Given the chance, would you have tried to save Tom Cruise from himself? That's my own personal torment regarding his cataclysmic wipeout. I could have spared him so much grief. You see, Cruise once revealed his fondness for couch-jumping to me, and I didn't try to help.

This was three months before he embarrassed himself in front of millions of people on Oprah last year. We were alone in his trailer on the set of War of the Worlds, and I was interviewing him for our April 2005 cover story, in which premiere deemed him the greatest movie star working today (don't smirk—he's arguably still Hollywood's most bankable international star). In addition to being intensely charming with me, and alternating between manic laughter and solemn whispers, he, at one point, jumped to a standing perch on the couch he had been sitting on—just like he did on Oprah—and then he jumped down yowling, "WHAAOOOO!"

I didn't say anything. I didn't grab Tom's wrist and try to get him to keep still and say, "Tom, you're acting really weird. You might want to rethink this whole million-watt persona thing, and turn it all down a notch." I didn't because I thought he was just being Tom Cruise.

And if you look back at his notorious meltdown, Oprah's audience is emphatically lapping up his histrionics. And after it, Paramount still green-lighted M:I:III. But now we have reached a tipping point of anti-Tomness, after all his Scientology-speak and declarations of love for Katie Holmes. Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone made it official by severing ties with Cruise, based on his “over the top” behavior. And yet, Cruise has always been an extraordinary figure. Has he really been acting so extra extraordinary lately, or is it the world around him that has changed?

Movie stars are strange creatures. At the same time that they are these self-involved suns around which entire galaxies orbit in ever-widening circles of sycophants, flacks, and fans, they are also such sensitive souls, whose jobs demand that they totally open themselves emotionally in order to play a character. And, simultaneously, they need to maintain ridiculously strong egos so that their personas burn brightly, amped up to hold focus on the big screen. It's always been a tricky process translating the private lives of movie stars to the public, and it got a little more so with this summer's A-list implosion, when Cruise was kicked to Paramount's curb and Mel Gibson went on an anti-Semitic tirade during his arrest for drunk driving.

More Dream Factory Columns:

Dream Factory: Hollywood Memoirs

Dream Factory: How Do Trailers Work?

Dream Factory: Good Actors, Small Roles

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