The film was at its strongest in this long escape sequence, only losing its grip with an ending that just faded away, failing to mirror David Koepp's vision of Tom in the emotional position of John Wayne in John Ford's ‘The Searchers’ after he has safely delivered Natalie Wood home. Nevertheless it proved to be Cruise's biggest box-office hit.
Cruise, his sister and PR Lee Anne DeVette, his agent Kevin Huvane and, finally, Steven Spielberg all had to appeal personally to the President of Universal Studios, Ron Mayer, to allow a Scientology tent peopled by ministers and assistants, to be erected on the studio lot, where no solicitation is allowed. Permission was at last given, providing the tent was not used for recruitment purposes. This, combined with DeVette's insistence that United International Pictures executives involved in the international release of the film go on a four-hour tour of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and that journalists visiting for the junket be obliged to do the same, presaged a summer of bizarre behaviour by her brother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Between his two big Spielberg movies, Tom made another film for DreamWorks – ‘Collateral’. Steven had little or nothing to do with it. The production fell under the aegis of the married couple Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who had produced ‘Catch Me if You Can’ and ‘The Terminal’ and were Spielberg's two closest colleagues after Kathleen Kennedy.
‘Collateral’ was an ingenious idea by a young Australian, Stuart Beattie. In the short space of one night a hit man, Vincent, arrives in town with the mission to kill five witnesses in an impending drugs trial. He hires a cab for the night. The intended sixth victim is the attractive female Federal Prosecutor whom the driver, Max, picked up earlier and with whom he has established a romantic rapport.
Michael Mann was hired to direct. He had not done anything since his rather plodding biopic ‘Ali’, with Will Smith, but his curriculum vitae before that was infinitely more impressive. A writer on ‘Starsky and Hutch’, he had masterminded ‘Miami Vice’ and directed what was easily the most outstanding Hannibal Lecter film, ‘Manhunter’, with Brian Cox as the Chianti, fava beans and human liver gourmet. Mann, an American, had trained at the London International Film School under the veteran Charles Crichton who, despite masterly Ealing comedies like ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’, suffered a twenty-five-year break from features following a dispute with Burt Lancaster on ‘The Birdman of Alacatraz’ in 1961. John Cleese then resuscitated his career by inviting him to direct ‘A Fish Called Wanda’.
Crichton would recall how at Ealing they used to cast two stars in the leads, say Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway, and then ask them to switch roles. Mann used Crichton's technique on ‘Collateral’. He hired the 'urbane, kinetic, impulsive stand-up comedian and singer' Jamie Foxx (ne Eric Morlon Bishop) as the humble and inhibited taxi driver and the whiter-than-white, all American hero Tom Cruise as a hired killer, “a stone hearted sociopath, a really bad guy.” Mann added: “It puts actors on the frontier at the end of a branch with no net. And that brings out the best in them because they have never been there before.”
Mann hardly had the Hollywood firepower to do an Ealing switch, being quite a long drop down the batting order from Tom Cruise. But the latter was undoubtedly in the mood for a change of character. “Michael Mann sent me a script. It was not an intellectual decision. I read something and think about why I was interested in it later. Churchill once said of Hitler: ‘I'm glad I never met the man. I might have been charmed by the little devil.’ And that's a perfect line. A person like Vincent doesn't feel responsible for what he's doing, that he's got to go and kill these people. They deserve what they're going to get. There is this disconnection from life, from responsibility to your fellow man. What you find out about these people is that they think they are absolutely right in what they're doing.”
Mann helped him design Vincent, whom Tom calls 'the silver fox'. Greying hair and stubble, immaculate grey suit, white shirt, grey tie. “As an actor,” Cruise observed, “sometimes you work from the inside out and sometimes from the outside in.” Cruise, who by now had an almost compulsive need to become the character he was playing, rejoiced in Mann's desire to give Vincent a back story even though it is never mentioned in the film. Mann told him that Vince grew up in the steel mill town of Gary, Indiana. They studied pictures of the place and his likely home. His mother died in childbirth and he was brought up by foster parents. lf every person who suffered these privations were to kill six people a night, the world would be a parlous place.
