Consider Mission: Impossible II, for example, which was distributed by Paramount. Based on a television series that ran for more than ten years and on the prior movie Mission: Impossible, the title had high audience awareness even before it was green-lighted. So did the star, Tom Cruise. The strategy of Paramount’s marketing campaign was to ineluctably link the star to the title so that all the publicity Cruise received in the months leading up to the release would remind people of the film. A back story was then scripted in which Cruise was seen to be indistinguishable from Ethan Hunt, the acrobatic hero he played, via the claim that he, and not a stunt double, had done the free falls, fire walks, motorcycle leaps, and other perilous stunts that Hunt did in the movie.
This back story was keynoted in a publicity short, Mission Incredible, shown on MTV and other cable channels owned by Paramount’s corporate parent. Made in the style of a documentary in which the crew and cast of Mission Impossible are interviewed, it has the director, John Woo, expressing great fear that Tom Cruise would plunge to his death in leaps across mountaintops or be incinerated in fire scenes. Woo states, at one point, “Tom has no fear. I prayed for him.” In another publicity short, Woo says, “Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts, so we did not need a stunt double.”
In the actual production, there were at least six stunt doubles for Tom Cruise’s part. Even if Cruise had possessed the skills and training to do the stunts himself, and even if the studio was not to object to the delays in shooting this conceit might cause, the insurance company, which insured Cruise as an “essential element” of the production, would not have allowed him to risk so much as an ankle sprain, much less his life. As far as this publicity script diverged from reality, however, it served its purpose by providing a plausible story for the entertainment media—“Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt,” and a tag line, “Expect the impossible again.”
---- The big picture the new logic of money and power in Hollywood (Epstein, Edward Jay)
