Hello and welcome to Substack Reads, your weekly roundup of the most thought-provoking things to read and listen to on Substack this week.
As the world and his dog go crazy for Top Gun: Maverick, we’ve highlighted a spectacular piece from former Vanity Fair contributing editor Kevin Sessums who, as a young Paramount executive, found himself working on the original Top Gun. Not only is it an eye-opening read into how Top Gun went from troubled film to ’80s classic, but it may help explain why Kelly McGillis is missing from the much-lauded sequel.
We also handpicked a wonderful essay and photographs from writer and photographer Chris Arnade whose Substack, Walking the World, is a beautiful exploration of the stories and people living in some of the world’s most forgotten corners. His story on the pigeons of New York City really is a must-read. Justin E.H. Smith, meanwhile, contemplates one of the questions of our time: Does everything really need to be political now? You might be surprised by the answer…
As ever, please feel free to share the love with readers you think might appreciate this roundup dropping into their inbox or Substack app every week.
Have a great week wherever you are, and happy reading!
CULTURE
The making (and almost breaking) of Top Gun
Kevin Sessums was an executive at Paramount when they began shooting a movie about a fighter pilot who falls for his instructor. Here, he explains why Top Gun shouldn’t have worked—but did
—Kevin Sessums in SES/SUMS IT UP
We had been shooting Top Gun for two weeks, when Kelly McGillis appeared on the screen. Top Gun was a troubled production, so the head of the studio wanted to see Kelly’s first day of work. Ned Tanen grabbed his head and shouted, “She looks like his mother!”
What could I do? We rewrote the first flirt scene to accommodate the awareness of the older woman-young man situation between the two leads. Maverick walks into the ladies room at a bar-restaurant and finds Charlie (Kelly).
Maverick: “I came in here to save you from making a big mistake with that older guy.”
Charlie: “Really? So I could go on to a bigger mistake with a young guy like yourself?"
Maverick: “Maybe.”
We used apple boxes and shoe lifts for Tom. In the movie, Charlie always found a way to “slouch” when in the same frame as Maverick.
We did our best to make it work. We thought we were making “Flashdance in the Sky,” a “Boys with Toys movie.” In our first preview, the movie tested higher with women than men. The highest testing scene which we were ready to get rid of was the Bruce-Weber Volleyball scene. The big complaint? Women wanted more of the romance. We shot new scenes with Kelly and Tom on a three-day weekend, including a sex scene. Kelly had cut off her hair so she wore a cap in most of the scenes as the wig that was built proved shoddy.
Per contract, Tom Cruise got top billing and his likeness on the poster art. Because women liked the pic (we were all flabbergasted), we also added Kelly McGillis and her likeness to the one sheet. Tom approved the placement. Kelly slouches for the poster photo.
POLITICS
“That’s illegal. What the f**k are you talking about? You idiots. The Prime Minister can’t get secret donations.”
Dominic Cummings is a political strategist who served as chief political advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Here, he talks exclusively to Suzanne Moore about Johnson, partygate, and leaving Europe
—Suzanne Moore in Letters from Suzanne
SM: I mean, there are a lot of rumours about Carrie [Johnson] now.
DC: I don’t know, and nothing would surprise me in any shape or form. I mean, she can’t be happy with the situation now and obviously it’s all blowing up in her face.
Power attracts certain kinds of people, and it becomes sort of self-feeding.
Add all of his money stuff as well.
SM: Did he [Boris Johnson] talk about all this with you?
DC: Yeah, I mean, that was an important part of the whole disaster on Covid-19 because he was literally in the process of trying to finalise his divorce. He was broke. He was having to find money to pay Marina, and at the same time, he had Carrie doing this insane renovation of the flat with Lulu running up these huge bills.
He jumped into conversations with me in January where he would say: “You’ve got to help me get money to pay for this stuff. She’s upstairs, she has spent £100,000. All this gold wallpaper and stuff. And I’m fucked with my divorce. I can’t pay for it.” So, I say: “Well, go to Coutts. Get one of your rich friends to take out a loan.”
“No fuck that. I want to get donations in to do it. But obviously it’s bad PR, so I have to keep it quiet.” I said: “That’s illegal. What the fuck are you talking about? You idiots. The Prime Minister can’t get secret donations.”
At the time, we were dealing with this whole Huawei thing. I said: “Well, we are dealing with Huawei and having meetings with GCHQ about what to do. Yeah, imagine if Huawei gave you 500,000 quid to pay for the gold wallpaper and it was kept secret. Everyone would say that’s bribery. Instantly removed. Like, are you out of your mind? You must be able to realise this.”
