It was only at the end of 1984—eighteen months after the first discussions—that the new head of Paramount, Ned Tanen, green-lighted the project. They had a budget of $16.5 million to play with. First priority was to bring the navy on board. At a meeting with top brass, including then–Secretary of the Navy John Lehman at the Pentagon in Washington, they gained agreement to film at the navy air base in Miramar, outside San Diego, and on board two aircraft carriers. Mindful of the navy’s reputation, retired two-star admiral Pete Pettigrew was seconded as technical adviser to ensure authenticity.
Hollywood seemed less enthusiastic. The reluctance of screenwriters was followed by that of directors and actors. Apparently both John Carpenter and David Cronenberg turned down the chance to shoot the film, Simpson and Bruckheimer eventually opting for Tony Scott, brother of Legend director Ridley Scott, who was back shooting commercials after his debut feature movie, The Hunger, was roasted as “agonizingly bad.” His commercial showing a Saab car racing a fighter jet apparently caught the eye of the two producers. Of course, Simpson and Bruckheimer put a brave face on their choice, praising the director for his stylish photography, if not for his storytelling ability. Their pick did not seem to inspire confidence among actors or agents.
Breakfast Club star Ally Sheedy turned down the romantic lead of Charlie, the female flying instructor eventually played by Kelly McGillis. “I didn’t think anyone would want to see a movie about fighter pilots,” she said later. A similar reaction came from actor Val Kilmer, who flatly refused a role and only reluctantly agreed to be involved—he eventually played the part of Iceman—after contractual arm-twisting.
Other stars rejected the lead role of Maverick, the cockily charismatic navy pilot who grows up during the movie—and gets the girl. Chisel-featured Matthew Modine, the star of Birdy, the story of the damage inflicted on homecoming soldiers by their Vietnam experience, did not like the film’s pro-war sentiments and passed on the lead role. He had just returned from a visit to East Berlin and discovered that the Russian soldiers were “just people.” The heartthrob from Happy Days, Scott Baio, said no, as did brooding bad boy Mickey Rourke. Charlie Sheen was considered, but, at only twenty, was thought to be too young, while John Travolta, an authentic pilot, was then seen as a failure at the box office. Finally, they hit on a young man with long hair fresh from the plastic forests of Pinewood, who, at five feet, seven inches, was an inch shorter than the minimum required height for a navy pilot. Rather disingenuously, Bruckheimer would later claim, “There was never anybody in our minds other than Tom Cruise. When the script was first delivered to our doorway, we saw Tom playing the part.”
At the time, even Tom Cruise was not wholly convinced. Like other actors, he was not sold on the film’s gung ho ethos, worried that it would be “Flashdance in the sky.” In any case, the actor, who had started his own production company, Kid Cruise, had other projects he was more interested in pursuing. But Simpson and Bruckheimer would not take no for an answer.
It was at this point that the myth of Tom Cruise and Top Gun was born. During a two-hour meeting with the two producers, he insisted that he would sign up only if he were involved in the whole production process. He wanted two months to develop the script, which meant that he would effectively be working gratis if there was no deal at the end. Simpson later recalled that Tom would show up at his house and they would grab a beer and spend five or six hours going through the script. “We had a lot of fun,” he said. As part of his hard-nosed deal, Tom secured the choice of his costars, oversaw director Tony Scott’s work on set, and was consulted during film editing. As Simpson recalled: “I was against it because I like to run things. To me, an actor is generally a hired hand. I like to be the boss. But we talked at great length, and he proved himself to us, and when he walked out of our office, he shook our hands firmly and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m on-board.’ ” It seemed that the decision to let him become the first actor in their company to be involved in the whole production process was an indication of Tom’s ballsy self-confidence and artistic altruism, along with recognition of his as-yet-unseen talents as a cinematic wunderkind.
