Word: actor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stone's canniest directorial decision was to choose Cruise. The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions, showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says...
...miserable. Then he auditioned for the Nathan Detroit role in Guys and Dolls and got the part. "It was the first thing in my life for a long, long time that I felt excited about," Cruise says. He announced to his family that he was going to be an actor. Within a year he had a movie part...
...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...
...Born on the Fourth of July, Cruise had no Hoffman to play actor's Ping- Pong with. In front of the camera, he was on his own. Behind it, he would be led by two Viet Nam vets, Stone and Kovic. "I chose Tom," Stone says, % "because he was the closest to Ron Kovic in spirit. I sensed that they came from the same working-class Catholic background and had a similarly troubled family history. They certainly had the same drive, the same hunger to achieve, to be the best, to prove something. Like Ron too, Tom is wound real...
...Sporting Club to buy a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he moved with his wife, nee Betty Crockett (a direct descendant of Davy), and his son Thomas IV. The breathtaking scenery and anything-goes ambiance soon attracted a freewheeling constellation of characters that included fellow writer Richard Brautigan, actor Peter Fonda, painter Russell Chatham and director Sam Peckinpah. Before long, stories started coming out of the valley, ribald tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that have become part of the local lore...