Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage

by Iain Johnstone

  “My tastes don’t run to shooting sequels,” Scorsese admits, “but I love Paul Newman’s work – especially in ‘The Hustler’ – and I liked the ambiance of that film. But I suggested to Newman starting fresh – taking the Felson character fresh and working a whole new story around him twenty-five years later. You see, I don’t know anything about pool. I don’t like what’s on the table, but what’s around the table, the intrigue, the manipulations.”

  Although the three men quickly agreed on a plot – “We kind of hammered together a plot line that day,” Newman recalls, “and we committed to it” – the sixty year old superstar had an instinct for what the public expected when they saw him and Price’s first shot at ‘Fast’ Eddie was too dark and too unlikeable.

  “Newman loves playing the antihero,” the writer explains. “Like a combination of all the H’s: ‘Hustler’, ‘Hud’, ‘Hombre’, ‘Harper’. He likes playing a character that you can’t bring yourself to hate. He was looking for redeemable features to come in a little earlier. He just didn’t like the guy. Marty and I like mean things – the meaner the better because of the shaft of light in the end. And while Newman wanted to explore ageing – the fear of losing it – he just thought the character was too hard.”

  Once the Felson character had be customised to fit the star, a sorcerer hustler, that of his apprentice, the flakey pool genius, Vincent Lauria was more easily crafted. Right from the outset Paul Newman had wanted only one young man for the part – Tom Cruise. Thus did the greatly rewritten script land on his lap as he was waiting for his next sortie from the deck of the USS Enterprise in the Pacific Ocean.

  At the end of this arduous ten month shoot he had promised himself a break. But now he had a dilemma. Should he pass up the chance to work with two of the legends of his childhood? It was a no-brainer.

  The irony was that they needed him far more than he needed them. Newman had had a terrible time on ‘Harry and Son’ in 1983 which he co-wrote, produced, directed, acted in and generally made a mess of. “I threw caution to the wind and, as far as the workload, I really regretted it. You can’t do your best work when you’re beat. Never again.” The casting of the uncharismatic TV actor, Robby Benson, as his son was a substantial part of the problem and Newman’s mood was not improved by flying across the continent from Florida to Los Angeles for the Oscars, only to sit and listen to his name not being read out as Best Actor for the sixth time. The movie took less than $5m.

  Scorsese had managed to do even worse commercially with ‘King of Comedy’ in 1982. It cost $25m to make and returned barely a tenth of that. Despite the presence of Robert de Niro, it was a deeply uncomfortable film, attempting to be both comedy and tragedy and ending up as neither. “When it was shown on the first night at the Cannes Festival, I went backstage with Sergio Leone and he looked at me and said: ‘Martin, that’s your most mature film.’ I don’t know if it was his way of saying he didn’t like it. I guess that comes to mind because my friends and I have had a running joke about slow movies, where the camera doesn’t move, as being ‘mature’”

  Although ‘Top Gun’ was not yet finished, Cruise’s star was in the ascendant. But even after he came on board they had trouble getting funding for the film. Although Twentieth Century Fox had made ‘The Hustler’, they were unhappy with the script. Columbia also passed. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, perhaps mindful of their decision at Paramount to reject Top Gun, finally agreed to back it – but only if Newman agreed to a pay cut and both he and Scorsese put up a third of their salaries as collateral against an overspend on the $14.5m budget.

  “Luck plays a part in a pool hall – but for some players luck itself is an art,” intones Scorsese in his voiceover that begins ‘The Color of Money’. Felson is now a liquor sales man and Vincent Lauria is pretty well a reincarnation of his younger self. Felson teaches the flakey youngster how to hustle, to use his psychology to study the motion of his opponents in order to take advantage of them, to understand when to lose is actually to win. He takes Vince under his wing with the co-operation of his feisty girl friend, Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the three of them set off for a high-stakes nine ball tournament in Atlantic City. Symbolically he gives Vincent a Balabushka pool cue, worth tens of thousands of dollars. For Felson money is God and “Money won is twice as good as money earned.” But he is deluding himself. He beats Vincent in a tournament in Atlantic City but when the younger man reveals that he threw the game in order to bet on Felson and make eight thousand dollars, Fast Eddie’s world crumbles. He realises the exultation of victory meant more than money. The apprentice has now become the sorcerer and Vincent has morphed into a more unfeeling, cruder, uglier person than his mentor.

  Tom set about the physical side of his part with his usual perfectionism. He played pool of 12 hours a day in various New York halls and then trained with former pool world champion, Mike Sigel, who was the technical adviser on the film. Siegel is able to isolate the element of Cruise that sets him apart from other actors. “He can turn his hand to almost anything. He is able to watch and then immediately do it. He can do it in anything – racing, cocktails – he has a gift of picking it up so fast, it’s amazing.”

  Tom had two apartments when shooting the movie in Chicago. In the lower one was a pool table. Sigel says that they would drink all night until four in the morning and then go back and play pool. Not the traditional picture of a Cruise who seems largely tee-total today.

