It's that time of the week, Dear Reader, when we all make a field trip out of the office and dowwwwwwn to the refurbished Vault at Movieline HQ, where another year of back issues from our print era emerges for online consumption. Today we welcome back 1992, and when I say it was a good year, I'm not making small talk. This was a really good year. What else do you call it when Tom Cruise laments missing out on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (with Steven Spielberg!) and Liam Neeson goes on the record about cigarettes and erections? Read on for these and other selected highlights.
· Tom Cruise was Movieline's December 1992 cover boy -- just ahead of the release of A Few Good Men -- when he opened up about his defused Spielberg collaboration The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:
You nearly played for Steven Spielberg a guy who grows younger and younger while everyone he loves is growing older. It was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and it's one of my favorite unproduced scripts.
That was a heartbreaking, very complex script and Steven was concerned, structurally, about how to do it. I'm developing a project now where I would be aged to about 55, and Nic[ole Kidman] is looking at this picture where she'd have to age to 70. Stuff like that is tough because it's about prosthetics and that's really out of the actor's hands. Look at the technology in Death Becomes Her and you realize it's going to get weird over the next 20 years because you're going to be able to take an image of the President, theoretically, and have him do just about anything.
Wow! Prescient!
· I totally forgot that Liam Neeson was once romantically linked with Barbra Streisand. Not that he was commenting on it back then, but there was this: "[H]is first mention of sex has nothing to do with women. No, when Neeson first talks about sex, he's thinking about his on-again, off-again love affair with something really hot. Cigarettes. What? 'The first time I lit one,' he sighs, looking out past the balcony to the panorama of Central Park, 'I had an erection.'" Take that, anti-tobacco zealots!
· How about this phenomenal endorsement from Sigourney Weaver herself: "Movieline: not as nasty as Spy, much more dishy and fun than Premiere." Classy lady, that one.
· Designated "future Oscar-winner" Jennifer Jason Leigh dished trade secrets from the set of Single White Female -- her Method-y oral sex technique in particular:
"Blow jobs aren't new to me on-screen," Leigh says softly, grinning when I raise the subject. She is referring to her character in Last Exit to Brooklyn, who had permanently chafed knees. "We didn't use any, umm, props, for those scenes in that movie, so what made this one so twisted is that Barbet Schroeder had the prop people go to a sex shop and get this enormous rubber dildo, because he wanted my mouth around something. Very authentic. I put mint-flavored oil on it, and it was so embarrassing and funny, I said, 'Look, if anybody laughs, I will f*cking kill them.' Working with the dildo turned out to be awkward though, because I was crawling back up the side of [Steven's] body and it was crawling up with me. For a long time in the film, there was this point where I'm talking to [Steven] down around his abdomen, and suddenly there's like this two-shot of me and the dildo. Barbet, who loves actors so much, thought, 'Well, no one would notice it.' Of course, the studio removed it."
· Spike Lee promoted Malcolm X by taking down his Jungle Fever leading lady Annabella Sciorra: "I'm amazed the film turned out as well as it did, because she was in another film entirely. Me and Wes[ley Snipes] were telling her about how black men got lynched in the South, they also got castrated. That it was this whole sexual fear. And she would look at us with her eyes all big, she didn't know nothing about this shit. It was all news to her. She was her own worst enemy..."
· Joe Queenan was Mickey Rourke for a day. Don't try this at home.
And of course take your time wandering through the rest. Recommended reading we might have overlooked is welcome in the comments...