His guide was a sports attorney, Leigh Steinberg (whom he rewarded with a small speaking part in the movie.) After meeting innumerable sports agents and their clients, he began to formulate the character of Jerry Maguire. The idea was that this would be a man of ideals. He is a top agent at the fictional Sports Management International but the film begins with him quitting this firm which he regards as cynical, giving the office floor a farewell sermon in the form of a Mission Statement about downsizing and doing that himself as only one client, footballer Rod Tidwell, and one secretary, Dorothy Boyd, are prepared to accompany him on this individual journey towards what he perceives as real success.
The part was created with Tom Hanks in mind but Hanks turned it down as he wanted to direct his own film ‘That Thing You Do!’ But Creative Artists had another client on their books who might take a look at it.
Tom Cruise was in London where Nicole was still filming ‘The Portrait of a Lady.’ He read ‘Jerry Maguire’ and called Crowe. “I liked your script. I relate to this character. I cried when I read it.”
They already knew each other socially. Sean Penn who had been with Tom in ‘TAPs’ had played Jeff Spicoli in ‘Fast Times at Ridgmont High.’ Tom had graduated to ‘Risky Business’ and the two of them and their friends sometimes partied together.
Crowe was delighted: the presence of Cruise would multiply the box-office. But it was not a done deal. The star flew to Los Angeles to meet Crowe and his collaborative producer, James L. Brooks – something of legend who had learnt his craft writing the ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’, won his Emmies for ‘The Simpsons’ and his Oscar for ‘Terms of Endearment’. Both men had been counselled that Cruise would not play a ‘loser’ which Jerry is for most of the movie but the star seemed unconcerned. “Who knows if I’m right for this part?” he told them. “How about if I just read it for you?”
They were happy with him – surprised, even, that such a major star would read. But Cruise was not yet happy with himself. He needed to get deeper into the part and it was only after two months of research and studying of videos of sports agents that he felt he had cracked the character.
His gain was Winona Ryder’s loss. She had been scheduled to play Dorothy, the loving secretary, opposite Hanks but when she tested with Cruise they looked, unfortunately, like brother and sister.
The producers looked at more contrasting female leads – Cameron Diaz, Marisa Tomei, Bridget Fonda, Posey Parker, Mia Sorvino, Courtney Love etc. – but timing is everything in a movie career and the scouts and agents were returning to Hollywood from Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. The toast of the mountain had been Renee Zellweger, who had played a nineteenth century pulp fiction writer in a small independent film ‘The Whole Wide World.’
Renee had a distinct advantage over her competitors when she came to test for the young widow struggling to bring up a son. No Method acting was required. That morning she put her card into an ATM machine to withdraw some money and found she had none.
With those bee-sting lips, Crowe watched her and knew he had found his Dorothy.
Jamie Foxx, a high school quarterback who would later win the Best Actor Oscar for ‘Ray’, tested for Rod but was beaten to the part by Cuba Gooding Jr. who had had a small part in ‘A Few Good Men.’ When summoned to audition for the role he informed Crowe “I’m going to pee all over this part” and on arriving to test with Tom yelled: “Let’s do it. I’m going to knock this motherfucker out of the park!”
Rubbing Cruise and Cuba together was like a skilled boy scout with two sticks: they were combustible. The double-charged electricity they brought to the screen reached its apogee in Cuba’s memorable ad-lib - “Show me the money!”
Cruise was more considered in his approach to the part of Jerry. “It was a great role, a difficult role, and I knew I’d go places I hadn’t been before as an actor. The structure of the script defies, really, what people think works in a movie because you never knew where the story was going to. Cameron’s got so many stories being told.”
The central story was Jerry’s determination, double-crossed by a valuable client and dumped by his girl friend, to keep the faith in Rod where others have little. At the same time he makes a curiously sacrificial marriage to Dorothy who loves him but whom he does not love.
Do things turn out all right in the end? Does the box-office dollar wave its magic wand over the laws of probability?
The film has nice touches, not least Jerry’s artfully ad-libbed scenes with six-year-old Jonathan Lipnicki (Dorothy’s son) who himself provided the information that “the human head weighs eight pounds” and his reconciliation with Dorothy as she is in the middle of a divorced women’s support group (providing a part for Crowe’s mum) and she calmly tells him: “You had me from hello.”
This matrimonial reconciliation had its repercussions on some cinemagoers. “People come up to me and say ‘this is the movie I showed to my boyfriend and he proposed,’” Tom reveals.
Once again Tom Cruise played foil to an Oscar Winner – Cuba won Best Supporting Actor – and once again he was denied one himself. Although nominated for a compelling performance, disability once again won the day with Geoffrey Rush as the mentally impaired pianist, David Helfgott.
It was, however, the fifth Tom Cruise picture in a row to gross more than a million dollars. Much more. His popularity was at an all time high.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the summer of 1996 Tom Cruise’s star was more than in the ascendant; it was higher than any other in Hollywood. These were the United States box-office gross of his last five films – ‘Interview with the Vampire’: $105m; ‘A Few Good Men’: $141m; ‘Jerry Maguire’: $154m; ‘The Firm’: $158m; ‘Mission Impossible’: $181m.
