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Of all the projects in play among his new friends, Spielberg preferred Joey Walsh’s ‘Slide’. He feared being pigeonholed as an action director and would often confide that he ‘basically wanted to make romantic films’, or ‘women’s films’, or was ‘really a director of comedies’. This last perception would survive until, during the making of 1941 in 1979, he confessed, ‘Comedy is not my forte.’ More important, however, was Slide’s buddy theme. Spielberg’s fascination with the male friendship he’d never achieved in childhood and the way in which men supported one another and formed effective teams would dominate Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Always, even Schindler’s List.
He and Walsh worked on Slide throughout 1972. His method, the guided joint improvisation he’d used with Robbins and Barwood on Sugarland, was to become standard for him, the response of a natural film-maker to the hostile world of the written word. ‘I don’t know if Steven ever told me what to do – ever,’ Walsh says, ‘but when he didn’t giggle like a little boy eating a cookie, saying “This is great,” I knew something was wrong, and I always took that as a gauge and somehow I looked deeper into the scene.’ Walsh wanted to produce the film, so as to prevent studio interference. Both Spielberg and McElwaine backed him up, and MGM seemed happy with the package. Spielberg, delighted, told journalists that ‘Slide’ would be his next film.
At Universal, business was picking up. The avatar of a new attitude to features was George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which officially started production on 26 June 1972. Though he was technically working for Universal, Lucas shot most of the film well away from Hollywood, within driving distance of his Marin County home. Ned Tanen watched the daily budget, but otherwise left the thorny Lucas to himself. It was becoming clear to all the studios that these new film-makers, raised in a college environment and with little concept of normal employment practices, responded ill to being treated as employees. ‘We are the pigs,’ Lucas said of his generation of directors. ‘We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. You can put us on a leash, keep us under control. But we are the guys who dig out the gold.’ He compared a studio editor cutting his work, a practice taken for granted in Hollywood, to someone amputating his children’s fingers. Old Hollywood was astonished and offended at the comparison, but soon John Milius would be able to say, ‘Nobody in a studio challenges the final cut of a film now. I think they realise the film-makers are likely to be around a lot longer than the studio executives.’
The conflict between New and Old Hollywood came to a head for the first time when Lucas showed his final cut of American Graffiti to an audience that included Tanen and Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was seen as the godfather of New Hollywood, able to deploy the same omnipotent octopoid power as Don Vito Corleone. When Tanen closed his deal with Lucas on American Graffiti he’d imposed two conditions. One was a reduction in the budget to $600,000. The other was that Coppola must act as the project’s moral, if not financial, guarantor. Magisterially, Coppola agreed. Now, at the preview screening, he took it on himself to defend the film, and Lucas, when Tanen dared to criticise it. ‘You should be getting down on your knees and thanking George for saving your job!’ he blustered. Reaching for his chequebook, he offered to buy the film there and then from Universal. (Fortunately, Tanen didn’t call his bluff, Coppola was, as usual, broke.) ‘This film is going to be a hit!’ he shouted – which it was, grossing $112 million. Though he didn’t know it yet, Ned Tanen had already lost Lucas. Lucas had tried to interest him in a version of Flash Gordon, but been turned down. Even before American Graffiti finished shooting, Lucas smuggled a copy to Alan Ladd Jr, along with his script for another space opera. It convinced Ladd to back him in the new film, Star Wars, and so deprive Universal of $250 million.
If Old Hollywood thought it could depend on the loyalty of these newcomers, it was badly mistaken. They would be satisfied with nothing less than total independence. The Brats shared a conviction that their generation must remake Hollywood in its own image. Otherwise they risked the fate of their hero and archetypal Hollywood renegade, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane had deteriorated into a bloated has-been living off TV commercials for Nashua photocopiers and Gallo wine When Joe Dante, a Spielberg protégé, was in the early eighties asked to work on National Lampoon magazine’s projected film parody of Jaws, called Jaws 3 People 0, his suggestion that Welles take a role horrified everyone. ‘We’d have to put his name on the poster,’ said one executive, aghast. The decline and fall of Welles was a lesson to New Hollywood of the dangers of fighting the system. So palpable was the curse which seemed to follow him that even Spielberg, given the opportunity to back the last film of Welles’s life, The Cradle will Rock, would refuse to do so, despite Welles offering to cast Spielberg’s then wife, Amy Irving.
It was one thing to vow that you wouldn’t end up like Orson Welles, and quite another to see how you could win independence while continuing to live in a community where, for better or worse, art was organised on business lines. In her 1974 essay On the Future of the Movies, the New Yorker’s influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote of a ‘natural war in Hollywood between the businessmen and the artists… based on drives that may go deeper than politics and religion; on the need for status, and warring dreams’.
Studios executives in the seventies were mostly ex-lawyers or agents, more comfortable in the gloom of the boardroom and the hush of the golf course. They seldom read a book or saw any movies but the latest productions. Martin Scorsese dismissed them generically as ‘Youpeople’, while Spielberg, like many of his friends, called them ‘The Suits’.
None of the young directors had any quarrel with making money; it was the only way one measured success in a business where personal satisfaction with what appeared on the screen meant less and less. Nor were they entirely opposed to Old Hollywood, which had nurtured them and furnished the fantasies which drove them to make films. But all of them hated the compromises forced on them by the corporate caution of the agents and accountants. Spielberg lamented:
The tragedy of Hollywood today [is that] great gamblers are dead… In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeons, vaudeville, they came out of the Borscht Belt theatre, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’. They’re afraid to take the big gamble. And that’s very very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble.
By the seventies, Hollywood had largely turned its back on the old virtues, as Spielberg saw them, of showmanship and mass appeal which had drawn audiences back to the cinema every Saturday night for the latest ‘big picture’. Talky films with ageing actors had alienated teenage filmgoers, whose billions in disposable income were flowing into the pockets of record producers and clothing manufacturers.
Spielberg was one of the few newcomers to sense the path American movies must take in order to survive in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He knew instinctively that issues were Out and entertainment In. He became instrumental in transforming a cinema of stories and characters into one of sensation. Jaws would be one of the first films since Gone With the Wind to exploit a movie as a national event. ‘Up until The Godfather,’ says Julia Phillips, ‘every time you had a picture you thought was going to have reviews and audience appeal, you let it out slowly in a handful of chichi theatres in the major cities, and let it build. Then you went in ever widening waves.’ But Spielberg sensed that the twelve- to twenty-year-olds who, though they made up only 22 per cent of the population, represented 47 per cent of filmgoers, wanted the week’s hot movie now. TV promotion and TV reviewers had made the measured opinions of Time, Newsweek and even the venerable New York Times redundant. Within a decade, studio bean-counters would be able judge whether a film was a hit or flop simply by the takings of the first weekend of its release. By the time the print-media critics caught up, their judgement was irrelevant.
Spielberg also saw that overseas markets would transform the selling of cinema. Action and special effects needed no translation, so his films were perfect for foreign audiences. Long before the American economist Theodore Levitt propounded the theory of ‘globalisation’ in 1983, Spielberg was making the kind of universally appealing product which Levitt foresaw would dominate world markets in the future. Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, McDonald’s and rock stars like Madonna were sold in the same form and with the same trademark all over the world; so was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the emphatic comic-book logo of which, with its lettering of crimson and gold, would become as widely recognisable as the Coca-Cola wave. Increasingly throughout the seventies and eighties, Asia and Europe would almost equal Spielberg’s domestic audience.
At Warners, Zanuck and Brown’s five-film deal was winding down in mutual boredom. Ace Eli, from Spielberg’s story, with Cliff Robertson as the pilot, still hadn’t gone into production, and the administration was showing cold feet about most of the duo’s projects. They had accepted only one ‘youth’ package, Steelyard Blues, assembled by Michael and Julia Phillips with actor-turned-producer Tony Bill. The script was by David S. Ward, and Alan Myerson would direct Jane Fonda and the then-hot Donald Sutherland.
In midsummer, word got around of an imminent move by the partners. Lew Wasserman had decided that he wanted Universal in the feature business. Rather than promote Sheinberg or Tanen, however, he offered Zanuck and Brown a bungalow on the lot and a role as, in effect, its feature division, developing projects with studio funding, and releasing only through Universal. They leapt at the opportunity. In July they left Warners to form Zanuck/Brown Productions, and six weeks later they announced the Universal deal. In the weeks before they left and in the month immediately following, agents were asked to come in and pitch. Fields and Spielberg joined the queue.
Anxious to be seen as creative film-makers rather than loose-cannon executives, Zanuck and Brown boxed the compass with their purchases: black exploitation and horror, comedies and thrillers, prestige pictures and women’s stories. Some were trivial, but their choices showed they knew what the market wanted: not sex, but sensation and humour. Having succeeded with Patton at Fox by giving the story of an American military hero to a radical young screenwriter, Francis Coppola, they decided to have George C. Scott repeat the feat, this time playing Douglas MacArthur, and commissioned a screenplay from Barwood and Robbins. Would Spielberg be interested in directing? He said ‘Probably,’ though in truth he hated the idea of ‘two years working in ten different countries and getting dysentery in each one of them’.
He remained keener on comedy, of which Zanuck and Brown had a number of films in development. From American Graffiti’s writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, they’d bought Lucky Lady, a thirties farce about booze running. Paul Newman, another client of Freddie Fields, showed some interest in it, and in Spielberg, for First Artists, the consortium he’d just formed with Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier to take more control of their films.
Mike Medavoy, representing Michael and Julia Phillips, sold Zanuck and Brown a period script, The Sting, about a con trick perpetrated on a gangster in Depression Chicago. The brainchild of David S. Ward, it had attracted Tony Bill. Ward, however, wanted to direct it, and was leery of letting it be shown around as a script. Bill persuaded him to recount the plot into a tape recorder, and the Phillipses, impressed, financed the screenplay.
