In the 1980s, Tom Cruise became a major movie star in films such as Top Gun, Rain Man, and Cocktail. But his breakout leading role was in 1983’s Risky Business, a film that fans still love more than 40 years later.
Starring Cruise as high school entrepreneur Joel Goodson, the film follows the high-achieving Chicago teenager and Future Enterpriser as he turns his parents’ upscale suburban home into a makeshift brothel after befriending a pretty prostitute (Rebecca De Mornay). Joel even squeezes in an interview with a Princeton recruiter during his one night as a pimp.
Entertainment Weekly ranked Risky Business among the “Best High School Movies of All Time” on a list that includes fellow ‘80s coming-of-age comedy-dramas Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club. The outlet described the film as a “sharp satire of privileged suburban teens” that wasn’t “just another teensploitation flick.”
Directed by Paul Brickman, Risky Business also has a 93 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Brickman once explained what inspired him to write the screenplay for Risky Business.
“I wanted to do a film for young people that was very stylized in a way that I hadn’t seen before,” he told Salon in an interview. “I wanted to make the film that if I were in high school I would’ve wanted to see. I was writing it in the time just after Reagan had taken office and everyone wanted to be a little capitalist, get their M.B.A.s and wear power suspenders. I thought, That’s all dandy, but life is more complex and darker than that. It’s tough out there. Capitalism takes its toll on a lot of people.”
“The working title was ‘White Boys Off the Lake.’ I think the studio rejected that because it sounded like an off-Broadway play,” he added.
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One of the most iconic scenes in Risky Business featured Cruise dancing to a Bob Seger song in the empty Goodson house in his underwear.
Cruise once told Interview magazine that ad-libbing the dancing scene was Brickman’s idea.
“We had talked earlier, and he said, ‘Look, I want Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock & Roll’ or maybe some Elvis, but if you can come up with something else, great,’” Cruise recalled. “I went through tape after tape. In the end, nothing beat Bob Seger. So I took the candlestick, and I said, ‘How about making this the audience?’ And then I just started ad-libbing, using it as a guitar, jumping on the table. I waxed half the floor and kept the other half dirty, so I could slide in on my socks. As we went along, I threw more stuff in. Like the thing with the collar up, jumping on the bed. Originally, it was only one line in the script: ‘Joel dances in underwear through the house.’ We shot it in half a day.”
Forty-three years after its release, Risky Business remains one of the most iconic coming-of-age comedies of the 1980s, a film that traded typical themes of high school romance for an exploration of suburban rebellion.
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