What to watch flashback: The Hijinks and teen angst of The Outsiders

Even at 18 years old, Tom Cruise had a sense of his value, and he really let Rob Lowe how he felt.

The Outsiders was legendary in discovering new talent.

Every week we take a look at a classic movie that’s endured in the cultural landscape, and remember why we were all so obsessed with it in the first place, and why it’s worth another look today

Late in The Outsiders, against a darkening backdrop, five figures run out of a house in amped up, boisterous spirits.

All dressed in the T-shirt and denim uniform of the “Greasers”, the five are barely distinguishable. One of them jumps up on the bonnet of a car and does a backflip off. It’s easy and effortless.

The person is Tom Cruise, because, of course it’s Tom Cruise.

Not yet 20 at the time production, The Outsiders was Cruise’s third movie. But according to Rob Lowe, even at that tender age, Cruise knew what he was about.

Lowe recalled when he and Cruise had flown to New York for auditions, the pair, along with C. Thomas Howell and Emilio Estevez were being put up at the famed The Plaza Hotel.

“We check in and Tom finds out that we’re sharing a room and just goes ballistic,” Lowe told Dax Shepherd on the Armchair Expert podcast.

If Lowe has any seething resentment, he’s hiding it. He contextualises Cruise’s outburst, “To me, what’s great about the story is, there are certain people who have always been who they are, and that element of them has powered them to where they are today, and the rest is history.

Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise in The Outsiders.

“And the notion that [Cruise], an 18-year-old actor with a walk-on part in Endless Love and like a seventh lead in Taps could have that kind of wherewithal.

“I remember going, ‘Wow, this guy is the real deal’. I mean, it made me laugh, it was gnarly. But in the end of it, you can’t argue with the results. He’s had his eye on the ball since day one.”

Lowe said Cruise was relentlessly competitive when it came to the stunts. “He ended up being the only who could do a backflip. It is in The Outsiders for no reason. Just to do it.”

Backflip aside, there was nothing so distinct about Cruise’s performance in The Outsiders that would mark him for super-super-stardom within a few short years when he followed up that part with Risky Business and Top Gun.

As part of the ensemble, Cruise was just one of the guys in a cast that would become legend. Director Francis Ford Coppola assembled a group of young talent who would go on to have decades-long careers.

The core cast, in addition to Cruise, Lowe, Estevez and Howell, were Ralph Macchio, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze and Diane Lane. All were either fresh or had only one or two roles on their resumes.

Coppola wrote in The Guardian in 2021 that, “If my company was famous for anything, it was casting new, unknown actors. I believed in the concept of open casting calls – but I tried to do them in a way that was appropriate for the film we were making.

Francis Ford Coppola pictured here in 1996.

“For The Outsiders, I had all the candidates – which included Nicolas Cage, Mickey Rourke, Robert Downey Jr, Patrick Swayze, Dennis Quaid, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez – sitting on benches in a circle watching each other trying for the different parts.

“No one knows more about acting than other actors. Tom Cruise, who ended up in a small role, was an intense kid who would do anything to make his part better.”

In 2018, Macchio called Coppola’s audition process “brutal”.

“You’re becoming self-conscious of any choices because you’re watching reactions based on other actors and watching the filmmakers and how they respond because you’re all trying to get the job. For Francis, it was about mixing and matching the ensemble, saying, ‘Dennis Quaid, you read this, and Rob Lowe, you read that’.”

The Outsiders was adapted from a book by S.E. Hinton, who started writing the story when she was still in high school. The teen angst is strong, but it’s rooted in a real vivisection of inequality in 1960s America.

The “Greasers” were the poor kids from the “wrong” side of town, plagued by a feeling of hopelessness but with strong loyalty to each other. The establishment expected the worst of them, cast them as outsiders, so, they played into that stereotype – especially the volatile Dally.

The Outsiders was released in 1983.

The “Socs” were the rival gang of rich kids with their chino pants and moral superiority, but were equally prone to violence. Tensions escalate between the tribes when one of the Socs is killed during a fight.

Hinton’s book and Coppola’s screen adaptation have been praised for its bracing, authentic look at classism in its coming-of-age context, and the redemptive powers of friendship and loyalty.

“There are parallels between the rivalry of the Socs and the Greasers, and the inequality in America today,” Coppola wrote in 2021. “Most of the bad of contemporary civilisation are not caused by nature. Civilisation reinvents fictions that people will kill for, which is absurd. Why is there such inequality when we’re all one family?”

That strata was even reflected on the rowdy set in Tulsa, Oklahoma where the production was filmed.

Howell wrote in 2021 that it was “intentionally dialled in to the Soc and Greaser actors”.

“We played football and basketball against each other – they had matching jumpsuits, while we’d show up in whatever we brought from home. The Socs stayed on floor 18 or 19 of the hotel, while the Greasers were on four or five.

“It was like a fraternity house in there, some pretty crazy stuff took place. Once I got home at three in the morning after an 18-hour shift, I couldn’t wait to get into my room and go to sleep. And I went in there, two of the Socs had turned everything in my room upside down.”

The pranking on set was notorious, and at 15 years old at the time, Howell said in a separate interview with Variety that he was mostly the victim of the hijinks.

Diane Lane as Cherry in The Outsiders.

Lane said that she had honey smeared over her toilet seat, something “terrorising” written with her lipstick on her mirror, vaseline on every door handle and then a shortsheeted bed.

“I never had any siblings or went to summer camp, so for me it was a bonding experience. Is that what they mean by trauma-bonding? Hahahaha.”

Hinton was on set during the filming and even though she was only in her early 30s at the time, she said she felt like the den mother to the young actors.

“We bonded really strongly because they’re these little boys, and they were tearing loose in Tulsa with no adult supervision, so I decided I was their mother and took over mothering them,” she told EW in 2017.

“Rob used to call me mum half the time.”

Last month, Lowe was reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the cinema release, while promoting his latest project. “The nearest thing I can put out there that people can relate to is it’s your first your of college and if you were in a frat or if you were in a sorority and the way you bond with those people, that’s how I feel about The Outsiders cast.

“It was my first time away from home, it was my very first movie, I’ll never forget it, it feels like it was four days ago, not 40 years.”

The Outsiders is streaming now on SBS On Demand and Binge

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Originally published as What to watch flashback: The Hijinks and teen angst of The Outsiders