One casualty of Zanuck and Brown’s move to Universal was Ace Eli. Lacking their protection, it was botched by Fox, who decided the ending, where Robertson commits suicide, was depressing. They reshot it, and producer, director and screenwriter all removed their names: Erman became ‘Bill Sampson’, Robert Fryer ‘Boris Wilson’ and writer Claudia Salter ‘Chips Rosen’. Spielberg probably had some part in the choice of these noms du cinema, since ‘Chips Rosen’ resembles ‘Josh Rogan’, a pseudonym he assigned to Melissa Mathison when she wrote part of his Twilight Zone: The Movie episode in 1983. Spielberg himself, however, kept his screen credit for Ace Eli’s original story. Savagely reviewed in Variety, the film was dumped in sixteen cinemas, mostly in regional centres like Washington DC and Baltimore, earning a paltry $13,400 in its first week.
With no decision in sight from Newman on Lucky Lady, Zanuck and Brown put The Sugarland Express into their schedule, burying it under a black exploitation film, Willy Dynamite, Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction, a reptilian horror film called Sssssss, and The Sting.
Wasserman wasn’t fooled when Zanuck and Brown visited his home to outline their first year’s production plans.
‘We think Steve has a great future,’ Wasserman told them, ‘but I have to tell you we do not have faith in this project.’
They pressed, and the studio chief relented, though with ill grace. ‘Make the film, fellows, but you may not be playing to full theatres.’ Had Zanuck and Brown known Wasserman better, they would have realised that such predictions tended to become self-fulfilling.
Encouraged by the Phillipses, Schrader was writing Taxi Driver for Scorsese. Hoping to win over Spielberg permanently to their side, the Phillipses encouraged their conversations about a project on UFOs.
Spielberg grew up watching films about alien contact and invasion. Trying to get his vision on paper in 1970, he wrote a short story called ‘Experiences’, about UFOs over a midwestern town which are seen only by the kids parked in the local lovers’ lane. It echoed his Boy Scout troop’s experience in the Arizona desert and his own memories of the New Jersey hillside where hundreds of people watched a meteorite shower. The Phillipses could see the idea had promise, though they urged a stronger political message, suggesting that the failure to investigate might be a kind of Watergate cover-up.
Schrader, arguably the most original mind of New Hollywood, had never seen the films that influenced Spielberg. Raised by Calvinist fundamentalists, he skipped junk film entirely: his heroes were ascetics like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer. However, once Spielberg began describing the international network of UFOlogists and their struggle to convince officialdom, Schrader’s fascination with morally driven characters was engaged.
One of the leading investigators, J. Allen Hynek, had begun investigating UFOs for the US Air Force. After discounting 80 per cent of sightings, he was left with a residue of genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Inspired by Hynek, Schrader drafted a script, called variously ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Kingdom Come’, about Paul VanOwen, a sceptical federal agent converted by what Hynek called a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ – physical contact with aliens, as opposed to lights in the sky or signs of a landing. He persuades the government to fund a fifteen-year investigation of the phenomenon, only to find, in Schrader’s words, ‘that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him’.
After one Sunday at the Phillipses’, Spielberg stopped his car in the middle of the night on Mulholland Drive, the road that weaves sinuously along the ridge between Los Angeles and the Valley. Climbing out, he flopped on his back across the bonnet to gape at the night sky. Tilting his head, he saw the Valley’s net of light inverted, spread out above his head, as if the constellations had suddenly arranged themselves in orderly lines of red, green and diamond white. He was no longer looking down on a city but up at… something else: a space ship so huge that it filled the sky?
Now at least he knew what the UFO film would look like. He was less sure what it was about.
In October 1972, Goldie Hawn had signed a three-film deal with Universal. Her career, which soared after she left TV’s comedy Laugh In to win a 1969 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower, had slumped with a Warren Beatty thriller, enigmatically called $s, and the comedy Butterflies are Free. Zanuck suggested her as Lou Jean Poplin in Sugarland Express. Hawn wanted to ditch her ditzy image, and Spielberg was happy to agree. She signed in December.
Julia Phillips in her autobiography harps on Hawn’s scruffy style and dirty hair, but to Spielberg these were her charm. She became the model for the tousled, untidy women of all his films: Close Encounters’s Melinda Dillon, sleepy in T-shirt and cut-offs; tomboyish Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in two Indiana Jones films; Holly Hunter in Always; harassed mum Dee Wallace in E.T.; Laura Dern in Jurassic Park; Julia Roberts’s Tinkerbell in Hook. All fit the ‘younger sister/older brother’ model with which Spielberg characterised his romantic relationships. Mostly sexless, these women in his films live for and through their children or boyish men. Femininity is a reward conferred by their lovers, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Always and Hook, women don ‘girl clothes’ as a sign of desirability. ‘It’s not the clothes,’ sighs Holly Hunter deliriously in Always when Richard Dreyfuss presents her with a cocktail dress and high heels, ‘it’s the way you see me.’
For Spielberg, as for many directors, the erotic gratification of shooting films transcended sex. ‘When I’m making a movie I become celibate,’ he has said. ‘I get into the routine of fucking my movie.’ (He also avoided seeing other films at such times, fearful, he says, of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others.) He deprecated those film-makers preoccupied with ‘sport fucking’. ‘Location shooting is the Rites of Spring to most film crews,’ he said. ‘Holiday Inns across America are probably host to more sprung beds and screaming orgasms when a movie company comes to town than at any other time.’
Spielberg lost his virginity at seventeen in a Holiday Inn motel – ‘With a creature,’ he joked, in the wake of E.T., ‘that was anything but extraterrestrial.’ During his days at Universal, he dated regularly, encouraged by the more aggressive De Palma, who made the pick-ups and set the pace. When Spielberg finagled one of the first portable phones out of the studio, he and De Palma enjoyed calling girls from their driveways to ask for a date, then ringing the doorbell half a minute later. De Palma, an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn, both of which are recurring themes in his films, shot all their excursions on the 16mm camera he always carried. Their conquests were mostly starlets as low in the pecking order as themselves. Spielberg briefly tangled with Sarah Miles, and with striking Hispanic Victoria Principal, but neither relationship was exactly serious. Miles was no stranger to romance, and the later star of Dallas was so nakedly ambitious that she founded her own talent agency and blitzed casting directors with head shots and resumes of its favourite client: herself. Spielberg later ruefully rated her ‘a great mind trapped in a great body’.
‘Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women,’ Martin Amis observed. ‘Surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters.’ But he recoiled from relationships which might have forced him to assume responsibility for another’s emotional well-being. Actresses never posed that problem. They were too self-absorbed for more than a passing involvement. But that cut both ways. An actress offered no reassurance or consolation when Hollywood turned and savaged you. ‘You can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad,’ Spielberg told one friend revealingly.
On 14 December 1972, just a few days before Spielberg’s twenty-fifth birthday, Universal printed out the red-covered Final Screenplay of The Sugarland Express. Shooting would begin on 8 January 1973 near San Antonio. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins took sole writing credit, from Spielberg’s original story, but because of his intensive observation and discussion of the script during writing, Spielberg’s signature was on almost every scene.
Scarfing up the remains of the youth boom, Warners and United Artists had also put films into pre-production about young outlaw lovers. Badlands, directed by another newcomer, Terrence Malick, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate with a convincing line of intellectual chat, was based on the 1958 plains states murders committed by Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, while Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us retold a Bonnie and Clyde story against a rural Depression background. Though both promised to be radically different in tone to Sugarland, Universal was nervous about so much competition. Spielberg didn’t care. Scouting locations, he was already thinking about ‘Watch the Skies’, as the UFO film was now called. Visiting Texas with Mike Fenton and Shari Rhodes to cast small roles for Sugarland, he’d earmarked some isolated airfields for what he told columnist Archer Winsten would be ‘an Air Force picture shrouded in science fiction’.
During this trip, Spielberg experienced a close encounter of his own that was to have far-reaching effects on his work. He found himself in a remote, old-fashioned hotel in Jefferson, Texas, with Diane Bucker, head of the Texas Film Commission, and Elliot Schick, the film’s production manager (and later producer of The Deer Hunter). Around midnight, as he undressed, he kept glimpsing a figure from the comer of his eye, though it disappeared as he tried to focus on it. A moment later, the entire room went cold, especially around the four-poster bed. Panicked, Spielberg roused the others and, pausing only to snap some flash pictures, fled. Bucker’s new Mercedes refused to start, so a mechanic was called. Once he had it going at 1.30 a.m., they drove sixty miles to the comforting anonymity of a Holiday Inn. Spielberg disavows any belief in the supernatural, putting such phenomena down to the power of suggestion. What the incident most resembles, in his retelling, is a movie, and in particular a favourite of his, Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which he called The Haunting. True to form, Spielberg recycled the experience in Poltergeist, another demonstration that in his universe everything, even the incorporeal, aspires to the condition of film.
As shooting loomed on Sugarland, he began choosing his team. He persuaded Verna Fields to take leave from USC to edit. Carey Loftin again planned the stunts, using one of the Corvettes he and Max Balchowski rebuilt as camera cars for Bullitt. Finding a cameraman was harder. Since he’d be shooting in winter, and on the open road, often in bad light, Spielberg needed the best. ‘Visually wooed,’ he said, ‘by the thought of all those cars,’ he wanted, as on Duel, to put his audience into them, like kids on a fairground ride. To do that, a cameraman had to be intimate with Robert Gottschalk’s spherical-lens Panavision cameras which, although they had only a shallow depth of field, allowed one to shoot on a wide-angle lens without distortion. In particular, he wanted to use the Panaflex, its lightweight and noiseless version, inside the cars.
He chose Vilmos Zsigmond, whom he’d met through McElwaine and Altman. A Hungarian with a massive ego, Zsigmond had bribed his way to the West with watches in 1956, bringing with him footage of the Soviet invasion. Within a decade he’d become one of Hollywood’s best cinematographers, with a reputation, earned on films like John Boorman’s Deliverance and Altman’s chilly Western McCabe and Mrs Miller, which Spielberg admired, for shooting in bad light and worse weather.
