What was not in dispute was that the film, as with all of Scott’s, looked extraordinary. Scott had visited the giant redwoods in Northern California where George Lucas’s Ewoks came out to play but decided he wanted the control afforded him by a studio set. It took fifty builders fourteen weeks to build the forest on the famous 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios. The columns in the Lord of Darkness’s home were twenty-five feet high and nine feet in diameter. For winter scenes the vast set was coated in polystyrene and decorated with fifteen hundred icicles made out of several hundred pounds of paraffin wax.
Ridley Scott pioneered the use of video playback on the film set so he could instantly review a take. Geoff Freeman recalls him coming onto the set on the first day of the winter shoot and looking at the screen of the monitor which was showing the virgin snow forest. “Absolutely perfect,” said Ridley. “Pity we have to spoil it with actors.”
Or dialogue. Here is the love scene between Jack and Princess Lili after he has shown her the precious unicorns and she has sung him a little song.
JACK: When I get to heaven, I know just how the angels will sound.
LILI: Do you flatter all the girls like that, Jack?
JACK: It’s the truth.
Lili kisses Jack sweetly. He doesn’t respond.
LILI: Are you afraid of my kiss?
JACK: I’m afraid you’ll break my heart.
LILI: Then still your heart... You are dear to me as life itself.
JACK: Only because I amuse you...Like some trained bear!
LILI: That’s not true! I do love you, Jack. You must believe me!
JACK: And if I do so no good can come from it. I am only a Green Man, without land or title, no name or wealth to bring you.
It might have been preferable if Jack, like L’Enfant Sauvage, had remained mute.
A month before the end of shooting on’ Legend’ the most remarkable thing happened. The 007 stage burned down. Fortunately the cast and crew had broken for lunch. It was known that the stage had poor ventilation so there was a build up of gas fumes which could not escape. They were ignited by a freak electrical spark and the vast polystyrene snowscape went up in smoke. A leading ingredient of polystyrene is the highly inflammable hydrocarbon pentone.
Tom joined the rest of the crew as they watch fire-fighters try to save some of the forest but in vain.
The ever pragmatic Ridley looked at his watch, turned to Tom and said: “Well, I’m off to play some tennis. Do you want to meet up for dinner later?”
The disaster proved less damaging than people at first feared due to the ingenuity of the art director, Assheton Gorton, who went through Ridley’s remaining storyboards with him and built the necessary smaller sections of the set on other stages. They lost only three days shooting and a few shots.
Much more of a disaster was the American sneak preview. Ridley had brought his 150 minute cut of the film down to 113 minutes but even that failed to hold the audience’s interest. On these occasions an independent company hands out sheets of paper to the audience with questions such as “Would you recommend this film to a friend?” and “What scene did you dislike most?” In the film industry these are known as the ‘cards of death’. Worse still sixteen people are invited to stay behind to discuss the film with a trained market researcher. They become self-appointed critics, infinitely more brutal than the professional newspaper ones.
As Sir Ridley ruefully observed later: “The fate of the film was decided by some pot heads.”
His nerve had been badly damaged by the failure of ‘Blade Runner’ and he agreed with Universal to cut the picture down to 98 minutes and replace Jerry Goldsmith’s score with hipper one by Tangerine Dream who had provided music for ‘Risky Business’, thereby emphasising to fans it was a Tom Cruise picture. This had little effect. When Legend eventually crept out in the States it grossed only $15m.
Tom shrugged his shoulders, saying: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. You have to learn what scripts not to do.”
But as his reputation grew over the years, so did a renewed interest in ‘Legend’. A well-run fansite on the web led to a ‘Legend Ultimate Edition’ DVD being released in May 2002 and, three years later, a two disc DVD with not only Scott’s commentary but Jerry Goldsmith’s score, a song by Brian Ferry and all the missing scenes.
As the authors of the site wrote: “Thank you to all the Legend fans around the world who kept the faith and made their voices heard.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Here’s the amazing thing about ‘Top Gun’, the film that elevated Tom Cruise from a star into a superstar, that was the biggest grosser of 1986 and one of the biggest hits of all time and broke the record for VHS sales on advance orders alone.
Nearly everybody in Hollywood turned it down - writers, actors, directors and, especially, the studios.
In May 1983 producer Jerry Bruckheimer read an article by Ehud Yonay entitled ‘Top Guns’ in California Magazine. It was about fighter pilots at the Miramar Naval Air Station, located near San Diego, nicknamed ‘Fightertown USA.’ Only la crème de la crème were admitted to this elite establishment.
“I thought it was like ‘Star Wars’ on Earth,” Bruckheimer recalls. His producing partner, Don Simpson, was less than interested thinking this was some cowboy piece. Eventually he was persuaded to read it and became as enthusiastic as Jerry.
