006 after 39 performances.

  Tom took his preparation for playing a vampire extremely seriously. Visually he had a flowing blond wig and fangs
and a softly spoken English accent. But it was the inner vampire that he needed to discover. “People don’t do things because they think they’re evil; they do things because they think they’re right. It just so happens it was evil to others. So it was really important to understand that and to understand Lestat’s loneliness. He really does love Louis. He really does love Claudia. He thinks what he is giving them is this wonderful gift of eternal life. They can join him in what he believes to be the greatest adventure ever.”

  Neil Jordan observes: “In a strange way the life of a vampire is not that different from a massive Hollywood star. You’re kept away from the harsh daylight. You live in a strange kind of seclusion. Every time you emerge a ripple runs through people. Lestat would enter a room and it was like an invisible stone had been dropped into a pool.”