Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  Hubris, perhaps, caused Cruise to take a substantial step in the wrong direction. He was inveigled, possibly by the size of his fee, by the now disgraced Canadian mogul, Garth Drabinsky, into an R-rated sex comedy, ‘Losin’ It’. “I didn’t know anything about agents or business or scripts. Coming off ‘TAPs’ I felt like, hey, everyone wants to make a great movie. Everyone who does this loves their work. It’s too hard a line of work not to love it. When I first read ‘Losin’ It’, it was worse than the released fim. I had this small time agent who said: “Do it, do it.” I worked hard, but it was a terrible time in my life.”

  The director was Curtis Hanson, who later went on to redeem himself with films like ‘L.A. Confidential’ (1997).

  The story of four American high schoolboys setting off for Tijuana to lose their virginities in a brothel, Tom realized the script was bad but was constantly reassured that it would be alright on the night. It wasn’t.

  “You know you’re in trouble,” he later observed, “when it’s a comedy and everybody making the movie is miserable.” So was the audience. ‘I neither laughed nor smiled for the entire 100 minutes of the film,’ one critic observed.

  The opening joke title card ‘A Long Time Ago In A High School Not So Far Away’ gave a substantial hint as to the level of wit that was to follow. The boys pick up a fugitive bride, Shelley Long (the disgruntled wife of a grocery store owner) on the road to Tijuana. Lured into the brothel by pretty prostitutes, they are shocked to find their actual purchases are a good deal older and uglier, with saggy breasts. Tom just can’t make out with his but – guess what? – he does later with Shelley. So his mission is not in vain.

  Known in the trade by the few who saw it as ‘Porky’s in Tijuana’ the film in fact was made in the small Californian town of Calexico with a large Hispanic population near the Arizona state line; nobody was too keen to cross the border to the land of Montezuma’s Revenge.

  According to contemporary accounts, Tom had rather too good a time with the birds and the beer on location and back in Hollywood. In retrospect he is somewhat remorseful about this. “I became an asshole. I was the most unpleasant person to be around.”

  Always looking on the bright side, Cruise later said of his ‘cable classic’: “Losin’ It is an important film for me. I can look at it and say: ‘Thank God I’ve grown.’”

  CHAPTER SIX

  For someone normally so focused as Cruise, this was the worst of times. Moving to Los Angeles at first he roomed with Emilio Estevez and then he moved into the same Hollywood apartment building as the brothers Penn, Sean and Chris - later to make his name in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1997). “Those were some wild times. My life just wasn’t full. It was very difficult to find where to go and what to do. Very unsettled.”

  “After ‘TAPs’ came out I was offered every horror film, every killer-murderer part. I told this one agent I wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola and he said: ‘Francis! He’s not going to pay you anything.’”

  The most important asset in Hollywood for any actor, writer or director, apart from a modicum of talent, is a good agent. Agents are the oil that enables the industry to run. They are more responsible than anybody for getting projects off the ground and greenlit. The reason is quite simple: a studio executive gets an annual salary; an agent only gets paid when a film is happening. And the most powerful agency when Tom hit Hollywood in 1982 was Creative Artists which had been founded by Michael Ovitz when he left William Morris with three other agents in 1975. It quickly hoovered up much of the major talent in town.

  A young agent, Paula Wagner, who had been there for less than two years, was on the lookout for new talent and her wise eye fell on Tom. They have been together ever since, forming Cruise Wagner Productions. Paula had been an actress on the East Coast, appearing on the stage in New York and at Yale Rep. Like Tom, she took the big step to Los Angeles and got a part in the NBC miniseries ‘Loose Change’ in 1977. But her own agent noted she was probably better at spotting talent than performing, so she made the switch to agenting.

  She liked Tom and she liked his philosophy: “I realized that if you wanted to grow as an actor you have to work with the best. Then you’ll be able to have more control over what you do.”