Others remember the negotiations rather differently. Far from wanting to rework the script without payment for a couple of months, Tom insisted the producers show him the money before he would even contemplate being in the movie. As he played hard to get, Don Simpson relentlessly pursued him, eventually nailing him for a fee of over a million dollars. A final meeting was set for April 1985, but with his agent, Paula Wagner, out of town, Tom was terrified about meeting the two producers on his own in their offices at Paramount Studios. “I can’t go over there, they will devour me,” he complained. Simpson curtly dismissed Tom’s plea to have the meeting in the offices of his representatives, Creative Artists Agency. Instead, CAA head Michael Ovitz accompanied this relatively new young client to Paramount to hammer out the deal.
Still only twenty-two, Cruise had every right to be nervous. In the piranha tank of Hollywood, Bruckheimer and Simpson were authentic sharks. As one industry veteran observed, “Bruckheimer is the one to really watch out for. He’ll stab you in the back. Simpson at least will stab you in the chest.” Simpson even liked to intimidate visitors to his office by leaving a nine-millimeter handgun on his desk. When director Marty Brest was asked for advice on how to deal with a meeting with Simpson, he said: “Wear a fucking bullet-proof vest.”
Simpson liked to pose as a tough guy, once boasting, “I would kill someone with absolutely no compunction.” In meetings he was notorious for haranguing scriptwriters, actors, and agents. Only those who did not crumble beneath his bullying earned his respect.
In the weeks when he was wooing Tom Cruise, Simpson’s wild excesses were more pronounced than ever, thanks to his wanton drug and drink abuse. He was often so wasted from a combination of hard liquor and lines of cocaine that by four in the afternoon he could barely talk—let alone walk. He became so paranoid that for a time he refused to visit his offices at Paramount because he thought the Mafia had ordered a hit on him. He spent his days barricaded inside his Cherokee Avenue house. The occasional visitor he allowed through the gates noticed numerous surveillance cameras outside the compound. There was copious evidence of drug abuse, as well as an armory of weapons, which he casually brandished.
“He was coked out of his mind,” observed screenwriter Chip Proser, who completed the major rewrite of the Top Gun screenplay in April 1985, shortly before Cruise came on board. That rewrite, with only a little further tinkering, was essentially the finished script, complete with detailed descriptions of the characters and the story. In fact, at this critical time, Simpson was so delusional that he believed Proser and director Tony Scott were trying to take his movie away from him. It meant that the director and scriptwriter met in cafés in Santa Monica rather than taking the chance of being spotted together in a Hollywood restaurant and incurring Simpson’s paranoid rage.
So the idea of Simpson, this wasted genius whacked out on coke, sitting down over a beer with Tom Cruise—who at the time was claiming that he needed a children’s dictionary to read a script—to whip the screenplay into shape appears fanciful, especially as the producers were already paying professional scriptwriters $30,000 a week to spin this slim thread of an idea into box-office gold. But that didn’t stop the publicity machine for Top Gun from repeating the story to anyone who would listen. As Tom Cruise—and the navy—found to their chagrin, truth doesn’t always have the same meaning in Hollywood as it does in the rest of the world. This late-night exchange between two movie moguls, reportedly overheard at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, sums up this philosophy:
First man: “You’re lying! You’re lying to me!”
Second man: “Yes, I know. But hear me out.”
It was simply part of the negotiation for Bruckheimer and Simpson to promise the Earth to land their quarry, whether it was the cooperation of the navy or the signature of a potential leading man. During filming they simpl
y ignored retired Admiral Pettigrew’s concerns regarding accuracy. “I’m just trying to keep them from turning Top Gun into a musical,” he complained at one point, although he agreed that the changes improved upon reality. So when Tom Cruise, in an initial meeting with the producers and their navy adviser, talked about exploring and developing the film’s locker room scenes to make it more like a sports film than a warmongering movie, Simpson and Bruckheimer listened carefully and nodded sagely. When Tom went out of the room and Pettigrew pointed out that navy pilots have private rooms, Simpson was blunt. “Look, we’re paying one million bucks to get him. We need to see some flesh,” he said cynically.
Once he signed in April, with filming due to start eight weeks later, the reality was that Tom had to concentrate on his own job—doing background research, learning the script, and spending three weeks with a personal trainer working out so that he looked like a trim navy pilot. In fact, his trainer did such a good job in “totally transforming” the actor that producer Jerry Bruckheimer hired him later to get him into shape.
