Winning the Skies Without Losing Your Lunch: Filming ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts. ....... Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask. ........ Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. .........
“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar
.......... “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said. ........ “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles. .......... Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans. .......... “You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.” ............ The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t. ........ “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.” .......... Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again. ........... that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again. .............. Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills.‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Lands Triumphantly on Opening Weekend The film industry takes the estimated $151 million in North American ticket sales as a breakthrough after a long pandemic slump. ......... “Top Gun: Maverick” finds Tom Cruise called back into service by a rattled Navy. A new threat has emerged, one that a younger generation of pilots can’t crack on its own. .........
Cruise, perhaps the last old-fashioned movie star
............ older audiences, largely absent from theaters over the last two years because of coronavirus concerns, returned en masse over the weekend, “ending the debate about a full recovery.” ......... cost roughly $170 million to make. A megawatt global marketing campaign cost another $125 million or more. ......... 20 percent of ticket buyers were aged 18 to 24, a demographic that had been in question before release. ........ Adjusting for inflation, the original “Top Gun” cost about $40 million to make and collected $942 million at the global box office in summer 1986 ......... “Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, arrived on 4,735 screens in North America, setting a theatrical booking record ......... As ever, Cruise trotted the globe on a tightly controlled publicity tour. .......... a large percentage of “Top Gun: Maverick” ticket buyers opted for premium-priced screenings in large-format theaters such as IMAX. ........ “The end is inevitable, Maverick — your kind is headed for extinction,” the superior says. Maverick’s reply: “Maybe so, sir. But not today.”The Good News in Georgia That’s Bad News for Trump the turnout rate for the Georgia primary, where early voting numbers were higher even than in 2020
The Hard Truth: Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear
David Ellison on ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Working With Tom Cruise and Hiring John Lasseter David Ellison, loves it so much that he pushed for a decade to get a sequel made. Unlike me, Ellison had the power to make that happen. He’s the founder and C.E.O. of Skydance Media, which is behind the new release. Ellison had a rocky start in Hollywood. He’s the son of tech mogul, Larry Ellison. .......... that was the film that really helped launch Tom into kind of singular movie star status that he currently sits atop of. .......... this isn’t a bullseye movie. This is hitting a bullet with a bullet. ........ It was an iconic movie........ this movie in particular is designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible and really is a love letter to aviation. It’s a love letter to fighter pilot culture. And it’s a celebration of the big screen, the big screen experience. ......... the other thing that we were just adamant about from day one was, we were going to shoot everything real. Tom was adamant that everybody go up in the F-18. .......... a training program where it was three months for the entire cast, where they graduated from flying Cessna 172s to Extra 300s, then flying L-39 with the Patriots Jet Team, and then ultimately being ready to step into the F-18. Because when you shoot that type of photography reel, it is an entirely different experience for the audience. .......... “Top Gun” is number six. The next two missions will be seven and eight with Tom. ........ one of the things that has always amazed me about Tom is the extraordinary lengths that he will go to, to entertain an audience. ...... They did that by aiming high and never stopping work on a movie until they thought it was ready to be released......... My dad is supportive, but we’ve thankfully built a multibillion dollar business. And I have to address him as you would any other shareholder when it comes to it. He gave me an incredible opportunity by believing in me in the beginning. I could not be more grateful for that. And we definitely talk about work constantly and work together constantly. But he’s been an incredible mentor and guide throughout all of this. ........ he said, oh, it’s because I didn’t raise them. Their mother did, which I thought it was unusual coming out of his mouth ...... God, I don’t have enough words to describe how influential my mom’s been in my life. But he’s correct. My mother did raise me. My parents got divorced when I was three. And I grew up predominantly with my mom. And you know, she did the incredibly impossible job of being a single parent to two kids and really set everything aside to raise me and my sister............. my mom had an incredible VHS collection that I actually still have. She had about 2,000 VHS tapes. ......... they think you’re the dumb rich kid, right, presumably. How did you deal with that? ............ Put my head down, did the work, personally. ........ avoided a lot of mistakes by being able to stand on their shoulders gratefully and really listen to the advice. But then also, I tried to partner and hire at Skydance the smartest people possible. And now, when you look around our senior leadership team, one of the things I am the most proud of is the incredible group of people I get to come to work with every day. ......... believing in a 50-50 culture and believing in supporting equal rights for all artists, that’s how we believed in and felt since day one. ........ “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck has been.” .......... As people, I believe we enjoy social experiences. And I think people will continue to go to the movies. And I think people are going to continue to have a tremendous amount of choice. ......... I’ll never forget personally the reason why I was so excited to get into virtual reality is, when I put on the headset, it was one of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. ......... So we are not for sale. Our heads are down, and we’re building the business. Last year, we had an incredibly good year. It was actually the strongest year in the history of the company. And this year is already scheduled to be significantly better. We feel very good about where we are. And we’re very much in building mode, is kind of how we’re thinking about it. ............
