John Horton, Hero of the Original Top Gun

He got the Navy to fly jets . . .

Watching the red, white, and blue aerobatics over the Cannes Film Festival last week would have delighted John Horton. In 1984, John visioned something that no one else truly saw: Top Gun had the potential to become a massive recruiting tool for the Navy.

Easy-going, charming, never without his suit and tie, John, the liaison between Hollywood and the Pentagon, worked quietly behind the scenes. If you needed an F-14 Tomcat, or a submarine to hunt for Red October, John was your go-to man.

In 1982, while we were making Officer and a Gentleman, John Horton tried to get Navy support for the production, but Navy officers disliked the portrayal of the swearing- drill instructor so much, there was not even a table to sit down to talk. And Paramount was as stubborn as the headstrong cadets it featured in three back-to-back boys-to-men theatrical releases of the 80s– Lords of Discipline (from the Pat Conroy novel), An Officer and A Gentleman written by Douglas Day Stewart (The Boy in the Plastic Bubble), and Top Gun (based on a California Magazine article on flight school).

“What do you do with the aggression?” mythologist Joseph Campbell passionately asked, “When war is in the rear view mirror and modern boys are still raging from a genome that…