Born on the Fourth of July (1989) on Netflix
Ron Kovic, a teenager in Massapequa, enlists in the Marines after President Kennedy's inaugural address. Paralyzed in Vietnam, he comes home in a wheelchair.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.2/10126,091 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ron Kovic grows up in Massapequa, New York, playing in the woods with his friends. On the Fourth of July, which is also his birthday, he goes to the town parade with his family and his best friend Donna. President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address turns him toward the Marine Corps, a choice his mother backs and his father resents. He dances with Donna at the prom and kisses her before he leaves for recruit training. On a second tour in South Vietnam he is gravely wounded and left paralyzed from the chest down. He spends months recovering at a veterans hospital in the Bronx, where the staff is thin and the equipment old. He wants to walk again, and takes up braces and crutches though his doctors warn him against it.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To help Tom Cruise realistically portray paralysis, director Oliver Stone proposed injecting him with a drug that would leave him temporarily paralyzed for two days; the film's insurance company vetoed the idea, fearing it could cause permanent harm.
- After reshoots wrapped in July 1989, the real Ron Kovic gave Tom Cruise his own Bronze Star Medal as a birthday present, in recognition of Cruise's commitment to playing him.
- In September 1976 Pacino's manager, producer Martin Bregman, opened negotiations for the film rights with Kovic's agent, and Bregman's company Artists Entertainment Complex acquired them for $150,000. Filming was scheduled to begin in June 1977 with Paramount Pictures acting as distributor, but the project fell apart.
- The film sparked real political controversy after Ron Kovic announced he would run for Congress against Republican Robert Dornan; Dornan publicly attacked the film's portrayal of Kovic, who dismissed the criticism as a "hatred campaign" and ultimately dropped his campaign.
- Kovic himself appears in the film as a background veteran in the opening parade scene, and activist Abbie Hoffman plays a student strike organizer; Hoffman died before the film's release and is honored with an in-memoriam credit.
- When costs escalated during production, Oliver Stone and Tom Cruise agreed to waive their salaries in exchange for a percentage of the box office gross instead, as the budget climbed to a final $17.8 million.
- In 2021, Tom Cruise returned all three of his Golden Globe awards, including his Best Actor win for this film, in protest of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's lack of diversity among its members.
