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“Can you make a shoe that will climb on glass?” That question came three years ago on a phone call to an employee at Calif.-based Five Ten.
At the other end of the line was Hollywood and Tom Cruise’s “people.” They were in planning for a major stunt for the then-upcoming “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” film.
In the movie Cruise’s character climbs the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. A production coordinator at the film asked if Five Ten’s president Charles Cole could drive to the studio and look at a mockup of the building and the set.
They needed Cole to talk with Cruise about climbing and rubber. And scaling the sheer glass of the Burj Khalifa building.
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Cole met with the movie crew, and in three weeks he and the Five Ten staff designed a new rubber type. Soon Cruise and his crew were filming on sheer glass walls made to look more than 2,500 feet off the desert floor.
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