‘Top Gun’ at 40: The Real Story Behind the Blockbuster That Sealed Tom Cruise’s Stardom

It was spring 1986 and Tom Cruise, then 23 years of age, wasn’t feeling the need, the need for speed. That iconic line — and the accompanying breakneck career transformation for him — would arrive a few months later with the release of naval action movie blockbuster “Top Gun.”When the biggest living Hollywood star’s early filmography gets cited, “Risky Business,” tends to immediately precede “Top Gun.” Yet “Risky Business” and “Top Gun” were released three years apart from each other. Between October 1983 and April 1986, Mr. Cruise did not appear in any film, until the release of “Legend,” a dark fantasy movie, which was directed by Ridley Scott, brother of Tony Scott, who made “Top Gun.” A month before the release of “Top Gun,” “Legend” flopped. It’s hardly a spoiler to recount what happened next. “Top Gun” became the biggest film of 1986, spawning a hit sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” in 2022, with a third movie presently in development. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of “Top Gun,” both films were re-released last weekend, re-entering the American box office top ten. During such an unstable and uncertain time for the movie business, “Top Gun” is an unstoppable Hollywood force as a franchise. Yet when the Sun explored the archive — much of it not online — we found that among the many who harbored doubts “Top Gun” would be “up there with the best of the best,” to quote the picture’s famous tagline, was Mr. Cruise himself. Perhaps Tom Cruise had been creatively burnt by his time making “Legend.” He told Rolling Stone in 1988 that while he admired the visual quality of that film, “I don’t think Ridley Scott necessarily needed me to do the movie. It could have been anyone in that part.” In a recent interview with The Slice of Life podcast, Mia Sara, his co-star in the film, recalled of Mr. Cruise, “He was a very nice guy but he was a weird guy, let’s face it.” Ms. Sara added, “It was really astounding he went on to become this…he was a little bit paranoid.”Mr. Cruise was clearly in no mood to repeat the “Legend” experience. So prior to agreeing to act in “Top Gun” — which had begun life when producer Jerry Bruckheimer read an article in California Magazine, about a young F-14 fighter pilot going through the Navy Fighter Weapons School training program in Miramar, San Diego, while in a dentist’s waiting room — Mr. Cruise exhaustively developed the role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. “I spent months prior to shooting involved in the development of the script and the overall piece of my character,” Mr Cruise said in an interview in 1986, adding this involved “spending time gathering stories and information and looking at footage and listening to different tapes of these fighter pilots.”The revisions to the script, undertaken by Warren Skaaren who would die of cancer in 1990, changed the fate of “Top Gun,” according to Mr. Cruise. “If you look at ‘Top Gun,’ you think, even from the bad script, that it has very good commercial potential,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “But ‘Top Gun’ could have totally gone the other way. It’s got to be a rollercoaster ride, and it could have been a kiddie ride.”Paramount PicturesMr. Cruise became the biggest star of his generation through possessing abnormally high levels of drive and distinctiveness. Harold Becker, the director of the 1981 military drama “Taps,” which was Mr. Cruise’s first major role, recently recalled in his memoir “Catching the Light” that he promoted Mr. Cruise, originally scheduled to be an extra, to a leading role in the film. Initially Mr. Cruise turned him down, before relenting to take the bigger part: “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 remember thinking that I wouldn’t experience this again.”Not that Tom Cruise wasn’t fiercely ambitious. He landed the role of Steve Randle in “The Outsiders,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel. But Rebecca De Mornay, Mr. Cruise’s co-star in “Risky Business,” and his lover in the mid-1980s, recently disclosed that Mr. Cruise might have overstated his supporting role in “The Outsiders,” when auditioning for his next film. During a recent talk to the Lee Strasberg Institute, Ms. De Mornay recalled, “He had talked his way into his own audition with them [Risky Business”] saying that he was kind of the lead of the film. There was no internet or anything so nobody could really check. They were like, ‘Ooh, he’s starring in a Coppola movie.’”The subsequent success of “Top Gun” has obscured how turbulent its filming was. Director Tony Scott was temporarily fired twice by Paramount during production who felt his style for the film was excessively dark and moody. Love scenes between “Maverick” and flight instructor Charlotte Blackwood, played by