Top Gun--Don and Tom Part 2

In this episode, we look into Don’s paternal relationship with Tom Cruise, how Don nearly sabotaged the Top Gun screenwriters efforts to produce a script good enough for Tom, and how Don’s last ditch effort to put Tom in the air with “The Blue Angels” got Tom to finally say yes.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Episode seven, Don and Tom and Top Gun Part two.
In this episode, we look into Don's paternal relationship with
Tom Cruise, how Don nearly sabotaged the Top Gun screenwriter's
efforts to produce a script good enough for Tom, and
how Down's last ditch effort to put Tom in the
air with the Blue Angels got Tom to finally say yes.

(00:27):
Now that Paramount Chief ned Tannet had given Don a
conditional green light to make Top Gun on the condition
that Don could land Tom Cruise, Don set his sights
on making it a reality. Like Don, Tom had a
somewhat fractured childhood and for a brief period of time,
turned to religion seeking answers. He entered the seminary his

(00:48):
freshman year of high school. He was living in Louisville.
At the time. He had just arrived with his mother
and three sisters. They had left his father in a
clandestine move in the middle of the night. Tom's father
would follow them to Ofville, seeking to get back together
with his mom. They soon divorced just after Tom's thirteenth birthday,
and so now Tom was at yet again another new school.

(01:09):
It was there that he heard a talk by a
pastor named Father Rick Schneider. Father Rick offered Tom an
opportunity to come to his seminary in Mount Healthy, Ohio,
just outside of Cincinnati. To get in, he would have
to take an i Q test and earn a score
of a hundred and ten to gain admittance. Tom scored
exactly a hundred and ten, and just like that, Tom

(01:31):
was now on track to becoming a priest. Each day
he would attend daily Mass. There was a prayer before
and after meals, followed by more prayer at bed time.
Tom would seek out the priests, wanting to hear their
stories and life experiences, but mostly he was remembered by
his classmates as a loner. There was a cockiness about him,
an obsessive willingness to prove himself that alienated him from

(01:53):
his classmates. He also struggled academically. Soon he started to
rebel against the strict religious ructure. He was lost, a
boy without a father, struggling with his parents divorce, and
then he met Father Obert Kreiser. Father Olbert had been
the former chaplain to the New Mexico School for the Deaf.
He was a man of the arts, a gifted musician

(02:15):
who would often compose his own compositions for Sunday mass.
He was also the speech and drama teacher. Father Olbert
was known for getting the students up on stage and
pushing them to let go of their inhibitions. For Tom,
a young man with so much pent up emotion, it
was therapeutic. He fell in love with performing, but at

(02:36):
the end of his freshman year, the school wrote a
letter to Tom's mother asking that Tom not returned for
his sophomore year. There were reports that he and a
friend had stolen liquor from the Franciscan's private stash and
would go out into the woods to drink and smoke cigarettes.
There were also reports that Tom was just too girl
crazy to stick it out in the seminary. Years later,
Father Obert would see Tom Rocket to Fame in Risky Business.

(02:58):
After seeing the movie, he was reported to have been
discussed it that Tom was now making dirty movies and
jumping all over the furniture in his underwear. Tom had
Father Albert and Don had passed a cully Dawn, even
at an early age, felt that he was being brainwashed.
In Don's words, these were fundamentalist Christians who expected me

(03:20):
to attend church three times a week and thank God
for the fact he didn't kill you. That day, he
was told that we were all born evil, nasty, dirty people,
and that all he could do was suppress his darker
thoughts and hope that God would reward him in the
next life. The more Dawn was told that he was

(03:40):
an evil, dirty minded little boy, the more Don started
to believe it. One day at church, Don got caught
looking up the scar of a young girl sitting in
the pub behind him. Pastor Cully dragged him out in
the middle of a service and took him to the basement.
Don confesses, yes, I was having pure thoughts about girls.

(04:02):
Pastor Culley tells him if he ever has another dirty
thought about a girl, God will strike him down and
he will live in hell forever. I mean imagine that
a ten year old boy in a cold, dank church
basement listening to this. It was at that moment that
Don knew he had to escape the church, and because

(04:22):
his family believed in the Helen Brimstone fire of Pastor Cully,
Dan knew he would have to leave his family. Whenever
Dawn was asked about family and whether he wanted to
have a family of his own. His response was always
the same. No wife, no children, no family. Family life
to him was just pure pain, pain and obligation. And

(04:46):
I think to some extent Tom could relate to some
of that. Don never spoke to his parents, but Tom,
in his father's final days, would go and see his father.
I got a call from my grandmother and I didn't
see my father really about almost ten years, and uh,
just saying that your father's dying. He's in the hospital

(05:06):
and he's going to die, and would you like to
see him? So I said, yeah, I want to see
my father. I called my sisters, my mother, and I
said I'm gonna go see him, and I flew my
sisters in and I went down. He would see me
under one condition that we didn't discuss the past. I

(05:28):
didn't want to discuss the best what happened. And I
brought him a gift and it looked like Tom Sawyer
a little boy who was playing hooky in a little
statue and it had the music from The Sting on it.
That that that that that and because he and I
we loved that movie and we saw that movie. And

(05:48):
I gave him that as a gift, and he laughed
and he got it, and it was you know, he
hadn't seen me at that point. You know, I'm twenty
one years older, and it was a very powerful moment
for me. And I looked at him because he was
a big man. He was just that six one and

(06:09):
striking looking man and very powerful looking guy, and he
can't help at that moment but to feel such compassion,
you know, and later on I heard, you know, he
recognized the kind of the loss, the loss of that family,

(06:30):
and it was a very special family, and it was
a huge life force that that he had let go of,
you know, that he had he made some mistakes, and
he knew it. And and it wasn't I wasn't angry
with him. I wasn't. I was really just looking at
a man who was my father, and I that I

(06:52):
love to see people suffer, and to see someone who had,
you know, really create our own suffering, our own life
and our own isolation. And it was crystal clear and
very apparent to me what had happened and what he'd done.
And uh, and it's not a matter of me saying

(07:13):
you didn't this. I don't feel that way about life,
you know, blaming our parents for our own existence. I
really believe we take responsibility for our own lives, and
we create our own lives. And I was just looking
at him as as a man and with great compassion
and and and a point of understanding. Tom had clearly

(07:34):
worked through his grief with his father dying, but don
sense there were daddy issues in his relationship with Rebecca Demurne.
Her dad was Wally George. Wally George was considered the
originator of combat talk shows. You are obviously, you are
obviously a wonderful man of God who is spreading the

(07:56):
word of love and and all that because you wrote me,
You wrote me a wonderful Christian letter. And let me
read to you a little portion of this wonderful Christian
thing that this pastor UH had to send to me.
And he said, in part, I just watched your show

(08:16):
regrettably for a few minutes. You are obviously a plastic,
insincere phony. How about that? Before Morton Downey Jr. And
Jerry Springer and the more mainstream right wing Loudmouth's Glenn
beck In Rush Limbaugh, there was Wally George. The closest
camp might have been Stephen Colbert's character on The Colbert

(08:38):
Report and ultra right wing blowhard, except Wally was an
actual right wing blowhard. Are you ready to get on
the hot seat with Wally George hang on for the wildest,
most controversial talk show on television, featuring enthusiastic participation from
our live studio audience and interviews with provocative Newsmaker guests,

(09:03):
And now here he is that hard hitting and award
winning conservative voice of television, Really George A visual on Wally.
He had a blonde comb over toupey styled in a
helmet shape. He had a frame picture of John Wayne
behind his desk, and USA were Number one posters behind him.

(09:25):
He would often bait guests into arguments and then have
them dragged off set by security guards. I think you're
leading these people astray, you think I'm I think I
think you're leading him astray because you're leading them to
believe that Ronald Reagan and conservatism can save America, and
that's a lie. It was like being at a Trump rally.

