|
>Was a bit sad reading this article:
>
>http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-youtube-and-internet-journalism-destroyed-tom-cruise-our-last-real-movie-star-4656549
>
> It was Jason Tugman's first day of work. Almost a decade
>later, he still remembers the screams.
>
>A former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting
>technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a
>chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't
>want to screw it up. But as Tugman carefully hung black
>curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where
>Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The crowd sounded as
>if it was going to tear the building down.
>
>"I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit,"
>Tugman says. "Just the absolute losing of minds." He glanced
>at a monitor that transmitted a silent, live feed. Tom Cruise
>was on a couch.
>
>You've seen it, too. You can probably picture it in your head:
>Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a
>cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the
>buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
>Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the
>last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his
>career.
>
>There's just one catch: It never happened.
>
>Like Humphrey Bogart saying, "Play it again, Sam," Tom Cruise
>jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. But
>there's a difference. Bogart's mythological Casablanca
>catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay
>the video and fact-check. Thanks to the Internet, we have
>video at our fingertips. Yet rather than correct the record,
>the video perpetuated the delusion.
>
>In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the
>world of celebrity changed. Perez Hilton and the Huffington
>Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the
>gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a
>24-hour Internet frenzy. Camera phones finally outsold brick
>phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. YouTube was a week
>old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight.
>
>The Internet finally had the tools to feed us an endless
>buffet of fluff, chopping up real events to flashy — and
>sometimes false — moments that warped our cultural memory.
>The first star to stumble in front of the knives was the
>biggest actor in the world — and the one who'd tried the
>hardest not to trip.
>
>Tom Cruise had always been edgy around the press. When Risky
>Business turned him — a 21-year-old kid with three bit parts
>and one flop on his résumé — into an overnight sensation,
>he disappeared. "I'm not personally ready to do this," he told
>the film's publicity team. Instead of giving interviews and
>swanning around Hollywood with his best friends, Sean Penn and
>Emilio Estevez, Cruise ditched the flash bulbs and escaped to
>London, where he hid out for two years while filming Ridley
>Scott's ill-fated Legend. (Sniffed one British director to The
>Hollywood Reporter, "Nobody would notice a boy with that
>little experience anywhere in Europe.")
>
>By the time Cruise flew back to America, he'd been
>half-forgotten — a breakout talent who'd been shortlisted as
>one of 1983's "Hottest Faces" by the Los Angeles Times, only
>to vanish. Meanwhile, his buddies had been christened "the
>Brat Pack," and Penn was marrying Madonna, exactly the kind of
>splashy spectacle Cruise wanted to avoid.
>
>To promote Top Gun, Cruise finally agreed to his first round
>of major interviews in 1986. He wanted to make one thing
>clear. "I want no part of that or this Brat Pack," he insisted
>to Playboy. "Putting me in there is absolutely absurd, and it
>pisses me off because I work hard and then some guy just slaps
>me together with everybody else."
>
>Just 25, Cruise could already sense that quick fame was a
>curse: for every Robert Downey Jr. who transcended the '80s,
>there'd be a Judd Nelson, frozen in time.
>
>He didn't want to be a trend — he wanted to be a legend.
>That meant controlling his public image: no drunken nights, no
>false moves. The attention had to be on his work. After Top
>Gun became the No. 1 box office hit of 1986, Paramount offered
>to quintuple his salary if he'd rush into Top Gun 2. He said
>no.
>
>Instead, he agreed to play second fiddle to Paul Newman in
>Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. Money versus Money,
>swagger versus respect. It's the most telling choice in
>Cruise's career. He seized the chance to learn from, and link
>himself to, the old-fashioned, closemouthed, serious actor he
>wanted to become. Forget the new Brat Pack — he'd be the
>last classic movie star.
>
>"When I get to be Newman's age, I'm looking to still be
>playing the great characters he plays," Cruise said in his
>first cover story, for Interview (written by Cameron Crowe,
>his future Jerry Maguire director).
>
>After The Color of Money, Cruise turned down more leading-man
>offers to take second billing to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
>Like Newman the year before, Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar
>for the film.
>
>Those awards wouldn't exist without Cruise's selfless
>supporting performances — Hoffman doesn't even appear on
>screen for the first 20 minutes of Rain Man. Cruise was
>proving he had the talent to work with the best, and
>demonstrating his box office clout. His name on the poster not
>only got an oddball movie about autism funded; it made it the
>top-grossing hit of the year. Cruise was the rare star who
>used his power to make good movies that matter: He could both
>rescue Born on the Fourth of July from 11 years of development
>hell and turn in a barnstorming, heartbreaking performance
>that earned him an Oscar nomination.
