Full Throttle

Paramount Pictures has turned up the boost on its “Days of Thunder” promotional blitz by enticing several automotive and racing publications to cover the Tom Cruise race-car drama as it closes in on its June 27 opening.

The trade journal AutoWeek is on the stands with a cover story titled “Box Office Thunder” and upcoming issues of Motor Trend and Circle Track have inside pieces on the movie. More coverage is coming in automotive sections in dozens of newspapers.

Joseph Molina, the Woodland Hills-based automotive PR specialist brought in to coordinate special “Thunder” publicity, is pushing the film’s “revolutionary” racing footage and the Chevy Lumina that Cruise drives in the picture. He tells us that Paramount’s put a quartet of Lumina racers “on tour.”

The automotive articles, however, will suffer from Cruise Control.

“We heard about what a terrific driver he is--but couldn’t get any access to him,” says Auto-Week executive editor Kevin Wilson. At the studio’s request, the magazine sent written questions to Cruise, but “the answers were really soft”--and got scrapped. With a nod to “Thunder” spreads in current issues of Sports Illustrated and Life, Wilson muses, “They got lots and lots of access. If I’d known we weren’t, I might not have committed to the cover.”