Meanwhile, Fox still hadn’t given Lucas the green light. Finally, the time came when Ladd had to decide whether to shelve Lucas’s movie, or let him begin. A few weeks before the Oscars, in March, he had put Lucas’s one-paragraph synopsis in front of CEO Dennis Stanfill and the board of directors. He asked them to commit $8.5 million to a project in a despised genre, without names, without a presold book. Miraculously, the board agreed. Lucas had a go.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK went into production without a finished script. “They started shooting because Minnelli had a commitment to go to Vegas or something,” recalls Mardik Martin, whom Scorsese called in to rewrite Earl Mac Raush’s draft. Scorsese knew the script wasn’t ready. He explains, “You get a big head. You think, ‘Oh, I don’t have to make up a script, I can work it out on the soundstage when I’m there.’ Sure. A lot of guys work that way. Evidently, I couldn’t.” Adds Sandy Weintraub, “After Mean Streets, the critics called Marty ‘The King of Improv.’ And he decided that he was ‘The King of Improv.’ So on Alice, he was just gonna have everybody improv up a storm. That continued through Taxi and obviously the result you see is New York, New York, where it got out of control.” Continues Martin, “It was a nightmare. I was writing up till the final frame. You don’t make movies like that.”
Scorsese says he used coke as a creative tool: “I didn’t know how to get to these feelings. I kept pushing and shoving and twisting and turning myself in different ways, and I started taking drugs to explore, and got sidetracked a lot of the time. We put ourselves through a lot of pain.” One day, he kept over 150 fully costumed extras waiting while he talked to his shrink from his trailer. He was sick a lot, and late to the set. Says Martin, “I blame all that on coke.”
The movie was intensely personal, for both Scorsese and De Niro. Consciously or unconsciously, De Niro’s jazz musician (Jimmy Doyle)—the artist as a young man—was very much Scorsese at that time, torn between the claims of his family and his art, intoxicated with his own talent, and honeycombed by self-hatred. Doyle rejects his baby just like Scorsese rejected his. The Minnelli character is a version of Julia Cameron, Sandy Weintraub, and other women Scorsese knew. Scorsese called it a $10 million “home movie.” Cameron continued to irritate Marty’s friends. Says Martin, “She conned her way into doing a lot of rewriting, then told everyone she wrote New York, New York, which is total bullshit. She was a really bad drunk, a Jekyll and Hyde. I had a brand-new, beautiful Cadillac Seville, and I used to pick her up when she was drunk, and take her home. She threw up in my car twice. Marty said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”
Cameron was pregnant, but Scorsese, mimicking the De Niro character, was carrying on an open affair with Minnelli, who was married to Jack Haley, Jr., (whose father played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz), and herself having a liaison with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Running into her with Haley on the street one day, Marty is supposed to have berated her about Baryshnikov. “How could you!” he shouted, while Haley looked on. On another occasion, according to Andy Warhol’s Diary, Minnelli appeared on Halston’s doorstep pleading, “Give me every drug you’ve got,” while Marty, ever dapper in his white suit, but shaking badly—apparently from the coke he’d taken—waited in the shadows. Halston gave her four ’ludes, a Valium, a vial of coke, and four joints. The couple went off into the night.
In the middle of the pregnancy, Marty realized it wasn’t going to work out between him and Cameron, and when the baby was born, a girl named Domenica, he left her. Fueled by an I-am-a-genius ego and surrounded now by an adoring circle of friends, with New York, New York shaping up as an unprecedented triumph, Scorsese had begun to change. Says Chris Mankiewicz, who had been in Europe and hadn’t seen Marty since he had known him in New York in the ’60s, “By the time I came back, I was surprised to see how much more—I won’t say arrogant, but self-assured and bordering on arrogance—he had become. He was already a superstar director, and it was clear that he didn’t tolerate [criticism].” Adds Huyck, “De Palma, who I always thought of as Marty’s best friend, thought that Marty was so egocentric that he just became very difficult to relate to. [At one point, Brian] hadn’t seen him in years, and there was no interest in anything that Brian had gone through. It was all what Marty was doing. I never liked him personally, but compared to everybody else, I always felt that Marty was the artist.”
WHILE LUCAS WAS FINISHING the last draft of the Star Wars script, post-production whiz Jim Nelson was putting together Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) from scratch in an old warehouse on Valjean in Van Nuys, next to the airport. “There was no ILM,” recalls Nelson. “There were four walls, no rooms, even. We had to build rooms, buy equipment, make equipment, because the equipment that made that film didn’t exist.” Nelson hired John Dykstra, the special photographic effects supervisor who had worked for Doug Trumbull on 2001. Dykstra’s breakthrough was to create a computer-controlled camera that moved around the models in a pattern that could be replicated again and again, so that shots could be built up out of layers.
Lucas was afraid from the start that ILM would be a sinkhole of money, and relations between him and the effects wizards he had hired were tense. “Having been a clever filmmaker who did things on his own, George’s idea was that ILM was going to be this little squad of techies,” says Robbins. “They’d figure out how to make these shots in a garage for $1.98. I remember Dykstra saying, ‘If it were up to George, we would have hung a black backing, and put the ships on broomsticks and waved them around. Like twelve-year-olds.’ I think George actually did propose that. Dykstra, of course, knew they were going to have to hire a lot of people and buy a lot of equipment. George, who was very much his father’s son in terms of business, felt he was being ripped off, that all the expenses and technical mumbojumbo were about creating an empire for John Dykstra, founding John Dykstra, Inc.”
