The atrocious 1982 movie Tom Cruise couldn’t even get an audition for: “Oh, he’s too short”
As you’ll be aware, Tom Cruise is not a tall man. As you’ll also be aware, not being a tall man has done nothing to stop Tom Cruise from becoming the single biggest movie star of the modern era.
If anything, you could make the argument that a serious case of short man syndrome is what drove him to the top. If he stood over six feet, would he really feel the need, not only for speed, but to prove himself as being hard as nails by performing death-defying stunts that no other actor would even consider?
Maybe, maybe not, but the studio executives who turned him down at the beginning of his career were no doubt left to rue the day they said he was too tiny to make it in Hollywood. He’s hardly Danny DeVito, either, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t deemed too diminutive for the atrocious sequel to a classic.
After making his screen debut with a small role in 1981’s Endless Love, Cruise convinced himself that he would make it after reading one line during his audition for the following year’s Taps. He was right, based on the fact that he became Tom Cruise eventually, but it’s fascinating to wonder how things would have panned out had those stars not aligned, and he’d ended up in Grease 2 instead.
As the follow-up to the highest-grossing release of 1978, the top-earning musical of all time, and the second-best-selling John Travolta movie soundtrack of the year behind Saturday Night Fever, the mere existence of another Grease flick seemed like enough of a guarantee that it would be a hit, in theory.
In truth, it was an embarrassment. Barely recouping its $11 million budget in ticket sales, the Travolta and Olivia Newton-John-less sequel was a fiscal embarrassment. A crap movie, too, although it did at least give Michelle Pfeiffer her first starring role in a feature, regardless of whether she loathed the experience or not.
Maxwell Caulfield, who is no Tom Cruise, played the male lead, Michael Carrington. As for the real Tom Cruise, producer Allan Carr (not that one) knew he was the one that he wanted, ooh ooh ooh, but the suits disagreed. “I found this new actor who auditioned in my living room,” he wistfully recalled.
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“Sang. Danced. And we went to the studio, met the director and one of the executives, and they said, ‘Oh, he’s too short to be in the movies, or to be a movie star!” As you’d imagine, Carr was incredulous. “Tom Cruise! So that’s one of life’s little adventures. It could have been Tom Cruise and Michelle Pfeiffer, which is what I wanted.”
Cruise’s impromptu screen test in front of Carr may have impressed the producer, but when he was carted in to do it for real in front of the Paramount brass, he was almost laughed out of the room. It wouldn’t be until 30 years later that he got his first bite at the musical apple, and much like Grease 2, Rock of Ages was also pish.