Just let me quote your father. Everything’s for sale.
‘The Elon That We’re Seeing Today Is Not the Same One We Saw a Couple Years Ago’ Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter has been a big case of hurry up and wait. ......... Elon kind of agreed to buy a house without an inspection ....... He got $13 billion of senior debt commitments. He then got a margin loan for another $12 or $13 billion or so, which has since disappeared. And then the rest, which initially was going to be about $20 billion of his own equity or equity that he could raise, has now been revised upward to $33 billion of equity, which has to be an absolute record for one individual to pledge to a single deal. ............ his outs are very few ........ So he used bots and fake accounts as the excuse for an escape hatch, essentially, or to get a discount. It’s not clear which one. .......... he does this all the time. He loses interest in things. ........ the bots thing is a total pretense. He knew there was a bot problem. ........
It used to be like 90 percent Tesla and rocket tweets and 10 percent everything else. And now it’s almost entirely the culture war.
.......... He’s like someone who stumbled on to a PragerU YouTube video and emerges six months later just totally bought into the culture war. It almost feels like now his account is like if Ben Shapiro had a passing interest in satellites. ......... I think he is genuinely annoyed by what he sees as the woke PC left. Do I think it’s strategic for him in some way? Possibly. ......... at the beginning of the pandemic, poor Elon was only worth about $25 to $30 billion. And during the pandemic, because maybe Tesla became a bit of a meme stock, and along with some other meme stocks, his net worth just exploded 10 times to up to $300 billion. ........... all of a sudden you think, if I may say this, your shit doesn’t stink and you actually begin to think that you’re much more important than everybody else. And your hubris level rises and you think that everybody wants to hear what you have to say. ............ But the way he communicates, he’s a troll. He’s now become a troll in a lot of ways. ........... he is extremely skilled at using Twitter to draw attention to himself, and his projects, and his pet causes. He reminds me of Trump in that respect. .......... he knows that if he does some boring tweet about some rocket, he’ll get X amount of engagement, but if he shares a meme from Reddit attacking the left, he will get 2X, 3X, 4X that engagement. So he’s a skilled user of Twitter. .......... I think it’s purely cathartic for him. I think it’s purely sort of psychological. ........ he clearly is addicted, spends way too much time on it. ........ what is his calendar? Is it just wake up, tweet for three hours, go to the rocket factory, tweak a couple of things on the design, and then go back to playing “Elden Ring“? .......... this is like a deal that’s got $30 billion of equity on a $44 billion deal. That’s not a leveraged buyout. ....... that loan somehow already existed and it was already tied to the Tesla stock, which was dropping like a stone. ........ Qatar is in there ........... the business plan that he’s proposing, the PowerPoint that’s out there circulating that has his projections is fantasyland .......... this is a company that has long struggled to make its financial impact commensurate with its cultural and social impact. .......... I don’t think this is a moneymaker for him. I think this is a passion project. And so he may not care about getting a huge return on it. He may consider this part of his political mission. ........ Twitter is not full of Elon Musk fan boys. It is a big, diverse, famously socially conscious — or at least says it’s socially conscious — tech company. A lot of the people who left Facebook, the integrity division, because they felt like that company was capitulating too much to the right, now work at Twitter. .......... Elon is going to come in and I expect that something like 30 percent to 40 percent of the workforce will just leave ......... he could have been very happy at 9.1 percent. He could have then had a nice return because the stock jumped up. He could have made money on that. And could have had huge influence owning 9.1 percent. .......... Like, if he goes to some potentate in the Philippines, like I’m the head of Twitter. It gives him power — political power. ........ have you ever looked at the comments under a Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post? ........ The number of people who are going to talk to Elon because their account got hacked — ......... why he would want this, I don’t understand. ........ I don’t even understand the power thing. So the sultan of whatever thinks he’s great because he owns Twitter. I think Elon’s great because he has SpaceX and he’s created these rockets that can land on a platform in the middle of the ocean.” ........... I think they want to get this thing off their plate and onto Elon’s as quickly as possible. .......... I would put it at 85 percent that the deal closes and maybe 10 percent to 15 percent chance that he finds a way out. ......... I think until April 25, Elon had the power. On April 25, the power switched to the Twitter board and to that merger agreement, that binding merger agreement. Since then, Elon has fumbled. He’s had his passes intercepted. He’s played this terribly. He’s obviously stopped listening to his advisors, in my opinion, who gave him good advice until April 25. ........ the board has suddenly become much more powerful in this dynamic. It’ll be the board that will let him recut this deal or not. ......... you have a signed merger agreement. Nobody put a gun to his head and made him sign that merger agreement at $54.20. And the outs are very few. .......... he came in, he had a lot of ideas ....... He talked a big talk about decentralization and blue sky. And he had a lot of buy-in at the company. And now my sense, from talking to folks there, is that they just think he’s trying to pass the hot potato, get his payout ........ we’ll be either at a lower price to consummate this deal or Elon will have abandoned it and will be instead spending all his time playing “Elden Ring” and yelling about woke liberals.Russian Academics Aim to Punish Colleagues Who Backed Ukraine Invasion A campaign is circulating a list of dozens of researchers in the hopes they will be denied the prestige of election into the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Crude, Ugly and Pro-American? China Investigates Images in Math Textbooks. The discovery of what some viewed as disturbing illustrations in books for elementary school students set off a national furor. ....... Then, on Monday, as anger spread online, the ministry announced a sweeping, nationwide investigation of all primary, secondary and university textbooks. ......... Universities have been ordered to emphasize the study of Marxism and the writings of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. In 2015, Yuan Guiren, China’s education minister, ordered a closer examination of foreign textbooks and said that those that promote Western values should be banned from classrooms.