(09:49):
When a protester would be hauled away, Wally's audience would
go wild. His brand of conservatism was largely defined by
attacking liberals and gaze the gay pride rage. I say
it is very offensive. It is very offensive for days
to be running around or groping each other in the park.

(10:12):
What do you think about that? Did Wally try to
reach out to Rebecca while she was dating Tom? I'm
sure if he had, Tom would have protected her. She
had already become a strange from him and had changed
her name from Rebecca Perch while he's actual surname to
the French Demurnay, although she wasn't French and was born
in northern California. With Tom and Rebecca's a strange dad's

(10:33):
and Don's as strange parents, there was certainly a kind
of a strange father bond link between them. I think
the subject of absent fathers in the movie definitely came
from Dawn and Tom. Fathers and sons may have been
the only thing they agreed on in the early phases
of the script. The writing wasn't going well, and Don's
behavior was partly to blame. He was feeling the pressure.

(10:57):
There had never been a blockbuster movie about flying, and
this would be a flying movie on a modest budget,
without the money for special effects. This was at the
height of Don's gun phase, when Don and Sean Penn
and a few others were part of a gun club.
A dirty little secret about celebs. They love their guns.

(11:17):
I mean, look at Angelina Jolie and she built a
four hundred thousand dollar gun range in armory on her
estate in southern France. I love to fire guns in
the movies and that carries over into real life sometimes.
But Don he always took things a step further for
a time. This is true. For a time, when a

(11:40):
new screenwriter would come to his house, Don would be
waiting for him and his roof with an oozy. He
would literally train the little red light onto the writer's
chest as he came up the steps. Why did he
do this, I guess in his mind it was controlled
by way of intimidation. It was a cocaine that was

(12:00):
making Don paranoid and it started to affect development. At
one point, he feared that Tony Scott and the screenwriter
Chip Prosser were trying to take the script away from him.
He accused Tony of taking writer meetings without him, and
in the end he was When we returned, Don brings
cocaine and private jets to Aspen in the early eighties,

(12:29):
Aspen was still a quiet, sleepy Colorado town until Dawn
started throwing these wild, drug fuelled rages. I was actually
at the big Christmas party. He was one of those
A list parties where you flew in your drug dealer.
Everybody showed up. Melanie and Don flew in. Melanie Griffith
and Don Johnson. They actually announced their engagement at Don's party,

(12:53):
while Don was livid he had gone all out to
throw the best Hollywood party ever and all the press
coverage went to Dawn and Melanie after that, while Don
mate sure he had a publicist in af Spin covering
all his parties. Aspen hadn't seen this kind of decadence
since Spider Savage back in nineteen seventy six. Spider Savage

(13:14):
was Aspen's most famous party boy. He was also the
USA's top Olympic skier. Robert Redford's Downhill Racer character was
allegedly based on Spider's life. Yeah, you ski fast, but
you're reckless. You never had any real education, did you.
All you ever had was your skis and that's not enough.

(13:37):
Spider would die tragically at just thirty one years old.
The prosecution began outlining next case today in the manslaughter
trial of Singer Claudine Lange. As Lange faces up to
ten years in prison if convicted of reckless manslaughter and
the shooting death of her lover, Skier Spider Savage. His girlfriend,
Claudine Lange, claimed not to have known that the gun
was loaded. After a three day trial, Langer would be

(13:59):
sentenced to a days in jail given a two hundred
and fifty dollar fine. After Spider's death, Aspen made a
big effort to keep out the drugs. Things were pretty
low key until the private jets started coming in every weekend.
Don had put celebrity Aspen on the map. He made
it his personal playground, just as old boss Charlie Bluehorn
had tried to do in the Dominican. Aspen was a

(14:21):
diversion for Don as much as it was a distraction
from all the pressure he was under to make another
hit movie. At this point, it had been nearly a
year since Don's meeting with Ned Tannin. They had a
production date locked in, but they didn't have a script
good enough for Tom Cruise. That's when Tom suggested that
he and Don start to work together on the script.
For three months they worked on it. I was actually