  One of the best at that time was Francis Ford Coppola. A few years previously he had scooped up Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars for ‘The Godfather Part 11’. While there was no doubt about Coppola’s merit as a visionary director, unfortunately his success led to excess: ‘Apocalyse Now’ went out of control and spiraled over budget. For his musical, ‘One From the Heart’, he virtually had to back himself and, as it flopped on release, virtually bankrupted himself. He had to sell his Zoetrobe Studios and faced vast debts. In seven short years he had gone from movie majesty to a desperate director looking for work with few studios prepared to trust him with a budget.

  ‘The Outsiders’ by S. E. Hinton was the Harry Potter of its day. Since its publication in 1967 it had become a classroom fixture. The author, Susie – like J. K. Rowling she feared her femininity might spoil sales – had little desire for it to be filmed. But a Fresno librarian, Jo Ellen Massakian, sent the book to Coppola saying he was the man to do it since she and her students liked ‘The Black Stallion’ so much and she included a petition to this effect signed by thirty students. (‘The Black Stallion’ had, in fact, been directed by Carol Ballard who was a bit miffed about any interference from Coppola as executive producer.)

  Miss Hinton wanted five thousand dollars for the film rights; Francis was so cash-strapped that he could only offer five hundred. She agreed, adding the amusing rider, “You made ‘The Godfather’ film better than the original book and I don’t want you to do that to my book.” In fact, he didn’t.

  To thin down the numbers of actors that go before the director and producers for final choice, a casting director can see literally thousands of people. Janet Hirshenson did. “I met all the good looking boys in the seventeen to nineteen age group. Tom came along to the pre-reads for ‘The Outsiders’. I had seen him in ‘TAPs’ and thought he was amazing. He read five different roles and, in fact, got the smallest but I was thrilled.”

  Coppola had not lost his superb knack for casting as he had amply demonstrated with ‘The Godfather’. He began with Matt Dillon, suggested by Hinton, already a bit of a heartthrob from ‘My Bodyguard’ and who had appeared in another Hinton film, ‘Tex’, and C. Howell Thomas who had been in ‘E.T.’ The other outsiders were relatively unknown but went on to fame and fortune: Ralph Macchio became ‘The Karate Kid’; Patrick Swayze starred in ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Ghost’; Emilio Estevez went on to ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ – and was thus focal in the ‘Brat Pack; Rob Lowe, also did ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ but then an unfortunate video with a minor sullied his reputation for a while until he triumphed in ‘The West Wing’ on television. And the other young man was Tom Cruise.

  It wasn’t surprising that Emilio Estevez was called to the final audition: he knew Coppola from visits to see his father, Martin Sheen, on the location of ‘Apocalypse Now’. Tom may not know it but his inclusion was very much due to Fred Roos, the man who had been Coppola’s casting director since ‘American Graffiti’, ten years previously, which Coppola produced and George Lucas directed. That film pointed Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss on the road to stardom. After the brilliant casting of the Godfather movies. Roos was upped to Coppola’s co-producer. Looking back he says: “I could see Tom Cruise had talent from ‘TAPs.’”

  Coppola used a most unusual auditioning process. He asked all of those who made the cut to act out scenes from the movie together, with the actors playing several parts, He videoed the whole process, something which gives a unique insight into the burgeoning talents of the young actors. “For me it was a lot of fun,” Francis says today, “but, looking back, for them it was a life or death career chance.”

  Matt Dillon remembers: “It was the film everybody wanted to be cast
in” and Rob Lowe recalls: “Nearly every actor under the age of thirty-five was there.”

  Some weren’t lucky. Helen Slater (who went on to be ‘Supergirl’) and Kate Capshaw (who starred in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ and went on to be Mrs. Steven Spielberg) lost out to Diane Lane for the part of Cherry. Diana stayed with Coppola through ‘Rumblefish’ to ‘The Cotton Club’. Only just eighteen, she proved herself very assertive in interview recalling how she fell in love at 15 and even more so during the filming, telling Coppola that she wanted to chew gum during the drive-in scene – he wouldn’t let her.

