Tom Cruise Turns 51 Today (With Top Gun Music Video!)

This is a guest post... Author Bio: Alex Smith is a freelance film and television blogger for Direct2TV.com who has been a huge fan of Tom Cruise, Top Gun and things that go fast since childhood. He enjoys writing celebrity profiles and reviews of new movie releases as well as retrospectives on films from the 1970s and 80s, and riding his motorcycle (it’s the closest he’ll get to piloting an F-14). He lives in Washington, D.C.

Tom Cruise: Aviation Ambassador? 

 Tom Cruise is celebrating another birthday (he’s 51 today), and he continues to be one of Hollywood’s top stars after more than three decades in the film business. It all started for Cruise with the movie Taps in 1981, with his first leading role coming just two years later in Risky Business with its iconic “dancing in underpants” scene. Since then, Cruise has appeared almost exclusively in big-budget, critically and financially successful movies, including Rain Man, A Few Good Men, War of the Worlds and the Mission: Impossible franchise.

 But perhaps Cruise’s best known role, and certainly one that established the persona that has allowed him to essentially play “himself” in many subsequent action flicks, came when he played Maverick in the 1986 hit Top Gun. This is the role that not only propelled Cruise to the top of A-list but also seems to have put a love of aviation in his blood, and arguably helped popularize and glamorize flying for much of the general public as well.

The amazing Grumman F-14 Tomcat - anytime baby!  (photo: wikimedia)

 
 When Cruise was preparing for the role of Maverick, he was taken up for three separate rides in the back passenger seat of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat that his character would fly in the film, a taste of jet-powered flight (and the view afforded by the Tomcat’s bubble canopy) that must have been a peak life experience even for a rich and famous actor. The first flight reportedly resulted in him vomiting, but he handled the other two flights well, and some actual in-flight footage filmed using F-14 cockpits can be seen in the finished movie.

 
F-14's and ground crew on a carrier in 2002  (photo: U.S. Navy)

  Top Gun was originally inspired by an article in the May 1983 issue of “California” magazine that described the training, activities and culture at the Navy’s Top Gun School for fighter pilots. The movie itself pays homage to the real training facility it portrays in several ways:

• The pilot standing behind Cruise in the graduation scene is “Heater” C.J. Heatley, an actual Top Gun instructor and F-14 air show demonstration pilot.
• Pete “Viper” Pettigrew is a retired Top Gun instructor who successfully took down a North Vietnamese MiG in the Vietnam War. He was the film’s technical consultant and Charlie’s date at the officer’s club.
• “Ghostrider” is the name of a real F-14 squadron, and it was also the callsign Maverick used for his plane. A model of a squadron Tomcat is seen behind Sundown in the scene between Maverick and Slider.
• In the locker room, there is a locker visible that’s marked as belonging to “Tex.” William “Tex” Spence is one of the real Top Gun instructors who helped with the film.

 The film featured tragedy on the screen with the accidental death of Maverick’s friend “Goose,” but there was also real tragedy off-screen with the death of Art Scholl. A renowned aerobatic pilot and aerial cameraman (his work had appeared in films like The Right Stuff and Blue Thunder), Scholl was hired to do some in-flight camera work that would provide some shots of certain maneuvers from a “plane’s eye view”. While performing a flat spin, which he entered intentionally in order to film with his onboard cameras, he lost control of his Pitts S-2 and crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Southern California.

The late great Art Scholl (1931-1985) in his Pitts Special

 
 The exact cause of Scholl’s craft is still unknown, though some have speculated that the camera equipment attached to the plane may have altered its weight-and-balance envelope so much that recovery from a flat spin was rendered impossible. Neither Scholl’s body nor his plane have ever been recovered, and the film was dedicated to his memory.

 Along with essentially setting Cruise up for his career as a charismatic action star, Top Gun also had a significant impact on 1980s pop culture. The “high-five/low-five” move Maverick and his buddies use to greet one another became popular after the film was released, and Ray-Ban sunglasses (recently resurgent in today’s fashion as well) enjoyed high sales thanks to the movie. The US Navy even claimed higher recruitment levels in the years following the film’s release, though today, instructors at the flight school are reportedly fined $5 if they make any reference to the movie.

Top Gun clearly inspired an interest in flying for Cruise (though the vast majority of his flying scenes were actually filmed in mocked-up cockpits on the ground), and that love continues to this day. The actor earned his pilot’s license in 1994 so he could enjoy flying his own planes, and he currently owns several military aircraft, including a WWII P-51 Mustang fighter, a Gulfstream IV, and even a 1941 Boeing Stearman, the biplane that was used in the movie Valkyrie.

 Of flying his P-51, once property of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, Cruise told USA Today in 2008 that “the landings are tough...you’re essentially landing blind. But when you learn it, you feel like you can fly anything. Anything that’s tough to do, I think, ends up being the most rewarding.”

 As Cruise turns 51, he continues to fly high both as a box office draw and as a man who can afford to indulge his passion for aviation. With three movies, including Mission Impossible: 5 announced for the next few years, Cruise clearly has no intention of slowing down, and according to producer Jerry Bruckheimer, we haven’t seen the last of Maverick, either: Top Gun 2 rumors have been flying!