They tried, with little success, to get established writers interested. So they had breakfast – as one does in Hollywood – with Jack Cash and Jim Epps who had never even had a film made but had circulated half-a-dozen scripts around town.
“They pitched us eight ideas and one was ‘Top Gun’,” Epps remembers (Jack Cash died in 1990 of an intestinal ailment). “I had my private pilot’s licence and I thought ‘this might be interesting, I might get a ride in a navy jet out of it.’”
He did.
“When I went to Miramar Naval Air Station everything changed. I wanted to be them. I told my wife that if I was younger I would have enlisted. Flying in an F-14 Tomcat is like nothing you have ever felt before in your life. It’s like being 28,000 feet up in a little sports car, an MG. Your instinct is to hold on to something but the lever beside you operates the ejection seat.”
And it was there that he formulated what the film was about.
“The pilots spoke a language I couldn’t understand, all the time spitting out these words and phrases like ‘he’s my Rio’ – Radar Intercept Officer, or ‘ACM’ – Aerial Combat Manouvering. It’s a great athletic thing and this was the key to the movie. It’s about sports. Who’s the best?”
It was essential to get the Navy’s co-operation to make the movie, this was before the era of Computer Generated Imagery in film post-production and when it came to F-14s it was the real thing or nothing. The Navy had disliked ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ – although it did wonders for recruiting – and so were wary of the Hollywood view of their way of life.
Simpson and Bruckheimer flew to Washington to give their assurances to top naval brass. Pete ‘Viper’ Pettigrew, a retired officer, was assigned to technically advise and watch over them. As a lieutenant commander he had flown F-4J Phantoms off the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk in Vietnam and had shot down more than a few North Vietnamese MiG-21 fighters.
Now fully versed in the subject, Cash and Epps were convinced they had an exciting, commercial movie but, as Epps sadly relates: “Paramount didn’t like it. Who wants to see a movie with too many planes?”
The studio had funded the initial development of the script but now the top executives cooled on the idea. This was especially galling for Simpson as he had been President of Worldwide Production for Paramount until he was eased out in 1983 and now it was his former assistant, Jeffery Katzenberg, who was in his job and telling them he was putting the movie into turnaround. (Turnaround is one of those technical Hollywood terms meaning the studio that nurtured and paid for your project suddenly turns against you and decides to hang you out to dry from a very hig
h clothes-line.)
Simpson was a man known for his excess - whether it be drugs or alcohol - and was also known never to take no for an answer. So, at a meeting with Katzenberg and the studio boss, Michael Eisner, he fell to his knees and begged them to change their minds. Eisner, in a rare moment of compassion, said to Katzenberg: “If they’re this desperate, we’ve got to let them keep developing it.”
So Cash and Epps continued rewriting the script until they reached the seventh draft when, Epps recalls, “the movie died.”
So that was the end of ‘Top Gun'. Or would have been had not Eisner and Katzenberg left Paramount for Disney at the end of 1984. Ned Tanen, who had been President of Motion Pictures at Universal until 1982, after a spell producing Brat Pack movies, returned to the fold as President of Paramount Motion Pictures.
Normally when a new guy takes over he kills all the existing projects of his predecessors to make his own reputation. But Ned had already proved himself. Besides, he found the cupboard was bare.
He knew – everybody knew – that Simpson and Bruckheimer could pull commercial rabbits out of their hats with the most improbable stories. Humble girl welder becomes star dancer? Yes, with ‘Flashdance’ in which they made Pittsburgh look like Las Vegas and coated the movie in fifteen musical numbers, the most notable being ‘What a Feeling!’ And ‘Beverly Hill Cop’ where a humble Detroit detective tears apart Tinsletown. The role was intended for Sylvester Stallone who pulled out at the last minute and the producing duo hired Eddie Murphy, guaranteed to appeal to the wide canvass of American cinemagoers. The result was $250 million at the box-office.
So when Tanen met them for lunch he simply asked: “What have you got?”
They outlined ‘Top Gun’.
“How much?” was his next question.
“$14 million.”
“Go and make it.”
At that point, one might think, all their troubles would be far away. But, if the word in Hollywood is to be believed both John Carpenter and David Cronenberg turned down the chance to direct, Matthew Modine passed on the leading role and Val Kilmer bluntly refused to be in the picture.
Simpson and Bruckheimer had already noticed that much British directing talent lay in commercials and, having seen Hugh Hudson make a good job of ‘Chariots of Fire’, hired Adrian Lyne, also a commercials director, for ‘Flashdance’.
