BY GENE TRIPLETT

Nobody feels the need for speed when it comes to getting older, but Kelly McGillis has made good use of the 25 years since “Top Gun” took off at the box office.

The California-born actress, now 54, went on to leading roles in such high profile films as “The House on Carroll Street,” “The Accused” and “The Babe” in the late ’80s and early ’90s, married in ’89, had two daughters, divorced 10 years later, acted onstage and in a string of TV movies, came out as a lesbian in ’09, narrated a highly regarded documentary on breast cancer in 2010, and is now working as a fulltime substance abuse counselor in New Jersey.

“It’s kind of shocking and kind of depressing to hear 25 years ago,” McGillis told The Oklahoman in a recent phone interview from her Collingswood, N.J. home.

“It sounds like a long time ago,” she said.

But to her it doesn’t seem that long ago that she took on the role of “Charlie,” a beautiful flight instructor who reluctantly falls for a cocky, hotshot Navy pilot (played by Tom Cruise) in the Tony Scott-directed romantic thriller, “Top Gun,” one of the biggest box office hits of 1986, not to mention the last 2 ½ decades.

The film releases Tuesday in a special anniversary Blu-ray edition, and McGillis can only speak of the making of the film with fond memories.

Kelly McGillis

“It was a great group of guys and it was so much fun to make,” she said. “We had a great time.”

Although the difference in heights of the romantic leads (she’s 5-10, Cruise is 5-7) caused concern in some quarters, McGillis said having three inches over her co-star was no problem with her.

“Not with me, not with Tom, not with Tony Scott,” McGillis said. “It was a problem with whoever was in charge of us at Paramount. They had a problem with that but none of us had a problem with that.”

And of her “Top Gun” leading man, McGillis said, “He’s a lovely man. I have nothing negative to say about Tom. He’s just kind and generous and loving and supportive, and I just think he’s a wonderful human being.”

McGillis did plenty of research for her role in the film, talking to a number of people including her father, a former aircraft designer for McDonnell Douglas, and to a real-life female flight instructor.

“I always try to do research on stuff that I do,” she said. “That’s part of the fun of acting.”

Another part of the fun of acting, for McGillis, is performing onstage before a live audience.

“That’s my background. That’s my training. That’s my first love,” she said. “And I find that the challenges and the skill level that it takes to do a Shakespeare play or to do O’Neill is incredibly different, and the discipline is different than acting in a movie, or for television or something like that. Also I think there is a wider variety of classic themes.

“The other thing that I love about theater is that it’s a living, breathing experience unique unto itself every single night,” said McGillis, who toured the United Kingdom in 2010 in a production of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” “The crowd that comes in is an integral part. It’s a character in the play for that evening. You know, a Friday night audience is very different from a Tuesday night audience. … What’s fun is to learn how to play an audience, and figure out how long you can hold a pause or not, how to get a laugh or not, that’s really interesting and fun to me. That’s where the thrill comes in.”

But McGillis pared back her acting schedule for nearly a decade in order to tend to her motherly duties. However, she did find time in 2010 to narrate “1 a Minute,” a documentary on the importance of early detection and cure of breast cancer.

“My grandmother died of breast cancer and my mother is a breast cancer survivor, so it’s something that has touched my life,” she said.

Another affliction that’s touched McGillis’ life is her own alcohol and drug addiction, which led to her work with female addicts.

“I work at a drug and alcohol rehab facility here in South Jersey, and I work a five-day, 40-hour week,” she said. “I work primarily with the women’s population and I really love it. I find it’s just an amazing gift to see people come in hopeless and to be given some hope and some desire to live, and some tools for hopefully changing their lives, their children’s lives, their families’ lives. I see God every single day when I go to work and that is amazing. I couldn’t ask for anything else.”

As for her decision in 2009 to come out as a gay woman, McGillis said he did it because: “I was tired of lying. I think I’ve had a long, long, hard journey to authenticity.”

McGillis most recent film work has included two horror films, the comic “The Inkeepers,” and the apocalyptic vampire tale, “Stake Land.” She isn’t certain and doesn’t really care whether her coming-out about her sexuality has affected he acting career in any netagive way.