More relevantly, Mann was anxious that Cruise become a natural born killer. The star spent three months with a British SAS soldier, Mick Gould, learning the body language of a man who shoots with real bullets (as opposed to cowboy blanks). It shows in the movie, with Tom manipulating his gun as his best friend, especially in a moment when he is thrown on his back in a nightclub and releases a stream of fire between his knees. Cruise's religion, too, came in handy in creating the character.
“I've studied antisocial behaviour and personalities, and in Scientology there is a large body of knowledge about anti-socials. So I worked to create Vincent's moral code from that.”
The film was a huge commercial step for Mann but a lesser one for Cruise. The reviews were tepid and the American box-office just nudged above what was by now Cruise's base figure for a movie: $100 million. As ever, his co-star took the Oscar glory. Jamie Foxx was nominated as Best Supporting Actor, something that undoubtedly paved his way to ‘Ray’, the biopic of the blind pianist Ray Charles. In 2005 Foxx won the Best Actor Oscar for his interpretation of the part.
In March 2004 Tom's elder sister, Lee Anne DeVette, told the world that her brother had ended his relationship with Penelope Cruz in January of that year. Lee Anne stated that it was 'an amicable break-up', a state of affairs underlined by Penelope's spokesman, Robert Garlock, who revealed that they remained 'good friends.' Penelope did not seem to be obsessed with Scientology and, since splitting with Tom, has not appeared to be an advocate of the religion. Breaking up must have been hard to do since in January Penelope was in the middle of the Sahara Desert making a movie of the same name, while Tom was shooting both a film and a lot of people in ‘Collateral’. But the wonders of email possibly played their part.
Senorita Cruz had been photographed several times at premieres with Tom, but she spent most of the period of their relationship seemingly taking part in a bad film competition ranging from ‘Masked and Anonymous’ with Bob Dylan to ‘Fanfani la tulipe’, ‘Gothika’, ‘Non ti muovere’, ‘Noel’ and ‘Head in the Clouds’. Little is to be gained by outlining the storylines of these works since virtually nobody went to see them.
What is noteworthy is that they took her to France, Canada, Italy, Canada again, Paris and London. Tom, meanwhile, had repaired for a substantial time to the ends of the earth - New Zealand - which did duty for Japan in his Samurai movie and Australia for ‘Mission: Impossible II’.
It would take a diary secretary to compute how many days the couple spent together during the three years, but the story does have a semi-happy ending for Cruz. ‘Sahara’, starring Matthew McConaughey, was something of a hit, enough at least to ensure her continuing presence in celebrity magazines even without being an appendage to Tom.
In the junkets and attendant interviews to promote ‘Collateral’ in August 2004 Cruise chose to bang the drum for Scientology and, even before the Brooke Shields outburst, lectured reporters on the evils of anti-depressants.
It is now almost exactly fifty years since moniamine oxidase inhibitors were successfully used in the treatment of depression, with the subsequent selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors effectively altering the level of mood-changing serotonin in the brain and lifting dark moods, to be followed by the Prozac family which did the same job more speedily and effectively. The chemical facts of these have been empirically verified internationally by the best brains in medical science, not least in an in-depth study by Rockefeller University. Cruise, however, l
ectured journalists that anti-depressants, in fact, were harmful according to Lafayette Ron Hubbard, the science fiction storyteller. We are free to decide which body of learning is correct.
Without doubt the abuse of Prozac is just as dangerous as the abuse of alcohol or aspirin but it was the very presence of Prozac that the star saw as evil, not to mention the whole history and practice of clinical psychiatry.
Tom was by now thought to have audited his way to Scientology's highest grade and crossed the 'Bridge to Total Freedom'. He is very close to the head of the organisation, David Miscavige, and spends time at Golden Era Productions, an exclusive desert compound. Jessica Rodriguez, one of the staff there, was assigned to look after Katie Holmes when she became engaged to Tom and sat in on her ‘Batman Returns’ interviews. Katie eagerly embraced the faith and, when she found she was pregnant, had her baby shower at the Scientology Celebrity Center in Los Angeles.