Kelly McGillis, were added in during reshoots following test audience reaction.While “Top Gun” is now critically acclaimed, that certainly wasn’t the case upon its release. Renowned critic Alexander Walker, of the London Evening Standard, wrote, “Top Gun represents the United States as a trigger-happy imperialist nation which trains its sons to risk starting the next war in a fit of buddy-buddy righteousness.” Jack Curry at USA Today was equally withering about Tom Cruise: “Supposed to be a super flyboy, he comes across more like just a fly or a boy.” Fierce critics of “Top Gun,” even included its own stars. Val Kilmer, who memorably played Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, and who had a poignant cameo in the sequel before dying of pneunomia last year, was quoted saying in Robert Sellers’ 1996 biography of Tom Cruise, “I didn’t want to do it, but it was a contract Paramount invoked. It was a horrible celebration of redneckness.”Promoting “Top Gun” in its release, Mr. Cruise was forced on the defensive about the movie. “If we wanted to make a war film, or a film that glorifies combat, we would have been blowing people away from the beginning to the end,” he told the BBC. “It’s a film about character.”Not for the first time audience sentiment markedly differed from that of movie critics, with “Top Gun” even topping the American box office in its 19th week on release. A deal Paramount struck with the Pentagon, buying its aircraft carriers and warplanes for $1.8 million in exchange for creative input, proved shrewd business. “The film showed that the military was a good career and life,” William Hart, a military PR official, told Premiere magazine in 1989. The film’s score and soundtrack, by Harold Faltermeyer and Giorgio Moroder respectively, further enhanced its appeal. Princess Diana even brought along a cassette of the “Top Gun” soundtrack when she visited London music station Capital Radio in November 1986, resulting in producers having to scramble to the library to locate the record on vinyl in order to play it on air for their special guest. As for Tom Cruise, a year after “Top Gun,” he starred alongside Paul Newman in “The Color of Money”, directed by Martin Scorsese, and in 1988 he made “Cocktail,” a critically-reviled, commercially successful, adaptation of Heywood Gould’s novel about a socially ambitious Manhattan bartender. “Tom Cruise understands who that guy is because he is that guy — a working-class guy made good,” Mr. Gould told the Sun.Mr. Cruise’s private life aroused considerable speculation even in the mid 1980s. Following news that Mr. Cruise had married his first wife Mimi Rogers, a question and answer column in the September 1987 edition of the magazine “Films and Filming,” entitled “Now You Know,” written by David McGilivray, clarified: “Tom Cruise, described by me in April as ‘not the marrying kind,’ married actress Mimi Rogers in May. You never can tell.” Following his divorce from Ms. Rogers, Mr. Cruise married his second wife, Nicole Kidman in 1990, his co-star in 1990’s “Days of Thunder,” also directed by Tony Scott and which was nicknamed “Top Car,” owing to plot similarities to “Top Gun.”Mimi Rogers and Tom Cruise at the 1990 Academy Awards. Wikimedia CommonsAnother unfortunate incident with the British press happened in 1989 in an interview with Time Out magazine to coincide with the release of “Rain Man.” Writer Mark Sanderson brought along New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s scathing review of “Rain Man” to show Mr. Cruise. “Not thinking, I hand him a photocopy and point at the relevant bit,” wrote Mr. Sanderson. “Silence. Silence. More silence. Oh-my-God. Oh-my-God. I’ve forgotten that he’s dyslexic.’” Mr Cruise replied, ‘I don’t know where you mean…What kind of reaction are you looking for here?”Minor media mishaps like that became rarer in the 1990s as Mr. Cruise stepped up his career, with Oscar-nominated roles in “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Jerry Maguire,” as well as kickstarting the “Mission Impossible” franchise. The role of super-spy Ethan Hunt subsequently meant Mr. Cruise could withstand negative publicity arising from his attachment to the Church of Scientology and an acrimonious break-up with his third wife, Katie Holmes.Last weekend’s commercial success reinforced that “Top Gun” still inspires immense audience affection. Who knows what Mr. Cruise, now 63, would say if tomorrow he was asked why “Top Gun” was so successful? But in Rolling Stone in 1988, he attributed the phenomenal popularity of “Top Gun” not to the soundtrack or or even his performance. “The jets,” he explained, was the reason. “The whole trick about that film was the jets. It was the gimmick that made the film work.”

‘Top Gun’ at 40: The Real Story Behind the Blockbuster That Sealed Tom Cruise’s Stardom

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