>
>But what he didn't do is equally striking. Cruise didn't make
>an action movie for the first 15 years of his career. Even in
>Top Gun, he never throws a punch.
>
>"I'd been offered a lot of different kinds of action movies,
>but nothing really interested me," he explained to Boxoffice
>Magazine in 1996. "I thought I'd seen it before." He wanted
>different challenges and different directors — he needed to
>push himself and grow. When he finally did launch an action
>franchise, that year's Mission: Impossible, he produced it.
>(And instead of hiring a fashionable blockbuster helmer such
>as John McTiernan or Joel Schumacher, he hired auteur Brian De
>Palma.)
>
>Meanwhile, he kept his private life private. Unlike Penn, no
>helicopters circled his weddings. When Cruise married Mimi
>Rogers in 1987, even his agent didn't know. The bride and
>groom wore jeans. Three years later, when he quietly married
>Nicole Kidman on Christmas Eve, People dubbed it 1990's
>"Best-Kept Hollywood Secret."
>
>Around that time, Cruise linked his future with another woman:
>publicist Pat Kingsley. The media had started asking about his
>new religion, Scientology, which he claimed had cured his
>dyslexia. The highly secretive faith fascinated the press. How
>to field endless questions about his minority beliefs while
>still charming majority-Christian America? He needed the help
>of the tough-as-nails Kingsley.
>
>She was adamant about keeping Cruise out of the tabloids. At
>press junkets, she demanded that journalists sign contracts
>swearing not to sell their quotes to the supermarket rags.
>Then Kingsley expanded her reach and insisted that all TV
>interviewers destroy their tapes after his segment had aired.
>
>Reporters were exasperated, but there wasn't much they could
>do about it. Kingsley had a slew of other big talents (Meg
>Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Al Pacino) on her roster. Thanks to
>media consolidation, she was able to keep the media on track
>by making only a few phone calls threatening to cut off
>access. American Media Inc. owned The National Enquirer,
>National Examiner, The Globe, The Star and The Sun. Time Inc.
>owned People and Entertainment Weekly, and Wenner Media owned
>Us Weekly. The eight-headed hydra was easily slain. If the
>tabloids refused to toe the party line, they could be sued:
>for claiming Cruise was sterile, that he and Kidman had to
>hire sex coaches, that he'd seduced a male porn star. He won
>or settled those cases and gave the proceeds to charity.
>
>But the Internet was about to transform the gossip world. What
>if the tabloids didn't have eight heads — they had 800?
>
>Mario Lavanderia Jr. loved tabloids. In college, he cut them
>apart and lined his NYU dorm room with homemade collages of
>celebrities. "I had a lot of Leonardo DiCaprio, like every
>girl," he admits.
>
>Lavanderia — better known by his pseudonym, Perez Hilton —
>wasn't tech-savvy. His apartment in L.A., where he'd moved
>after graduation, didn't even have Wi-Fi.
>
>But blogging software had just hit the tipping point, where
>anyone could have an online voice. In the course of 2005, the
>number of blogs skyrocketed from 10 million to 25 million. The
>majority were online diaries written for an average audience
>of seven people. Hilton didn't want to talk about himself, a
>young, single, gay man who'd just been fired from E! for
>saying something mean about former supermodel Janice
>Dickinson. He wanted to gossip about celebrities.
>
>"People didn't really use the Internet to talk about celebrity
>news," Hilton says with lingering amusement. "In fact, the
>celebrity magazines like People and US Weekly didn't even use
>their own websites to talk about celebrity news back in 2005.
>They just used their websites as a way to get subscriptions,
>like, 'Go here to sign up to get a subscription.' It was all
>about the print. They were not about breaking news online."
>
>Hilton's timing was perfect. From his table at the Coffee Bean
>& Tea Leaf on Sunset Boulevard, he could publish stories in
>minutes — not days — and trump the print tabloids that had
>spent decades playing softball with publicists.
>
>"Because it was all so new, celebrities were behaving
>differently," Hilton says. Like rabbits stumbling into a
>snare, they and their handlers realized too late that no space
>was a safe space. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and, yes,
>Paris Hilton were making headlines every day. "Send us your
>hot dirt!" Hilton's website pleaded.
>
>Armed with cellphone cameras, his readers did just that.
