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• The True Story Behind the Movie <em>American Made</em>

The True Story Behind the Movie American Made

American Made , the new Tom Cruise crime drama out Sept. 29, has all the makings of a romp: drug running and arms smuggling. An FBI sting. Enough cold, hard cash to make the phenomenon of raining money a plausible ecological scenario. And a sex scene in the cockpit of a plane. That’s flying through the air. With one participant being the pilot. Did we mention it’s Tom Cruise?

If it sounds like an exercise in screenwriting excess, it’s not entirely — the film takes as its inspiration the true story of Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal, a TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel and, later, an informant for the DEA. It’s an ideal vehicle for Cruise, a.k.a. Maverick , whose mischievous swagger is accented here (literally) with a Louisiana drawl.

The movie hardly purports to be a documentary — director Doug Liman, who reteams with Cruise after Edge of Tomorrow , has referred to it as “a fun lie based on a true story.” And perhaps its looseness with the facts is for the best, as conflicting accounts make it difficult to get a clear picture on certain aspects of Seal’s seemingly made-for-the-movies life. It’s a thorny story that takes place against the backdrop of the Reagan-era War on Drugs and the notorious Iran-Contra affair , with Seal never hesitating to do business with opposing sides, so long as the payout was prodigious.

Here’s what we know about Seal — and what’s still up for debate.

MORE: Review: American Made Lets a Smug Tom Cruise Just Be Tom Cruise

Fact: Seal was an unusually talented young pilot.

According to Smuggler’s End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal — written by retired FBI agent Del Hahn, who worked on the task force that went after Seal in the ’80s — Seal obtained his student pilot license at 15 and became fully licensed at 16. His instructor was so impressed by his natural talent that he allowed him to fly solo after only eight hours of training. After serving in the National Guard and Army Reserve, he became a pilot with TWA, among the youngest command pilots to operate a Boeing 707.

Fact: He had a colorful personality.

As Cruise plays him, Seal was a blend of balls and braggadocio, fond of stunts and rarely registering the possibilities of danger or failure. According to Hahn, Seal’s high school yearbook photo was accompanied by the inscription, “Full of fun, full of folly.” His flight instructor described him as wild and fearless and generally unconcerned with the consequences of his actions. In an interview with Vice , Hahn says Seal was personable but “not as smart and clever as he thought he was.”

Partly Fiction: He was married to a woman named Lucy and they had three kids.

Sarah Wright plays Seal’s delightfully foul-mouthed wife in the movie, alternately exasperated by his schemes and enthralled by the riches they bring. In reality, Seal was married three times and had five children. He had a son and daughter with first wife Barbara Bottoms, whom he married in 1963 and subsequently divorced. He then married Linda McGarrh Ross in 1971, divorcing a year later, before marrying Deborah Ann DuBois, with whom he would go on to have three children, in 1974.

Fiction: The government first took notice of his smuggling when he was transporting Cuban cigars.

While the film depicts Seal’s foray into smuggling as beginning with Cuban cigars, his first documented run-in with the law for a smuggling offense took place in 1972 when he was one of eight people arrested for a plot to smuggle explosives out of the U.S. Though he wasn’t convicted, he lost his job with TWA. By 1976, according to Hahn, he had moved onto marijuana, and within a couple of years graduated to cocaine, which was less bulky, less sniffable by dogs and generally more profitable.

Fact: He smuggled drugs in through the Louisiana coast.

Seal and the pilots he recruited — including one he met in jail and his first wife’s brother — trafficked drugs over the border of his home state. As in the movie, he sometimes delivered them by pushing packed duffel bags out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be retrieved by partners on the ground.

Mostly Fiction: Seal was chummy with the leaders of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel, including Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers.

In the movie, Seal meets the cartel big wigs early on. In reality, Hahn writes, he did not deal with them directly, and they referred to him only as “El Gordo,” or “The Fat Man.” He finally met with them in April 1984 when he was working with the DEA on a sting operation intended to lead to their capture. (That operation would go awry when Seal’s status as an informant was revealed in a Washington Times cover story months later.)

Fact: Seal offered to cooperate with the DEA to stay out of prison.

The DEA was onto Seal for a long time before securing an indictment against him in March 1983 on several counts, including conspiracy to distribute methaqualone and possession with intent to distribute Quaaludes. As the movie suggests, there was some confusion among government agencies intent on taking him down.

His initial attempt to make a deal with a U.S. attorney, offering information on the Ochoa family, was rejected. But in March 1984, he traveled to Washington to the office of the Vice President’s Drug Task Force and cut a deal on the strength of his intel on and connections to the cartel.

Contested: He worked for many years alongside the CIA.

The film has Seal’s involvement with the CIA beginning in the late 1970s, relatively early on in his smuggling career. Under the handling of an agent played by Domhnall Gleeson, Cruise’s Seal gathers intelligence by flying low over Guatemala and Nicaragua and snapping photos from his plane. Later, the CIA turns a blind eye to his drug smuggling in exchange for his delivery of arms to the Contras in Nicaragua, who the U.S. government was attempting to mobilize against the leftist Sandinistas, who controlled the government. The movie even suggests that the CIA helped set Seal up with his very own airport in the small town of Mena, Ark.

According to Hahn’s book, rumors of Seal’s involvement with the CIA anytime before 1984 were just that — rumors. The only confirmed connection between Seal and the CIA turned up by Hahn’s research was in 1984, after Seal had begun working as an informant for the DEA. The CIA placed a hidden camera in a cargo plane Seal flew to pick up a cocaine shipment in Colombia. He and his copilot were able to obtain photographs that proved a link between the Sandinistas and the cartel, key intelligence for the Reagan administration in its plans to help overthrow the Sandinistas’ regime. But the final piece of the operation — a celebration of the successful cocaine transport, at which the Ochoas and Escobar were to be arrested all at once — never happened because of the revelation of Seal’s status as an informant.

Fact: Seal was assassinated in 1986.

Jorge Ochoa reportedly ordered a hit on Seal early in 1986. At the time, Seal was living in a Baton Rouge Salvation Army facility. Charges against him had not been fully erased as a result of his cooperation with the government, and he was sentenced to probation and six months residing at the treatment center. On the evening of Feb. 19, just after he parked his Cadillac, he was killed by two Colombian hitmen armed with machine guns.

Thanks in part to several witnesses, both men and four additional men who conspired in the killing were arrested within two days. Seal would go down as a legendary criminal, one of the most important witnesses in DEA history and — in Hollywood’s estimation, at least — a classic American story fit for only our most American onscreen hero.

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American Made (2017)

Tom cruise: barry seal.

• Photos (106)

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Quotes 

Barry Seal : I'm the gringo who always delivers.

Barry Seal : Schafer?

Monty 'Schafer' : Who is "Schafer"?

Barry Seal : [Barry records his last confession on video tape before his assassination]  You know I guess you could say I helped build an army, defend a country and create the biggest drug cartel this world has ever seen. DEA, CIA, White House. I mean, it's been a hell of an adventure. Yes sometimes a little more than I bargained for. But goddamn, you try telling me that this ain't the greatest country in the world?