A few weeks before he began shooting, Spielberg found himself judging a student film competition with Douglas Trumbull, largely responsible for the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Goldsmith. The young director’s name didn’t register with Goldsmith, but Spielberg was so familiar with Goldsmith’s themes for series like Thriller and The Twilight Zone, and for Planet of the Apes and Patton, that he could hum long stretches of the music. He flirted with asking him to write the score for Sugarland, but opted instead for John Williams, who, though less inventive than Goldsmith, could be relied on to turn in a score squarely in the Hollywood vernacular.
Williams’s Sugarland music would indeed be consensus composing by a master pasticheur. ‘I wanted John to do a real symphony for this film,’ says Spielberg, ‘but he said, “If you want me to do The Red Pony or Appalachian Spring, you’re going to ruin your movie. It’s a very simple story, and the music should be picking and soft, with just a few violins and a small orchestra; cradle-like.”’ He used Dutch harmonica virtuoso ‘Toots’ Thielmans to enliven fragmentary music of a folksy simplicity. Working with Goldsmith, however, became an ambition for Spielberg. ‘I heard,’ says Goldsmith, ‘that Steve and Zanuck tossed a coin to decide between me and Williams to score Jaws.’ Coincidentally, Goldsmith also did the music for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Shies, but still didn’t associate its author with his fellow panellist.
From the start, the logistics of Sugarland promised the most problems. Universal’s technical departments helped Spielberg visualise the action by building models of locations like the used-car lot so he could plan his shooting with military precision. An artist sketched every scene in storyboards which he took to Texas and taped around his motel room – ‘so I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view… I always had a visual overview in terms of day-to-day shooting.’
A hundred cars participated in the original chase. Universal’s publicity claimed the film used 250, failing to mention that this included the crew’s private cars and support vehicles. In fact only forty appeared on camera, and even that number threatened to be unwieldy. Richard Zanuck arrived on location the first day with trepidation.
I was thinking, well, let’s take it easy. Let’s get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean tricky; all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. But he had such confidence in the way he was handling it. Here he was, a young little punk kid, with a lot of seasoned crew around, a major actress on hand, and instead of starting with something easy, he picked a very complicated thing that required all sorts of intricate timing.
And it worked incredibly well – and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they’d made. He took to it like – you know, like he was born with a knowledge of cinema. And he never ceased to amaze me from that day on.
Zanuck was right about the shooting, but charitable about the performances. Then, as later, nobody got much direction from Spielberg, who simply outlined the action and let them provide the characterisation. ‘The most I ever heard him say before a take,’ recalls one actor in his later films, ‘was, “Lots of energy” – which is what directors always say when they don’t know what they want. And afterwards he said, “A nice sense of reality.”’
Paul Freeman remarks diplomatically, ‘Steven is one of those people who do their direction of actors in the casting. They trust the performer to know his or her business, and to get on with it. On Raiders, he knew Karen Allen and I were from the stage and were used to rehearsing, so he sent us off to improvise. When we came back and showed him, he said, “Fine.” All that stuff in the tent between Karen and me was made up like that.’
Casting was, and is, agony for Spielberg. He often chooses actors from tests shot on his behalf, and almost never talks to the performers until they arrive on the set. ‘Steven goes with his nose,’ says Julian Glover, the villain of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He looks for performers who physically resemble his conception of the character and who have enough experience not to need direction. Wayne Knight arrived in Hawaii to play the fat computer hacker and embryo thief Nedry in Jurassic Park without having met him.
I got out of the van, walked up to him, and said, ‘I hope I’m the guy you wanted.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you are.’… So I get in the Jeep, and Steven gets in the Jeep, and here we are, me and Steven Spielberg sitting in this Jeep. I had never had so much as a conversation with him, and it was like, ‘So how about those Mets?’ I had no idea what to say.
If Spielberg auditions someone in person, it is seldom with a scene from the film. Usually he asks for some trivial physical action. On Raiders he held casting sessions in the Lucasfilm kitchen, asking nonplussed actors to mix and bake cookies, in an attempt to throw them back on their natural reactions. Emily Richard, the hero’s mother in Empire of the Sun, was requested simply to put her hair up for a moment. ‘He actually blushed when he asked me,’ says Richard, ‘and I blushed when I did it.’
William Atherton’s physical appearance rather than his acting recommended him for Clovis in Sugarland. ‘He’s a very soft-spoken individual with wild eyes,’ Spielberg said. ‘He could be so easily misunderstood by somebody with a pair of binoculars. One look at Bill [in Looking for Mr Goodbar] and you think, “My God, he’s going to kill Diane Keaton.”’ Michael Sacks was chosen for ‘Slide’ because Spielberg wanted the cop and Clovis to look as much alike as possible. ‘It’s two men who really began in the same small town, and went in two different directions.’
Casting as he prefers, exactly to type, paid off best in his choice of John Ford veteran Ben Johnson as Chief Tanner. With an actor whose screen persona was so firmly established, direction was superfluous. As Sacks remarked admiringly, ‘he has an extraordinary quality – he can say any cliché to you and make it seem profound.’ So effective was Johnson, however, that Spielberg came to regret his subsidiary role, feeling he should have spent more time on Tanner, explaining the compassion both for his quarry and his men that leads him to chase the fugitives rather than force a shoot-out.
