40 years ago this scene made Tom Cruise a star.

The sequence is one of the highlights of Risky Business, a ‘teen comedy’ that was the craze of the 1980s. Directed and written by Paul Brickman, it was compared at the time to the classic The Graduate and one of the highest-grossing of the year (over $68 million in the U.S. alone). The plot is simple and follows, as mentioned, the rules repeated ad nauseum for at least 10 years: when parents go on vacation, a teenager in his last year of high school embarks on a series of adventures (romantic and sexual) and misadventures ( houses and cars are destroyed) with comic moments and an uplifting romantic ending.

40 years ago comedy was essentially about so-called “politically incorrect” situations and Risky Business is yet another example. Joel Goodsen (Tom Cruise) lives with his wealthy parents who want him to study at Princeton University. To get the grade he needs to get in, Joel participates in an extracurricular activity in which students work in teams to create small businesses. The problem is that, in the absence of his parents, he throws a “little party” at home, destroying everything, and needs to make quick money to cover the damage. An alternative is to “manage” call girls, taken by Lana (Rebecca DeMornay). In other words, Joel’s ‘risky and successful business’ is being a luxury pimp. So it is.

The scene in which Tom Cruise dances around the room in his underwear and button-up shirt to the sound of Old Time Rock and Roll is still repeated today and the film is considered a classic, being the first to have the actor as the protagonist. Ironically, the script struggled to land. At the time, the porn comedy Porky’s was what was considered funny and the story Brickman came up with was neither daring nor risky enough. Only the dialogue in which he asks “What the fuck is this”, something unusual for 40 years of appearing in films, shows how much he came to change things. Another sign of the times is that the issue of prostitution was an obstacle, not from a female perspective but because in the line of Porky’s, other productions used brothels as a setting, such as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Night Shift, both without success. Even so, the project was accepted and one of the requests made by the studio was to increase the age of Lana, Joel’s girlfriend and call girl, who initially would have been only 16 years old and became 21.

Before closing with the unknown Tom Cruise, all the young actors of the time auditioned: Sean Penn, Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, John Cusack, and Kevin Anderson were rejected. Megan Mullally, years before Will and Grace was also turned down for the role of Lana. It was only with the success of The Outsiders that they saw a young man who appears in a few scenes, always with greasy hair slicked back and a pointed tooth and who had a day off in the city, who decided to audition with him at lunchtime. That’s how legends are born, isn’t it?

The polite and serious boy busted the test. All that remained was to choose who would be her romantic partner, but not many women were excited about the idea of playing a call girl who seduces an underage senior high school student. Michelle Pfeiffer, for example, competed. That’s when she decided to test the then “girlfriend of Harry Dean Stanton“, Rebecca De Mornay. The chemistry with Tom Cruise was undeniable (they would later date). To think that in order to star in Risky Business, Tom passed Francis Ford Coppola‘s invitation to be one of the main characters in Rumble Fish, a role that ended up going to Matt Dillon.

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As filming continued, tests discovered that the original ending (where Joel ‘loses’ everything) didn’t quite work and so an alternative giving him the impossible: getting into Princeton, having a happily ambiguous future with Lana, and leaving his parents in the dark about his adventures – except for a small crack in the crystal egg was on. The face of the 1980s and a deep dislike for the director, who found the conclusion cheesy.

On the eve of returning to the screen with Mission Impossible, it’s fun to see how the Tom Cruise phenomenon emerged from such a small project. And also thanks to the film, for 40 years we have associated the actor with the best sunglasses of the moment. Legends are born that way.

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