Another British commercials director was languishing in LA, down on his luck. His vampire movie, ‘The Hunger’, with Catherine Deneuve as the Egyptian vampire and David Bowie as her lunch seemed to have brought his feature film career to a halt with reviews such as ‘agonizingly bad’ and ‘a nearly unwatchable lesbian vampire flick.’ They don’t come much worse than that so with Scott conceding “for four years I couldn’t get arrested” he returned to ads. One was for the new Saab 200 Turbo and Scott shot it with his usual aplomb racing the car against a jet plane.
After their success with Lyne, the producers decided to risk him. They needed someone who could handle plane shots inventively and his brother, Ridley, helped the connection with Tom Cruise. Coming from the underwritten ‘Legend’, Tom was ultra cautious about stepping into another role until he was happy with the script and told Simpson, Bruckheimer and Scott that he wouldn’t sign on for the leading role of Maverick, but instead would work with them for two months on the script to try and get it right.
“I think they were kind of taken aback at first,” Cruise recalls. “I just wanted to make sure that everything was going to go the way we talked about.”
Pete Pettigrew, the technical adviser, is more precise about Tom’s initial recalcitrance. “He wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the movie but we tried to convince him that it was a movie about excellence, trying to become better at what you did which was a very difficult job – not a movie about killing people.”
However eventually Tom succumbed to the ultimate seduction. His boyhood ambition had been to become a pilot and, although becoming a movie star had somewhat thwarted this, his love of prowling the skies remained constant.
He got on his motorbike and shot down the San Diego Freeway to Miramar. There he spent a lot of time with the fighter pilots, trying to work out what made them tick.
“They just stuck me in a plane and said ‘don’t touch that, you can touch that, don’t touch that.’ Then they just said ‘have a nice flight, sir’ and closed the lid on me. I had this great pilot called Griz who really gave me a ride. We screamed along about 50 feet above the ground. He said ‘now don’t you tell anybody I’m doing this for you, do you hear.’ ‘All right, man.’ He let me take over the stick after a while. I thought it was going to be the greatest thrill and it was. It went beyond that.”
Griz was, in fact, Dave Baranek who became a role model for Maverick. He liked Tom. “I taught him how to climb up onto an F-14, told him about flying one and helped in the details of what he had to say. He was polite and he was eager. He wanted to hear more and more about the business.”
Meanwhile negotiations were still going on with the Navy at various levels. There obviously had to be a love story in the script and Cash and Epps had Tom – or Maverick as he was to become – having an affair with a woman instructor. The commander of the Miramar base found that unacceptable. “We don’t let our officers date one another.”
It looked as if they had reached an impasse. But Tony Scott set up a meeting with him and inquired if any civilians came in contact with the pilots. The Commander informed him that the Ran Corporation evaluated them. Thus Kelly McGillis was transformed from a Naval officer into a Ran employee, Charlie. Ally Sheedy had turned down the role. McGillis was five years older than Cruise and so had a measure of authority. She had also enjoyed a big hit in ‘Witness’ opposite Harrison Ford the previous year.
Dave Baranek ruefully notes: “Our teachers did not wear fish-net stockings.”
Pete Pettigrew (whose name was subsequently borrowed by J.K. Rowling for a rat-like member of Gryffindor House in Harry Potter) was amused by some of the requests the Hollywood team managed to get past him. Although pilots are officers with their own rooms they insisted: “We have to have a locker room scene. We have to have the analogy to sports. There are things we can say there that we can’t say anywhere else. Besides, we’re paying a million dollars for Tom Cruise and we have to show some flesh.”
Worst of all, thought Pettigrew, was the notion of the pilots competing for the Top Gun Trophy – the very raison d’etre of the movie. “If there was a Top Gun Trophy, no one would ever graduate,” he observed. “They would all crash in pursuit of it.”
But Pettigrew had a nice sense of humour. When questioned by Washington how the movie was going he responded: “Right now I’m just trying to prevent them turning it into a musical.”
He was less accommodating on the death of Goose, Maverick’s mate who had to die so Maverick could feel responsible. A lethal crash on the deck of an aircraft carrier was out of the question. It was eventually agreed that the F-14 could go into a flat spin. The pilot would be outside the centre of the spin but his co-pilot behind would find himself unable to open his canopy because of the spin and thus be unable to eject. Unlike such scenes in some other movies – it is not possible to do so through the canopy.
The film was to open with a spectacular dogfight between F-14s and MiG-28s, but this had to be rewritten to accommodate the rules laid down by Robert Manning of the Navy Department. The director wanted to shoot it over land. No. “That would have made it over Cuba,” Manning pointed out. “We said it had to be over international waters. And we insisted that the Navy pilots would not fire until they were fired upon.”
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 10