  “He learned to play pool better in six weeks than I did in five months twenty-five years ago,” Newman observes.

  Scorsese recalls: “Tom played all his own shots except one – the slow motion one when he hits a ball that goes over two other balls. He could have done it but it would have taken a further two days and I didn’t want to spend the time.”

  For the most part, the film was shot in grimy pool rooms and bars in Chicago. Newman insisted that they rehearse for two weeks, something neither Scorsese or Cruise had done before, and the young actor found the experience ‘a revelation. When I was doing ‘TAPs’, I must have seen ‘Raging Bull’ five times in one week. And now I am working with Scorsese and Paul fucking Newman. What surprised me about Scorsese is the joy he had. Joy of the characters and the behaviour of the characters. He got off on the characters. Scorsese is an actor’s director – details, details, details.”

  His input is evident from the first time we see Vincent, playing an electronic games machine in the pool room bar and the sheer braggadocio of his body language tells you that here is a cockerel who has more than the confidence of youth. When he kisses his girl friend, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, it is with a feral intensity that we have never seen Cruise embrace a woman before. And, as he takes John Turturro to the cleaners on the pool table, he manipulates cue like the marshall of a marching band, a wizard who knows that this is his magic wand.

  Newman recalls that Scorsese’s most valuable advice to him was to underplay the humour - “try not to be funny.”

  Cruise’s relationship with Newman in rehearsal was more laid back. “He immediately made me feel comfortable, but he didn’t go out of his way to make me feel comfortable. I realised he was already working on the character but it didn’t feel manipulative, it was just very easy. We were sitting there, just talking and suddenly he was doing the scene.”

  Newman had hoped to lure Jackie Gleason back to reprise his role as Minnesota Fats but the seventy-year-old actor declined the part saying it was too small. He died two years later.

  Until the action reaches Atlantic City, it is a deliberately dark and dirty movie, with the streets of Chicago covered in filthy slush. There are only so many ways you can shoot innumerable games of pool and Scorsese did them all, his camera sometimes skimming across the table like a ball, crabbing with the players or fast tracking in and, at one stage, performing multiple three hundred and sixty degree circles round and round a close up of Newman’s head. The director paid less attention to Tom’s hairstyle with his dark lock
s rising vertically in a wave like Jack Lord in Hawaii Five O. It seemed to rise higher as the film progressed.

  During the course of filming, Paul Newman learned that he was going to be presented with an Honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards on March 24th 1986, presumably to compensate him for the six times he had sat there, nominated but not the winner. He declined to travel to Los Angeles but agreed to speak from ‘The Color of Money’ set in Chicago, masking his disappointment that it was not quite the real thing. “I certainly want to thank the members of the Academy and I’m especially grateful that this does not come wrapped as a gift certificate to Forest Lawn,” adding pointedly, “my best work is down the pike in front of me and not in back of me.”

  For Tom Cruise it was the best of times: he was working with men he profoundly respected and from whom he could learn. “I could call Newman. He would never say: ‘This is how it is kid.’ He’d say: ‘I don’t know. It’s a different time now. But this is how I did it. You have to find your own way.’”

  He also extended the hand of friendship to a man nearly forty years younger. Six years previously Newman’s son, Scott, had committed suicide taking an overdose of drink and drugs. He was only 28. Scott had been Paul’s only son – he has five daughters, two by Jacqueline Witte, his first wife, and three by, his second, Joanne Woodward. Scott had felt resentful about his father’s divorce and Newman was never really able to be a proper parent to him. The boy tried to go into film acting but was not a success and so he turned to excess. His father felt haunted and not a little guilty about his son’s death.

  Now here was a younger man with no father, upright and ambitious and eager to learn. The two of them played endless games of pool with each other while waiting to shoot. And Newman, aware of Cruise’s ‘I feel the need – the need for speed’, introduced him to the world of automobile racing. Newman’s passion for the sport had led him to make a feature about it, ‘Winning’, in 1969. Three years later, at the age of forty-seven, he took an eighteen month hiatus from films to concentrate on his racing. He was good, driving his Triumph TR6 to victory in four Sports car Club of America national championships in Class D. In 1977, completely against his wife’s wishes. he entered for the Le Mans twenty-four hour race with team mates Dick Barbour and Roldf Stommelen -– at 54 he was the oldest competitor – and came second. “Racing is the best way I know to get away from all the rubbish in Hollywood,” he told Tom.

  Tom had asked him during filming: “If we’re still friends at the end of this, could you get me into racing.” Newman responded by renting a race track near their location and letting Tom bomb round the track in his Porsche.

  At the end of the shoot he arranged for Tom and Don Simpson to spend five days intensive training at a racing school with his partner, Jim Fitzgerald.

  Scorsese, who at forty-four was closer in age to Cruise, provided entertainment of a less frenetic kind. He and his wife, Barbara De Fina, who was producing the film, had an open dinner table for him. “I never had such Italian food! I felt taken care of,” Cruise said.