>
>Hilton's first effort, PageSixSixSix.com, grew so fast that,
>six months after he began blogging, the New York Post
>threatened to sue him for infringing on its "Page Six"
>trademark. In May 2005, he debuted PerezHilton.com. Two of his
>first stories that month announced that his just-carved niche
>was about to get more crowded: the Huffington Post and a U.S.
>version of OK! were launching. "Things are gonna get a little
>bit bloody," his post foretold.
>
>Hilton had already nicknamed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
>"Brangelina" ("It was just such a long time ago that people
>don't remember," he sighs). When Cruise coupled with Katie
>Holmes, Hilton was thrilled to have another massive romance to
>flog. TomKat went public on April 27, and PerezHilton.com
>embraced their relationship with exuberant cynicism. Wrote
>Hilton, "We can't get enough of the TomKat show because
>eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully
>see all the ugliness as openly as we've been shoved the
>lovey-dovey bullshit."
>
>With gossip sites mushrooming like a nuclear cloud, Kingsley's
>fear tactics no longer worked — in fact, she wasn't even
>around to wield them. She'd spent a decade and a half
>shielding Cruise from questions about his religion. But as
>Scientology increasingly drew fire from the media, Cruise
>seemed to have decided to be more vocal about defending his
>beliefs. When he sought to promote Scientology on his press
>tour for The Last Samurai in 2003, Kingsley later told The
>Hollywood Reporter, she told him to cool it. A year later, in
>March 2004, he ended their professional relationship,
>replacing Kingsley with a fellow Scientologist, his sister,
>Lee Anne De Vette.
>
>As then– In Touch editor Tom O'Neil told Variety in 2004:
>"Tom's sis doesn't have Pat's secret weapons. She can't nuke a
>media outlet's access to other A-list celebs if a journalist
>doesn't bathe Tom in honey." And even if De Vette did, for
>Perez Hilton and the bloggers, access didn't matter. They had
>no pretensions of scoring an interview with Tom Cruise. They
>wanted web hits.
>
>When their faster, meaner formula worked, the old guard was
>forced to follow suit. In May, People's blog, then a
>half-hearted affair, ran seven stories about Tom Cruise. In
>June, it ran 25.
>
>"The rise of the Internet changed how I do my job," says
>veteran publicist Joy Fehily, who was mentored by Kingsley.
>"Everything started changing at once, and the conversation
>moved a lot faster." Instead of having a week to handle a
>photo running in the next National Enquirer, suddenly Fehily
>could walk out of a meeting to discover that a breaking news
>story had spread online before she'd had a chance to shape
>it.
>
>Fehily found herself spending less time coaching her clients
>about how (and whether) to do interviews, and more time
>coaching them how to live their lives. "I just remember having
>to explain to clients how nothing is private anymore," she
>says. "It's about walking down the street as a normal person
>because everybody has the ability to take your picture, to
>catch you doing something." (Political blogs, which had arisen
>the year before during the presidential race, had already
>taught candidates the destructive power of the Internet —
>remember Howard Dean's scream?)
>
>By comparison, TV seemed safe. When Cruise went on Oprah in
>May 2005, he and De Vette surely imagined most viewers would
>see the show live.
>
>"Viral video was a very difficult thing to pull off," says
>Andy Baio, a Portland, Oregon–based writer and coder who
>would go on to help build Kickstarter. Before the summer of
>2005, in order to watch a clip online, you had to download it
>and hope it worked with the software on your computer. Most
>people didn't bother: Video downloads were slow and risky.
>What if you were accidentally downloading a virus?
>
>Plus, there was no cash benefit to spreading a video. If a
>video caught on, its host could actually lose money.
>
>"At the time, if you wanted to host a video, you had to have a
>server and you had to have bandwidth, and even then it could
>be challenging," Baio explains. "You could only host so much,
>and if something got so popular that you exceeded it, you had
>to pay per gig, and it could get really expensive."
>Early bloggers would stop hosting videos because they couldn't
>afford it, leaving the Internet littered with broken links
>that added to would-be viewers' frustration.
>
>Baio's site, waxy.org, had a terabyte of bandwidth. At the end
>of a month, he'd see how many gigs he could spare and do what
>he'd call a Bandwidth Blowout, and host something that geeks
>would like. He found a nerd swinging a golf club retriever
>like a light saber and dubbed him "Star Wars Kid"; he was the
>first to put Danger Mouse's Jay Z/Beatles mash-up, The Grey
>Album, online.
>
>Baio's uploads went viral because he realized that online
>video needed infrastructure: To make sure his links always
>worked, he set up a script connecting his content to mirror
>sites that would share the traffic. He was trying to tame the
>Internet.
