Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Cocktail

Tom Cruise’s tenure at Disney/Touchstone was brief but productive. In 1986, the year he broke through in the blockbuster Top Gun, he earned Serious Actor cred by holding his own against Paul Newman in Martin Scorsese’s The Color Of Money. Two years later, he cemented his newly minted status as a major movie star with his second and final Touchstone picture, Cocktail. With that one, Cruise proved that audiences would pay good money and lots of it to see him in literally anything, no matter how terrible it was.

It's often said that no one sets out to make a bad movie (usually by filmmakers trying to explain why they just made one) and Cocktail doubtless is no exception. The screenplay was by Heywood Gould, whose previous credits included rewrite duties on Paul Schrader’s Rolling Thunder and Paul Newman’s Fort Apache The Bronx. Gould’s script was based on his own semi-autobiographical novel. Published in 1984, Cocktail was inspired by Gould’s experiences as a New York City bartender in the ‘70s. It is, by all accounts, a very different beast than its eventual adaptation: dark, cynical and awash in the gritty, booze-soaked details the movie hides behind the glare of electric blue neon.