Hollywood Director Harold Becker Dishes on Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin in New Memoir, Alongside Plenty of Creative Nourishment

During the shooting of the 1981 military drama “Taps”, its director Harold Becker decided to replace one of the leads in the film who he deemed ill-suited to the role with an extra who had caught his eye. That extra was Tom Cruise, then 18-years-old, who would of course go on to become the biggest film star on the planet.But as Mr. Becker recounts in his riveting new memoir “Catching the Light: A Memoir From Behind the Lens”, his entreaties to Mr. Cruise to assume his first ever major acting role were initially unsuccessful. “Without skipping a beat, he turned it down,” Mr. Becker writes. “Here was the opportunity of a lifetime — to go from being an extra to a lead. But for Tom, the overriding issue was that he didn’t want to take a role away from somebody else, someone who had become a friend… I explained that I would find another part for the other actor, and if Tom wasn’t going to take the part, I would be taking the next train back to New York to recast it. It was only then that he relented.”The elevation of Mr. Cruise in “Taps” is a typical Harold Becker story, suffused with simplicity, humility and a sharp eye for young talent. In the course of his career, as well as Tom Cruise, Mr Becker can claim to have helped launch the careers of James Woods, Sean Penn and Linda Fiorentino.Like Stanley Kubrick, Mr. Becker was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1928 and plied his trade as a photographer before graduating into directing feature films. While Mr. Becker cannot claim to possess anything like Mr. Kubrick’s cinematic legacy, he excelled at directing edgily entertaining and erudite films such as “The Onion Field” (1979), “Sea of Love” (1989), and “Malice” (1993). Just as “Taps”, which tells the story of a group of young cadets who forcefully take over their military academy when it is threatened with closure, seems like something from a bygone cinematic era, the intelligent Hollywood film, which Mr. Becker specialized in making, is itself now nearly extinct.So thank goodness that at the age of 97 Mr. Becker has opted to put down his life story on paper. Anyone who takes more than a passing interest in film and the creative process could do worse than read “Catching the Light”. At less than 200 pages, it is a brisk read but thanks to Mr. Becker’s powers of observation, there is wisdom to be found throughout the tome. “Catching the Light” includes eighteen of Mr. Becker’s photographs and he supplies an account of his career as a lensman, but it is when Mr. Becker writes about his motion pictures that the book takes flight. Mr. Becker is a sharp observer on all aspects of filmmaking filling his book with pithy aphorisms (“Talent is wasted when monsters sit on the throne”, he writes of opting to sever ties with the late boorish producer Martin Ransohoff while he observes of film composers, “There’s no script for the score…you can’t sit down at the piano and speak to them in their language.”) He recounts meeting the former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for research purposes when he made his 1996 Big Apple political drama ”City Hall” and compares his later make-up and hair dye issues, when he was personal attorney to Donald Trump, to Dirk Bogarde’s character Gustav von Aschenbach in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 drama “Death in Venice.” Mr. Becker is particularly insightful analyzing the personalities of the actors he directed. Writing about making “Malice”, Mr. Becker recounts an incident where the sudden availability of a location impacted on the timing of the film’s lead actor Alec Baldwin’s plans to marry Kim Basinger. “I had the unfortunate task of informing Alec that we couldn’t give him the time off,” Mr. Becker writes.“I dreaded the confrontation, as I was already aware of his temper. There was a moment when delivering the bad news, I didn’t help matters by adding, “We’re making a movie, Alec”, as though that trumped everything. I saw the color rising in Alec’s face and prepared for the worst. In a rage, Alec burst out of my trailer and into producer Charles “Chuck” Mulvehill’s trailer. Chuck bore the brunt of Alec’s anger. I think I actually saw Chuck’s trailer shaking.”Rather like the reception for “Malice” at the box office, the tale ends happily. Years later, dining with Mr. Baldwin in New York, Mr. Becker writes, “He told me that on their anniversary, he and Kim would toast me for forcing them to postpone their wedding until the beginning of the following year. Kim had been sued for breach of contract for pulling out of a film, and she had lost the suit and all of her money. If she and Alec had been married at the time, he would have been liable as well.”As director of the sorely underrated drama “The Boost” (1988), Mr. Becker had a ringside seat to one of the spiciest scandals of the decade— the acrimonious personal and legal fall-out between the film’s stars James Woods and Sean Young. Suffice to say, his account, while brief, does not disappoint.Mr. Becker has not directed a film since “Domestic Disturbance”, starring John Travolta and Vince Vaughn, in 2002. It has not been for want of trying. He recounts almost getting a remake of “Middle of the Night”, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1959 May-to-December romance drama, off the ground, which was set to star Al Pacino,. According to Mr. Becker, the project got stalled, partially due to the headwinds of the #MeToo movement. Writing about critical notices early on in his career, Mr. Becker writes, “It takes years to put it in perspective, and by then it doesn’t matter.” The same cannot be said for “Catching the Light.”

Hollywood Director Harold Becker Dishes on Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin in New Memoir, Alongside Plenty of Creative Nourishment

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