An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) on Netflix
Zack Mayo joins the Navy to become a jet pilot and enters a thirteen-week officer candidate course, where drill instructor Emil Foley trains the recruits. He begins seeing Paula Pokrifki.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Zack Mayo grew up with little parental guidance after his mother's suicide, passed into the care of his father Byron, a Navy petty officer stationed in the Philippines. He enlists because he wants to fly jets, and reports for thirteen weeks of officer candidate training near Port Townsend, Washington, where Marine Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley is the class's drill instructor. Recruits are warned about local girls known as Puget Sound Debs, and Zack intends to bend the rules. He starts a relationship with Paula Pokrifki, a factory worker, while fellow candidate Sid Worley dates Lynette Pomeroy.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- R. Lee Ermey, a real United States Marine Corps drill instructor, was considered for Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley, but Taylor Hackford cast Louis Gossett Jr. and had Ermey coach him; the "steers and queers" line came out of that, and Ermey reused it in Full Metal Jacket in 1987.
SPOILER
Richard Gere balked at the ending, in which Zack carries Paula off the factory floor, thinking it too sentimental, and Taylor Hackford agreed with him until the extras playing the workers began to cheer and cry during a rehearsal.- Folk music singer John Denver was originally signed to play Zack Mayo, and the casting process then took in Jeff Bridges, Harry Hamlin, Christopher Reeve and John Travolta before Richard Gere beat all of them for the part.
- Paula was first given to Sigourney Weaver, then Anjelica Huston, then Jennifer Jason Leigh, who left to do Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Debra Winger replaced her, and Rebecca De Mornay, Meg Ryan and Geena Davis had auditioned.
- Producer Don Simpson complained that "Up Where We Belong" was no good and not a hit, and unsuccessfully demanded that it be cut from the film. It later became the number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100.
- Screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart drew on his own time as a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate, where he had enrolled meaning to become a pilot before a medical issue disqualified him, and he based Paula on a local factory worker he had a relationship with at Candidate School.
- Hackford kept Gossett Jr. in separate living quarters from the other actors during production so that Gossett could intimidate them more during his scenes as the drill instructor.