The Poplins’ flight, trailed by scores of police cars, was again structured like a carnival ride, with incidents of random violence – an ambush by vigilante deputies, a chance pile-up at an intersection, the ‘potty stop’ scene, with Clovis flushing a gunman hiding in a Portaloo – breaking the exhilaration of sheer movement. Film historian Diane Jacobs rightly called Spielberg and his coevals ‘excruciatingly conscious of their medium and its history’. Hollywood had nursed them through adolescence and handed them a means of expressing themselves. As a result, they revered its past to a degree that baffled the Suits. The studios’ response to the credit squeeze of the sixties had been to sell backlots for office buildings and auction off their props. In June 1982, however, Spielberg would pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet for one of the surviving ‘Rosebud’ sleds from the last scene of Citizen Kane – a sequence which inspired the last shot of Raiders, where the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.
All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard, who wrote the script for Spielberg’s version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and acted for more than a year as his informal dramaturg. ‘If one was talking about Captains Courageous, one was talking about Spencer Tracy and the movie, rather than the book.’ Julian Glover says:
It’s not that he ever said, ‘This shot is a copy of one in Stagecoach; the remake, not the original,’ or, ‘Here’s my Lawrence of Arabia shot. But you just had a sense… He asked me to do one shot [on Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade], and I said, ‘Steven, I don’t know why I’m making this move.’ And he said, ‘Well, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy…’ And I just held up my hands and said, ‘That’s fine.’ Obviously he knew exactly what he was doing.
Kevork Malikyan, who played Kazim in The Last Crusade, had a similar experience. Spielberg spent hours staging his death. He was to collapse into Alison Doody’s arms and slide down her body. After grabbing him, she pulls her hands back to find them covered in blood. The shot refused to gel, and Spielberg dropped it, never mentioning he’d been trying to recreate the death of a disguised Daniel Gelin in the arms of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s remake of The Man who Knew too Much.
One can multiply such stories by the dozen. TV exposed the Brats to more movies than most Hollywood professionals saw in a lifetime. They wore their knowledge self-consciously, even arrogantly, and while Spielberg didn’t carry it to the extremes of Schrader or De Palma, he prepared his first cinema feature with a sense that he was not so much creating something new as building on what had gone before. ‘Once,’ recalls John Milius, ‘Steve and I were talking about how easily we could recreate the atmosphere of a Ford or Hitchcock film. He said, “But how is it we’re able to do that?” and I said, “Simple. We stole it.”’
Older heads despaired of the Brats’ fascination with movie lore. The newcomers, too young to have worked on the films they admired, saw old films not, as their makers did, in terms of personal experience, but as collections of themes, catchphrases, stylistic tricks. Recycling a gibe of Oscar Wilde, British critic Philip French accused them of knowing ‘the credits of everything but the value of nothing’. John Gregory Dunne agreed.
It always struck me that of all the people who were at the Phillipses that summer, there were very few who actually work… the social and cultural mines. [They were] basically gadgeteers. More interested in things… People graduate from Michigan State or wherever, take their book bags, come here to film school, and have no other basis in life except the movies they’ve seen. That’s why they’re making movies about Superman and poltergeists, and about psychic phenomena… Their problem is that they have never done anything.
‘You get the feeling,’ wrote Pauline Kael in an influential review that did much to put Spielberg on the map, ‘that the director grew up with TV and wheels (My Mother the Car?), and that he has a new temperament. Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he doesn’t really care if the movie has nothing else in it.’
The model for The Sugarland Express was, inevitably, another movie. In 1951, Austrian-born Billy Wilder paid an acid tribute to the affection of his adoptive country for bread and circuses with Ace in the Hole. A reporter named Chuck Tatum, played by Kirk Douglas at his most misanthropic, happens on the story of a lifetime, a man trapped in a mine under a New Mexico mountain. Rescuers expect to dig him out in a day or two, but Tatum, spinning out the story, persuades them to sink a shaft from the top. A ghoulish carnival gathers around the stricken man, with the reporter as its arrogant ringmaster. Tatum becomes famous, but the man dies.
To nobody’s surprise, least of all Wilder’s, Ace in the Hole flopped. ‘Americans expected a cocktail,’ he said, unperturbed, ‘and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.’ But Spielberg never concealed its affinities with The Sugarland Express: ‘I loved the Ace in the Hole similarity. I liked the idea of people rallying behind a media event, not knowing who the characters are or what they’re about, but just supporting them because they are on an errand of mercy to get their baby back – and that sparks a good deal of good old American sentimentality.’ It was a theme he would return to in 1941: the power of the media to convince people of almost anything, and the readiness of those people not only to believe what they hear but to act on it, often catastrophically. Sight and Sound saw the connection between Wilder and the anarchic hymns to road violence to which The Sugarland Express superficially belonged by summing it up as ‘Ace in the Hole meets Vanishing Point’. Few people grasped that Spielberg, as he been on the side of the truck rather than the car in Duel, wasn’t deploring mob rule in Sugarland Express but relishing it.