Barry Seal : Guys. It ain't about room, alright? It's about weight.

Barry Seal : I'm not working for TWA no more.

Lucy Seal : No shit, Barry! Are you going to prison?

Barry Seal : No, Ma'am.

Barry Seal : Either I fly the big fella or I fly your product.

Dana Sibota : Well you hit the trifecta, didn't ya? I mean... guns, drugs, money laundering. And the state of Arkansas is gonna rip the bark right off of you, boy. We are gonna put you in a four by six cell for the rest of your life.

Barry Seal : Ma'am, that's a long time

[Barry is sitting cuffed to a bench in a room full of DEA officers and agents] 

Barry Seal : Did you all know that Caddies have more trunk space than any other car? I'll give each and every one of you a Caddy for your troubles, Because I'm going to walk out of here and there ain't a damn thing any one of you can do about it.

[just then Dana Sibota walks in] 

Dana Sibota : He's free to go.

DEA Agent Winter : Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.

[Barry's hands are uncuffed] 

Barry Seal : You boys should have taken the Caddies.

[holding a duffel bag] 

Lucy Seal : Roscoe dug this up in the backyard. There are bills blowing around everywhere.

Barry Seal : I'll rake it up in the morning.

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American Made

2017, Comedy/Drama, 1h 55m

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Critics Consensus

American Made 's fast-and-loose attitude with its real-life story mirrors the cavalier -- and delightfully watchable -- energy Tom Cruise gives off in the leading role. Read critic reviews

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Barry Seal, a TWA pilot, is recruited by the CIA to provide reconnaissance on the burgeoning communist threat in Central America and soon finds himself in charge of one of the biggest covert CIA operations in the history of the United States. The operation spawns the birth of the Medellin cartel and almost brings down the Reagan White House.

Rating: R (Some Sexuality/Nudity|Language Throughout)

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Adventure

Original Language: English

Director: Doug Liman

Producer: Brian Grazer , Brian Oliver , Doug Davison , Kim Roth , Ray Angelic , Tyler Thompson

Writer: Gary Spinelli

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 29, 2017  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 19, 2017

Box Office (Gross USA): $51.3M

Runtime: 1h 55m

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Production Co: Hercules Film Fund, Brian Grazer, Vendian Entertainment, Quadrant Pictures

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)

Cast & Crew

Domhnall Gleeson

Monty "Schafer"

Sarah Wright

Jesse Plemons

Sheriff Downing

Caleb Landry Jones

Dana Sibota

Judy Downing

E. Roger Mitchell

Agent Craig McCall

Alejandro Edda

Jorge Ochoa

Benito Martinez

James Rangel

Louis Finkle

Gary Spinelli

Screenwriter

Brian Grazer

Brian Oliver

Doug Davison

Ray Angelic

Tyler Thompson

Paris Kassidokostas-Latsis

Executive Producer

Terry Dougas

Brandt Andersen

Eric Greenfeld

Michael Finley

Michael Bassick

César Charlone

Cinematographer

Andrew Mondshein

Film Editing

Dylan Tichenor

Christophe Beck

Original Music

News & Interviews for American Made

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Critic Reviews for American Made

Audience reviews for american made.

The combo of director Doug Liman, writer Gary Spinelli and actor Tom Cruise all deliver huge in a film that serves as entertainment and a peek inside the corruption factory of the Reagan presidency.

American Made is a fascinating biopic about Barry Seal, a commercial pilot who worked with the CIA to run drugs and guns in South America. Set in the early 1980s, to combat the spread of communism the CIA recruits Pan Am pilot Barry Seal to fly recon missions in South America and eventually to run guns to the Contras; but things soon start to spiral out of the control. Tom Cruise gives a pretty strong performance, and director Doug Liman does a good job at giving the film a unique style; blending a political thriller with a crime drama, with some lighthearted comedy mixed in. Also, the sets, costumes, and soundtrack are all well-done, giving an authentic early '80s look and feel. Entertaining and fun, American Made is an interesting look at a little known chapter of the Cold War.

It's a pretty poor imitation of Scorsese, mostly because of the overly frantic editing and the fact that we just don't get a good sense of who Barry Seal is.

Say what you will of Tom Cruise as I'm fully aware that some don't take to him at all but, personally, I've always been a fan. That said, it's been some years since I've fully embraced a film of his as nothing has really showcased his abilities. As good as they were, I turned a little cold on the Mission: Impossible series where Cruise seemingly focused on being an action star for a while. American Made, however, sees him return to what he does best. This is a tailor made role for the likes of Cruise's cocksure mannerisms and shit-kicking grin. In fact, the film thrives on him in the lead which makes this very enjoyable entertainment. Plot: In 1978, skilled airline pilot Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is contacted by CIA agent Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleason), who employs him to photograph communist facilities over Central America. Barry accepts but it's not long before he's contacted by the Medellin Cartel to transport drugs back to the USA. Before he knows it, Barry is making millions in drug and gun-running which involves everyone from the FBI, the ATF, the CIA and the the Contras in Nicaragua. The longer it goes on, however, the harder it becomes for Barry to get out. I've now lost count of the amount of films that portray a character that spirals out of control once involved in some drug running or criminal activity. Tv's Breaking Bad became a critically acclaimed phenomenon for a start but the ones that spring to mind, when comparing American Made to anything, are the 70's set Johnny Depp film Blow and, in terms of its style and vibrancy, Scorsese's Goodfellas. Now, I wouldn't put this in the same class as Scorsese's masterpiece but it's equally as good as (if not better than) the aforementioned Ted Demme film. There's a lot of style and pizazz to Doug Liman's portrayal of this very interesting time in American history. He gleefully exposes the political machinations behind the events and doesn't pull punches in indicting President Ronald Reagan, Governor Bill Clinton and the CIA in there involvement with such a huge drug running cartel and their intentions to quash a South American uprising from the Sandinistas. Put simply, everyone had their fingers in a lot of pies at this time in America and Barry Seal happened to be "the gringo that always delivered". It's serious stuff but what makes it so enjoyable is because Cruise injects such a tongue-in-cheek zaniness to the whole affair while Liman confidently handles the material with a great eye for the 70's and 80's period detail and intercuts the film with news footage of the events as and when they came to public knowledge. It's a good case of truth being stranger than fiction and that's what grabs your attention as you roll with the ridiculously over-the-top scenarios. Cruise is hugely appealing here. His southern accent adds another dimension and character to his resumé that's refreshing to see. He can play these characters in his sleep but it's been a while since we've seen it. It feels like old school Cruise and it's a pleasure to have him return. Mark Walker

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Barry Seal: The real-life story behind Tom Cruise's character in American Made

Doug liman’s new film follows the wild true story of a pilot, drug smuggler, and eventual informant, article bookmarked.

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Hollywood screenwriters toil their lives away trying to come up with the next crazy, catchy story to pitch. Yet, sometimes, history does the work for them.