>
>But suddenly, in the spring of 2005, he didn't have to.
>
>"YouTube changed everything," Baio says. He could upload a
>video to YouTube's servers and people could watch it in their
>browsers: no downloads, no long waits, no plug-ins, no
>bandwidth fears, no cost. "That was mind-blowing," Baio says.
>Now bloggers — like him, like Perez Hilton — could share
>videos without even sending their readers off their site.
>
>Neither Tom Cruise nor Oprah was likely aware of YouTube when
>he agreed to tape an episode in early May. The site's first
>video, "Me at the Zoo," had only been uploaded a few weeks
>before. Even Baio didn't hear about YouTube until June 14.
>"Wants to be Flickr for video," he wrote on his blog.
>
>A week later, Baio hosted another funny video he found on a
>private sharing site, a short mash-up of Star Wars: Episode
>III: Revenge of the Sith and Cruise's appearance on Oprah, two
>pop culture jokes from that May. Dubbed "Tom Cruise Kills
>Oprah," the movie star cackles in slow-motion as he blasts the
>talk-show host with a jolt of Jedi lightning. Baio thought the
>video was "awesome." He put it online and, just as "Star Wars
>Kid" had before, it blew up.
>
>This time, however, it wasn't just the geeks linking to his
>video — it was MSNBC and USA Today.
>
>"It's hard to imagine now, but six months before I posted that
>Tom Cruise video, that viral spread was practically
>impossible," Baio says. "That was a pivotal point, 2005."
>
>A weird thing happens when people watch a viral video. In
>catching up with a cultural touchstone, the clip everyone's
>talking about at the water cooler, we assume we're on top of
>the whole story. After all, we've seen what everyone else has
>seen. Whatever gets edited out isn't part of the
>conversation.
>
>Tom Cruise and Oprah talked on TV for 43 minutes. "Tom Cruise
>Kills Oprah" was 15 seconds. Even the longer YouTube clips of
>Cruise on Oprah's couch clock in at only four minutes. Yet it
>was the latter two that were shared, discussed and
>remembered.
>
>With all context gone, we're judging soundbites of Cruise on a
>screen. We forget he was experiencing a live, long and loud
>interaction — a literal stage performance before a raucous
>crowd.
>
>Harpo Studios seats 300 audience members, all of whom answered
>a questionnaire months before, listing their favorite actors.
>The show's producers try to match up their spectators with
>their guests. It's a recipe for good TV. "They want the
>bat-shit people," Tugman explains. "All those people that were
>in there were most likely picked because they're Tom Cruise
>fanatics."
>
>That's why Tugman could hear their screams from the next
>studio over. It was his first day on the job, but during the
>next 200 episodes, it was the loudest audience he'd ever hear
>except for the crowd for George Clooney.
>
>If you track down the full Tom Cruise episode on YouTube —
>only one user from Spain has bothered to upload it across four
>videos, thanks to the site's roughly 10-minute cap — the
>room is deafening. Oprah's first words to the live audience
>are, "OK. Let me just say you all are going to have to calm
>yourselves." They don't. They're on their feet jumping up and
>down. She has to ask them to settle down twice more before
>Cruise even walks onstage, and then the screams get even
>louder. Oprah starts screaming, too. If you listen closely,
>you can hear Cruise says, "Wow! Is it like this every day?"
>"No," Oprah says, shaking her head. After a full minute goes
>by, Oprah starts to look annoyed. "It's too much," she
>commands the audience. "Sit down, sit down."
>
>Like a gladiator at the Coliseum, Cruise plays to that
>screaming room. When a fan in the crowd pumps both his fists
>in the air, Cruise pumps his back. When kneeling on the floor
>makes the audience holler, he simply keeps doing it.
>
>"The energy in that room was just pandemonium, and that had to
>enable him," Tugman says. "He could be thinking, 'Oh, I'm
>making such a great example of how much I'm actually in love,
>I'm going to take it further and further and further.' "
>
>Cruise also was playing to the daytime TV viewers at home,
>predominantly female like the studio audience. He flatters
>them. He brings up being raised by women, how he loves to
>treat women right. The women wanted to hear that he was in
>love, and Cruise — who had just been anointed the 3rd
>Greatest Movie Star of All Time by Premiere magazine, beating
>out Paul Newman at No. 6 — was finally ready to loosen up
>and tell them.