  Tom desperately needed the counsel of these more experienced friends. ‘Top Gun’ was just about to open. Word was beginning to build in the industry, in the press and on television and radio that Tom Cruise was going to become the hottest star on the block. And the prospect intimidated him. “I felt lonely and isolated. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  When it did happen and from 12th May 1986 when Top Gun opened, Tom Cruise lost the peace of privacy and would never again be able to go out in public without attracting attention. He rationalized his situation as carefully as preparing for a part because from now on all the world was going to be a stage for him. Part of it was a fear that he might “piss it all away,” that he might succumb to the heady pleasure of celebrity. MTV was just starting and the appetite for icons had never been stronger. He acknowledged: “I don’t quite know how to handle all this stuff.”

  He arrived at a mature decision for a man who was not yet twenty-four. He would buckle down. He would not take the easy route. He would take the harder route. And he would learn.

  So instead of all the ‘Top Gun 2’ offers that were coming his way with vast pay cheques, he set his sights on working with Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man’.

  ‘The Color of Money’ duly opened to a raft of rave reviews and an ultimate US gross of $52m which was high for a Scorsese film – his biggest hit to date - helped, no doubt, by his star casting.

  Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: ‘Mr. Newman appears to be having a ball as the aging but ever-resilient Fast Eddie. It's a wonderfully funny, canny performance, set off by the actor's intelligence that shines through the character without upstaging it. Mr. Cruise works successfully against his pretty-boy looks to find the comic, short-sighted nastiness that's at the center of the younger man.’ He added: ‘The film's revelation is Miss Mastrantonio.’

  And here Cruise’s contribution is not to be underestimated. He brought such energy to his part that Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio rose a few notches above the performance anyone had seen from her before or since. It brought her her only Oscar nomination. Since then, however, her roles have been in largely moderate movies. Maybe producers have a problem with her name; how wise of Tom to elbow the Mapother the Fourth.

  Newman duly got his Best Actor Oscar on his seventh nomination. Naturally he didn’t attend the ceremony – pride and the fear that his presence was a jinx on his likelihood of success stopped that - nor did he permit his publicist, Warren Cowan, to run an Oscar campaign.

  It was perhaps as well he didn’t attend. The presentation of Best Actor Oscar was a hilarious shambles. Seventy-eight-year-old Betty Davies got a standing ovation as she came on but as the ceremony was running late and her timing was not hitting the clips of the nominees, the director, Marty Pasetta, cut off her microphone, only turning it on again when she announced Newman as the winner. Paul’s pal, Robert Wise, who had directed him in ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ came on stage to accept it on his behalf but no sooner had he begun to speak than Miss Davies interrupted him and decided to tell the audience who Wise was. She took so long there was no time for Wises’s speech so the mike was unplugged for the second time that evening.

  Newman, watching in Connecticut, was gently amused. “I’m on a roll now,” he said in a television interview the following day. “Maybe I can get a job.”

  Tom Cruise was not to make his first appearance on the Oscar stage until two years later when he presented the Academy Award for Best Actress to Jodie Foster for ‘The Accused’.

  Tom’s intention to work only with the best came about in the most remarkable way. The one actor he had idolised throughout his short career, Dustin Hoffman, renowned for his character roles, had agreed to play an idiot savant in a film property owned by Peter Guber and Jon Peters (hairdresser husband of Barbra Streisand.)

  Dustin’s career, which must be one of the most meteoric climbs in Hollywood history, had fallen into a black hole with Elaine May’s disastrous ‘Ishtar’ in 1982. In what appeared to be an attempt to recreate a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby ‘road’ movie. Hoffman and Warren Beatty (who was also the producer) played two second-rate lounge singers who tour North Africa and become embroiled in a mythical coup. It was meant to be a comedy but laughs proved very thin on the sand and the venture was more renowned for its budget ($40m) than its box-office ($4m).

  Hoffman now actively needed a part that would remind people of his prodigious acting versatility ranging from Ratso Rizzo in ‘Midnight Cowboy’ to Dorothy Michaels in ‘Tootsie’. So he asked his agent, Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists, to find him one.

  Fortunately the uberagent was aware of a developing project in the Peter Guber – John Peters Company about an autistic man and his brother. Tom Cruise was also looking for a rich acting role and fortunately he was with the same agency. So, in the way Hollywood was beginning to be run, Ovitz put together a tight package. Unfortunately the script was far from cooked and it would be
a year and many writers and directors on before the camera rolled.

  Tom, in the interim, turned his attention to religion. Although he had been brought up a Catholic and even attended a Seminary he needed something more. Many people in America are not just content with the Christ story but want a more recent and assimilable religious leader with clear-cut rules. As a consequence many men have put themselves forward to fill that need. In 1827 Joseph Smith Jr, a penniless farmer, met an angel, Moroni, who gave him golden plates. Using special stones set in silver bolws he translated the writing on them into ‘The Book of Mormon’, bringing the news that God has evolved from man and man, in fortunate reverse, can become a god. The church has five million members.