6 Takeaways About Haiti’s Reparations to France How did the modern world’s most successful slave revolt give birth to a desperately poor nation? Here is a summary of what a team of New York Times correspondents found out......... A failed state. An aid trap. A land seemingly cursed by nature and human nature alike. When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement. ......... Haitians overthrew their notoriously brutal French slave masters and declared independence in 1804 —
the modern world’s first nation born of a slave revolt
. ............ what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war. ........ delivered an astonishing demand: France wanted reparations from the people it had enslaved. ......... Haiti was virtually alone in the world, with no powerful allies. It was fearful of being invaded and eager to establish trade with other nations, so it agreed to pay. .......... The demand was for 150 million French francs, to be turned over in five annual payments, far more than Haiti could pay. .......... So France pushed Haiti to take a loan from a group of French banks to start paying. That Sisyphean weight came to be known asthe double debt
. ......... $560 million in today’s dollars. ........ Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper. ........... the payments to France cost Haiti from $21 billion to $115 billion in lost economic growth over time. ....... in later years the French approached Haiti with a different tactic: the outstretched hand of a business partner. .......... But the National Bank of Haiti was Haitian in name only. It was a creation of Crédit Industriel et Commercial, a Paris-based bank commonly known as C.I.C., and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s national bank from Paris and took a commission on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. ........... When the American military invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915, the official explanation was that Haiti was too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices. Secretary of State Robert Lansing made little effort to mask his contempt for the “African race,” casting the occupation as a civilizing mission intended to end “anarchy, savagery and oppression.” ............. a small team of Marines entered Haiti’s national bank and strolled out with $500,000 in gold. Within days, it was in the vault of a Wall Street bank. .......... “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” the general who led the U.S. forces in Haiti, said years later, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.” ............National City Bank was the predecessor of Citigroup, and along with other powers on Wall Street, it pushed Washington to seize control of Haiti and its finances
............ For decades to come, the United States was the dominant power in Haiti, dissolving parliament at gunpoint, killing thousands and shipping a big portion of Haiti’s earnings to bankers in New York while the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived near starvation. ........... The 19th-century Haitian official who engineered a sweetheart deal for a bank in France — and then retired there? ......... “That’s not the first case of a Haitian official selling the interest of his country for personal gains,” Mr. Michel said. “I would say it’s almost a rule.” .......... Haiti’s leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain. Elected legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world. ......... In an 1875 loan, the French bankers took a 40 percent cut off the top. Most of the rest went to paying other debts, while the remainder lined the pockets of corrupt Haitian officials ........... The Times spoke to more than 30 descendants of families that received payments under Haiti’s double debt. Most said they had never heard of it. “This is part of my family history I never knew,” said one sixth-generation descendant of Napoleon’s first wife. ............ in 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stunned Haitians by denouncing the debt imposed by France and demanding reparations. ............ France moved quickly to try to discredit him. Talk of reparations was alarming to a nation with other former colonies still suffering the legacy of exploitation. The French ambassador to Haiti at the time recalls the reparations demand as “explosive.” ........... Mr. Aristide even offered a precise figure for what France owed, eliciting mockery. But Haiti’s long-term losses, The Times found, turned out to be surprisingly close to his estimate. He may even have been too conservative. .............In 2004, Mr. Aristide found himself being hustled onto a plane in an ouster arranged by the United States and France.
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