Claremont Independent

People often say that the ‘80s did for money what the ‘60s did for sex. And what the ‘80s did for money, Risky Business did for Tom Cruise. And what Risky Business did for Tom Cruise, Paul Brickman did for Risky Business.

Mentioning Risky Business automatically brings to mind the iconic image of a 19-year-old Cruise, playing neurotic protagonist Joel Goodsen, sliding across the floor of his parents’ upper-crust Chicago home. Unfortunately, this classic scene is probably the only thing most people remember about the film. And while Cruise lip-synching Bob Seger does not usually remind one of CMC, the film has a great deal in common with our school.

In case you’ve been living in North Korea for the past 25 years, Risky Business is the story of Joel Goodsen, a teenager whose parents leave him alone at home while they go on vacation. The hyper-neurotic Goodsen cuts loose with a little coaxing from his friend Miles and a series of disastrous events follow, including a few forbidden trips in his father’s Porsche and a night with a hooker named Lana. When Lana discovers Joel cannot pay for their night of romance, she steals his mother’s crystal egg. Joel has a sudden need for cash to buy his mother’s egg back, which he raises in a creative way with the help of Lana and her friends.

Risky Business was the brainchild of CMC alum Paul Brickman, class of ’71. Brickman wrote and directed the movie, constructing the 1983 film as a product of his personal environment. In part, he based Joel Goodsen on himself and his own experiences. It was no accident that Cruise’s call girl co-star Rebecca De Mornay once told Premiere magazine “The jeans, the sweater, the loafers. It was Tom’s outfit for the movie, but it just happened to coincide with Paul’s real-life wardrobe. They were both Joel, as far as I could see.”

When it originally debuted in theaters, critics lauded the movie and its brilliant young director. (Brickman, CMC lore has it, got his directorial start in pornographic films.) Brickman’s film received critical acclaim from the New York Times, Variety, and noted film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert raved about Brickman’s directing debut, calling the film “one of the smartest, funniest, most perceptive satires in a long time” and applauding Brickman’s genius as a writer and as a director. The movie even made Ebert’s “Top Ten Films of 1983” list.

Risky Business was also the movie that launched Tom Cruise to stardom. For the next twenty years, people would see Cruise as the prototypical Hollywood playboy. Since Risky Business, no director has ever dared to film Cruise as physically small as he actually is (he stands just 5’7”). Brickman, however, had no such qualms. Especially in the first half of the film, Brickman likes to show us Tom Cruise as he really is. And for that, the director’s artistic genius should be remembered.

Yet it was not just Cruise’s performance or Brickman’s direction that make this film worth writing about. Primarily, it was the screenplay Brickman created and the uncanny similarities between CMC and Risky Business that make it so worthwhile for Claremont McKenna students to see.

Joel Goodsen is your typical CMCer as a high school senior. He is a member of his school’s Future Enterprisers club, he aspires to go to a prestigious university, he cares deeply about his future, and he really wants to get laid.

Unfortunately for him, Brickman’s story only gives Goodsen the opportunity to choose one. He can worry about his future, maybe get into Princeton, and spend his time running around without any pants on; or he can get laid and make some money while he’s at it. It is no surprise which choice he makes. It is a movie after all.

Of course, the sequence of events that force him toward the latter option are more a matter of Brickman’s screenplay than of anything else, and the chances of anyone rolling their father’s Porsche into Lake Michigan in real life are relatively slim. Maybe we would not all be forced to turn our parents’ Colonial into a brothel, but the similarities between CMC students and Joel Goodsen are quite apparent nonetheless.

The entire plot of the film involves entrepreneurship, albeit shady entrepreneurship. Initially Joel and his Future Enterpriser teammate create a notepad meant specifically for telephone messages. A light blinks when a message is unread and a voice even calls out that a message has been taken for those really important calls. The whole idea is somewhat ridiculous and completely unnecessary, and like the other Future Enterpriser projects we eventually see, not very profitable. It is Joel’s risky business that really puts him in the green. Running a brothel for his friends and a Princeton admissions interviewer, he earns enough money to get his mother’s egg back and pay for the repairs on his father’s car.

In the movie, we see a transformation that turns Joel from an angsty high schooler into a freewheeling entrepreneurial pimp. Watching the film, I wonder to myself if Brickman aligned himself more with the first Joel or the second and, more importantly, which Joel was more fully derived from Brickman’s experiences here at CMC.

Despite how cool Joel seems in the latter stages of the movie, I hope Brickman did not see his CMC days as embodying that entrepreneurial spirit. True, we are a school built around leadership and Joel Goodsen only becomes a leader once he resorts to building a prostitution ring. But is that really the impression four years at CMC left on Brickman? Profit at any cost? Leadership regardless of whether or not what you are doing is right?

I watched the film over Winter Break with the intention of relating themes from the film to general themes here at CMC. I was completely disappointed, not with the quality of the film, but with the message that came at the end. Sure it was nice, and everyone wants Joel to do well, but it sends an ugly message about entrepreneurship at the dawn of the Reagan era.

It was not until afterward, when I began to research the film in depth, that I learned a more interesting story. In Brickman’s original script, Risky Business ended with Joel and Lana realizing their business was a failure. Producer David Geffen, however, wanted an ending more appropriate for a fairy tale than a coming-of-age film. Brickman felt so enraged by the change he threatened to quit, although he eventually conceded and shot the ending as Geffen wished.

Geffen probably had a point. The film most likely made more at the box office with the fairy tale ending than it would have had it been shot as Brickman wished. Yet we lost some of the substance that would have made the film even better and the storyline more meaningful in our lives.

Most importantly to us here at CMC, we lost the sense that Risky Business might say something about how we would all like to live. Sure, the film is still a satirical comedy about capitalism that arguably says as much about the perils of free enterprise as Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, but the meaning does not carry the weight it could.

Despite a brilliant directorial debut, more than $60 million in gross revenue, and a Writers Guild of America Award nomination, Paul Brickman has directed only one movie in the 26 years since Risky Business hit the box office. Maybe he felt disenfranchised with the process. He created Risky Business, from the first draft of the screenplay to the last post-production edits, to tell a story. Unfortunately, business itself changed that story into one that Brickman was not nearly as interested in telling.

Chase Gray CMC ‘12 is an associate editor of the Claremont Independent.

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