Overdue and Insincere

Posted on September 21, 2005 in Stigma

The mouth that knows everything — hinged to the face of Tom Cruise — said one noodle-headed thing too much for the patience of (ex?)friend Steven Spielberg. Cruise used his Budapest and Munich publicity tours for War of the Worlds to rant against the use of Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This, according to a private source, sent Spielberg over the edge.

Myway.com reported

“Steven and his wife [Kate Capshaw] have five children themselves and know some children for whom Ritalin does a lot of good. They took exception to what Tom said about the drug….”

Another source, a close friend of the director, said: “They will not be working together again and Steven will never call him his friend.”

Cruise turned the color of his lawyer’s buckram legal codices when the story began to circulate in August. His attorney, Bert Fields, shoved out a threatening missive when Myway’s Page Six began looking into the story:

“We have received word that you are planning a report that Steven Spielberg was upset with Tom about Tom’s speaking out about his views on children’s use of drugs . . . and that now they are not speaking to each other.”

The letter stated: “Each of these statements is absolutely and demonstrably false. Steven is not upset with Tom . . . Tom and Steven remain close friends and are looking forward to working together again. The idea that they are not speaking is not only false but absurd. Actually Steven is shooting a movie in Budapest and Tom is shooting one [in the States].”

News travels slow, evidentally, at least between Spielberg and Cruise.

Spielberg’s intentions, however, may not be altogether honorable. It seems that what annoyed him most was that Cruise spent more time screaming about the dangers of psychotropics than he did promoting the film. This may explain why Spielberg said nothing about Cruise’s earlier shenanigans on the Today Show: he doesn’t care enough about stigma against the mentally ill.

So, again, what comes wrapped as a victory against stigma might turn out to be just a move of the market. If Cruise had said just one sentence about the nonexistence of ADD and the rest about WOTD, he might have got away with that, even if the media had repeated that sentence a thousand times and every patient advocate in the country had yelled.

Spielberg has yet to convince me with his heart. Perhaps he could talk to some of us who suffer from mental illness and write a film about our sufferings. (P.S. Thank you Martin Scorcese.)