Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...80s, Cruise, 27, is the movies' biggest star, with nothing but promise on the horizon. Just ask two masters he has apprenticed with: Dustin Hoffman, the decade's most lauded actor, and Paul Newman, the last golden exemplar of Hollywood star quality. "There's no sense of a crest in Tom," says Hoffman, who won an Oscar as Cruise's brother in Rain Man. "His talent is young, his body is young, his spirit is young. He's a Christmas tree -- he's lit from head to toe." Newman, who played Cruise's mentor in The Color of Money, considers...
...against Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, he played a military-school cadet who goes picturesquely bonkers and is killed by the National Guard. "It's beautiful, man! Beautiful!" he shouts as he sprays the quad with an orgasm of machine-gun fire. In his first significant film of the '80s, as in his last, Cruise was the gung-ho soldier boy, his body destroyed in the fantasy of combat...
...young actor in the early '80s there was plenty of roles, but mostly in the tits-and-zits teenpix that emulated Porky's. Cruise did time in a dim comedy, Losin' It (1982), about some lads who visit Tijuana to mislay their virginity; he played the sensitive one. From its plot synopsis, Risky Business (1983) promised more of the lame same. An affluent high school senior has an affair with a hooker (Rebecca de Mornay), dunks the family Porsche in Lake Michigan, turns his house into a brothel and still gets into Princeton. Sounds like the Reagan era in miniature...
Slumps, of course, are made to be broken. ABC jumped from nowheresville to first place in the mid-'70s, and NBC was a sorry No. 3 before Bill Cosby helped boost it to No. 1 in the mid-'80s. But CBS may be in more desperate straits than either of them was. For one thing, its low ratings are compounded by poor demographics: its audience is not just smaller but also older. What's more, cable and other viewing choices have siphoned away much of the network audience and made it tougher for a weak network to revive itself...
...shortfall is worsening. Among other things, Congress reacted to the Reagan cutbacks by passing 23 public health bills during the '80s, many of them efforts to shore up the FDA's powers. The action significantly expanded the FDA's workload. Yet Congress never moved to restore a single lost staff position or add employees to meet the increased responsibilities. The advent of an entirely new industry, biotechnology, demanded an FDA response to more than 950 genetically engineered products during the 1980s...