Tom Cruise ‘s latest vehicle American Made , directed by Doug Liman, sees the A-lister play the infamous Barry Seal: a pilot who became a drug smuggler, who in turn became an informant, finding himself at the centre of the Iran-Contra scandal of Ronald Reagan’s era.

Seal’s love of flying blossomed early; he took his first solo flight at the age of 15, before gaining a pilot’s licence at 16, earning money by towing advertising banners. After serving in the Louisiana Army National Guard and Army Reserve, he joined Trans World Airlines in 1968 as a flight engineer, before becoming one of the youngest command pilots in the entire fleet.

• American Made is pure Tom Cruise, all while history takes a backseat

According to his wife Deborah Seal, he became involved in drug smuggling in 1975. During the early 1980s, he developed a close relationship with the Medellin Cartel, whose leadership included Pablo Escobar. It was then that he moved his operations from his home state of Louisiana to an airstrip in rural west Arkansas.

In 1983, however, Seal was caught in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as he tried to smuggle a shipment of Quaaludes into the country. By his own admission, he had by then flown more than 100 flights of 600 to 1200 pounds of cocaine each, equating to between $3bn and $5bn worth of drugs into the US.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Former FBI agent Del Hahn, however, describes how Seal was desperate to avoid jail time ; after his offer to turn snitch was turned down multiple times, he eventually flew straight to DC and the office of the vice president’s drug task force. They sent him to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Seal was soon enlisted into a sting operation. The aim? The Reagan administration was keen to see the Contras militia overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government which had installed itself in Nicaragua; Seal claimed the Sandinistas had made a deal with the Medellin Cartel, and proof of such could lend justification to the US’s support of the Contras, despite accusations of human rights violations amongst the counter-revolutionaries.

And so, the pilot flew into an airstrip in Nicaragua with CIA cameras installed on his plane, snapping pictures which showed Escobar and several other members of the Medellin Cartel loading kilos of cocaine onto a plane with the aid of Sandinista soldiers.

Seal claimed that one of the men present, Federico Vaughan, was an associate of Tomas Borge of the interior ministry of Nicaragua. However, Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny threw doubt over Seal’s accusations, claiming there was no evidence tying any Nicaraguan officials to the drug shipment.

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Others, however, jumped on Seal’s testimony. And that would be his undoing. A front page story in The Washington Times by Edmond Jacoby about links between Sandinista officials and the Medellin Cartel discussed Seal’s mission and appeared to out him as a government agent.

The DEA cut him loose, but that also left him vulnerable. He was later arrested by the FBI in Louisiana, though only received six months supervised probation; a condition of his sentence was that he spend every night, from 6pm to 6am, at the Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge.

It was outside of this building that he was shot and killed on 19 February, 1986. A friend said of the incident, “I saw Barry get killed from the window of the Belmont hotel coffee shop. The killers were both out of the car, one on either side, but I only saw one shoot, cause Barry saw it coming and just put his head down on the steering column.”

Colombian assassins sent by the Medellin Cartel were apprehended trying to leave Louisiana soon after Seal’s murder. Three of the men were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, some believe the CIA was behind the killing.

After his death, Louisiana attorney general William Guste hand-delivered a letter to US Attorney General Edwin Meese in protest at the government’s failure to protect Seal. Though he called him a “heinous criminal”, Guste added: “At the same time, for his own purposes, he had made himself an extremely valuable witness and informant in the country’s fight against illegal drugs.”

“Barry Seal’s murder suggests the need for an in-depth but rapid investigation into a number of areas. Why was such an important witness not given protection whether he wanted it or not?” There’s still no real answer to this question today.

‘American Made’ hits UK cinemas 25 August

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, american made.

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The makers of the based-on-a-true-story black comedy "American Made" fail to satisfactorily answer one pressing question: why is CIA operative and Colombia drug-runner Barry Seal's story being told as a movie and not a book? What's being shown in this film that couldn't also be expressed in prose? 

In telling the true story of American airplane pilot Barry Seal ( Tom Cruise ), writer Gary Spinelli and director Doug Liman ("Edge of  Tomorrow ," " Jumper ") choose to overstimulate viewers rather than challenge them. They emphasize Barry's charm, the exotic nature of his South American trade routes, and the rapid escalation of events that ultimately led to his downfall. Cruise's smile is, in this context, deployed like a weapon in Liman and Spinelli's overwhelming charm offensive. You don't get a lot of psychological insight into Barry's character, or learn why he was so determined to make more money than he could spend, despite conflicting pressures from Pablo Escobar's drug cartel and the American government to either quit or collude.

But you do get a lot of shots of Cruise grinning from behind aviator glasses in extreme close-ups, many of which are lensed with hand-held digital cameras that show you the wilds of Nicaragua and Colombia through an Instagram-cheap green/yellow filter. "American Made" may be superficially a condemnation of the hypocritical American impulse to take drug suppliers' money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But it's mostly a sensational, sub-"Wolf of Wall Street"-style true crime story that attempts to seduce you, then abandon you.

The alarming pace of Barry's narrative, designed to put Cruise’s charisma front and center, keeps viewers disoriented. It's often hard to understand Barry's motives beyond caricature-broad assumptions about his (lack of) character. In 1977, Barry agrees to fly over South American countries and take photos of suspected communist groups using a spy plane provided by shadowy CIA pencil-pusher Schafer ( Domhnall Gleeson ). Barry is impulsive, or so we're meant to think based on an incident where he wakes up a sleeping co-pilot by abruptly sending a commercial airliner into a nosedive. This scene may explain why Barry grins like a lunatic as he explains to his wife Lucy ( Sarah Wright ) that he'll figure out a way to pay out of pocket for his family's health insurance once he opens an independent shipping company called "IAC" (Get it? IAC - CIA?).

Barry's impetuousness does not, however, explain why he flies so low to land when he takes his photographs. Or why he doesn't immediately reach out to Schafer when he's kidnapped and forced by Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) and his Cartel associates to deliver hundreds of pounds of cocaine to the United States. Or why Barry thinks so little of his wife and kids that he packs their Louisiana house up one night without explanation, and moves them to a safe-house in Arkansas. There's character-defining insanity, and then there's "this barely makes sense in the moment when it is happening" crazy. Barry often appears to be the latter kind of nutbar.

There are two types of people in "American Made": the kind that work and the kind that get worked over. It's easy to tell the two apart based on how much screen-time Spinelli and Liman devote to each character. Schafer, for example, is defined by the taunts he suffers from a fellow cubicle drone and his own tendency to over-promise. Schafer doesn't do real work—not in the filmmakers' eyes. The same is true of Escobar and his fellow dealers, who are treated as lawless salesmen of an unsavory product. And don't get me started on JB ( Caleb Landry Jones ), Lucy's lazy, Gremlin-driving, under-age-girl-dating, Confederate-flag-waving redneck brother.

But what about Lucy? She keeps Barry's family together, but her feelings are often taken for granted, even when she calls Barry out for abandoning her suddenly in order to meet up with Schafer. Barry responds by throwing bundles of cash at his wife's feet. The argument, and the scene end just like that, like a smug joke whose punchline might as well be,  There's no problem that a ton of cash can't solve .