(14:43):
over at Don's place a few times to see them
hard at it. Tom would be acting out scenes and
Don would be throwing him lines of dialogue. They were
brilliant together, but the script still wasn't working with the production.
Just weeks away, Don turned to the executive in charge
of production, his former protege, Don Steele, for help. Don

(15:04):
Steele was the fifth and last remaining member of the
Killer Dillers at Paramount. She grew up in the Bronx,
the daughter of a zipper salesman back when zippers were
a big deal as a new fashion fat in the
nineteen forties. Don had her father's knack for sales and
landed a job marketing star Trek Merchandise at Paramount. That's
when she met Don. Dawn and Dawn were Atteine she
was as executive on Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop. He

(15:27):
absolutely loved her as one of the Killer Dealers. She
was just as smart and tough as those guys were.
But whereas the media wrote favorably about her male counterparts,
they attacked Don for her extreme behavior, as if no
male executive had ever screamed at his secretary or made
threats to an agent. The way Down had the media
gave her the nickname the Queen of Mean and Balls

(15:51):
of Steel. They labeled her bitchy and means spirited, an
obvious double standard compared to men in a similar position
acting in a similar fashion. When Dawn the exact on Flashdance,
she wouldn't confirm the rumors around the casting. The rumor
was that Michael Eisner had gathered a group of janitors
on the Paramount Law to watch the screen tests for

(16:12):
the final three actresses. In contention, after watching the tests,
they were asked by him, which of the actresses did
they most want to fuck? The results, I mean, if
you believe the tale was Jennifer Beale's. Well anyway, cut
to two years later and Paramount is casting the film Footloose.

(16:34):
Dawn watches the screen test. The director and the producer
really loved the actor for the part, and Dawn, who
has the final say over who gets the job, says,
in typical Dawn Steel fashion, guys, he's just not that fuckable.
Kevin Bacon corroborates the story. But you know, God bless her.
You know she was running a fucking studio. I mean,

(16:57):
that's her rate, you know, to say that, The fact
that Uh, there's something kind of like the fact that
that even becomes a negative against her to me is
almost in a way, like kind of deeply sexist, because
we were were afraid of a woman in power being

(17:19):
able to actually say something like that. And I think
it's cool. I mean in retar of course I didn't
like to hear it, but in retrospect, I was like, yeah,
good for you. She didn't get it. Don played the
game the way the boys played the game, and to
her credit, she didn't change. She was a free spirit
and she was true to herself. Male producers and exact
stated movie stars, why couldn't done this was nunheard of

(17:42):
a female executive dating Richard Gere and Marty Scorsese. For Dawn,
who grew up watching her dad struggle to make ends
meet selling zippers, life was there for the taking. Dawn
and Dawn, I mean they should have run a studio together.
They were easily the two most colorful people working in
Holy It at the time, no question, and they really

(18:02):
loved each other. Dawn really saved Don's ass on Flashdance,
and now Dawn needed her help on Top Gun. Don
knew she had to move fast to help Don Cruz
was tired of all the rewrites. The script was, in
his opinion, not working. Don knew of one writer that
she promised could fix it when we return. How a

(18:23):
soft spoken screenwriter from Texas saved Top Gun from collapse.
Without Warren Scaron, A genuinely don't think there would have
been a Top Gun. Warren Scaron was Don's go to
script doctor. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Warren Scarren

(18:45):
was that there was an entire book written about Warren
Scarren titled Rewrite Man, written by Alison mccore. The book
maybe the only biography ever written about a top level
Hollywood script doctor. Don had previously hired Warren on several
projects in need of script doctor of work, but Top
Gun was a far bigger and a far more complicated
mess than anything else he had worked on. This was

(19:06):
at the height of Don's paranoia. There was real distrust
amongst the entire creative team, everybody at lost sight what
the story was about. And then in walks Warren and
he puts everybody at ease. He's got the Alaska connection
with Dawn and the whole Hemmingway outdoorsman thing with Walter Yates.
Walter Yates was a folk legend in Alaska. Bush pilot, goldbiner, explorer,