“You know, I haven’t worked in so long because I took 10 years to raise my kids and for me it’s starting over,” she said. “I was given a huge gift when I started, by just being given these incredible jobs. Now I kind of look at it that I’m paying my dues, the dues I never had to pay. And also I’m coming to acting this time with my authenticity.”

Most people would guess that an historical accounting of cinema shot in the Sooner State would just about fill a pamphlet, but John Wooley has filled a revelatory and richly readable 309-page book with facts about rolling film in red dirt country.

“Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema” reveals a long record of movies filmed in the Land of the Red Man, dating as far back as 1904. That was the year inventor Thomas Edison himself, the American movie studio pioneer, sent a film crew to Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City, seeking to capture authentic Western atmosphere on celluloid.

Many people who’ve lived in Oklahoma for any significant length of time might recall that Francis Ford Coppola brought young unknown actors such as Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane to Tulsa to film “The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish” (both released in 1983), based on novels by Oklahoma author S.E. Hinton. They might also be aware that director Barry Levinson brought Cruise back to Oklahoma, along with Dustin Hoffman, to shoot scenes for the Oscar-winning “Rain Man” in 1988, and that the big-budget disaster movie “Twister” (1996), with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, was shot in Wakita, Guthrie and several other state locations. And that’s about all that most folks know.

Fascinating details

But meticulously researched details of many older and/or lesser-known features shot in the Sooner state make for fascinating and informative reading, especially for film buffs and movie trivia fans who live here.

The book’s cover, for example, is taken from a poster hawking a low-budget 1950 Western called “Rock Island Trail,” a Republic picture shot mostly in Hollywood, with some outdoor action scenes filmed along a stretch of abandoned railroad track near McAlester. Its star, Forrest Tucker, is pictured leaping from the front of a locomotive with a six-gun in his hand and a savage look on his face. Great cover. Enhances the book’s title perfectly.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans filmed 1946′s “Home in Oklahoma” around the Arbuckle Mountains, and Roy and Dale actually came back to the Sooner State and got married on a cattle ranch in the area the very next year.

I was intrigued that a Western project called “Osage,” starring, among others, Tulsa Western swing ace Johnnie Lee Wills and actress Noel Neill, who would later play Lois Lane on the first “Superman” TV series, was shot in part around Pawhuska, but never completed.

I was surprised to learn that parts of the wildcat oil boom drama “Tulsa” (1949), starring Robert Preston and Susan Hayward, were shot on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and even a small bit of John Ford’s 1940 film version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” — a book vehemently denounced by Sooner citizens and politicians alike for its depiction of Dust Bowl Okies — was quietly filmed around the Beckham County courthouse in Sayre.

Fun stuff from Wooley, one of the most prolific and popular of Oklahoma writers, a former Tulsa World entertainment writer, novelist and author of many music- and movie-related books and articles rooted in Okie culture. “Shot in Oklahoma” is published in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press with a list price of $16.95.

— Gene Triplett

Prolific Tulsa author John Wooley should limber up his autographing arm as two movie-related books he penned are coming to bookstores this spring.

On March 15, Wiley Publishing released Wooley’s new biography, “Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares.” On April 7, the University of Oklahoma Press will issue Wooley’s book, “Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema.”

“Wes Craven” draws on Wooley’s interviews with the director and on exhaustive research to provide an absorbing portrait of the cult film director who gave us “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream” and other iconic horror films. In a career that has spanned nearly 40 years, Craven’s works, which often mounted masterly examinations of the nightmarish nexus of dreams and reality, have employed pithy themes cloaked in the conventions of populist horror fiction.

Wooley’s book provides fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about the director’s films, as well as keen critical analyses of the philosophical and psychological foundations for Craven’s body of work.

“Shot in Oklahoma” is billed as an engaging ride through Oklahoma’s untold cinema history. It ranges through a period when movie pioneer Thomas Edison shot westerns at Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City and advances through the era when Francis Ford Coppola came to Tulsa (with young actors such as Matt Dillon and Tom Cruise) to film “The Outsiders,” based on local author S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel. And along the way it touches on many high-profile Hollywood films that employed the Sooner state as soundstage – films as diverse as “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Twister,” “UHF,” “Elizabethtown” and “Rain Man.”

Through in-depth research and interviews, the author also reveals unsung aspects of the state’s early all-black films shot in Oklahoma’s African American towns, films starring American Indian leads and low-budget slasher movies created in Oklahoma that transformed the home-video movie business worldwide.

