Celebrity Reputations

 Can you separate the actor from the role?

As you may have heard, there is a second Top Gun movie out now. 

And Tom Cruise is back as Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. Tom Cruise is one of the last big movie stars. Pretty much every movie released that he has a part in is guaranteed to be a massive hit. From the Mission: Impossible series to the Jack Reacher movies, Cruise has had a long and varied career. 

He is also a very visible member of Scientology. 

The church has been accused of many things. None of them are great. And as the world grows smaller, thanks in large part to the internet, people's opinions and stories are now easier to hear and they move quickly. I am not going to get into all of them here, you can look up the accusations if you choose. 

Because of his affiliation with this organization, many people are asking that the public at large not see this movie. Which got me thinking about other movie stars, and what happened with them. Is the boycotting of actors based on their private (I am using private kind of loosely here) lives a new thing that comes with an increased lack of privacy due to an increase in curiosity and technology that makes it harder to hide things? Or do we just care about the type of people our celebrities are more than we did in the past?

There were plenty of things going on with celebrities in the past that by today's standards could have killed their careers. Elvis Presley had a preference for girls under 16, he moved his eventual first wife in with him when she was 14. Alfred Hitchcock was known for being obsessive about his actresses. If they failed to comply with his wishes, he would attempt to sabotage their careers. The actress Gloria Grahame slept with her underage stepson, while still married to his dad. Of these, and many other examples I could give, only Grahame faced the loss of her career, and that was after she married the son when he came of age. 

In a way, I get the blowback. We tend to idolize movie stars. And because we look up to them, we want them to be good people. Would we want to be judged the way we judge them? Would we want the lack of privacy? 

I guess that is something that each one of us needs to figure out. I haven't seen Top Gun: Maverick yet. I don't know if I will. But it is a choice. And everyone should feel good about their choices, how they spend their money, and who they support. 



Music Corner

There are really only three choices when the post is about Top Gun. I am going to go with Take My Breath Away by Berlin. The song itself was written specifically for the movie by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock. It went on to win both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 1986.

The duo was asked by Jerry Bruckheimer to write a romantic song for the film, they had already written Danger Zone (recorded by Kenny Loggins)  and I guess Bruckheimer wanted to see what else they had in them. Moroder and Whitlock actually first met when Whitlock (then a mechanic) worked on Moroder's Ferrari. 

Shopping Corner

Top Gun: The Book


The Science of Celebrity...Or is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?



Scandals, Secrets, and Swansongs






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