"American Made" sells a toxic, shallow, anti-American Dream bill of goods for anybody looking to shake their head about exceptionalism without seriously considering what conditions enable that mentality. Spinelli and Liman don't say anything except,  Look at how far a determined charmer can go if he's greedy and determined enough . They respect Barry too much to be thoughtfully critical of him. And they barely disguise their fascination with broad jokes that tease Barry's team of hard-working good ol' boys and put down everyone else.

Sure, it's important to note that Barry ultimately meets a just end, one that's been prescribed to thousands of other would-be movie gangsters. But you can easily shrug off a little finger-wagging at the end of a movie that treats you to two hours of Tom Cruise charming representatives of every imaginable US institution (they don't call in the Girl Scouts, the Golden Girls or the Hulk-busters, but I'm sure they're in a director's cut). If there is a reason, good or bad, that "American Made" is a movie, it's that you can't be seduced by the star of " Top Gun " in a book. 

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

American Made (2017)

Rated R for language throughout and some sexuality/nudity.

115 minutes

Tom Cruise as Barry Seal

Domhnall Gleeson as Monty 'Schafer'

Sarah Wright as Lucy Seal

Jesse Plemons as Sheriff Downing

Caleb Landry Jones as JB

Lola Kirke as Judy Downing

Jayma Mays as Dana Sibota

• Gary Spinelli

Cinematographer

• César Charlone
• Andrew Mondshein
• Christophe Beck

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American Made Is a Super Cynical Crime Caper

Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a drug smuggler who worked for the CIA, in Doug Liman’s surprisingly caustic true-story film.

“It’s not a felony if you’re doing it for the good guys,” blares the tagline on the poster for American Made , Tom Cruise’s freewheeling new caper of a film about the life of Barry Seal. It’s the kind of sentiment Hollywood loves to celebrate—a rebel breaking the rules for an important cause, or even a patriotic one, as Seal did working off the books for the CIA. What better casting could there be for such a role than Cruise, sporting a shaggy ’70s hairdo and a pair of aviators, executing daredevil pilot moves as he flies around Central and South America? It’s Maverick from Top Gun all over again, just a little grimier.

Except Seal’s life was more than a little grimy—he was a grade-A drug smuggler, a favorite of the Medellín Cartel and Pablo Escobar. Whatever CIA benefactors he served were essentially blackmailing him into clandestine ops to serve shady operations like the Iran-Contra affair. The director Doug Liman takes advantage of Cruise in a fascinating way (much as he did with the star in Edge of Tomorrow , the duo’s last collaboration): by poking at his inherent charisma and peeling it back, mocking the very idea of the American cowboy hero at the center of his boisterous but refreshingly cynical tale.

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When we meet Seal, he’s a TWA pilot with a low-level smuggling business on the side, bringing a duffel bag of contraband with him on his flights to score a little extra dough. He’s approached by Monty (Domhnall Gleeson), a CIA agent with a proposition for him: Fly a little propeller plane over rebel bases in Central and South America, take some pictures, and maybe drop off some secret packages for Manuel Noriega, the U.S.-supported military leader in Panama. Good money, off the books, very hush-hush, but all in the name of serving his country.

Seal obliges, and quickly things spiral out of control. Escobar, then on the rise in Colombia, takes note of Seal’s secret flights and demands he start shipping bricks of cocaine on the way back, dumping them out of the air in Louisiana to avoid the DEA. The CIA eventually cottons on but allows the whole thing to continue, as long as Seal can smuggle back some guns for the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. Escobar tolerates that, as long as Seal can operate a whole fleet of cocaine planes to keep his product moving. On and on it goes, with both sides tacitly ignoring the other so that Seal can keep operating extralegally wherever he goes.

Liman and his screenwriter Gary Spinelli tell the tale with all the freewheeling charm required of a caper picture. But American Made never lets the audience forget just how shadily the CIA is behaving throughout, even though Seal is always along for the ride. He has to be—the house of cards he’s built collapses if any of the extralegal organizations he’s working with gets sick of him—and Cruise plays Seal as breezy with just a hint of desperation.

Cruise, one of the last titans of the 1990s who’s still regularly churning out these kinds of star-driven vehicles, already had one flop this year— The Mummy­ —in which he strained credulity as a virile, strapping young adventurer. At 55, Cruise is far older than the man he’s playing (who was 40 at the height of his CIA misadventures, though his life story has been significantly smoothed out and Hollywoodized). But Liman uses Cruise’s age mostly to his advantage, playing up the cracks in Cruise’s façade, especially as Seal tries to convince his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) that his newfound wealth isn’t ill-gotten.

American Made ’s best set pieces revolve around Seal’s obvious lie; it’s quite something to watch the smuggler, covered in blood, cheerfully shoving clothes in a garbage bag and telling Lucy they have to leave home before the sun rises. At another point, a drug run gets interrupted by the DEA and Seal ends up ditching the plan in a small town in Louisiana, getting away from the cops on a children’s bicycle while covered in cocaine. It’s been a while since Cruise made a movie this risky, but American Made is exactly that—it’s a story where Ronald Reagan ends up as the ultimate villain, and Pablo Escobar comes across as the most level-headed of Seal’s bosses.

Liman’s visual panache is lacking at times. The action scenes are often shoddily edited, keeping Seal’s daring flights from feeling genuinely thrilling, and whatever late ’70s/early ’80s look he’s aiming for is absent outside of the hairdos. Cruise, for all his live-wire energy (and he has a lot of it), should probably stop making films that so willfully deny his age, even though he’s talented enough to make it work for two hours. But by the time the movie roared to its shockingly grim, remarkably embittered ending, American Made had won me over. Barry Seal, it turns out, isn’t a hero worth rooting for—but neither are the “good guys” handing him the keys to the plane.

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What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in American Made

David James, © 2017 Universal Studios.

Like The Wolf of Wall Street , American Made is based on the real-life exploits of a “lovable” rogue, Barry Seal. Also like TWWS , it gets us rooting for our hero despite his engaging in morally questionable, not to mention illegal, activities like gun-running and drug smuggling. To win us over, it uses many of the same techniques employed by TWWS : having our dubious hero played by an extremely charismatic star, in this case Tom Cruise, fully at home in the cockpit as another cocksure pilot; giving him a gorgeous blonde wife and adorable children for whom he’s doing it all; and, that standby of engaging villains from Richard III to House of Cards’  Frank Underwood, breaking the fourth wall with confessions directly into the camera, thus making us co-conspirators.

Plus, director Doug Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli streamline the story to suggest Seal had rather less agency in becoming a career criminal than the actual facts would indicate.

Recruitment

In the movie, Seal is an ace pilot whose daredevil streak leads him from TWA to the CIA. He’s bored rigid flying commercial flights, so he takes to performing stunts that trigger the oxygen masks and terrify passengers. His aviation skills and reputation for sailing close to the wind lead to an approach from Schafer, a CIA agent (or possibly a composite of several) played by Domhnall Gleeson (whose father, actor Brendan Gleeson, resembles the stocky real Seal much more than sleek Tom Cruise does). Schafer recruits Seal to take reconnaissance photos of guerillas operating in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, wooing him with a super-fast, super-nimble twin engine plane.