But his mindset was very much, “Fuck that. I’m gonna do what I want.”
SM: Quite amazing, isn’t it?
DC: Yeah. It was already clear that this was all heading to disaster, but he’s always had that idea. Always famously turns up at places and then just leaves and lets everyone else pay the bill.
LITERATURE
Ten ways of thinking about endings
George Saunders delivers a masterclass in dealing with writing’s most difficult discipline
—George Saunders in Story Club with George Saunders
Years ago, I was teaching Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron” to a group of undergrads. I’d photocopied it from a certain anthology and passed it out in class. Just before class, I read through it quickly, and something was off. There seemed to be something missing. I located the story in another anthology and, yes: what was missing was the last page of the story—there’d been an error in the anthology I’d used. Being both clever and desperate, I converted this mistake into, uh, a teaching moment. I “revealed” to the class that the last page of the story had been left off and asked them to supply it. (I counted the words and let them have that many words to do the job.) Now, these are undergrads who were not writing majors. I only gave them forty minutes. But when I had them read their endings aloud, it was astonishing: every single ending was good. Some were better written than others, yes, but all of them landed—they all made sense, all took into account the story that had preceded the ending. It was very strange, really.
A good ending, really, is a taking-into-account of everything that came before. Sometimes—not enough has come before. No bowling pins are up in the air, or not enough of them. The fabric from which a rich ending gets made is supplied in the earlier portions of the story. (Remember our discussion of “My First Goose,” and how many things that arose naturally and early ended up reappearing, transformed, in the ending.) If that early richness isn’t there, we get that sadly familiar feeling of begging the ending to work—stretching it and making it over-literal and so on.
The Vonnegut story was so perfectly constructed that every student in the class, even the ones who weren’t big readers, knew which bowling pins were in the air. (I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in the TV/movie world as: “A third-act problem is a first-act problem.”
PSYCHOLOGY
Does everything have to be political?
Justin E.H. Smith examines the shortcomings of a world in which we are asked to decide on what side of the line we stand…
—Justin E.H. Smith in Hinternet
The way we frame our political views, the way political-compass questionnaires are written, for example, implicitly involves the presumption that what it is to have a political view is, first, to identify the things that are bad, and to seek to eliminate them; and, second, to identify the things that are good, and to seek to foster them. The first part of this presumption in turn compels those who accept it either to explain any lingering bad things in the modern world as the result of some current injustice enacted by a small minority of the powerful, or to rationalize those same things to a point where they can plausibly be seen as morally neutral.
HEALTH
The IVF fairy
When you’re struggling to get pregnant, sometimes the support you need can only come from another woman who has been there before you
—Emma Barnett in Trying
The first night of my very first injection of my very first round of IVF, I was hosting an awards ceremony. The last thing I felt like doing was going to the loo, fumbling with some needles and figuring out how on earth to inject myself.
And yet that evening, the lovely woman helping me on stage with handing out awards to the right people, became a helper off stage and is still in my life five years on.
There was just something about her which made me think: “I can tell you that I am about to put drugs in my tummy and probably mess it up.” Her being a total stranger also appealed. The confession felt risk-free.
What I didn’t know before I took my leap at the dinner, in between wolfing down a bread roll and reaching for another, is that she too, years earlier, had gone through IVF to have her children.
I couldn’t believe it. I know more women are having IVF—but the odds of me sitting next to one, on that night and choosing to confide my fears, just felt, well, like it was meant to be.
FOOD
The inconvenience of kway chap
From the ritual of queueing to pressing an extra bill into the hawker’s hand, food culture is as much about how we eat as how we cook, as demonstrated by kway chap
I love the inconvenience of kway chap.
To start with, there’s the queue. A long line at a hawker stall is always a good sign, but a kway chap stall without a queue is a risk. A key component of kway chap is pork innards, and when they’re not done right, they tend to be done very wrong. And kway chap just isn’t as omnipresent as chicken rice or mee pok tar. With fewer stalls, demand concentrates, good stalls all have long queues. So if you want some kway chap, you go to a hawker centre, you get in line, and you wait.
The wait is a small penance. You stand there, sweating through your shirt, taking a sauna in a dim sum steamer, watching people eat in perfect Smell-O-Vision. A foot to your right, a table of happy ah peks, each with at least two bowls of kway in front of them, besiege a pork hock that glows like polished ebony. A foot in the other direction, someone is scarfing chye tau kueh and setting the air ashimmer with wok hei.
