Fall Out Boys

notes from the dream factory By tom roston
Fall Out Boys
Can Tom and Mel overcome their alienating behavior
and win back our admiration? Or has an era of
unironic actor worship finally come to an end?
Given the chance, would you have tried to save Tom Cruise from
himself? That’s my own personal torment regarding his cataclysmic
wipeout. I could have spared him so much grief. You see, Cruise once
revealed his fondness for couch-jumping to me, and I didn’t try to help.
This was three months before he embarrassed himself in front of millions of
people on Oprah last year. We were alone in his trailer on the set of War
of the Worlds, and I was interviewing him for our April 2005 cover story, in
which premiere deemed him the greatest movie star working today (don’t
smirk—he’s arguably still Hollywood’s most
bankable international star). In addition
to being intensely charming with me, and
alternating between manic laughter and
solemn whispers, he, at one point, jumped
to a standing perch on the couch he had
been sitting on—just like he did on Oprah—
and then he jumped down yowling,
“WHAAOOOO!”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t grab Tom’s
wrist and try to get him to keep still and
say, “Tom, you’re acting really weird. You
might want to rethink this whole million-
watt persona thing, and turn it all down
a notch.” I didn’t because I thought he was
just being Tom Cruise. And if you look back at his notorious
meltdown, Oprah’s audience is emphatically
lapping up his histrionics. And after it,
Paramount still green-lighted M:I:III. But
now we have reached a tipping point
of anti-Tomness, after all his Scientologyspeak and declarations of love for Katie
Holmes. Viacom chairman Sumner
Redstone made it official by severing ties
with Cruise, based on his “over the top”
behavior. And yet, Cruise has always been
an extraordinary figure. Has he really been
acting so extra extraordinary lately, or is
it the world around him that has changed?
Movie stars are strange creatures. At
the same time that they are these selfinvolved suns around which entire
galaxies orbit in ever-widening circles of
sycophants, flacks, and fans, they are also
such sensitive souls, whose jobs demand
that they totally open themselves emotionally in order to play a character. And,
simultaneously, they need to maintain
ridiculously strong egos so that their
personas burn brightly, amped up to hold
focus on the big screen. It’s always been a
tricky process translating the private lives
of movie stars to the public, and it got
a little more so with this summer’s A-list
implosion, when Cruise was kicked to
Paramount’s curb and Mel Gibson went on
an anti-Semitic tirade during his arrest for
drunk driving.
With the dust having settled on both
scandals, there’s a sort of eerie silence as to
what will happen to Cruise and Gibson.
To fill the void, I seek the wisdom of a crisis
PR manager, a psychiatrist, and a rabbi.
Sounds like the setup to a joke, I know, but
I can’t resist the allure of talking with three
counselors who help troubled people—one
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who is specifically trained to help the likes
of Cruise and Gibson, and the other two
being members of groups attacked by both
men. Maybe I’m asking for trouble, but if I
were a celebrity in hot water, I couldn’t
think of three better professions to lean on.
It figures that the crisis manager—Alan
Mayer, who has helped both Eminem and
Halle Berry out of tough jams doing what
he calls “strategic counseling”—has the
most instructive things to say. He describes
his job as often figuring out “how a public
figure can act in an artificial way that will
make him seem more authentic.” But he
adds, “The best prescription for a public
figure who is unfairly perceived is greater
transparency. If what they’re saying about
you is wrong, show them what’s right.”
Mayer believes that Gibson’s and
Cruise’s falls from grace are different from
that of, say, Russell Crowe, whom he
happens to have worked with. When Crowe
throws a telephone at a hotel employee, his
behavior falls into a convenient category:
tempestuous actor. “Russell is the first one
to admit it: He has a temper,” Mayer says.
“But he’s a totally stand-up guy. So he’ll do
something really stupid because somebody
has provoked him. And then he’ll feel terrible
about it.” Mayer says that the telephonethrowing incident was precipitated by
Crowe’s frustration at being away from his
newborn son. “His issues are something
that everybody in the world can identify
isn’t buying it. “Someone has obviously
advised Tom to apologize to Brooke Shields
as a PR move,” she says. “Scientology is
strongly against psychiatry and psychiatric
medication. So Tom would not go against
this main principle of Scientology, unless
he was scared that his fan base was
eroding and his star was beginning to fall.”