The real-life Seal seems to have joined up with the CIA much earlier. The late investigative journalist Alexander Cockburn contended that Seal first came into contact with the CIA in the ’60s as a special forces helicopter pilot in Vietnam and maintained links with them throughout his TWA years. Other accounts suggest his links might have gone back as far as the Bay of Pigs. Moreover, although the film suggests Seal was just an excitement-loving pilot who got swept up into espionage at the time, eight years earlier he had been attempting to fly 1,350 pounds of plastic explosives to some anti-Castro Cubans based in Mexico when he was arrested by the U.S. Customs Service . And far from resigning from TWA in 1978 to pursue this new, more exciting career in spying, he was fired in 1974 for falsely claiming medical leave when actually he was absent due to weapons trafficking. He escaped prosecution only because the CIA intervened, stating a trial would threaten national security.

Guerrilla reconnaissance

As a good ol’ boy from Louisiana, Seal readily accepts that the rationale for taking photographs is “fightin’ communists,” and the filmmakers don’t provide much context for this assessment.

In real life, of course, one person’s communist insurgent is another person’s freedom fighter. While certainly left-wing and receiving aid and training from Cuba, the guerrilla movements in these Central American countries were primarily a reaction to brutal dictatorships and, as a 1983 presidential commission reported , “decades of poverty, bloody repression, and frustrated efforts at bringing about political reform.” Oliver Stone’s kind-of based-on-true-events Salvador (1986) gives a view of the conflict from the other side.

Enter the Medellín

2017 Universal Studios, Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In American Made , Seal is just minding his own business refueling his plane in Colombia in 1980 when he is bundled into a car and taken to a hidden airstrip in the Colombian jungle. There he is made an offer he can’t refuse by three “businessmen” (one named Pablo Escobar) in need of a pilot with the skills to navigate the dangerously short runway. Already feeling undercompensated by the CIA for the loss of his TWA pension and health care, Seal is swayed by the promise of $2,000 per kilo of cocaine brought to the U.S.

In real life, according to statements in his Drug Enforcement Administration file, Seal was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976 and began smuggling cocaine in 1978, well before any contact with the cartel.

Arrested in Colombia

The film has Seal becoming buddies with cartel kingpins Escobar and Ochoa after forming a lucrative partnership and partying with them at their penthouse in Cartagena, at least until the party is broken up by the Colombian Army. The kingpins, plus Seal, are thrown in jail, but while the Colombians walk free the next day, Seal remains incarcerated until Schafer gets him out. The agent later warns Seal that the smuggler has to get himself and his family out of Baton Rouge before sunrise in order to avoid a police raid and arranges for them to relocate to remote Mena, Arkansas, where the agency provides Seal with not only a house but also an airfield.

In reality, Seal was arrested with 40 kilograms of cocaine and spent nine months in a Honduran jail. There he met Ochoa’s New Orleans business manager, who brought Seal into the Medellín cartel’s orbit in 1982. He became its chief link to cocaine markets in the southeastern U.S., with his 1981 bank records showing daily deposits of $50,000 into a Bahamian bank. Also, he moved to Mena of his own accord in 1982.

Supporting the Contras

In the movie, in return for his get out of jail free card, Schafer wants Seal to fly AK-47s out of Mena to the Contras, the insurgent group tasked with overthrowing the Sandinistas, the leftwing movement that itself overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza DeBayle in 1979 and took his place. Then Schafer ups the ante by requiring Seal to return bearing Contras who will be trained in Mena. Meanwhile, Seal’s old pals Ochoa and Escobar suggest he drop off some of his guns in Colombia and resume bringing in cocaine on the return trip.

It is certainly true that Seal’s planes (by now he had a fleet) flew from Mena to Colombia, making refueling stops in Panama and Honduras (where the Contras were training) before returning laden with approximately $13 million worth of drugs.

Cockburn, among several other journalists and historians, also alleged that a quid pro quo existed, with the CIA turning a blind eye to Seal’s drug smuggling in return for his using it as cover to get weapons to the Contras. Further, there are allegations that Seal bought several of his planes from CIA-owned companies such as Air America (itself the subject of Roger Spottiswoode’s 1990 movie of the same name ) and Southern Air Transport.

The main source for the allegations that the Contras were brought for training in Arkansas is a book by a former Seal pilot named Terry Reed. However, many of those named in the book have disputed his account, with one bringing suit for libel.

In the film’s telling, the CIA abandoned Seal—getting rid of any paper trail or hard evidence that could link them to the smuggler—right before the ATF and the DEA and the FBI and the state police raid the Mena airport. Seal is charged in Arkansas with weapons, drug, and money-laundering offenses, but gets off with a community service order and is whisked off to the White House.

In reality, the DEA busted Seal for smuggling 200,000 Quaaludes into Florida in 1983. Facing a 10-year stretch, he was desperate to make a deal, but the DEA wasn’t interested. Going over their heads, he met with two members of then–Vice President George H.W. Bush’s Task Force on Drugs, offering his services as an undercover informant. Lured by the promise of getting inside information on the Medellín cartel, in March 1984 the DEA listed Seal as an official informant and got his sentence reduced.

What happened next is murky. According to Robert Joura, the DEA agent working with Seal, on the next pickup either Escobar or Ochoa told Seal the cartel was moving its base from Colombia to Nicaragua and giving a cut of its profits to the Sandinistas in exchange for use of an airfield in Managua.

But given that the cartel was operating more or less with impunity everywhere else in Central America and this would only further antagonize the U.S., another theory suggests this was a scheme cooked up by Seal and Ochoa to keep Seal on the good side of the intelligence community. At any rate, Seal went to Florida to face long-delayed sentencing on his Quaalude bust, receiving 10 years reduced to six months’ probation thanks to letters of support from the CIA and DEA.

Enter Oliver North

At this point, American Made introduces the controversial figure of Lt. Col. Oliver North, Reagan’s point man on anti-Sandinista activities, who is keen to give Seal one more mission: to obtain proof the Nicaraguan government is in bed with the cartel. To this end, they modify his new former Army C-123 transport plane so that he can take photographs unobtrusively.

Seal flies to Managua and duly obtains pictures of Escobar and Sandinista soldiers taking delivery of kilos of cocaine. But in his haste to nail the commies so that Congress will fund arms shipments, North releases the pictures before the Colombians are in custody. His cover blown, Seal is of no further use to the DEA, who promptly seize his assets. Worse, he must spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for a vengeful cartel.

In real life, Seal’s cover was blown even before the photographs appeared when, thanks to NSC and CIA leaks, the Washington Times ran a front-page story on the Sandinistas’ drug trafficking on July 17, 1984. But Congress was not persuaded and passed the Boland amendment prohibiting direct military aid to the Contras.