>
>Oprah was thrilled. Cruise was giving his first unchecked TV
>interview, well, ever. She ups the energy by getting physical,
>ruffling his hair with both hands and grabbing his legs and
>arms as she presses him with personal questions about his
>public girlfriend of a month: Is it love, will he marry her,
>has he asked her father, does he want more children? She
>clutches both of Cruise's hands, pulls her face close to his,
>and asks if he will propose to Katie Holmes today. Cruise
>gives a reasonable answer, "I've got to discuss it with her,"
>and Oprah leans back, disappointed.
>
>When Cruise finally stands and grabs her shoulders — the
>moment that was remixed into "Tom Cruise Kills Oprah" — it's
>while jokingly begging if they can talk about his new movie,
>War of the Worlds.
>
>It's a performance reminiscent of his Oscar-nominated role six
>years earlier as Magnolia's Frank T.J. Mackey. In that film,
>Mackey gets into a showdown with a pushy interviewer and
>deflects questions by showboating. When Mackey gets antsy, he
>does a backflip in his underwear. When Cruise doesn't want to
>say if he's marrying Holmes, he distracts attention by falling
>to one knee — a crowd-pleasing move Mackey stole from
>Elvis.
>
>Neither he nor Oprah thought they were about to tape something
>that would have a life that stretched far, far beyond the
>people who watched her show on May 23. The crew didn't,
>either. After the interview, they didn't gossip about Cruise
>— they went to the season wrap party, where Oprah gave
>everyone a trip to Hawaii.
>
>"There really was no water cooler talk," Tugman says. It
>wasn't until after the show aired that Tugman realized he'd
>been a witness to pop culture history: Tom Cruise scaring
>Oprah by jumping on a couch. Says Tugman, "I heard about it as
>more of an Internet thing and was like, 'Oh my God, I was
>there for that.' "
>
>Except Cruise never jumps on a couch.
>
>It is Oprah who seeds the idea that he should stand on it. She
>thanks Cruise for attending her recent Legends Ball, where she
>honored Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. "I turned and
>looked at one point and you were standing in the chair going,
>'Yes! Yes!' " she gushes to Cruise. "I loved that
>enthusiasm." Minutes later, he stands on the couch for a
>second, and after she and the audience cheer that, he does it
>again. When she continues pressing about if he wants to marry
>Holmes, he exhales, "I'm standing on your couch!" as if that's
>the answer he thought was enough. All told, Cruise on the
>couch — the key image of what the gossip blogs deemed his
>meltdown — is less than three seconds of airtime.
>
>The distinction between standing and jumping is small but
>significant. We imagine Cruise bouncing on the couch — we
>can even picture it — because the Internet convinced us it
>happened. The echoing blogosphere screaming "Kills!" and
>"Jumps!" rewrote over what little of the actual episode people
>saw.
>
>For two decades, Cruise had tried to keep the spotlight on his
>work. Now, it was fixated on him. Even the old guard — after
>years of chafing under his publicity restrictions, and finally
>freed from the need to appease the powerful Pat Kingsley —
>happily spun everything to fit the new narrative: Cruise was
>crazy.
>
>Guided by his sister's inexperienced hand, Cruise could only
>oblige, proposing to Katie Holmes and then debating the use of
>antidepressants (which Scientology opposes), specifically by a
>postpartum Brooke Shields, on The Today Show with Matt Lauer.
>
>Kingsley never would have let the Today footage air. But, of
>course, Kingsley wasn't there. "Afterward, I remember the PR
>people coming in and saying, 'Well, none of that stuff on
>Scientology and Brooke Shields, that's not going to be on the
>air,' " says Jim Bell, then executive producer of Today. "I
>started laughing and I said, 'That's probably going to be on a
>promo in about 30 minutes. It's going to be airing in a loop
>to get people to watch tomorrow morning.'"
>
>Breathless for more clicks, the media questioned whether
>Cruise's wave of bad publicity would hurt the box office for
>War of the Worlds. Restless reporters analyzed everything down
>to the decision to leave Cruise off the poster (which had been
>designed months before, in January). When War of the Worlds
>opened to $64.9 million — Cruise's biggest opening ever —
>and went on to be his most successful film of all time, the
>story stubbornly refused to change. In op-eds across the web,
>the "fact" was that Tom Cruise had killed his career.
>
>"I was a little upset — not at Tom but at the press, for
>making such a big deal out of a kind of small thing," War of
>the Worlds director Steven Spielberg told Newsweek.