  In the States there used to be twenty-five cent seats at the back for those who couldn’t afford cars – free seats, actually, for the Outsiders who used to crawl under the wire – and Tom had to do the scene where he chatted up Diane and her friend. “I know you two, don’t I? You used to hang around rodeos.”

  But he was nearly three years younger than her and in his sleeveless yellow T-shirt and teenage lock of hair over one eye, looked younger still. Tom Howell got that part.

  He also read for Darry Curtis who is bringing up his two younger brothers after the death of their parents in a car crash. But that was never really on; Patrick Swayze, some ten years older, played Darry in the movie.

  In Coppola’s rehearsal videos Tom seemed always to be smiling but, in the looks department, was eclipsed by Rob Lowe (who was mysteriously cut out of much of the final film.) However Fred Roos observes that Tom “was severely intense, not playing around between tests, but getting into character. He took acting very seriously.”

  Possibly, it was this lack of joining in with the rest that caused Tom not to be part of the main pack but drop down to co-starring billing as a gas station attendant. He did however get a role, unlike Mickey Rourke, Val Kilmer and Dennis Quaid.

  Tom knew he was in competitive company and was just desperate to get a part, any part. “I had been offered some leading roles but I didn’t think that I could carry a film. I hadn’t learned enough and felt that I would be eaten alive. So when they started auditioning for ‘The Outsiders’, I remember pulling Francis aside and saying: ‘I’ll do anything it takes. I’ll play any role in this.’ And he was nice enough to hire me.”

  Incidentally the twelve-year-old playing a young panhandler at a drive-in dairy Queen restaurant didn’t have to audition. She went on to be nominated for three Oscars for ‘Lost in Translation’, winning for best Original Screenplay. She was, of course, Francis’s daughter, Sofia.

  Coppola flew the assembled cast to Tulsa, Oklahoma where the story was set but he omitted to tell them that he had a major problem: there wasn’t enough money to finance the film. Undaunted, he hired the gym of a local school and rehearsed his actors, videotaping them at work. This suited Tom.

  “We had workshops with all the actors in which we would ad-lib and play around. I remembered feeling very good, building up my own instincts on acting and understanding more of each level. Learning more about film acting and what I wanted to do.”

  Rob Lowe is still in thrall to Coppola’s educating skills. “He would help us with the technique of being an actor. He might say ’you’re nervous in this scene and you want to go to the bathroom.’ He would provide us with props and wardrobe in rehearsal so we could find the character.”

  The late Patrick Swayze stated unequivocally: “My career wouldn’t be where it is now without him.”

  ‘The Outsiders’, originally set in the Sixties, is about gang warfare between the upmarket ‘Socs’ and the very downmarket ‘Greasers’. On location Coppola housed the Socs in expensive rooms and the Greasers in drab ones, with a much lower living allowance. Tom had the misfortune to be a Greaser. Nevertheless there were a lot of fun and games in the Excelsior Hotel when the young men were not on set. Groupies thronged to the place as they would for visiting pop stars. And within the group pranks were not uncommon: Tom managed to get into Diane Lane’s room and put jam on her lavatory seat.

  Several years later, after ‘Top Gun’ had made Tom a household name, he was approached by a bellman at the Chicago hotel where he was staying who informed him he had been working at the Tulsa Excelsior Hotel when Tom and the others were there. The star put his hands to his head in shame: “Oh, my God!”

  The story of ‘The Outsiders’ is street fighting turned into a tragedy with a murder, a boy burnt to death and another shot by the police. Towards the end of the movie, for no very persuasive reason, the Socs and the Greasers agree to have a fight without weapons in a wood. It rained heavily that night and the resulting brawl has echoes of Monty Python’s Batley Townswomen’s Guild’s re-enaction of the Battle of Pearl Harbor which had taken place in a muddy field a decade earlier.