This meant that North still needed Seal to run guns for his operation, until the pilot was busted again in December 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for smuggling marijuana. Thanks to testifying in three major drug trials over the next year that helped obtain convictions, he got off with five years’ probation along with six months at a local halfway house. Aftermath and death

As in the movie, three men shot Seal to death as he sat outside a Salvation Army in Baton Rouge in his white Cadillac. He died on Feb. 19, 1986, and three Colombian men were convicted of his murder .

After Seal’s death, a 1986–1989 Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation popularly known as the Kerry Committee report found that the State Department had made payments to known drug traffickers from funds earmarked for Contra humanitarian assistance. (Arthur L. Liman, the director’s father, was the chief counsel for the Senate investigation, which is what got the filmmaker interested in Iran–Contra in the first place .) The Reagan administration admitted that funds from cocaine smuggling had helped fund the Contras but insisted it was a rogue operation carried out without the government’s knowledge.

Even if some of the specifics vary, the film is true to two essential elements of Seal’s story. One, he made a hell of a lot of money—estimates range from $50 million (Seal himself) to $5 billion (Arkansas State Police investigators). In any case, it all seems to have disappeared. Secondly, Seal was a man caught between a rock and a hard place. As his brother Wendell said , he had become entangled in so many relationships “it was hard to tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.”

Screen Rant

American made ending explained: what happened to barry seal.

American Made dramatizes the stranger-than-fiction story of drug-smuggling pilot Barry Seal but ultimately builds up to an alarming ending.

• American Made exposes the behind-the-scenes politics of the drug trade in the 1980s, shedding light on the complex bigger picture.
• Barry Seal's death is believed to have been orchestrated by the drug cartel for revealing sensitive information to the DEA, but conspiracy theories also suggest CIA involvement.
• The ending of American Made hints at the Iran-Contra scandal, showcasing how the CIA funded right-wing militants through selling American firearms in Iran.

American Made recreates the dramatic true story of Barry Seal, a commercial pilot who smuggled pile-loads of million-dollar drugs, only to become a DEA informant and then meet an unfortunate end. Tom Cruise reunited with Edge of Tomorrow filmmaker Doug Liman to play Seal in the 2017 biopic. Earning positive reactions from critics and audiences alike, American Made had its fair share of creative liberties, but it still did a faithful job of exposing the behind-the-scenes politics of the drug trade in the 1980s. While Seal did make a fortune out of his high-profile drug operations, he was just a part of the more complex bigger picture.

The American Made ending exemplifies the socio-political realities of the era by not only delving into Seal’s untimely death but also the steps that the American government took in its aftermath. From Moby’s goosebumps-inducing “Extreme Ways” establishing a Bourne movie tradition in The Bourne Identity to John Newman’s rousing ballad “Love Me Again” closing Edge of Tomorrow , Doug Liman’s best movies end with iconic tracks. American Made is no exception as its climatic events play in the backdrop of The Heavy’s power anthem “What Makes A Good Man.” Even though the song is a 2012 release, the ending reveals some era-defining moments of the' 80s.

Why Is Barry Seal Killed?

After years of flying stealth-heavy missions for the CIA and later smuggling drugs for Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel, Barry Seal is at his wit’s end by American Made ’s third act. Following a desperate attempt to crash-land a plan to evade arrest from the DEA, Seal gives himself up to the authorities. In the tradition of classic crime movie finales like the ending of Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street , Seal willingly gives up his information and contacts to the DEA in exchange for protection. For his illicit operations, the ever-smiling aviator is still punished. Serving his sentence of 1,000 hours of community service, all seems to be fine for Seal.

This is, of course, until he gets mysteriously shot dead. The American Made ending suggests that the cartel had him murdered for revealing sensitive information to the DEA. More or less, this is the general theory that is accepted to explain Seal’s death even as conspiracy theories on the Internet suggest that his murder might have been orchestrated by the CIA itself. In fact, Seal’s widow Deborah DuBois Seal even told The Daily Mail in 2017 that the US government didn’t do much to protect her husband after he came clean as an informant. She adds that even she doesn’t know who exactly might have been behind Seal’s assassination.

Why The CIA Destroyed All Connections With Seal

Even though the CIA’s involvement in hiring Barry Seal subsequently became public knowledge, American Made suggests that the secret agency immediately destroyed all evidence connecting it with the infamous aviator after he was murdered. While there is no concrete evidence to support how the CIA hid such evidence, it is probably standard agency protocol to hide all connections after a major drug supplier like Seal died. Even before he got involved with the Cartel, the CIA’s instructions to Seal to conduct aerial surveillance over Central America were always meant to be a hushed-up affair. However, it must be noted that Monty Schafer, the CIA officer who recruited Seal, was fictional.

How The CIA Funded The Contras

While Domhnall Gleeson’s character Monty Schafer wasn’t real and was just created to represent the collective state of CIA at the time, Monty’s actions at the very end of American Made are of utmost importance in American history. Moments after Barry Seal’s death, an elated Monty is found suggesting to his seniors to fund the Nicaraguan right-wing militant group Contras through all the funds that the Agency can secure by selling American firearms in Iran. This strategy did work as a perfect way to replace the funds that were otherwise raised by Seal’s constant drug-smuggling operations. Hence, within just a matter of seconds, American Made hints at the Iran-Contra scandal.

To make the ending more realistic, the final seconds also feature actual archival footage of then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President George Bush being questioned about claims of America arming Iranian terrorists to wage war elsewhere in Latin American countries. Both leaders are shown dodging journalists’ questions even though it’s left for the viewer to deduce what actually happened. By now, it’s common knowledge that the Iran-Contra affair was an effort by the Reagan administration to oust the left-leaving government in Nicaragua at a time when the Cold War was still in effect. As for Barry Seal, he was unfortunately just a pawn who was forgotten after his death.

What Happened To Lucy Seal?

Barry Seal’s wife Lucy is played by Sarah Wright in American Made , the character being a dramatized version of Seal’s third wife Deborah DuBois Seal . The final scene of American Made features Lucy and her three children resettling in Baton Rouge where she works as a waitress. Following her husband’s death, it’s clear that she picked up a job at a fast-food restaurant to make ends meet. This is in stark contrast with the upscale life she led earlier, thanks to Seal’s million-dollar missions. But as the camera zooms in on an expensive-looking bracelet on Lucy’s wrist, the ending suggests that maybe, she hasn’t parted from all her wealth.

The real-life fate of Deborah Seal was similar as she told The Daily Mail that she and her children had to struggle financially following her husband’s death. In the same interview, she also revealed that she had actually crossed paths with Barry first when she was working as a waitress. It’s only an ill-fated irony that the American Made ending finds Deborah’s on-screen version Lucy picking up a waitressing job. It’s unclear how much Deborah Seal paid by the movie’s producers to secure the rights to her husband’s life story, but she did add that she had been living only a modest life for the past few decades.