Tom, still sporting his long mane after his performance in Legend, didn’t even have time to get a haircut, let alone rewrite a script, before heading down the freeway to hang out with the “top gun” pilots at Miramar. For all his initial reservations, when Cruise drove past the base’s gate, he found himself in boy heaven. Ever since childhood he had dreamed of becoming a pilot, and now he had the chance to mess around with $36 million fighter jets. It was exhilarating for him to fly in F-14 jets and soak up the lifestyle of a group of professional men who had a technical focus, drive, and sense of daring that matched his own. “That was a dream come true,” he later recalled. “I dug it, I dug making that movie.”
He and his fellow actors soon became familiar figures on the base. Instructor Dave “Bio” Baranek remembers his first encounter over a beer with a “skinny kid with long hair” one Wednesday night in the Miramar club. “Tom asked me, ‘What’s the most fun part of flying, what’s the scariest part?’ ” recalled Dave. “He was polite and sincere, but like a sponge soaking up the stories we loved to tell. I told him about high-G dogfights, about flying at low altitude and high speed, and the almost unlimited power and maneuverability of the jets.”
After that first meeting, a call went around the squadron for a single guy who would like to be a drinking buddy for Tom. Lieutenant Jim Ray answered the call, becoming the squadron’s “designated drinker.” Instructor Dave Baranek recalls: “He was nothing wild, but they went to lots of parties and had a good time.” Mostly Cruise and his fellow actors met at the Rusty Pelican, a seafood restaurant in San Diego, where they would pepper the real-life top guns with questions. Before very long he was walking like a pilot, talking like a pilot, and thinking like a pilot. “The thing that’s so impressed me about him is that he’s taken so much time to make sure he’s doing the job right. He’s done his homework,” noted Jim Ray approvingly.
Finally, after testing for F-14 certification, which involved learning to withstand high G forces, eject, and escape an ejection seat in water, he was allowed to go for a ride. It was a thrill seeker’s dream come true. As Tom recalled, “It’s very sexual. Your body contorts, your muscles get sore, and the straining forces blood from your brain. You grab your legs and your ass and grunt as sweat pours over you. I had this grin on my face that wouldn’t leave.”
The making of the movie reignited what was to become a lifelong need for speed. This time, rather than “drag racing” up and down the streets of Louisville in his mother’s car, he was sitting next to studio boss Ned Tanen roaring through the boulevards of Santa Monica at dawn in his vintage Porsche, a car so highly tuned that it burned high-octane aircraft fuel and was housed in an airplane hangar. “He just fell in love with racing,” Tanen later recalled. His induction into the world of motorcycles was rather less glamorous, learning to ride in the parking lot next to the House of Motorcyles in El Cajon, California. However, the vision of him hurtling along a desert road, framed by a blood-red setting sun, became one of the iconic images of the movie and helped establish Cruise as an all-action hero.
Filming, it seems, was just as much fun. Every Friday night was treated like a wrap party, with drinking and carousing by the pool at the officers’ club. Director Tony Scott, whose then affair with statuesque actress Brigitte Nielsen ended his marriage, got into the habit, according to navy adviser Pettigrew, of “auditioning” young actresses long after all the roles had been cast. While Scott, a close friend of Timothy Leary, the champion of LSD, kept his activities behind closed trailer doors, the parties really got started when Don Simpson, who jokingly referred to himself as “Beverly Hills Cock,” made his raucous arrival on set, often so high on coke that he crashed his black Pontiac Trans Am in the parking lot.