Once he started shooting, Spielberg had his hands full controlling his first major feature crew, and in particular Zsigmond, who had ambitions to direct and wasn’t backward in suggesting how he would have planned a scene. These problems were exacerbated when Spielberg insisted on operating the camera himself for many sequences. Lighting cameramen traditionally work with an operator who runs the camera while they concentrate on placing lights and mapping out movements. Spielberg, however, still had the amateur’s love of shooting, and would continue to handle the camera on many scenes throughout his career, to the irritation of directors of photography.
‘Vilmos is a very interesting man,’ Spielberg said diplomatically, ‘And when you employ his great camera eye, you also get gratis his thoughts. He would offer ideas beyond the definition of the American cinematographer.’ Arguments were common, but Spielberg won most of them. ‘When a cameraman [has] free rein,’ he said, ‘he becomes the director and the director becomes the apprentice.’ And he felt he’d gone through his apprenticeship at Universal already. However it was Zsigmond who persuaded him that the camera, rather than occupying the position of a detached directorial Eye of God, should always represent the point of view of a character. Thereafter, Spielberg’s films became more concerned with people and a little less like cartoons.
‘Several crew members said they’d never been on a happier location,’ Goldie Hawn remarked. ‘Four of them ended up marrying local girls from San Antonio, which was our base of operations. One was a waitress, another took reservations at the Holiday Inn. Hollywood meets Texas. It was a happy company.’ Spielberg was unaffected, even amused by the nocturnal sighs and moans, which, characteristically, he noted in relation to a movie. ‘Walking along the hall at one in the morning at those Holiday Inns sometimes sounds like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmospheres from 2001.’ Sex helped alleviate the tensions of working in a district fed up with film units. Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Getaway in the area, and his piratical crew had looted CB radios from their hired police cars. As a result, Zanuck/Brown had to buy twenty-five junked black-and-whites at auction. After the shoot, Spielberg bought the Poplins’ car, with dozens of bullet holes still visible where the special effects technicians had drilled them, and drove it for years.
In February, he had cause to be glad he turned down White Lightning. Scandal erupted on location for Reynolds’s The Man who Loved Cat Dancing, shooting in Gila Bend, Arizona, with his one-time playmate Sarah Miles. Miles’s ‘personal assistant’ David Whiting was found dead after a Quaalude overdose, and evidence at the inquest suggested he and Reynolds had been sharing Miles’s bed. In different circumstances, it might have been Spielberg, not Vanishing Point’s Richard Sarafian, who had to handle this production and public-relations nightmare.
In May 1973, just as shooting on Sugarland ended, literary agent Roberta Pryor delivered to Zanuck in the California office and to Brown in New York typescripts of a new novel by an unknown writer. Both men read it overnight. Richer producers, once they got around to looking at it, were ready to buy the book, but by then Zanuck and Brown, often telephoning from public phones and restaurants to disguise their interest in the property, had snatched Peter Benchley’s Jaws for $175,000, with a further $75,000 for writing the first-draft screenplay, plus 10 per cent of net profits.
A few days later, Spielberg spotted the manuscript on Zanuck’s desk and took it home for the weekend. After reading until late, he tried to sleep, but woke from disturbed dreams. At 3 a.m. he picked up the book again, gripped by the story of a monster ravaging an East Coast resort until killed by a coalition of the local police chief, an Ivy League scientist and an old shark-hunter.
By Sunday night, he knew he had to film Jaws. All his life he’d feared the sea and its creatures. When he bought a house at Malibu in the eighties, he had nightmares of the waves undermining the foundations, and dreamed of piling up sandbags to protect it. He felt personally attacked by the shark, and wanted to strike back. This was reflex thinking, punch/counterpunch, the sort that video games sharpened. On Monday he walked into Zanuck and Brown’s office and said, ‘Let me direct this film.’
‘We’ve got a director,’ Brown told him.
He was Dick Richards, a competent technician but, more importantly, a client of Mike Medavoy, who also represented Benchley and had attached Richards to the project at its inception.
‘Well, if anything falls out,’ Spielberg told Brown, ‘I love this project.’
He didn’t have long to wait. Two days later, Zanuck and Brown lunched with Richards, Benchley and Medavoy. To Benchley’s mounting irritation, Richards kept referring to ‘the whale’. Finally Benchley blew his top; nobody who was unable to tell a shark from a whale was going to film his book. Richards said he’d rather make Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely anyway, and the fragile coalition collapsed.
Four days after Spielberg expressed interest, Zanuck and Brown offered him the film – and found, to their dismay, that he’d changed his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ he told Zanuck. ‘After all, it’s only a shark story.’ Wouldn’t it be perceived as another Duel: Everyman v. The Beast? At other times he compared it to just an inflated episode of Sea Hunt, the popular 1950s TV scuba series with Lloyd Bridges.
He was also finding the UFO project ‘Watch the Skies’ both more interesting and more challenging.
When pressed, Spielberg always professed scepticism about UFOs. He never mentioned his teenage UFO feature Firelight, nor the phenomenon seen by other members of his Scout troop in the Arizona desert. Later he would claim to have been converted by the US government’s objections to him making ‘Watch the Skies’. ‘I really found my faith,’ he said, ‘when I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.’