The Real Meaning Of American Made's Ending

Some of Tom Cruise’s best movies have offered introspective critiques of the military and the government. Born on the Fourth of July , A Few Good Men and Lions for Lambs are some cases in point. One way or the other, American Made continues this tradition for Cruise, and it exposes how America’s militaristic hegemony can influence global geopolitics at a concerning level. Doug Liman doesn’t rely on any preachy discourse to criticize the corruption behind the drug trade as the ending of American Made shows, the director crafts an entertaining yet alarming attempt to satirize the inner workings of an infamous secret agency.

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Deleted Scenes

Jb goes to church, tv delivery, plane auction, barry crashes into sheriff's station, schafer in cia meeting, featurettes, american storytellers, cruise & liman: a conversation, in the wings, shooting american made, flying high, the real barry seal, theatrical trailer, rotten tomatoes® score.

American Made might push Cruise further along his evolution to more interesting, character-based roles. One doesn’t expect an immediate return to iconic roles like Vincent Lauria or T.J. Mackey, but hopefully Barry Seal is just the start.

"American Made" is southern-fried Scorsese Lite, a gumbo of decadent deviance masking over a sharp spice of potentially fatal risks.

Regardless of its exciting story and sharp ending, the film contains almost no lasting consequence and feels more like an adventure than the story of a real-world scandal, rather troublingly so.

[The movie] is phenomenal. ... This is brilliant casting ... It's Gleeson's performance as the institutional representative that sells the film's recklessly excessive 80s vibe.

There's more character work in any episode of Breaking Bad or Narcos than American Made's entire 115 minute running time but Cruise's movie does have a sense of humour about itself that makes for an amiable, if not memorable, watch.

Despite a strong Tom Cruise performance, the movie is as generic as its title.

There was a time when I looked forward to a Tom Cruise motion picture.

It just sort of putts along, rough around the edges and unjustifiably confident in itself, like a rich guy wasted on cocaine.

Worth watching to see Tom Cruise as good as he's been in years.

American Made is one of the best kinds of biopics: A tale that makes me want to explore the story further and find out more about its subject. Even if only half of this film is true to life, it's still 100% crazy.

Additional Info

• Genre : Action, Comedy
• Release Date : September 29, 2017
• Languages : English, Spanish
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : 5.1

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The Awful Accident That Happened While Filming Tom Cruise’s ‘American Made’

Death, severe injury, and charges of negligence loomed over the Hollywood star's 2017 film.

The Big Picture

• Tom Cruise's performance in American Made deserves praise, as he portrayed real-life pilot Barry Seal in a daring role.
• The tragic plane crash during the film's production resulted in two deaths and severe injuries to the surviving pilot.
• Lawsuits were filed by the families of the deceased pilots, alleging negligence on the part of the film's production and questioning safety measures.

Any movie fan not living under a rock is well aware of Tom Cruise 's affinity for aviation. Having attained a pilot's license in 1994, the 60-year-old actor has put his skills to jaw-dropping use in several films , most dangerously in the Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick . While his role as Pete Mitchell in the latter film and its predecessor remain iconic portrayals of a pilot, his performance as a flying daredevil in another film – American Made – also deserves praise.

In 2017's American Made , Tom Cruise played real-life pilot Barry Seal , a man who would turn to drug smuggling in the 1980s. Featuring many aerial sequences and high-altitude stunts, many of which were performed by the actor himself, the film's production was beset by tragedy on September 11, 2015. Carrying three pilots working on the film, Carlos Berl , Jimmy Lee Garland , and Andrew Purwin , a twin-engine Aerostar 600 crashed while en route through the Colombian Andes . The accident resulted in two deaths and severe lifelong injuries sustained by the sole survivor. But how did such an accident happen? And who would answer to the grieving loved ones filing lawsuits with charges of negligence?

American Made

The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980s in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra Affair.

Who Were Pilots Carlos Berl, Jimmy Lee Garland, & Andrew Purwin?

Having grown up among aviators in Venezuela, Carlos Berl followed in his family's footsteps and became a pilot himself. Eventually relocating to Florida and New York, he amassed a variety of licenses over the years, and in 2015, caught wind of an upcoming Tom Cruise-starring film looking for experienced pilots. Won over by the opportunity, but with a constant eye toward safety, Berl voiced concerns after learning the production wanted him to fly the Aerostar 600, an aircraft with which he had no experience and was infamous among aviators for its involvement in "more than 260 deaths in 191 accidents around the world since 1969."

A native of Georgia, Jimmy Lee Garland had also never worked on a film. But as a pilot and mechanic running his own aviation company and teaching lessons, his knowledge and experience put him on Hollywood's radar. In addition to serving as Tom Cruise's double, Garland also taught the actor how to fly a Cessna 414, noting that his student "liked to participate in the stunts" and was "a very good pilot." The month before the crash, Garland was in Colombia putting his skills to use, racking up many hours in flight and enjoying the good life in the hotels and casinos of Medellín.

Unlike Berl and Garland, however, Andrew Purwin's aviation record was not without controversy. Particularly known in the industry for performing helicopter stunts, and having worked on high-profile films like Pirates of the Caribbean , Tropic Thunder , and Transformers , he'd cultivated a reputation among colleagues as a "dangerous" and risk-taking pilot. Purwin was also well-known to the Federal Aviation Administration, though perhaps not for the most reassuring reasons. In 1996, he crashed a helicopter that resulted in the death of a business partner, and would eventually be prohibited from flying fixed-wing aircraft in certain "weather and regulatory conditions." Purwin was involved in "dozens of incidents" over the years, and according to some in Hollywood's aviation circles, was even a member of the so-called "death pool," a group composed of pilots considered likely to lose their lives in a plane crash.

What Happened on the Set of 'American Made'?

As cameras were rolling on American Made in Colombia, Berl, Garland, and Purwin were tasked with flying the twin-engine Aerostar 600 from Santa Fe de Antioquia to Medellín after a long day of filming. Embarking on what should've been a 35-mile flight lasting just 20 minutes, the trio took off around 5:30 P.M., only moments after Tom Cruise had departed the set in a helicopter. According to initial reports, the Aerostar encountered bad weather and crashed near the village of La Clarita.

Upon discovering the wreckage , local civilians found all three pilots alive, though severely injured. But after summoning help and returning to the downed plane, Carlos Berl and Andrew Purwin had perished. The lone survivor, Jimmy Lee Garland, suffered "a shattered vertebra, collapsed lung, herniated diaphragm, 10 broken teeth, broken ribs, a broken jawbone, and a cracked skull on both sides of a dislodged eye socket." Waking up in a hospital nine days after the crash, Garland would later claim to have no memory of the flight, who was flying, or how the plane went down.

What Happened After the 'American Made' Set Accident?

Many questions were being asked after the tragedy in the Colombian mountains. How could three experienced pilots, each of whom had logged hours over the dramatic terrain of South American jungles and rainforests, end up crashing on a routine flight? What kinds of safety guidelines and industry regulations did the film's production have in place to avoid such an accident? What, if any, external factors may have contributed to what happened? And perhaps the most crucial question of all, who was flying the plane? With survivor Johnny Lee Garland unable to remember anything about the flight and its demise, it appears the question of who was flying the Aerostar will never be answered.