By the time foreign rentals, TV, VHS and DVD profits had been accumulated this total would exceed half a billion dollars of which Tom would get a substantial bite.
He insists: “I’ve never done work for money, ever. If your choices are based on grosses and the film doesn’t do well, what does that mean? It leaves you with nothing.”
So he had time to think about what he would do next, always knowing that he was committed to producing and starring in another ‘Mission Impossible’ for Paramount.
“Chance,” as Louis Pasteur famously observed, “favours the prepared mind” and seemingly out of the blue a fax arrived from Stanley Kubrick asking him if he would mind looking at ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, a script the director was thinking of shooting, with a view to playing the leading role.
Would he mind? Cruise venerated Kubrick above any other director working in the current cinema.
Nicole was in London at the time still filming ‘The Portrait of a Lady’. She, too, was asked if she would read a script from Stanley Kubrick. “I was stunned,” she recalls. “There was a letter from Stanley saying he would love me to play Alice Harford (Tom’s wife in the film). He asked me to sit down, make sure I was well rested and not distracted and to read the script right through.”
Flattered, she agreed, and was then told to make sure that she was in her London house at a fixed time at the week-end when the top secret document would be delivered by messenger.
She shared the news with her agent. It came as no surprise to him. “He told me Stanley had been looking at different takes of my work for the past nine months.”
Tom had barely finished reading the script – actually it was more of an eighty-five page short story with dialogue – before he contacted his co-pilot to file a flight plan for a trip to London at the earliest opportunity.
Were they going to agree to do the film? The truth of the matter was that if Stanley had asked them to film Kennedy’s Latin Primer they would have done that.
Tom recalls: “Once in your life you get the chance to work with someone like Stanley Kubrick. It could be two years of your life, but it would be worth it.”
Nicole’s time was tight as she was filming nearly every day so they hired a helicopter to fly from London to Kub
rick’s home near St. Albans. Stanley was himself a trained pilot and eagerly gave Tom the co-ordinates to enter into the helicopter’s Global Positioning System so that he could land in Kubrick’s back yard.
Well, not quite yard. Stanley and Christiane Kubrick lived on a sprawling estate with several gabled houses scattered about a winding drive and the main house a vast but low Victorian building with stuccoed pillars. It was both home and workplace for them both: Christiane painted there and Stanley did all his preproduction and most of his post-production as well as controlling the world-wide distribution of his twelve movies there.
Stanley was waiting for them, dressed in his favourite home gear of a one-piece dark blue boiler suit with black buttons. His ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ co-writer, Frederic Raphael, recalls: “He might have been a minor employee of the French railways.”
Even Nicole was a little shocked. “He looked kind of stuffy. But he had the most extraordinary eyes you have ever seen. Hooded, mischievous, a great sense of having lived.”
She was terrified of him. Tom, too. “I was so nervous.”
Kubrick put them at ease with small talk about the helicopter they had just planted on his lawn and his own complex attitude to planes. Although he was a pilot he didn’t fly. Not even as a passenger.
Inside the house he had a short wave radio that picked up all the conversations between pilots and Air Traffic Control at Heathrow Airport which was quite close. Stanley’s theory was that, although the international language of air communication was English, pilots thought in their own languages and the moment they panicked, they spoke in them as well. This very often explained a near-miss – or worse. He cited the Belgian KLM plane that ploughed into a Pan Am jumbo in Tenerife. ‘Communications difficulties’ were the main problem; pilots and controllers were jabbering in French/Spanish/English. 578 people died.
On a much lighter note, he and Tom found a passionate common interest in sport. Stanley had grown up in Brooklyn and followed his American teams intensely. And the younger couple were introduced to the delights of the Kubrick kitchen table, always groaning with food and wine and open to anyone who happened to be working in the house which included two of his daughters, Katherina and Anya, and, of course, Christiane, his wife.
Paradoxically, Tom and Nic would not have been sitting there if it were not for her. Stanley had first read and optioned Arthur Schnitzler’s ‘Dream Story’ (which is the basis of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’) in the fifties and wanted to make it then. But Christiane – who is German (they met when she was cast as the German girl who sings in the café at the end of ‘Paths of Glory’) – recalls: “There was in the 50s a reaction in Europe against the American preoccupation with psychoanalysis. I thought many guilt-free people who walked out of analyst’s office could have done with a bit more guilt. ‘Use your conscience to good purpose, don’t whinge over everything.’ Then Terry Southern gave Stanley ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ I read it and said: ‘Forget Schnitzler, read this.’ He jumped onto that one immediately and Schnitzler was forgotten for a while. But he kept coming back to it.”