Tom's behaviour in 2005 turned several previously favourable publications against him. Vanity Fair carried the cover banner 'Has Tom Cruise Lost His Marbles?' on its August issue and, in its edition of March 2006, Rolling Stone led with a thirteen thousand-word minutely researched story that was deeply critical of Scientology.
This was the cruellest cut of all. Not only had Rolling Stone been a constant champion of Tom and his movies, but the editor, Jann Wenner, had had a cameo role in ‘Jerry Maguire’ and Cameron Crowe, the film's director and Rolling Stone reporter and, subsequently, devotee, had been a loyal friend to Tom. The magazine appeared to doubt what it described as Hubbard's claim that 75 million years ago an evil warlord named Xenu put 13.5 trillion beings from overpopulated planets onto Earth and took issue with the fact that people were having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach 'Total Freedom'.
So when it came to ‘Mission: Impossible III’, Rolling Stone got no set access or interviews. This episode of the series moved from Rome to Naples (where the Palazzo Reale at nearby Di Caserta doubled for the Vatican) to Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which was blown up in a manner reminiscent of the Florida Keys in Arnold Schwarzenegger's ‘True Lies’. In fact throughout the film one is reminded of similar scenes from other action movies. No crime in this: neither Mozart nor Shakespeare was averse to a bit of borrowing. The Mozart/Shakespeares in this instance were Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who had helped director J. J. Abrams create the 2001 television series ‘Alias’ in which Jennifer Garner played a CIA double agent.
It had been rumoured that ‘Mission: Impossible III’ was in trouble when directors David Fincher and Joe Carnaghan pulled out and Tom did ‘War of the Worlds’ instead. But the loss was theirs - both men went on to make unsuccessful movies and, after seeing ‘Alias’ DVDs, Tom was convinced that Abrams, creator of the wonderfully impenetrable ‘Lost’, could direct an action feature - and he was right. In this episode Ethan is obliged to prise a Hitchcockian MacGuffin called the Rabbit from the sizeable hands of utterly evil Philip Seymour Hoffman. Sadly his part is woefully underwritten - they didn't know they were dealing with a future Oscar-winner then. The film is all Ethan. He leaps from skyscraper rooftops in China, drops hundreds of feet by wire until his nose almost grazes the pavement, and gets married to Michelle Monaghan who thinks he studies traffic systems. In some respect he does as he dodges speeding vehicles in the streets of Shanghai.
After the shoot Michelle confessed: “I couldn't have asked to kiss a better guy. When we finished I went over to Katie Holmes and said I understood why she kept him around.”
The film remains true to the TV template with the Lalo Schifrin tune, the latex masks being pulled off when you least expect it, and - for the first time - being created, along with the voice computer that completes Cruise's transformation into Hoffman. This scene has a very nervy countdown, but the imperative that drives the entire movie is about countdowns. From the pre-title sequence where Tom is given ten seconds by nasty Seymour Hoffman to reveal the whereabouts of the Rabbit before pulling the trigger on his bride to Ethan's five-seconds-to-destruct orders to the time-release capsules in the IMF victim's brain to the forty- eight hours Tom has to find the damned Rabbit's foot to Tom's own '1-2-3-4 execute!' and innumerable - well, exactly numerable, others - the movie has more countdowns than the late, and sadly lamented, Richard Whiteley's television show.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘Mission: Impossible 111’ was a success by the standards of most films, taking $397.9 million worldwide, but not by its own high standards. The first film in 1996 had made $457.7 million and the second capped that with an impressive $546.4 million in 2000. But, ten years after the start of the franchise, takings had fallen by nearly $150 million.
It wasn’t the money, however, that caused 83-year-old Sumner Redstone to drop Tom from Paramount Studios which he owned. It was his wife. 43-year-old former teacher Paula Fortunato had been very upset about Tom being nasty about Brooke Shields on the Today Show and so her husband, citing ‘behaviour unacceptable to the studio’ bade him farewell.