  Tom fought well but broke a thumb. Nevertheless he bravely jumped up and down at the end of the battle to celebrate the Greasers’ win, his hands in the air in a pre-echo of Opera’s sofa.

  Coppola didn’t give him much to do in the movie, his character was rarely in the foreground. He was persuaded to remove the cap from the tooth which he broke at tennis so his developing smile was not a weapon. But he did manage both a forward somersault and later a backward one across the hood of a truck. Roos maintains that Tom was so nervous about the stunt that he discharged his lunch in the lavatory.

  The final film held little appeal for an adult audience as is exemplified by the major reviews: ‘a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice small characters – New York Times; ‘a teary teen soap opera’ – Newsweek.

  But, like the original novel, it wasn’t for grown ups, it was for kids and it found its niche market. It was, Coppola now says, “a ‘Godfather’ for children.” Coppola got his $10,000,000 from Chemical Bank with a completion guarantee from Britain’s National Film Finance Corporation and strict orders to stay on budget. He did, and the film grossed more than $25,000,000 in the United States alone.

  Fred Roos has a very definite recall of Tom Cruise. “We all knew he was going to be a star.”

  Coppola had the sensible idea of remaining in Tulsa with the same crew and many of the cast and shot another Hinton book, ‘Rumblefish’, a dark tale of two dysfunctional brothers. During the shooting of ‘The Outsiders’ he had scripted the novel with the author. He worked from a huge silver trailer with his editing equipment inside so he would be able to cut ‘The Outsiders’ in the evenings.

  Curiously Mickey Rourke, who had been turned down for The Outsiders, was cast as the lead – The Motor Cycle Boy – with Matt Dillon playing his third Hinton film in a row. It was assumed other actors would be available, as would Diane Lane and Sofia Coppola who were given roles.

  But Tom wasn’t available, not even for the great Coppola. Paula had read a good script in LA which she thought was right for his first lead. The writer/director hardly fulfilled Tom’s dictum that to improve as an actor you have to work with ‘the best’ – Paul Brickman’s main contribution to American screenwriting was ‘The Bad News Bears Break Training’ some six years earlier – but, there again, Brickman didn’t want Cruise as his leading man, Joel: “This guy for Joel? This guy is a killer – let him do Amityville 111.”

  Possibly Tom’s cause was not helped by the fact that he was still in ‘Greaser’ mode with oiled hair, chipped tooth and even an Oklahoma accent. The part he was reading for was a clean-cut preppy schoolboy from the affluent outskirts of Chicago. Moreover, due to his dyslexia, when asked to read by Brickman, he made a hash of it. He sensed the director was about to say ‘thanks but no thanks’ and pleaded to have another try, going again from the top. This time he managed to make Brickman laugh – at the dialogue he had written himself.

  Whatever misgivings Brickman may still have harboured, Tom had a new and infinitely more powerful friend in court: David Geffen. The music business billionaire had made his fortune by spotting and promoting talent. Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Eagles and Cher all owed their success largely to him. Now another name was added to that lis
t – Tom Cruise. Geffen spotted the considerable potential in the young actor and ‘Risky Business’ was produced by Geffen Pictures for Warner Bros. It was no surprise that Tom was called back a second time.

  “I tested for it at six in the morning. I was shooting nights and so I flew in late, got in at 1.00 am and I had to leave by 10.00am to shoot the rumble scene in ‘The Outsiders’ that night. Here I was again. My hair was greasy and I was heavy, but now I was wearing this preppy maroon Adidas shirt. My arms were huge. I walk in and see this stunningly gorgeous woman sitting there looking at me and I’m thinking: ‘Oh, my God.’ She had already been cast. They wanted to see the two of us together. I tested and, to make a long story short, we didn’t test that well. Paul just believed in me. I told him exactly what I was going to do. We talked about it for a long time and he trusted me.”