Schnitzler, a doctor who practised psychiatry, had been a friend of Freud in Vienna. The interpretation of dreams was their not always similar voyage of discovery into the human mind through the unconscious. Billy Wilder, who had been a journalist in Vienna, had wanted to film the story but was unable to crack it. Indeed, when Louis Malle told him that he had made another dream-within-a-dream film, ‘Black Moon’, for just two million dollars Wilder quipped, presciently: “You’ve just lost two million dollars.”
Kubrick had given ‘Dream Story’ to several writers over the years but none had come up with a script he felt he could film. Frederic Raphael was, in some ways, a curious choice for a collaborator since his best work had been thirty years previously. Kubrick dictated the major changes. He wanted the story to take place in modern Manhattan and he didn’t want the married couple, to be Jewish: they were called Harford after the all-American Harrison Ford, Bill and Alice Harford.
Raphael was publicly miffed about Stanley’s changing of his formal script to a looser treatment but had he consulted any of those close to the director he would have realised that Kubrick didn’t want any scene or character to be nailed down. Leon Vitali, Stanley’s right hand man for a quarter of a century, told me how Kubrick required the basic document from which he worked to be as fluid as a river. Leon would do a lot of the casting and when Stanley saw the video of the audition he would frequently amend the character to fit the actor. On occasion he would create a new character if he saw an actor he wanted. He never stopped writing and rewriting, something Tom was to testify to when he began to receive faxed pages in the middle of the night. Kubrick liked, where possible, to shoot in sequence so that he was free to let a finished scene have an influence on the one that followed it, causing alterations where they organically arose.
One passage in Raphael’s memoir, ‘Eyes Wide Open’, published just three months after Stanley died, indicates he may finally have reached this conclusion. ‘Kubrick never explains why he doesn't like a scene, especially when he has to concede that it is pretty funny. I have come to see that he distrusts my jokes - any jokes - probably because a well-scripted passage of dialogue which presages a climactic laugh demands that the scene be shot precisely to that end. Joe ‘All About Eve’ Mankiewicz used to say that a good script had, in some sense, been directed already. That is not the kind of script Kubrick will ever want. Anything too finished leaves him with an obligation to obedience. He did not want the scenes to carry any authorial mark but his. If I was preparing the way for him to do his stuff, anything that was markedly mine was never the stuff he was going to do.’
In case of the leading actors he knew who they were from their films. He had studied Nicole, as her agent informed her, and he had earmarked Tom from the top ever since ‘Risky Business.’ He had thought his performances in ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Rain Man’ quite brilliant, according to Leon Vitali.
Before they left, Stanley, Tom and Nicole sat down and worked their way through the story. Stanley was emphatic to both of them: “This film is about sexual obsession and jealousy. It is not about sex.”
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ - presumably Stanley’s title came from Tiresias, the most famous prophet in Ancient Greece who was blind and warned: "Your eyes are open and you see not a thing" - remains fairly faithful to Schnitzler’s book, not surprisingly since Kubrick wanted to examine it’s essential theme: jealously. To be more precise, Dr Bill Harford’s jealousy for his wife’s mental infidelity. Like President Jimmy Carter she confesses to her husband of lust in her heart one evening after they have shared a joint. This is normally a prelude to sex but she chooses to tell him about a holiday when she set eyes on a naval officer and realized that if he had asked she would have left Bill and their daughter for him.
The sailor confession launches the entire movie which is Bill’s impassioned, ambivalent response to this. Is he looking for revenge? He certainly punishes himself with images of his wife coupling with the officer – although it never actually happened. These images are the most passionate in the film.
Bill is called away to confirm the death of a patient; his odyssey that night is imbued with sex. The dead patients daughter makes a passionate lunge for him – but she is interrupted by the arrival of her fiancé. Bill picks up a hooker, Domino, in the street. Back in her apartment potential sex is interrupted by a mobile call from Alice. An old friend, Nick, gives him the password to an orgy, Bill hires a cloak and mask (later the shopkeeper will apparently offer him his under-age daughter). The orgy is the main set-piece of the movie, a black Mass, an almost religious ritual with a priest singing an Orthodox Romanian mass – backwards. Full-breasted naked women choose from the circle of men dressed as masked monks. And people fuck throughout the house, in all positions, in some rooms women having sex with women. One woman selects Bill but warns him his life is in danger. He is unable to give the second password (not surprisingly, w
e later learn that there isn’t one). He is unmasked and exposed. His life seems in danger. But the woman sacrificially offers to take his place.
Alice is asleep when he gets home. When he wakes her she tells him she has been having a dream that they were both naked in a strange city and when she sent him away to get their coats she fucked many men.
The following day he retraces his steps to try and validate the previous night. A bruised Nick has been taken from his hotel by two men. Domino, the hooker, he learns from her room-mate has been diagnosed with AIDS. He finds the orgy house but is given a note telling him to give up. A newspaper story reveals the woman who saved him there is dead – he goes to the morgue to confirm this. Victor Ziegler, at whose party this strange sequence began, suggests to him the whole orgy was a charade to scare him. Back home, his missing mask is on the pillow beside Alice. He tells her all.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 22