The loved ones of Carlos Berl and Andrew Purwin filed lawsuits, each citing negligence on the part of the film production and making claims regarding shortcuts taken at the expense of overall safety. Filed a year after his death, the suit on Berl's behalf alleged that American Made 's producers, as well as his fellow co-pilots, pressured him into piloting the notorious Aerostar that he'd not been trained to fly. Filed in April 2016, the lawsuit on Purwin's behalf made similar allegations against the film's producers and flight coordinators, claiming that Berl was flying the plane and his inexperience contributed to the crash. For their part, the producers filed a countersuit against Purwin, claiming that his aviation company, Heliblack, supplied the film production with a compromised plane and that the pilot had been dishonest about his qualifications.

The True Story Behind Tom Cruise’s ‘American Made’

Regarding the events immediately preceding the flight, an anonymous source noted, "Apparently there was an argument about needing to leave immediately, even though they had some information about the weather that they should have stayed behind. I was just told there was intense pressure to get out as soon as possible." Another source, an experienced Colombian pilot, acknowledged, "I fly there regularly, and I would have stayed on the ground that day. You have to have experience to fly in Colombia. You cannot fly here like you fly in Miami, where there’s not a mountain anywhere. If you fly in South America, you have to be very trained in the conditions."

In April 2019, more than three years after the accident and a year-and-a-half after American Made hit theaters, the legal battles came to an end. According to Variety , the litigation was resolved in an undisclosed settlement between the plaintiffs and the film's producers . While it may never be known exactly why the Aerostar went down, or who was flying the plane in the first place, the tragedy behind the 2017 film shined a sobering light on the often contentious issues surrounding overall safety, the vetting of individuals, and regulatory processes as they relate to the logistics of film production.

Something Similar Happened on the 'Top Gun' Set

As tragic as it was, the accident associated with American Made wasn't the first of its kind while filming a movie starring Tom Cruise . Renowned pilot Art Scholl , 53 years old and known for his stunt work in Hollywood and air shows, was flying a Pitts Special biplane to capture footage for Top Gun in 1985. While in an inverted flat spin over the Pacific, Scholl suddenly radioed, "I've got a problem here." Moments later he crashed into the ocean, and though debris was recovered, neither the full wreckage nor Scholl's body was ever found by authorities. Much like the events leading to the deaths on American Made 's production, a level of mystery and speculation will forever shroud the accident involving Scholl , only further confirming the inherent risks and danger that come with efforts to capture thrilling aerial feats on film.

'American Made' Has Seen a Resurgence in Popularity on Streaming Service

Six years after its release, American Made has made waves on streaming platforms , particularly Netflix, in which it held a position in the service's Top 10 Movies for weeks. There is no simple explanation for why a film or TV show from yesteryear sees a resurgence among viewers, but Tom Cruise's reassertion as a cinematic force in recent years is a likely factor. Between Mission: Impossible - Fallout and the unexpectedly massive box office performance of Top Gun: Maverick , the 61-year-old superstar is enjoying a well-deserved career renaissance after a period of lukewarm reception among audiences. American Made is one of Cruise's most breezy and watchable efforts in a forty-year career, balancing its real-life narrative basis with a playful sense of humor and irreverence for its subject and lead character. And, of course, its status as a true-crime film can't hurt as it streams on a service well-known as a haven for such non-fiction fare . Even so, understanding the tragic context surrounding the film's creation remains important and sobering.

American Made is available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.

Watch on Amazon Prime

Dakota Fanning reveló cuál fue el costoso regalo que le hizo Tom Cruise cuando cumplió 11 años: “De todos modos, no lo pude usar”

La actriz, que compartió elenco con su colega en la guerra de los mundos, contó, además, que el mejor obsequio de su vida se lo dio otro actor: kurt russell.

Esta semana, las estrellas parecen haberse puesto de acuerdo para ponderar la generosidad de Tom Cruise. Este sábado se sumó a la lista Dakota Fanning, quien en una divertida entrevista recordó que su compañero de elenco en La guerra de los mundos le hizo un costoso regalo que, a pesar de sorprenderla y hacerla feliz, no pudo usar.

Durante una entrevista de Harper’s BAZAAR junto a su coprotagonista de Ripley , Andrew Scott, Fanning, de 30 años, debía contestar quién le regaló su primer teléfono celular. Antes de revelar la respuesta, Scott adivinó: “Seguro que fue algún ícono de Hollywood... ¿Tom Cruise?”, arriesgó.

Entre risas, la actriz le dijo que había acertado. “Fue para mi cumpleaños número 11. ¡Estaba tan emocionada!”, recordó. Sin embargo, más allá del costo del obsequio y del buen gesto, el regalo no le resultó muy útil. “¡Es que no tenía a nadie a quien llamar o enviar mensajes de texto en ese momento!”, reconoció. “Tenía 11 años”, explicó risueña. “Pero me encantó tenerlo. Me encantó. Me sentí genial al recibirlo”, indicó.

De todos modos, hubo revancha: “ Tom me envía un regalo de cumpleaños todos los años, y lo ha hecho desde ese cumpleaños. El más reciente lo recibí al cumplir los 30, a principio de mes. Es muy atento. Realmente, muy agradable”.

Según contó, aquel no fue el único regalo que una estrella le hizo durante su infancia. “El mejor regalo que jamás recibí me lo hizo Kurt Russell, con quien trabajé en la película En busca de un sueño . ¡Me dio un caballo!”, reveló.

Y, mientras reflexionaba sobre su trabajo con Cruise, Russell y otras celebridades importantes cuando era apenas una niña, indicó que nunca se sintió intimidada. “Cuando tenés ocho años y conocés a alguien, no pensás en lo que significa esa persona ni ninguna de esas cosas”, explicó.

También esta semana, Kirsten Dunst se refirió a un particular regalo que recibe todos los años de parte de Cruise , su compañero de elenco en Entrevista con el vampiro cuando, al igual que Dakota en La guerra de los mundos, era apenas una criatura.

A 30 años del estreno de esa película , Dunst contó que cada 24 de diciembre, además de los regalos de su familia, recibe un dulce presente de parte Cruise: una torta de coco y chocolate blanco valuada en 126 dólares que preparan en una famosa panadería de Woodland Hills, California.

La actriz agradeció formar parte del selecto grupo de celebridades amigas a las que el protagonista de Top Gun les envía ese regalo para Navidad. De ese listado, según ellos mismos contaron en algún momento, también forman parte Jon Hamm, Rosie O’Donnell y Tom Hanks.

Dunst ya había hablado sobre el tema en 2016: “Él me regala una torta cada Navidad”, explicó en The Graham Norton Show . “En mi casa la llamamos ‘La torta Cruise’. Es el mejor pastel de coco que he probado en mi vida”, exclamó.

A diferencia de otros destinatarios, la familia de Dunst recibe dos de los obsequios navideños más icónicos. “Jesse [Plemons, el marido de la actriz] también recibe uno, así que duplicamos nuestras tortas”. Plemons trabajó junto con Cruise en Barry Seal: sólo en América , de 2017.

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