The hawker uncle at the stall chiak-chiak-chiaks away with his cleaver, bringing you closer plate by plate. Inevitably, someone in line is buying lunch for four generations of their family, or an army platoon. Another seems to be getting a week’s worth of takeout, and to judge by the stanzas of instructions, has a special request for every meal. The uncle just nods and keeps chopping, and in the meantime ah mas trundle shopping carts over your toes, the better to call your attention to the open bags of youtiao on top, burnished and ruched, still fresh enough to warm your knees as they pass.
Forty-five minutes later, you present yourself to the hawker uncles and offer up your supplication, “zeg nang ziah” (one person eating), and receive a snort of acknowledgement. The more soy-spattered of the two will start fishing flotsam and jetsam from the cauldron next to him, and introducing them to his cleaver. The cleaner one, who just snatched your money out of your hand, has a cauldron of his own, into which he’ll throw some kway. Kway shouldn’t be cooked so much as rinsed, ideally with an expression of supreme disdain.
MUSIC
Such ado about nothing
Why everyone from James Baldwin to Bob Dylan has borrowed from Shakespeare’s ‘controversial’ artistic process
—Scott Newstok in The First Person with Michael Judge
Many have chronicled the Shakespearean echoes across Dylan’s career, whether nodding to play titles (Tempest), characters (Ophelia in “Desolation Row”), phrases (“Murder Most Foul,” from Hamlet), or more general inspiration (“I’ve been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama”).
But as both a teacher of Shakespeare and a lifelong Dylan fan looking forward to The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan’s first book since his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, I remain most fascinated by his invocations of Shakespeare’s artistic process—championing the poet’s freedom to create from any source whatsoever.
In response to 2012 accusations of plagiarism, Dylan reminded an interviewer that similar charges had dogged him since 1963: “If you think it’s so easy to quote … do it yourself and see how far you can get”—a line that echoes Virgil’s response to charges he had plagiarized Homer: “And why don’t they try the same thefts? They would soon understand that it’s easier to pinch Hercules’ club than a line from Homer.”
As Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s idol from the start, once said of another songwriter: “Aw, he just stole from me, but I steal from everybody.”
NEW YORK LIFE
The pigeon keepers of New York
Why this humble bird reveals the heart and soul of a city
—Chris Arnade in Walking the World
I became fascinated with the pigeon flocks, not just because of their beauty, but because they could be used as landmarks. As a way to navigate mile after mile of row-houses, bodegas, parks, liquor stores, barbershops. (“Walk towards the large flock of white pigeons, you will find me in the park next to them”).
I started paying more attention to them. One flock flying high above Maria Hernandez park in Bushwick stood out and each walk I stopped midway there to rest on a bench, sip a mango juice, and admire the “hundred-birded tumult and blur.”
One day I noticed a long pole with an attached white sheet being spun in long circles from the top of a rundown brownstone beneath the pigeons as if conducting them.
Curious about the pole (was it signaling to the pigeons, or just joy-ishly emulating them?) I found the brownstone it came from, one partitioned into tiny apartments. The doorway was a tangle of buzzers, wires, and nameplates, none of which seemed to work, but it was jammed open with a beer can. I went in, climbed the five flights of stairs, then up the tiny metal ladder to an open skylight.
It was like crossing a magical boundary. Outside was sky, light, air, a breeze, and the whoop whoop whooping of hundreds of pigeons wings flapping together. Inside was the dark tight stairwell filled with toys, drying clothes, yells, and the smell of dirty oil.
OUTDOORS
Confronting the bear
Writer Kelton Wright grapples with the real and metaphorical bear in her pathway to understanding her new professional identity after moving to a town of 180 people
I’d picked up a hiking stick earlier along the trail from a fallen aspen and started to make the traverse, kicking into the snowpack to find footing and digging the stick into the snow below to give me an anchor, Cooper staying close behind. The snow was resisting my kicks, iced over from its own melt, and I was silent in my focus.
At the crest of the hump, I went down onto my knees to slip onto the other side and froze. Twenty feet from me, at the edge of the snowfield, was a bear. I was alone, with a 22-lb dog in the wilderness, on what was essentially a sheet of ice, holding onto a stick.
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost with writer Hannah Ray and editor Farrah Storr.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments
Test
Great read about Kelly McGillis! Thanks for that one!