Tom Cruise Made His Debut In An Awful Brooke Shields Box Office Hit

Tom Cruise was a wholly unknown quantity when he went supernova in Paul Brickman's sex comedy classic "Risky Business." The 21-year-old had made a mild impression as a gung-ho military school cadet in Harold Becker's underrated "Taps," but that film was primarily a showcase for rising stars Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. "Risky Business" belonged to Cruise, and that iconic scene where he lip-syncs to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" changed his life, and Hollywood in general, forever.

If you're curious as to where it all started for Cruise, you can hit up YouTube to see him do his damndest with a clumsily scripted monologue about arson in Franco Zeffirelli's 1981 teen romance "Endless Love." Or, if gawking at a slow-moving, 116-minute cinematic car wreck is your thing, you can watch the whole godawful movie. This is clearly not one of Cruise's best movies.

Based on the celebrated novel by Scott Spencer, "Endless Love" was a star vehicle for red-hot model/actor Brooke Shields, who'd made a big-screen splash the year prior in the deeply silly shipwrecked-kids drama "The Blue Lagoon." Hollywood viewed the stunningly beautiful Shields as a superstar in the making, and thought that pairing her with the director of the beloved 1968 production of "Romeo and Juliet" would unlock her acting talents. She's certainly better than her empty vessel of a co-star, Martin Hewitt in "Endless Love," but the film's failure is all on Zeffirelli.

Released in the summer of 1981, the heavily-hyped "Endless Love" was a modest box office hit for Universal Pictures, grossing $32 million against a $9.7 million budget. But the studio couldn't figure out how to sell Zeffirelli's movie because he completely misunderstood Spencer's novel. As the author wrote in an article for The Paris Review in 2013:

"I was frankly surprised that something so tepid and conventional could have been fashioned from my slightly unhinged novel about the glorious destructive violence of erotic obsession, but I'd been warned. Riding to the premiere with Zeffirelli, he reached across the expanse of his hired car and, patting my knee, said, 'Scott, this movie is going to be like a knife in your heart.' He was already on his way back to Positano by the time the reviews rolled in."

The film's explicit sex scenes initially earned it an X rating (which is, to put it mildly, troubling given that Shields was 15 years old when the film was shot), but he made cuts to secure an R rating. It's still steamy, but the heat can't mask the sheer storytelling ineptitude. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, "[T]he movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it..., and is a narrative and logical mess."

Meanwhile, Cruise has given some rotten performances throughout his career, but I've never seen him fail to sell dialogue more spectacularly than in "Endless Love." But if you're looking to get Cruise to trash the movie, forget it. The man is the Floyd Mayweather, Jr. of interview subjects. When he was asked point-blank about the movie in 1992, he deftly made it a matter of amateurism. "I didn't know what the hell was going on," he said. He eventually figured it out.