Cocktail (1988 film)

The film was based on Heywood Gould's semi-autobiographical[4] novel published in 1984. Gould had worked as a bartender in New York from 1969 to 1981 to support his writing career. Gould said he "met a lot of interesting people behind the bar and very rarely was it someone who started out wanting to be a bartender. They all had ambitions, some smoldering and some completely forgotten or suppressed."[5]

Gould says the lead character "is a composite of a lot of people I met, including myself in those days. I was in my late 30s, and I was drinking pretty good, and I was starting to feel like I was missing the boat. The character in the book is an older guy who has been around and starting to feel that he's pretty washed-up."[5]

Universal bought the film rights and Gould wrote the script, changing it from his novel. He says the studio put the project in turnaround "because I wasn't making the character likable enough."[5] Disney picked up the project "and I went through the same process with them. I would fight them at every turn, and there was a huge battle over making the lead younger, which I eventually did."[5]

Gould later admitted that the people who wanted him to make changes "were correct. They wanted movie characters. Characters who were upbeat and who were going to have a happy ending and a possible future in their lives. That's what you want for a big commercial Hollywood movie. So I tried to walk that thin line between giving them what they wanted and not completely betraying the whole arena of saloons in general."[5]

Tom Cruise expressed interest in playing the role, which helped get it financed.

"There were a lot of bartenders around like Tom Cruise, younger guys who came on and were doing this for a while—and then 10 years later, still doing it," said Gould. "It wasn't as if I was betraying the character. It was a matter of making the character more idealistic, more hopeful—he's got his life ahead of him. He turns on the charm, without the cynical bitter edge of the older guys."[5]

Bryan Brown later said the original script "was one of the very best screenplays I had ever read. Very dark... about the cult of celebrity and everything about it.... Tom Cruise is a very sweet man, he was then and still is. But when Tom came in, the movie had to change. The studio made the changes to protect the star and it became a much slighter movie because of it."[6]

Bryan Brown was cast on the strength of his performance in F/X.[7]

Gould says the tricks involving throwing bottles was not in the book, but something he showed Cruise and Bryan Brown. They used it and it became a prominent feature of the film.[5]

A music score was originally done by Maurice Jarre. A new score was added at the last minute.[8]

Kelly Lynch later said the film "was actually a really complicated story about the ’80s and power and money, and it was really re-edited where they completely lost my character's backstory—her low self-esteem, who her father was, why she was this person that she was—but it was obviously a really successful movie, if not as good as it could’ve been." She claimed Disney reshot "about a third of the film... and turned it into flipping the bottles and this and that.... But we had a really great time. And Tom was so much fun, just a ball to work with, both on and off camera."[9]

Cocktail earned $78.2 million at the North American box office, and $93.3 million globally to a total of $171.5 million worldwide, almost nine times its $20 million budget, and ranking as the eighth highest-grossing film of 1988 worldwide.[3][10]

Despite its box office success, the film received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 7% of 44 film critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 3.94/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "There are no surprises in Cocktail, a shallow, dramatically inert romance that squanders Tom Cruise's talents in what amounts to a naive barkeep's banal fantasy."[11] On Metacritic, the film has a 12 out of 100 score based on 14 reviews, indicating "overwhelming dislike".[12] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[13]

Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave a negative review, calling it "an upscale, utterly brainless variation on those efficient old B-movies of the 1930s and 40s about the lives, loves and skills of coal miners, sand hogs, and telephone linemen, among others."[14] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was also critical, explaining that "the more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is."[15]

"I was not happy with the final product," said Gould. "It got so savaged by the critics ... I was accused of betraying my own work, which is stupid. So I was pretty devastated. I literally couldn't get out of bed for a day. The good thing about that experience is that it toughened me up."[5]

In 1992, Cruise said the film "was not a crowning jewel" in his career.[16]

However, the official soundtrack single, The Beach Boys' "Kokomo", was commercially successful and topped the charts in America, Australia and Japan. The song was nominated for a Grammy and a Golden Globe.

Cocktail won two Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay while Cruise was nominated as Worst Actor and Donaldson as Worst Director.[17] The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of "The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made".[18] The film was also nominated for Worst Picture at the 1988 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards but lost to Caddyshack II.[19]

Additionally, Cruise's other film in 1988 was his co-starring role in the Best Picture-winning film Rain Man, alongside Dustin Hoffman. In doing so, he became the first (and as of 2020, only) actor to star in a Worst Picture Razzie winner and Best Picture Oscar winner in the same year. The film has gone on to attain cult film status.

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