What he really believed is unimportant. Not for the first time, he was adopting the beliefs of his audience, sensing what polls later made clear: that many Americans, without having particularly strong convictions, felt there ‘might be something to’ flying saucers. For a consensus film-maker, that was enough. Five years before John Naisbitt’s Megatrends became the fashionable read, Spielberg and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as ‘Watch the Skies’ was renamed, exemplified its propositions: that the best way to beguile America’s slow-reacting public is not to be original but to spot a trend and exploit it; that such trends seldom emerge in Washington or New York but are more apparent in a few heartland states, and in California; and that Americans had lost interest in travelling to outer space. What they now wanted was for outer space to come to them.
It was for the ability to chart the Zeitgeist, to articulate the mood of the crowd before they knew it themselves, and then to exploit it, that Spielberg most admired Orson Welles, whose radio version of War of the Worlds in 1938 convinced thousands that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles, he said, ‘was not so much writing a radio program about Martians invading New Jersey as about America’s fear of invasion from Europe. War was just a few months away, but Welles’s invasion was not the Stuka, it was the Martian; it preyed on the vulnerability of the time.’ Spielberg, both in this film and in Jaws, would do the same For the record he repudiated Welles’s broadcast, but later he bought the original script for the programme and displayed it under glass at his home.
In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters, VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’
But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.
‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’
‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’
Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’
After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.
Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws. He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel?
‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie.’
Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws. There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’
Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.
Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.
Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.
The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent. Almost in passing, the trade papers of 21 June 1973 announced that Jaws had a director.
Spielberg was unaware that he had enlisted for the duration. The bane of Zanuck and Brown’s days at Fox had been Darryl Zanuck’s veto, exercised in its most extreme form when he fired them. Going into business on their own, they had agreed privately never to reverse a firm decision. As Bob Woodward put it, ‘Loyalty was their vice.’ They even refused to give interviews separately. If one spoke to the press, the other was always present, even if only on a telephone line. Like an old married couple, they often finished one another’s sentences.
Meanwhile, the board of an ailing Columbia, Hollywood’s most underfunded and troubled studio, had installed, at the urging of the town’s most reclusive and Machiavellian power broker, Ray Stark, a new president, David Begelman. The ex-agent, one of Hollywood’s great gamblers, took over in the summer of 1973. Within three years, he would have turned Columbia’s loss into a huge profit. Begelman’s first act was to sign a number of old friends and clients to lucrative production deals. Michael and Julia Phillips were given a contract for two pictures, both written by Schrader. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ‘Watch the Skies’. With Jaws still lacking a script, Spielberg signed that deal too.
All summer, editing on Sugarland had continued. Satisfied with finishing only five days over its fifty-five-day schedule and near enough to the $2.5 million budget, Spielberg initially spoke warmly of the film. ‘I guess if I had Sugarland to do over again, I wouldn’t change anything,’ he said at the time. But within a few years he all but disowned it as mechanistic and heartless, unconcerned with its characters.
Universal had promised that, if he had a release print before 10 September, the film could open on the November Thanksgiving weekend. Spielberg delivered, but from the moment the studio viewed the rough cut, they decided they had a loser. Richard Zanuck drove down to Palm Springs and showed it to his parents. Darryl didn’t think much of it either. Nor did Goldie Hawn, who found it ‘too serious, too unrelenting and too uptight’.
It contrasted starkly with their period comedy thriller The Sting, which had worked out far better than Zanuck and Brown had dared hope. After ousting scriptwriter David Ward as director, they replaced him with the bankable George Roy Hill, who had a deal at Universal but also, more important, inspired confidence in Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who starred as the two swindlers of gang boss Robert Shaw. Hill realised the film brilliantly. With its Depression setting, lovingly recreated on the Universal backlot, its ragtime score skimmed from Scott Joplin and the inspired joint performance of Redford and Newman, it exuded the heady perfume of a hit.
Rather than damage The Sting’s Christmas release, Zanuck persuaded Spielberg to withhold Sugarland Express until the following April. As their Universal deal guaranteed control of advertising, he argued that this would give them time for some intelligent promotion. Spielberg reluctantly agreed.
‘Our early ads were our own,’ said Zanuck. ‘Spielberg himself shot one of them.’ They featured the image of a road leading to an empty horizon which he would use again for Close Encounters. In the middle distance was a police car. In the foreground, scattered over the centre line, were broken glass, handcuffs, a policeman’s Stetson, a handgun, a rifle and a teddy bear. The advertising copy was ambivalent: ‘It’s Not Every Day You Take a Ride Like This!’
These ads barely survived the press and trade screenings in the first weeks of March. ‘Our campaigns didn’t work,’ Zanuck admitted. ‘We learned that any ad with a gun is anathema to the East Side public on Third Avenue in New York City. On Broadway, however, show lots of guns. We learned a great deal.’
Zanuck and Brown took Sugarland, and Spielberg, to Cannes. Benchley was also in Europe to promote his novel, so the four men met in a cabana at the Hôtel Cap d’Antibes to chew over Benchley’s screenplay, which Spielberg was due to start shooting almost immediately. After Benchley left, the film-makers gloomily contemplated the chasm between their perception of Jaws