Perhaps the most memorable night was the party held in July at the North Island Officers Club to celebrate Tom’s twenty-third birthday. Simpson and his assistants Dave “the Rave” Robertson and Dave Thorne, known as Baby Dave, headed to the beach and invited bikini-clad girls to join the cast and crew for the party. As the drink-fueled evening wore on, one assistant recalls that leading lady Kelly McGillis left the girlfriend with whom she had been dancing, stripped naked, and jumped into the water. Her costars and pilots from the top gun school then grabbed Bruckheimer and Simpson and threw them unceremoniously into the pool. Simpson sank straight to the bottom because he couldn’t swim. “It was insane,” the assistant told writer Charles Fleming. “Tom had his girls there and Kelly [McGillis] had hers there. She’s doing the entire navy plus has her lesbian girlfriend come down on the weekend from Los Angeles. Tony [Scott] has his girls with the huge boobs, plus Brigitte was there.”
If life was good during the filming of Top Gun, it was about to get a whole lot better. While he was on board the USS Enterprise, snatching what rest he could as the jets rumbled overhead, he got a call from the Hollywood director he not just admired, but revered. Martin Scorsese, the man who made Raging Bull, wanted him for his latest venture. Just a couple of years before, Tom had been rapping the script with his friend Vinnie Travisano in his home in Glen Ridge. Now he had the great man asking if he wanted to work with him. Oh, and there was the little matter of teaming up with another Hollywood legend—Paul Newman. As Tom later recalled: “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me.”
The idea was to make a long overdue sequel to the 1961 movie The Hustler, where Newman played the pool hall king, Fast Eddie Felson. The new film, entitled The Color of Money, would introduce a younger version of Fast Eddie, a talented but arrogant pool player called Vincent who plays the apprentice to the older sorcerer. Scorsese had seen Tom in All the Right Moves and thought he would be ideal for the part. Flattered though he was, after a grueling ten-month filming schedule, Tom was looking forward to taking a break. However, the opportunity to work—and learn from—two Hollywood greats was too tempting, and he duly signed up.
This time there was no mythic nonsense about Tom rewriting scripts, editing the film, or choosing camera shots. He was joining committed and talented artists at the height of their powers. Newman, Scorsese, and writer Richard Price had worked on the script and storyboarded the shots for the previous nine months. When filming began in January 1986, Tom simply had to turn up and act. That in itself was an intimidating prospect. Cocky as Tom was, he was duly overawed. Even though they had met before—Tom had read unsuccessfully for Newman when he was casting his 1984 film Harry & Son—for the first few days he called the star of the show “Mr. Newman” before the older man told him to call him Paul.
Unusually, Newman insisted on several weeks of rehearsals before filming began, the seasoned actor quietly testing the mettle of his young protégé. Tom practiced pool for hour after relentless hour under the watchful gaze of professional Mike Sigel. It was a dedication that earned the respect of the leading man. “He learned to play pool better in six weeks than I did in five months twenty-five years ago,” Newman recalled. During filming, which too
k place mainly in grimy poolrooms in Chicago, Tom did all his own pool shots, except for a two-ball jump shot executed by Sigel. Even that he could have managed with more practice, but the tight fifty-day shoot schedule would not allow that luxury.
The movie was much more than wielding a pool cue like a samurai warrior’s sword, which Tom did during one scene. At its heart it dealt with the complex interplay between the old cynic and the young pretender, the older man teaching his protégé how to hustle and study the psychology of his opponents. Tom had to step up to the plate as an actor, not just a performer. He realized as soon as he first met Newman that he was being quietly and subtly assessed. It was a test he passed. By the end of filming, such was Newman’s respect for the younger man that when he was nominated for an Academy Award, he sent Tom a telegram: “If I win, it’s ours as much as mine because you did such a good job.” Newman did win, and Tom was so proud of the telegram that he framed it and put it on the wall of his New York apartment.
Indeed, Newman later described the filming of The Color of Money as the “most creative experience” he had ever had. “During the movie there wasn’t any ritual dancing. No egos. Tom Cruise and I were just very, very open with each other.” From calling him “Mr. Newman” at the beginning of filming, by the end Tom joined in the “worst joke of the day” competition on set and even gave Newman a bra and garter belt for his sixty-first birthday. There was a real family feeling during the production, Scorsese’s wife Barbara De Fina often cooking pasta and other Italian fare for Tom. The convivial, friendly atmosphere spoke to Tom’s deep-seated need for family, his yearning for a sense of belonging.
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