When Risky Business turned him - a 21-year-old kid with three bit parts and one flop on his résumé - into an overnight sensation, he disappeared.
Tom Cruise had always been edgy around the press. The first star to stumble in front of the knives was the biggest actor in the world - and the one who'd tried the hardest not to trip. The Internet finally had the tools to feed us an endless buffet of fluff, chopping up real events to flashy - and sometimes false - moments that warped our cultural memory. YouTube was a week old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight. Camera phones finally outsold brick phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a 24-hour Internet frenzy. In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the world of celebrity changed. Yet rather than correct the record, the video perpetuated the delusion.
Thanks to the Internet, we have video at our fingertips. Bogart's mythological Casablanca catchphrase got embedded in the culture before we could replay the video and fact-check. Like Humphrey Bogart saying, “Play it again, Sam,” Tom Cruise jumping on a couch is one of our mass hallucinations. There's just one catch: It never happened. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career. You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. “Just the absolute losing of minds.” He glanced at a monitor that transmitted a silent, live feed. “I could just hear the audience going absolutely apeshit,” Tugman says. The crowd sounded as if it was going to tear the building down. But as Tugman carefully hung black curtains in Studio B, directly behind the orange set where Oprah taped, those screams wouldn't stop. The pay was $32 an hour and he didn't want to screw it up. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams.Ī former circus fire-eater, he'd taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue.