Cruising for a bruising

This week, an ex-planet and a major star suffered a very public downgrading. The effect on their reputations is not the same: while Pluto has been removed from the solar system A-list for good, the fate of Tom Cruise is still very much up for debate. His long-term production deal with Paramount Studios has come to an end, but there is disagreement about the reasons and the implications.

Was it about money or behaviour? Does this mean that his career has stalled? Is it too soon to start predicting that the place of actors in the Hollywood hierarchy is under threat? And, for that matter, how much stranger can the stories about Tom Cruise get? He is a public figure who exercises a strange fascination over the culture. The elements that fuel the interest in him - the trappings of celebrity, Scientology, Hollywood and power - are scarcely unique to Cruise, but he has given them a special, idiosyncratic, over-the-top twist. He represents the things that money can buy and all the things it can't: he embodies control, but also the lack of it.

Part of the avid interest in Cruise revolves around his financial success: he's the actor as mega-entrepreneur, a man with $US25 million-per-film pay packet, back-end production deals and a franchise movie series. But still more compelling are his public relations failures- and these are generally thought to include his relationship with Katie Holmes and the birth of their baby. It has got to a point where even New York Times columnist Frank Rich regards him almost as a fictional character. Writing about the nature of public opinion, Rich suggested: "We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs, but give it no more credence than a subplot on Desperate Housewives."

And he's undermined himself, almost single-handedly. There are plenty of bizarre rumours about Cruise floating around the blogosphere and finding their way into the gossip magazines, but in general the stuff that generates the most negative response happens in full public view.

On Oprah, when he "jumped the couch", with that hysterical, fist-pumping declaration of love. On the Today show, when he got into a spat with Matt Lauer and declared: "You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do." It's easy to forget that he is capable of giving good performances in good films.

But it's the offscreen performances that have been the problem: that's what Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, conveyed very pointedly in an interview with the Wall Street Journal when he said: "We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

To add insult to injury, Paramount also announced a two-picture deal with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park's creators, who in an episode called "Trapped in the Closet" satirised Cruise, reportedly infuriating him.

Creative suicide meant spruiking for Scientology, bagging Brooke Shields over her post-natal depression treatment and going troppo on Oprah. From this, Redstone made the leap that bad perceptions of Cruise might have cost Mission: Impossible 3 $US100 million ($A131.5 million) in ticket sales, a claim that is as expansive as it is impossible to prove.

Yet Cruise has made Paramount a lot of money, as his production partner Paula Wagner was quick to point out when she tried to counter Redstone's offensive strategy: Cruise-Wagner productions were responsible for 32 per cent of the company's theatrical revenue in the past six years, she said. Cruise also walked away with a large amount of it in lucrative back-ended profit deals, and a recent decline in DVD sales, it is said, might have made companies such as Paramount eager to renegotiate these kinds of arrangements.

So Cruise might have to change with the times. He has been around since the early '80s, but his boyish schtick has endured, almost unmodified, although his disconcertingly protracted episodes of laughter have got longer. He made it big early, launched at 19 with Risky Business. Once its famous air guitar-underwear sequence would have been a defining image of Cruise: but that was before his Oprah couch trip.

He has recently been involved in some overblown works that look more like vanity projects than movies: some of them made money, some tanked. The Mission: Impossible series seems like a Cruise toy, the Hollywood equivalent of a giant train set — but it still collected hundreds of millions at the box office. Vanilla Sky, in which Cruise starred opposite Penelope Cruz, was an excruciating, bloated pseudo-art movie mess, and he looked silly and self-centred, rather than noble and warrior-like, in The Last Samurai. His best recent roles are characters with flaws or darker aspects: he was terrific in Michael Mann's Collateral, as a hitman who involved a taxi driver in his contract killings. And in Spielberg's War of the Worlds he made a perfectly plausible feckless father forced to take responsibility for his children in the face of an alien invasion.

What kinds of roles will the post-Paramount Cruise take? He and Wagner have talked hedge funds as sources of finance, but will this mean more or less creative independence for them? And how clean will the break really be? The trade magazine Variety, after all, is treating the split as a divorce, with potentially difficult custody battles over projects still in development, some of them starring vehicles for Cruise, some not. There has been very little speculation about this, but it's worth wondering what qualifies as acceptable weirdness for actors.

It's too early to tell whether Schadenfreude has inflated the significance of these events: it's not clear if the dire predictions about a seismic shift in Hollywood power bases or a fall from grace for Cruise are warranted. One thing is certain, however: Tom, Katie and baby Suri will continue to be fixtures in the magazines, tabloids and blogs, from Vanity Fair to popbitch. Tom's latest mission, should he choose to accept it, is to attract the same level of interest in his movie roles.