(19:30):
helicopter crash survivor, grizzly bear hostage. He was the real
deal Alaskan survivalist, the sort that Don promoted himself to be.
Everyone Alaska knew of Walter Yates. There was even a
documentary about him called Breakaway. The film was a survivalist
tale of one man's year living in the remote Alaskan wilderness.
There are no existing clips of the film, but you

(19:52):
can track down the documentary on VHS tape now. The
director of the film was none other than Warren Scaren.
I think if Don were to be a writer, he'd
have wanted to be a writer in the vein of Warren.
Warren was the warrior poet that Don professed to be.
He was very much steeped in the mythology of the warrior,

(20:13):
but with a real spiritual take on what that meant.
In many ways he was. It was the perfect collaborator,
and Tom Cruise loved him too. Don loved him so
much he tried to get Warren to move to l
a but Warren knew he needed to stay in Austin.
It was a buffer from all the noise of Hollywood.
Like Don, Warren was deep into his own wellness regime.

(20:36):
I had suggested Don try floatation tanks, but he was
just way too restless. When you're in the tank and
you're floating in the salt water and you're completely relaxed
in that dark chamber, it's hypnotic. It's the closest thing
I imagined to experiencing zero gravity in the eighties. This

(20:57):
was a really very radical sort of wellness. Warren needed
all the wellness he could get to prepare for the chaos.
During Top Gun pre production, Don and Tom and Tony
Scott had been developing the script for so long that
Warren felt they had lost all perspective. The script would
need a full rewrite. The studio had given him a
twenty one day contract. He wrote so hard and for

(21:19):
so long that his hands became so callous that he
had to wrap them in bubble wrap. For a time,
he was temporarily blind and was forced to wear an
eye patch. You can imagine what a sorry sight he
was with gauze covering his hands and a pirate's patch
over his eye. When he went to Los Angeles for
the first table read but before any table read could happen,
Tom Cruise had to officially sign off on the script.

(21:40):
Even after Warren's page one rewrite, Tom was still on
the fence. They were just days from production. Don had
to somehow convinced Tom to sign on. They had to
get him up in the air jet planes. For two
years they had been talking about how Tom would be
flying real Navy fighter jets. Why not get to flying,

(22:01):
So it was arranged Tom would fly with the greatest
daredevil pilots in the world, the Blue Angels. Tom drives
down from Los Angeles on his motorcycle. He still had
his ponytail from working on Legend. Don was worried that
the military guys would look at this hippie looking kid
and take the piss. He wanted them to go easy
on his young star, but they didn't hold back, and

(22:22):
Tom loved every moment of it. Years later, Tom would
recount the story, and I flew with the Blue Angels,
and then I went when we were filming, I kind
of my deal was. When I made my deal, I said,
I've got to fly in the F FOURT team. I
made it with the studio and I had to be
filmed in the four Team live and so I had
to go through all the adjecture seat training, and I

(22:44):
couldn't wait to fly. It was a life changing moment
for Tom. The speed, the power, the adrenaline, the athleticism
it took to fly a jet. After Tom had landed
and thanked the pilots for the ride, he immediately ran
to the nearest pay phone and let Don know he
was going to do Top Gun. Tom had been paid

(23:05):
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for risky business. For
Top Gun, Paramount offered five hundred and seventy five thousand dollars.
Tom wanted double that. Eventually Paramount settled on a cool
one million dollars. Four years ago, Tom was an actor
without a credit, working sanitation in New York City. Now
he was a million dollar actor in what was to

(23:25):
be the biggest action movie of the year. Don had
done it. Tom was on board. Now the real pressure
was on. They had to figure out how to make
the movie. The Down Season two is executive produced by
Will McCormick and David Harris Klein. Klein also wrote and
created the series. Mike Jursits is the editor, sound designer,

(23:47):
and producer of the series. The podcast is produced and
narrated by Malia Vera Drew That's Me. Louis Weymouth voices
the character of Pierce and also produces the series. For
more episodes of The Dawn season two, listen to the
series on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you
listen to podcasts. H