RUBRICS

KELLY McGILLIS: STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS, SOME JOY, BEFORE GOOGLE

McGillis in Top Gun as Charlie. Paramount Pictures. 1985.

With all the Top Gun: Maverick hoopla the last couple of weeks - I contributed to it over at Facebook and Instagram by posting my thoughts about the film and my memories of writing a cover story on Tom Cruise for Vanity Fair, etc. - I thought I’d be counter-intuitive and make the RUBRICS today about Kelly McGillis, a wonderful actress who was in the first film as the character Charlie, Tom’s love interest who had a man’s name. I have read that she has been the recipient of snarky comments and commentary - some downright mean - about her appearance these days, which added to the speculation of why she is not in the sequel at all, or even referenced. I worked at Paramount at the time of the first Top Gun’s release and there was even snark back then about her and her appearance and her age even though she had already starred with Harrison Ford in Witness and been nominated for both a Golden Globe and BAFTA Award. Ford and Cruise were two of the biggest stars of the era and she more than held her own in those films with them; her presence challenged them to be better actors themselves. She always had presence and still has it even when she’s not present based on those talking about her absence from the sequel of Top Gun. It was that presence and her talent that got her accepted in Juilliard’s Drama Division in its Group 12. She graduated from Juilliard in 1983 and two years later she was making movies with Ford and Cruise.

She came out as a lesbian after getting a divorce from her husband. Her next marriage was to a woman. She is in recovery and has worked as a drug counselor in a rehab facility. She teaches acting in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives close by.

Cruise and McGillis in a scene from Top Gun. Paramount Pictures. 1985.

David Kirkpatrick was a story editor, production executive, and finally President of the Motion Picture Group at Paramount. He has always been, at heart, a writer. This is what he posted about Kelly on his Facebook page:

Kelly McGillis was much too tall for Tom Cruise. She was 5'11". He was 5'7". Besides, she was 27 and he was 24 and the difference was palpable. After I saw them together for a “chemistry meeting” on the Paramount lot, I walked away conclusively uttering, “She looks like his mother.”

Top Gun was a Paramount production in 1984, long before Tom Holland at 5’8 and Zendaya at 5’10” walked blithely down the red carpet for Spiderman No Way Home, breaking “stupid’ (according to Tom Holland) stereotypes of height between guys and gals.

It was fine when Kelly McGillis starred opposite Harrison Ford in Witness (her first movie for Paramount) but Harrison was 6’1”.

Demi Moore was in rehab and the insurance company deemed her (at that time) “uninsurable”. Later, Cruise and Moore were magnetic in the 1992 production of A Few Good Men.

In the old days at Paramount, we made three picture deals with unestablished actors. We guaranteed the first picture but had options for them for two more. If they became a star off a Paramount movie, we had the advantage of two more negotiated deals at a fair price (at least from the studio’s perspective). It was standard practice for Paramount and that’s how it started with Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours and Kelly McGillis in Witness.

We did 10 successful movies back-to-back pictures with Eddie. But during that tenure, Eddie’s fees went from $75k to 10 million plus significant participations in the profit. As a Paramount executive, I oversaw Eddie’s deal as well as Kelly’s deal. Over a period of four years, we made our three pictures with Kelly—Witness, Top Gun, and The Accused. Over her term, her fees went from $125K to $500K.

I was the executive on Top Gun but the producers, Tom Cruise , the director Tony Scott and the head of the studio, Ned Tanen would not consider screen testing Kelly and Tom to see how they “played” on screen. The screen carried its own mysteries. If the fiction of them as a couple worked on screen, that was the “truth”. Nothing else mattered.

Witness opened the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 to a 7-minute standing ovation and Kelly McGillis became a “star.” But Kelly was her own woman. She was gifted, beautiful, eccentric. In a time when you were closeted, Kelly was openly and refreshingly gay. A graduate of Juilliard, she never wanted to be a “movie star”, unlike Tom Cruise who was driven by powerful desire. She wanted to be a working actress. The last time I saw Kelly was when we got together for a late dinner after a performance of Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout Theater in NYC. The year was 1994.

We had been shooting Top Gun for two weeks, when Kelly McGillis appeared on the screen. Top Gun was a troubled production, so the head of the studio wanted to see Kelly’s first day of work. Ned Tanen grabbed his head and shouted, “She looks like his mother!”

What could I do? We rewrote the first flirt scene to accommodate the awareness of the older woman-young man situation between the two leads. Maverick walks into the ladies room at a bar-restaurant and finds Charlie (Kelly).

Maverick: “I came in here to save you from making a big mistake with that older guy.”

Charlie: “Really? So I could go on to a bigger mistake with a young guy like yourself?"

Maverick: “Maybe.”

We used apple boxes and shoe lifts for Tom. In the movie, Charlie always found a way to “slouch” when in the same frame as Maverick (as in the scene above).

We did our best to make it work. We thought we were making “Flashdance in the Sky” a “Boys with Toys-movie.” In our first preview, the movie tested higher with women than men. The highest testing scene which we were ready to get rid of the Bruce-Weber Volleyball scene. The big complaint? Women wanted more of the romance. We shot new scenes with Kelly and Tom on a three day weekend, including a sex scene. Kelly had cut off her hair so she wore a cap in most of the scenes as the wig that was built proved shoddy.

Per contract, Tom Cruise got top billing and his likeness on the poster art. Because women liked the pic (we were all flabbergasted), we also added Kelly McGillis and her likeness to the one sheet. Tom approved the placement. Kelly slouches for the poster photo.

There’s been a lot of age and fat shaming about Kelly over the last months and the fact she is not in the continuing story. It is unfair. Kelly is her own woman. She made a choice. She wanted to be a sober mother to her two daughters. Stardom “didn't become a priority; what became the priority was raising my girls and being the best sober parent, I could be." When she heard of Jennifer Connelly was playing the new romance in Top Gun Maverick, she responded, “I am happy she got the opportunity. She’s a wonderful actress.”

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS

Kelly McGillis. Photo by Larry Bussaca.

SOME JOY

McGillis at the Witness premiere at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1985. Photo by Dan Marschka. From Lancasteronline.com.

McGILLIS on her wedding day when she married Melanie Leis. Photograph by Ryan Collerd for The New York Times. From the the Vows article that ran about their marriage.

BEFORE GOOGLE

McGILLIS in Witness. Paramount Pictures. 1984.

Jeff Daniels and McGillis. From The House on Carroll Street. Orion Pictures. 1987.

McGillis with Jodie Foster. From The Accused. 1988. Photo by David Hume Kennerly from IMDB.com, “courtesy of Getty”