Copyright 1995 Daily News, L.P.
Daily News (New York)
May 3, 1995, Wednesday
SECTION: Gossip Pg. 19
LENGTH: 896 words
HEADLINE: TOM EXERCISES CRUISE CONTROL ON 'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE' SET
BYLINE: BY GEORGE RUSH and JOANNA MOLLOY
BODY:
'Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a $ 70 million movie in which your star is also your budget-obsessed boss."
Maybe somebody should have given Brian De Palma that message conveyed, of course, by way of a self-destructing tape recorder before he signed on as director of "Mission Impossible."
Gossip leaking off the closed London set of the film claims that De Palma has more than once been chewed out by Tom Cruise who is co-producing his own picture.
Cruise is reportedly so determined that the flick not go over budget that he's using a stop-watch to check how long each scene takes.
"Tom doesn't want De Palma to dawdle," says a source. "He wants decisive direction."
Word is Paramount execs have been flown over to mediate, and that Nicole Kidman has been implored to calm her husband down.
Cruise's publicist, Pat Kingsley, assures us: "Everything is going smoothly. The person Tom is happiest with is Brian De Palma."
Yes, a Paramount exec checked in on the shooting, "but that's standard," says Kingsley.
And, yes, Mrs. Cruise is there but only because she wants to be with her family.
"The stopwatch is an exaggeration," insists Kingsley. "But Tom does take his work as a producer very seriously.
He's on the scene even when he's not in the scene."
Cruise does allow himself a little diversion. Like the joyride he took on a Russian Yak. No, he didn't gallop off on some stringy-haired quadruped. We're talking about a two-seater plane made by the Yakovlev company.
A few weeks back, the "Top Gun" star got himself smuggled onto an air base, slipped into a flight suit, and vaulted into the wild blue yonder.
Bad weather forced the star vehicle down after 10 minutes. All the same, the movie's insurers were hysterical that the actor had pulled the stunt.
Who to complain to? They could try talking to the producer. Virtual Monroe
Bringing Marilyn Monroe back from the dead is scary enough, but what if she returned as a porn star?
Monday night, the creators of the new documentary "Marilyn Monroe . . . Life After Death," gave a peek at a virtual reality version of MM being developed by computer graphics experts at GTE.
The virtual realists had to start with a version of Marilyn sans clothes. We're told that, in the early stages of the project, the developers worried that the genie might get out of the bottle that someone might bootleg the nude Marilyn, copy her onto CD-ROM, and let thousands of nerdy hackers know the pleasure that, up till now, only a few, like Joe DiMaggio and (supposedly) John F. Kennedy, experienced.
Thank heavens, the reincarnated Marilyn has since squeezed into a gold lame dress. Technical glitches kept Monday's audience from seeing too much of her. But they did see the film, which opens Friday and features the memories of people like Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner and the mortician who worked on her corpse. (He saved her falsies and a lock of her hair.)
They also saw a dozen faux-Marilyn drag queens strut their stuff, and the stunning portrait that Peter Max created from a rare photo by Milton Green. Misinformation on Amis
It took some coaxing, but novelist Martin Amis and Isobel Fonseca finally agreed when we asked them to pose together for a photo on Monday. (See left.) You can understand how they might be a little cautious.
Over in England, Amis has been tweaked in the press ever since he left his wife, Antonia Phillips, for Fonseca, the voluptuous heiress who has been called "the intelligent man's ideal girlfriend."
Since Fonseca calls New York home, the London tabloids have also insisted that Amis planned to live here.
No way, he told us at the party at Match celebrating his new HarperCollins novel, "The Information."
"It's not an option for me because of my children," said the writer, smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarets. "As long as they live in England, that's where I'll live."
"For me," said Amis, "America is a healthier spot." No one here seems to begrudge him his decision to bolt his London agent for our own Andrew Wylie, who fetched him a $ 800,000 advance for his novel.
Or the fact that Amis choose to use a New York dentist for $ 20,000 worth of tooth repair.
"Their attitude there is, 'We've got plenty of dentists who use blowtorches and hammers. Why go elsewhere?' "
Among those at Amis' party were Wylie (who told us that, though he agents for dangerous client Salman Rushdie, he will not rep the Unabomber), Tina Brown, Brett Easton Ellis, Morgan Entrekin, Christopher Hitchens, Jesse Kornbluth, George Plimpton, Ed Kosner and Julie Baumgold, Sonny Mehta, Charlie Rose, Lynn Snowden and James Truman.
Incidentally
She's blond, shapely, beautiful and she was on the arm of John Kennedy at the American Ballet Theater gala Monday night. Don't hate her she's Carole Di Falco, the ABC producer who's married to Kennedy's cousin Tony Radziwill. . . .
What does Margaret Thatcher think of President Clinton rolling out the White House's red carpet for Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams? Thatcher, once nearly killed by an IRA bomb, lumped the two Irish organizations together during remarks at a private dinner in Washington Friday.
"It would be the equivalent of having the Prime Minister of England invite the Oklahoma City bombers to 10 Downing St. to congratulate them on a job well done."