Lieberman suggests Gibson has an
agenda as well. “Mel’s comments were
a reflection of his deeply held anti-Semitic
beliefs, which he tries hard to conceal in
interviews,” she says. “Although he’s tried
to deny following in his father’s footsteps
as a disbeliever of the Holocaust, his antiSemitic tirade has revealed the naked
truth.” Ah, if only I believed in such a
thing. We can be blind to our own
prejudices, and so to truly understand
someone else’s, let alone that of a celebrity
who’s being infinitely refracted through the
media lens, seems impossible. I’m not sure
what to make of Lieberman’s comments,
especially considering her response to my
question regarding how she thinks Cruise
and Gibson should heal their relationships
with the American public.
“They both should lay down on my
couch—preferably not at the same time—so
that I can analyze how their troubled
childhoods are causing the problems they
have today. Short of that, Tom should
seriously consider quitting Scientology,”
Lieberman says. “Mel should do hundreds
of hours of community
service for Jewish
organizations that teach
tolerance and help the
needy. He should also
live on a kibbutz for
a year, take the hardest
jobs as his share, and
make a heartfelt movie
extolling Israel.”
Mazel tov with that.
Perhaps I should
be thankful that Rabbi
David Baron doesn’t
have much to say about
Cruise’s situation—I
interview him while he
is in Israel, just after
he’s visited bombed
neighborhoods in Haifa.
jump shot: Cruise has fun with himself on Jay Leno’s sofa.
He’s the rabbi who made
the very public
with. And there’s no bigger agenda there.”
invitation to Gibson to come to his Beverly
Clearly, Cruise has an agenda—to
Hills synagogue to seek forgiveness.
further the aims of Scientology—which
Although he’s still waiting for a personal
means any action of his can be cynically
response, Baron sounds tired of the subject.
construed within that framework. After
Nevertheless, he has specific ideas for how
his breakup with Paramount, Cruise
Gibson can clean up his mess: “He’s got to
reportedly apologized to Brooke Shields for
step up to the plate and repudiate his
his remarks condemning her use of antifather’s Holocaust denial.”
depressants, but Dr. Carole Lieberman,
But do we really want movie stars who
a psychiatrist who specializes in analyzing
always do the right thing? Would we prefer
how the media affects the public psyche,
that they be puppets on the strings of
handlers, always maximizing their
profitability through perfectly predictable
personas? Obviously not. But neither do we
want them to be bigots or dogmatic freaks.
Stardom is an illusion, and by its nature,
fleeting. If anything, the long dominance of
actors like Gibson and, more so, Cruise,
has been the exception. They are members
of what may be the last unironic movie-star
generation (Tom Hanks is fading more
quietly, with typical class). A look at the
top box office movies in the past five years
shows that the studios are getting better
returns from hobbits, wizards, and ogres
than Toms, Mels, or Julias. It’s been ten
years since Cruise and Gibson could do no
wrong in the wake of Jerry Maguire, Mission:
Impossible, and Braveheart. And it’s not just
that they’re getting older; I don’t think A-list
movie stars will ever burn as brightly as
they once did. The studios don’t need them
as much in our jaded paparazzi culture, in
which schadenfreude and irony have
eclipsed adoration and celebrity worship.
I’m not saying that they won’t make any
more movies worth going to. I think Cruise
will do what it takes to keep on top for as
long as possible (his fame is Scientology’s
greatest platform, after all), and that Gibson
will either control his drinking problem
or, the next time he gets drunk, make sure
to rant about an unobjectionable ethnic
group, like hobgoblins. Gibson is in a much
better spot because his interests seem to lie
more in being behind the camera, directing
movies in arcane languages (I’m actually
looking forward to December’s Apocalypto).
And he’s also not outwardly advocating
anti-Semitism. He claims to be what the
mainstream wants him to be—remorseful.
Cruise, on the other hand, is a movie star,
which means he needs to remain attractive
to wide audiences. And he hasn’t shown
any sign of breaking with Scientology,
which puts him at odds with a populace
that, at times, finds his beliefs alienating.
As much as what both men have
recently done bothers me, I can’t help but
root for them—a little—because they’re
positioned as underdogs now. Looking back
to when Cruise still seemed to be made of
Teflon, I remember the mixture of awe and
eye-rolling his couch-jumping inspired
in me. And to think he did it in response to
my question about whether or not he put
on a pair of pants one leg at a time. He
made a wild, physical joke of it, suggesting
he could jump off a couch and slap both on
at once. He was laughing at the idea that
he wasn’t a normal person. And, now that
he’s shown himself to be vulnerable, I can’t
help feeling bad that I didn’t tell him to cool
it, and to try to remain superhuman. But
that time has passed. •
Will Tom and Mel be able to reconnect with fans?
Send your e-mails to [email protected].
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