Word: manly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What does he have that separates him from the Brat Pack? He's not as lovely as Rob Lowe. He doesn't explode, on- or off-camera, as ripely as Sean Penn. "Tom is at a disadvantage," says Barry Levinson, his Rain Man director. "He's got a pretty face, so his abilities are underestimated. And he's not working a rebel image, which is associated with being a good actor." But he does have the image, in the films that made him famous, of an intense young man with a mission: the total workhorse, the ultimate party animal...
...become actors. In one early role, Cruise showed he had the capacity for both. In Taps (1981), where he was up 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...
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...
They shot for 65 exhausting, twelve-hour days (on a slim budget of $17.8 million), and Cruise would not trade a day of it. "At the beginning I thought, 'Oh, man, I just don't want to blow this. Every day I am going to give it everything I have. In the 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...
...more adventurous programming, will help recapture an audience that has grown rather jaded. "You cannot anymore launch shows that simply repeat yesterday's viewing patterns," says Stringer. "That's something we learned the hard way this year." Any other lessons will have to be learned quickly by Sagansky, the man about to fill the toughest job in network television...