Supported by vintage photographs and an in-depth filmography of more than one hundred movies shot in Oklahoma, the book serves as the first comprehensive survey of the Sooner state’s rich and colorful history as a thriving on-location film player.

John Wooley, formerly entertainment writer with the Tulsa World, has written, co-written or edited more than 20 books, including the recent novel, “Ghost Band,” and the nonfiction book “From the Blue Devils to Red Dirt: The Colors of Oklahoma Music.”

- Dennis King

That Tom Cruise’s new big-boom summer action vehicle is a chop-shop contraption cobbled together from parts, premises and personalities of other movies is as obvious as, well, “Knight and Day.”

Summer hype aside, when producers of this derivative blockbuster boast that their movie springs from an original spec script – not one based on a comic book franchise or recycled from an old TV series or retrofitted from a previous summer juggernaut – you might naively expect some smidgeon of originality.

But “Knight and Day,” scripted by first-timer Patrick O’Neill and co-written and directed by jack-of-all-trades James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted,” “Walk the Line”), seems to exist solely to give Cruise a summer project in which to flash his toothy grin, trot out his frat-boy swagger and romp around cutely with Cameron Diaz. It is a cut-and-paste enterprise in which originality doesn’t figure into the equation.

While the producers allow that they were aiming for a sophisticated mixture of action, intrigue and worldly romantic comedy of the “Charade” kind, they seem to have modeled their movie on much more than just the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romp.

The story features Cruise as Roy Miller, a lethal, on-the-run spy, and Diaz as June Havens, an ordinary gal with a penchant for restoring vintage street rods. It plays around with a classic Hitchcock McGuffin – in this case a revolutionary perpetual energy battery capable of powering a nuclear submarine or a small city or a rabid army of Energizer bunnies.

Naturally, a sinister Spanish arms dealer (smug Jordi Molla) and a rogue FBI agent (a very bland Peter Sarsgaard) seek to obtain it for nefarious purposes. So Miller and June are thrown together in a globe-hopping adventure to safeguard the battery and its youthful inventor, bring the bad guys to justice, and, of course, fall in love.

More than “Charade,” “Knight and Day” seems a stylistic cousin to the Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner gambol, “Romancing the Stone,” in which a naïve damsel is thrown together with a suave man of the world, whose motives are vaguely sinister, and sets off on a hair-raising, bullet-riddled, chase-filled duel with international villains.

There are also touches of “The Jewel of the Nile,” with a gifted innocent – in this case nerdy teenage physics prodigy Simon Fleck (Paul Dano) – who possesses a world-altering secret.

And there are in Cruise’s swift, muscular performance obvious flashes of Robert Ludlum’s hyper-kinetic Jason Bourne, a deep-cover operative with lightning quick, death-dealing skills whose All-American past has been erased by government spooks. (Miller’s quaint parents, thinking he died in combat, keep his Eagle Scout picture over their homey hearth.)

On top of all that, the frantic pacing, action mechanics and elaborate stunt sequences seem drawn straight from the “Mission: Impossible” playbook, with breakneck car chases, a revving motorcycle pursuit, and even a scene in which Cruise plays limbo with the hurtling steel hulk of a flying car.

“Knight and Day” is dumb summer fun, even though most of the fun is in counting all the other movies it mimics.

– Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Knight and Day”

PG-13

1:50

 2 stars

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Molla.

(Sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language)

Silly names have been a staple of comedy since the early days of vaudeville, and when old burlesque performers eventually moved in front of Hollywood’s rolling cameras their outlandish sobriquets, garish noms de plume, goofy monikers and loopy pseudonyms came along with them

And so pioneers of comedy traipsed across Nickelodeon screens in the guise of characters such as Egbert Souse, Cuthbert J. Twillie, Larson E. Whipsnide, T. Frothingill Bellows, Rollo La Rue, Elmer Prettywillie and Professor Eustace McGargle (all W.C. Fields inventions), or as Wolf J. Flywheel, Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Otis B. Driftwood and Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (a.k.a. Groucho Marx).

That va-va-voom vamp Mae West gave us the suggestive Marlo Manners, Flower Belle Lee and Peaches O’Day.