>
>Cruise kept quiet and focused on filming his next movie,
>Mission: Impossible III. Over the next year, he married Holmes
>and had a baby. Even with his near-total media silence, his
>personal life kept his name in the gossip columns. A year
>after his Oprah appearance, Mission: Impossible III set a
>record as Cruise's hugest non-holiday debut — but the media
>deemed it a failure. After all, they'd predicted it would open
>to more than $60 million domestically, which only War of the
>Worlds had ever done. (Mission: Impossible III remains
>Cruise's third-biggest opening weekend.)
>
>Cruise hadn't hurt his career. But Hollywood was convinced he
>was poison, a religious fanatic, and possibly unhinged. Three
>months later, Paramount boss Sumner Redstone, who had
>partnered with Cruise's production company for 14 years,
>succumbed to the bad publicity and ended their professional
>relationship.
>
>"His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount,"
>Redstone told the press. "It's nothing to do with his acting
>ability — he's a terrific actor. But we don't think that
>someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company
>revenue should be on the lot." In the six years before,
>Cruise's movies had made 32 percent of Paramount's revenue.
>
>The Internet told us Tom Cruise killed Oprah. The truth is the
>Internet tried to kill him.
>
>Today, when even ABCNews.com runs "5 Things to Know About
>George Clooney's Fiancee, Amal Alamuddin," it's hard to
>remember that just nine years ago, the worlds of tabloid and
>legitimate journalism were more sharply defined. (The
>Huffington Post has made a fortune blurring the line.) In
>turn, we've become more cynical about click-baiting headlines,
>even as celebrities have figured out the new rules. After the
>summer of Cruise and the couch, celebrities go on network TV
>fully aware that anything they say could go viral. Actors
>weaned on the web can wield it to their advantage — think
>Emma Stone lip-synching on Jimmy Fallon.
>
>Today's Internet-driven media culture isn't necessarily worse
>than the one run by the big, boring conglomerates that Pat
>Kingsley expertly controlled. Even Cruise has figured out how
>to navigate the new playing field.
>
>But the lesson came at a cost.
>
>Building up to 2005, Cruise had tackled some of the most
>challenging dramas of any actor of his generation: Eyes Wide
>Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky. Even his popcorn flicks —
>Minority Report, Collateral, War of the Worlds — were
>intriguingly dark. He'd never played it safe or shot a
>cash-grab. He trusted that if he chose movies he believed in,
>the audience would follow. And he was right.
>
>Post-2005, we've lost out on the audacious films that only
>Hollywood's most powerful and consistent star could have
>convinced studios to greenlight. Cruise was in his mid-40s
>prime — the same years when Newman made Butch Cassidy and
>the Sundance Kid and The Sting — and here he was lying low,
>like the kid who'd run away to London. Imagine the daring
>roles that he hasn't dared to pursue. Cruise's talent and
>clout were responsible for an unparalleled string of critical
>and commercial hits. We gave that up for a gif.
>
>Like an insistent heart monitor, the box office numbers
>continually prove Cruise is alive, but even he seems to have
>been convinced of his own premature demise. He'd finally
>opened up and been harshly punished. Cruise closed ranks,
>retreating not just from the press but also from his own
>personal career ambitions. He made fewer films, tried fewer
>challenges. He wanted us to love him again.
>
>When Cruise's cameo as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder was a
>hit, instead of daring to think we might embrace him in
>another comedy, he cautiously considered only a Les Grossman
>sequel. And when Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol was
>deemed his comeback (not that he'd ever made a flop — even
>Knight & Day earned its money back), he decided that audiences
>wanted only one version of Tom Cruise: the action hero he'd
>never wanted to become. He's even said yes to Top Gun 2.
>
>Cruise's present-day, crowd-pleasing action crutch hasn't been
>bad. He's given every film his all, and some of them have been
>quite good.
>
>His latest, Edge of Tomorrow, is ambitious fun. Cruise plays
>Lt. Col. Bill Cage, a smooth-talking, cowardly Army recruiter
>forced to fight on the front lines of mankind's make-or-break
>battle against alien species the Mimics. No one expects him to
>live more than a few minutes. And he doesn't.
>
>But Edge of Tomorrow's high-concept twist is that, to his
>surprise, every time Cruise is killed, time resets and he
>wakes up the day before the battle, alive and eager to try
>again until he gets it right. It's an energetic blockbuster
>that balances Wile E. Coyote cartoon hijinks with his painful,
>unending martyrdom. It's also a nifty parallel to Cruise
>himself: the last great screen hero who refuses to die.
>
>It won't earn him an Oscar, but maybe Cruise still has time.
>After all, Newman won his Oscar at 61.
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