Tom’s partner in his unrenewed bread-and-breakfast deal at Paramount was his former agent, Paula Wagner. Her husband, Rick Nicita, was now one of the managing partners of Creative Artists. They were hardly going to let the superstar’s career be wrecked on the rocks of Ms. Fortunato, so, to save face, Cruise and Wagner took over the largely defunct United Artists studio, part of MGM. To get the show on the road they made a film ‘Lions for Lambs’ (2007) and called in the services of the man who in many ways helped to get Creative Artists off the ground, Robert Redford, to act and direct, and another favoured client, Meryl Streep, who happened to have the same agent as Tom in Kevin Huvane of CAA to co-star.
To say that it was an unformed script panicked into production would be generous. Redford, turned seventy, still looked presentable but was not as dab a hand as directing as he had been when he won the Oscar for ‘Ordinary People’ more than a quarter of a century earlier. ‘Lions for Lamb’ was a quote from a German general during the First World War regarding the British politicians view of their foot soldiers – although not one on the lips of every American.
The story takes place concurrently in three locations: in Afghanistan two young Army rangers are injured and stranded behind the lines; in Washington, an ambitious young senator (Tom Cruise) unveils his new Middle East strategy to a television reporter (Meryl Streep); in California, a political science professor (Robert Redford) tries to convince a gifted student not to devote his life to money and pleasure, but to devote it to his country.
Where the $35 million it cost to make the film was spent is difficult to identify since it consists of a few conversations interpolated with some unconvincing battle footage. Perhaps it went to the stars. It certainly didn’t manage to put United Artists back on the map, taking only $15 million in box-office returns in the United States.
Although there were innumerable paparazzi pictures of the newly pregnant Katie Holmes, after the birth of Suri on April 16th 2006, both mother and child became invisible. Some cynics wondered if Katie really had been pregnant and had just gone shopping with a cushion up her jumper but their scepticism was confounded in the October issue of Vanity Fair that year when the new Cruise family was given more than twenty pages coverage with snaps by Annie Liebowitz.
Their reporter, Jane Sarkin, spent a week with the Cruise family on their ranch near Telluride, Colorado, a 400-acre piece of paradise with the Rocky Mountain peaks in the distance.
Miss Sarkin rode with the family, hiked with them in the hills and drove with them through the countryside. She revealed that: ‘The house has the feel of a sprawling lodge or chalet, with rustic, log-cabin touches - informal, airy, built with honey-colored deadwood from Oregon. The family room has a vast stone fireplace made by local craftsmen. The Cruises spend long hours in the kitchen, dining room, and living room. There is a guesthouse, called “the bunkhouse,” set, like the main quarters, amid stands of aspen, which residents call “quakies.” The white bark of the trees has been rubbed dar
k brown by herds of wandering elk. Around the grounds are a sleep-in tepee and an in-ground trampoline.’
Tom, who evidently began planning his refuge in 1990, had now realized his dream of having a getaway in the mountains, a home filled with family and friends, a place where he could raise his children. “My whole life I always wanted to be a father,” he said. “I always said to myself that my children would be able to depend on me and I would always be there for them and love them - that I’d never make a promise to my kids that I couldn’t keep. I’m not one of those people who believe you can spoil a child with too much love. You can never give a child too much love. There’s just no way.”
‘The Cruise athleticism and competitive spirit are everywhere in evidence. The kids, with Dad in the lead, roar around their homemade motocross track,’ wrote Jane. ‘Katie, Tom, and the family ride horses, fish, exercise, hike, and play round after round of Take Two, a quick-paced crossword-style game, using Scrabble tiles. Tom seems proud to have encouraged his kids to share in his need for speed. Meanwhile, many of the relatives are off flying over the mountains in sleek white gliders. Tom takes the opportunity to fit in a round of golf with his future father-in-law and various Holmes men.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 28