And while the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy mostly appeared onscreen in their heyday as Stan and Ollie, their earlier screen incarnations, both together and individually, were rich with purple appellations. Stan boasted performances as Ferdinand Finkleberry, Romaine Ricketts, Winchell McSweeney, Rhubarb Vaselino, Gabriel Goober, Dippy Donawho and Magnum Dippytack, while Ollie donned such character names as J. Piedmont Mumblethunder, Sharkey Nye, Oswald Schwartzkopple and Solomon Soopmeat.

Preston Sturges, that master of screwball comedy from the 1930s and ‘40s, wrote into his scripts such distinctively nutty character names as Dr. Zodiac Z. Zippe (“Hotel Haywire”), Charles Poncefort Pike (“The Lady Eve”), Constable Edmund Kockenlocker (“The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”), Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith and Sgt. Heppelfinger (“Hail the Conquering Hero”), Harold Diddlebock and E.J. Waggleberry (“The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”) and Judge Alfalfa J. O’Toole (“The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend”).

Comic Bob Hope kept close to his vaudeville roots with such movie names as Milford Farnsworth (“Alias Jesse James”), Pippo Popolino (“Casanova’s Big Night”), Hot Lips Barton (“Road to Rio”), Painless Peter Potter (“The Paleface”) and Humphrey “Sorrowful” Jones (“Sorrowful Jones”).

Even sexpot Marilyn Monroe wasn’t immune to a little suggestively silly nicknaming, appearing on screen as such characters as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (“Some Like It Hot”), Pola Debevoise (“How to Marry a Millionaire”) and Dusky Ledoux (“Right Cross”).

Hollywood he-men generally veered toward macho character names in their movies, but every so often they also got saddled with slightly silly monikers. John Wayne turned in one of his best performances ever as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit,” and as an early matinee cowpoke the Duke labored under such trumped-up sagebrush pseudonyms as Stony Brooke, Duke Slade, Biff Smith, Dare Rudd and Singin’ Sandy Saunders.

Even big star James Stewart suspended his leading man image to play such whimsically named characters as Mattie Appleyard (“Fools’ Parade”), Elwood P. Dowd (“Harvey”) and Rowdy Dow (“The Gorgeous Hussy”).

Some modern comic actors still hold to that old tradition of silly names, notably Ben Stiller, who has created such amusing screen roles as Gaylord Focker (“Meet the Parents”), Tugg Speedman (“Tropic Thunder”), Derek Zoolander (“Zoolander”), Bwick Elias (“If Lucy Fell”), Garth Motherloving (TV’s “The Simpsons”) and Reuben Feffer (“Along Came Polly”). And Woody Allen has contributed two of the best with nebbishy Fielding Mellish (“Bananas”) and the pseudo-murderous Virgil Starkwell (“Take the Money and Run”).

Of course, the silly name phenomenon isn’t limited to film comedies. Occasionally, goofy character names even show up in heavyweight dramas – note Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt (“Interview With the Vampire”) or Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle (“Taxi Driver”). The list is endless.

If there were a Silly Name Hall of Fame we’d nominate all of the above, plus the following, for a place of honor:

Tom Cruise again as Cole Trickle (“Days of Thunder”), Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (“Goldfinger”), Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe (“Every Which Way But Loose”), Uma Thurman as Beatrix Kiddo (“Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2”), Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (“Boogie Nights”), Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo (“Midnight Cowboy”), Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”), Scott B. Morgan (uncredited) as Keyser Soze (“The Usual Suspects”), Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr (“Blazing Saddles”), Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink (“Reservoir Dogs”), Yano Anaya and Zack Ward as Grover Dill and Scut Farkus (“A Christmas Story”), Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips O’Houlihan (“MASH”), Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite (“Napoleon Dynamite”), Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley (“Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”).

And naturally there’s George Lucas, who stands in a category of his own for silly and sillier names via “Star Wars” – from the mainstays Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader to supporting players such as Boba Fett, Mace Windu, Jar Jar Binks, Hermi Odle, Jek Porkins, Kit Fisto, Lak Sivrak, Momaw Nadon, Mon Mothma, Nute Gunray, Ponda Baba, Salacious B. Crumb, Sy Snootles, Sio Bibble, Plo Koon, Dexter Jettster and on and on.

Did we leave any out? Have your own favorites? Send them in to dking@wimgo.com and we’ll include them soon in an updated version of this post.

- Dennis King