Meredith Jordan - Top Gun Memos: The Making and Legacy of an Iconic Movie

TOP GUN MEMOS

THE MAKING

AND LEGACY

OF

AN

ICONIC

MOVIE

BY MEREDITH JORDAN

Copyright 2022, Meredith Jordan

Published in the United States by Citation Press.

First Edition 2022

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any manner without written permission

except in the case of brief quotations when properly cited.

ISBN: 978-1-7337874-3-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-7337874-4-4 (eBook)

Contents

Preface

I was working at the Margaret Herrick Library one day in 2017 when I requested files from several different movies. The main repository of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is filled with amazing material and this was more for fun than anything. I needed a break from the work I was there to do, so I went fishing.

One of the folders contained Tom Cruises contract for Top Gun. It was fascinating its in these pages but my focus wasnt celebrities. I write about the lesser-known heroes of movie production, the artists, artisans and business people who contribute mightily to the art form from behind the scenes.

More compelling to me was Bill Badalato, executive producer of Top Gun. That movie was on my fishing list because Id heard stories about it from his son, Billy Badalato, whod been a production assistant (P.A.) on it. The younger Badalato, also a producer, was central to my first book, Below the Line: Anatomy of a Successful Movie, about the making of Last Vegas (2013).

When I left the library that day I had copies of several interesting documents, all to be filed away for some magical day when I had no other obligations.

I met Bill Badalato in late 2018 for lunch, a casual meeting set in motion by Billy. We discussed a number of topics that day, just one of which was that Bills agent had told him he should write a book about Top Gun. The next meeting, a few months later, focused solely on what a book might look like. I didnt hear from him for a few months after that, and when I did, it was to say he didnt think there was enough interest.

I didnt argue because Id taken a job at a magazine, but Id done enough homework to think there was both interest and a really great story to be told. One definition of what makes a film iconic is whether people debate its place in film history including whether it was a good or bad movie to begin with decades down the road. That Top Gun is still part of the dialogue 35-plus years later makes it one of the most enduring movies of the last century. And no one had ever written more than a chapter about the making of the movie, despite its rare longevity.

Several elements made Top Gun different. The obvious one was that there arent many movies where the U.S. military supplies billions of dollars of its assets for sets, props and locations, and some of its best pilots.

Perhaps less obvious is how dangerous it was to make the movie. It was dedicated to Art Scholl, a well-known aviator and stunt pilot who died shooting plate footage, which were shots of real sky to go behind the actors in the mockups when they were on soundstages. Two other incidents might also have resulted in deaths. One involved the ocean rescue scene and the young Tom Cruise, who was pulled underwater by a prop parachute and cut free by Navy rescue divers. The other was on the side of a mountain outside Fallon, Nev., where movie crew was getting spectacular footage of jets soaring toward them. One jet turned late, narrowly averting a crash, the sheer force of it knocking crew and camera to the ground.

Top Gun had two other defining features. The first is that it was made with an incredibly small budget given what they set out to accomplish. The $15 million budget in 1985 would be about $38.8 million today, when adjusted for inflation. Compare that to the $150 million circulated as the estimated cost of the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick (2022), a guestimate that insiders say is way too low.

The other was the extent to which the movie was fixed in post-production, without any of the contemporary tools available now. Its always true that a movie comes together in the cutting room, but the editors of Top Gun helped reinvent the narrative in order to have a story.

I got a call from Bill on the last day of March 2020, a week after the pandemic hit and I was laid off from the magazine. Top Gun fans had been in touch in numbers, changing his mind about the level of interest in a book. Only he didnt want to write it. If I did, he would help where he could.

Id like to acknowledge the impeccable timing of the call and COVID-19 for clearing my calendar of work and other remnants of a previous life. Id like to thank Bill for his invaluable notes, and his time over those interviews and emails, many of them friendly exchanges. I appreciate that he understood I would go wherever the facts led.

A reporter is said to be gathering string in preparing a story, and the box of notes was filled with string. It led to many other sources of information, including access to private collections of production and studio documents. In the end, I had interviewed 90 people, most of whom had worked on the movie. Naval officers and personnel comprised another block of interviews. Writers and reporters who have covered the movie or someone connected to it, experts in specific areas of filmmaking and aviation, and cinema scholars, were another contingent. The last group included librarians, various museums and economic development people, and of course, fans.

All of that sits atop more than 1,250 pages of production, studio, personal, and government documents. Many of them were memos, hence the title of this book. Included in all that paper was an almost complete set of daily production reports, or PRs. Those daily reports summarize all other set documents used in a given day and, in the event the film ends up in court, are considered the controlling document. I write about the two missing pages in Chapter 8.

That paper provided a lot of details, from costs to equipment to rejected locations, but also a lot of insight into the personalities of the filmmakers. Sadly, it also included the coroners report on the death of Director Tony Scott. He leaped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles on Sunday, Aug. 19, 2012, a day after returning from a scout to Nevada on the long-awaited sequel to Top Gun. Scotts last days are covered in Chapter 14 and his contributions to film in Chapter 15.

Its a strange thing to spend this much time studying the work of someone you cant observe or interview, even with the mountains of material of him talking about his most successful movie. Tony Scott was, in the words of Tom Cruise, a great man and a great artist.

About halfway through the book I stopped thinking of the director as Scott and started thinking of him as Tony. That change was triggered by an interview with a cameraman who choked up talking about him. By then I had interviewed dozens of people who had worked with Scott, many of them friends, and they all called him Tony. Collectively, they helped fill in the story of this brilliant, funny and complex man who was sometimes cerebral and visionary, other times telling jokes or scaling rocks and occasionally mountains, which he did as a hobby.