Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that box and mess with his image -- take him to the dark side." So the kid goes off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers who expect to find the best of America in Cruise's face will instead discover a haunting...
Here, the disasters of war are at home. The Bronx veterans' hospital where Ron is sent to recuperate is an open sewer teeming with rats, drugs and whores. Back in Massapequa, Ron is now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom...
...women. By his senior year he was in Glen Ridge, N.J., where a knee injury dislodged him from the school wrestling team. He was 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...
Cruise was willing to do anything for the picture; he tabled his usual multimillion-dollar salary, and will earn no money until the box office sends some back. He spent hours with Kovic, peppering the vet with questions, soaking up the man's life. In matching wheelchairs, the two men would go shopping; Cruise was rarely recognized. In a Westwood, Calif., electronics store, he was asked to leave because his wheels were leaving marks on the rubber carpet. "He was furious," recalls Kovic. "Everyone in the store turned and looked at him when he shouted, 'I have as much right...
...Philippines, where we shot the Viet Nam stuff, I was thinking, 'I don't know how it's going to be, but all I know is, I have got absolutely nothing left.' I was burned out. Burned out. But when I think back to the happiest moments in my life, I think of when we finished Born on the Fourth of July. You're looking down from the mountain and saying, 'Jesus, I had no idea it was this big.' I love that feeling of conclusion, accomplishment, overcoming obstacles...