1986 — The wardrobe & objects
Top Gun
Featuring Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
On the carrier deck, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s Ray-Ban Aviator Classic RB3025 arrives with the same clipped authority as the jets around him. Gold frame, green lenses, all business. In Top Gun’s opening montage, the glasses belong to the machinery of launch and ritual, worn less like an accessory than a badge of speed, nerve and procedure. That is the clean trick of it: nothing is overdesigned, yet everything carries a charge. The aviators sit neatly within the film’s hard-edged spectacle, catching the light as Maverick moves through the disciplined chaos of takeoff. Quietly exact, and hard to miss.
Contents
Dispatch Nº 01 · On Set
Top Gun
The $25,000 Sunset
Tony Scott got Top Gun’s gleam by chasing real light on real carriers, right up to the point where he paid to turn one around.
By the time the light went, the deck had become a furnace. Jets were slamming down at roughly 180 miles an hour, the wind was cutting across the carrier at 30 knots, and nobody could hear much of anything except the afterburners. Jeffrey L. Kimball, the film’s cinematographer, remembered the place as a realm of sign language and sensory assault, where “50,000-pound jets slam every 10 seconds onto a football field length of black and white parking lot.” Tony Scott, who liked a picture to look as if it had been lacquered in sun, kept coming back to one problem: he needed the ship, the planes and the sky to line up for a few more minutes.
Continue reading · 4 min →