Did Tom Cruise walk out on Paramount?

Tom Cruise

NEW YORK - Gone are the days when Hollywood studios could sign up film stars and treat them as their property, controlling every hour of their lives.

But, as one of the industry's most successful box-office draws, Tom Cruise, has just discovered, there are still lines of bad - or at least very odd - behaviour that even the best talent should not cross.

But cross it he did, not once but several times in the last 12 months.

There were the love-sick gymnastics on Oprah Winfrey's sofa or his contention that psychiatry is a "Nazi science".

So, the studio with which he has been happily hitched for 14 years, Paramount Pictures, has unceremoniously shown Mr Cruise the door and the boss of Viacom, the parent company of Paramount, has made no secret of the reasons.

"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone told the Wall Street Journal in a candid interview.

"His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount." Mr Redstone, 81, went on: "It's nothing to do with his acting ability, he's a terrific actor. But we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

Mr Cruise, 44, and his production partner Paula Wagner had been operating their company, Cruise/Wagner Productions, from offices on the Paramount lot, a benefit for which the latter reportedly paid the pair $10 million a year.

The first signs of trouble emerged last month, when Paramount opened negotiations to renew the contract with Cruise/Wagner with a demand that the yearly payment be slashed to $2.5 million.

Even by Hollywood standards, the ensuing melt-down has been of high magnitude.

Talks between the two sides collapsed beached last week; it was not entirely clear yesterday whether they ended with Paramount firing Mr Cruise and ejecting his company from the lot or whether he and Ms Wagner acted first and walked out.

Ms Wagner, who fired back at Mr Redstone calling his remarks "offensive" and "undignified", insists it was the latter.

"Whatever remarks Mr Redstone would make about Tom Cruise personally or as an actor have no bearing on what this business issue is," she commented.

"There must be another agenda that the studio has in mind to take one of their greatest assets and malign him this way," adding: "It's not really the most businesslike approach. We've had virtually no dealings with Mr Redstone."

The way Ms Wagner tells it, she and Mr Cruise, who first captured audiences worldwide with his 1983 film Risky Business, were seeking to unhitch from Paramount to make a fresh start with their company.

She told reporters that they already have new investors lined up, including hedge funds, to finance their next projects although she did not provide any names.

It seems unlikely that Mr Cruise, with three Oscar nominations under his belt for the films Born on the Fourth of July, Magnolia and Jerry Maguire will vanish and sulk.

His first film with Paramount, Top Gun, which came out 20 years ago, grossed $100 million at the US box office and he has starred in another 13 films since then that passed the same box-office milestone.

"The whole Tom Cruise bashing thing is a little unwarranted," argued Brandon Gray, a respected industry analyst in Los Angeles.

"It's difficult to knock a guy who has had so many US$100 million movies. I think his next picture will confirm his stature. We'll get a better sense of where he is with the public."

It was concern with Mr Cruise's deteriorating public image that motivated Paramount to cut him loose.

The unusual behaviour came in the run-up the US release of Mission: Impossible III in May of this year.

Aside from cavorting on Ms Winfrey's sofa to underscore his love for the actress Katie Holmes, with whom he recently had a baby daughter named Suri, there has been his public boosting of Scientology and a cringing spat with a television anchor during which he lambasted the actress Brooke Shields for taking medication for postpartum depression.

The new Mission: Impossible film had a disappointing opening weekend in the US, generating a slightly anemic US$47 million, even though it went on to make a respectable US$393 million worldwide.

But according to Mr Redstone, the assorted antics of the film's star may have trimmed ticket sales by US$100 million to US$150 million.

And in Hollywood, it is the numbers that matter in the end.

- INDEPENDENT