On several occasions the two men engaged in shouting matches. Says Marcia, “ILM was a mess. They spent a million dollars, and the fx shots they’d been able to composite were just completely unacceptable, like cardboard cutouts, the matte lines were showing.” Remembers Nelson, “We were under a great deal of pressure, we had nothing to show anybody, and we kept spending all this money. We didn’t have a shot for over a year.” Three million dollars of Lucas’s budget had been earmarked for ILM. By the end of the first year, they had spent $4 or $5 million, with few results. Lucas came down from the Bay Area once a week, on Tuesdays, expressed his disappointment, and went home. Continues Nelson, “I always had to be the bearer of bad news, which he never wanted to hear. You couldn’t argue with him, he didn’t want to hear no, he didn’t want to hear, ‘You’re wrong, George.’”
That same fall of 1975, while Marcia was still editing Taxi Driver, Lucas went down to L.A. to begin casting. She was nervous. “I knew he was going to be looking at the most beautiful eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls in Hollywood for Princess Leia, and I felt insecure.” She said, “George, are you going to be a good boy when you’re there?” He and Marcia had promised to tell each other if either one strayed, hoping that that unpleasant duty would deter them. “My first vow when I came to a film studio was never to date an actress,” said Lucas. “You’re just a funny kid, and someone like a Playmate of the Month is coming after you—life is just too short for that.”
Despite the fact that Star Wars was about as far as you can get from a realistic drama, Lucas, like his peers, did not want to cast stars, despite Fox’s pressure to do so. De Palma was casting Carrie at the same time, and also looking for new faces of similar ages, so the directors held readings for the two films together, working out of the Goldwyn Studios, seeing thirty to forty actors a day in a cattle call. De Palma was relaxed and garrulous. Lucas sat at his side in silence, obviously uncomfortable. George would make the opening speech, and Brian would make the closing speech. If the actor was somebody they were not interested in, Brian would start the closing speech before George had finished the opening speech.
Fred Roos, w
ho was advising Lucas on casting, persuaded Lucas to use Carrie Fisher instead of Amy Irving or Jodie Foster. Harrison Ford was cast as Han Solo, Mark Hamill as Luke. Lucas wanted young and callow, that is, Hamill and Fisher, as opposed to, say, Ford as Luke and Raquel Welch, or a Playboy bunny type to play the princess. He said, “You can make this picture for teenagers, late teenagers, early twenties, or you play it for kids, and that’s what we’re going for, eight- and nine-year-olds. This is a Disney movie.” During production, he bound Fisher’s breasts with gaffer’s tape. “No breasts bouncing in space, there’s no jiggling in the Empire,” she observed, wryly.
De Palma ended up using Irving in Carrie. With her emerald eyes and high cheekbones, Irving made a striking impression. She was smart and ambitious, and had a crush on De Palma, who did not reciprocate. Instead he introduced her to Spielberg. Steven was still very awkward with women. Says Gottlieb, “By the time he was thirty-five, he was where normally a twenty-five-year-old would be, sexually.” He felt he was-unattractive to women, and the only way he could attract them was through power, which made him uncomfortable. Occasionally, when he would go to Show West, the annual exhibitors confab, they would fix him up with a model.
Marginally more hip than he had been, with his Prince Valiant haircut, aviator glasses, brown suede jacket, and Levi’s, Spielberg had become quite the catch. Steven, Irving, and De Palma went to Nick’s Fish Place on Sunset. “They hit it off right away,” says De Palma. The daughter of actress Priscilla Pointer and actor-director Jules Irving, one of the founders of Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, she was considerably more worldly than Spielberg, whose horizons were limited to film, movie music, TV, and video games, which were just beginning to catch on. Irving took her career extremely seriously. She was humorless and driven. A few years later, De Palma cast her in the lead of The Fury, a Stephen King rip-off about a girl with telekinetic powers. Several members of the cast, including John Cassavetes, thought the picture was garbage, and made fun of Irving for treating it like Shakespeare, like it was a big career move. She worked on her character with a great earnestness. “You’d think she was playing Joan of Arc,” Cassavetes joked to another actor.
Steven, who up to this point had not had a real relationship, fell hard. She was often cruel to him in public; he took what she dished out. His friends needled him for being “pussy-whipped,” and few of them either liked or trusted her. Says producer Rob Cohen, “She was a lynx-eyed beauty, but I found her cold, and I didn’t feel like they were a good match. He was so sweet in many ways, and such a gentle person, and she just had that air of actor’s ruthlessness about her, like she was gonna get to be a star no matter what it took. Their relationship was very volatile.” Like Brooke Hayward on Easy Rider, and Marcia Lucas on Star Wars, she derided Spielberg’s pictures, saying, “I know he’s an incredible moviemaker, but the kind of films he makes aren’t necessarily the kind I want to be in,” and complained that “our social life was going out to dinner with studio heads.”
STAR WARS went into production at Elstree Studios outside London on March 25, 1976. Lucas chose to shoot in London to get away from the studio and to save money, but right away he ran into trouble. His relationship with the cast and crew was prickly, to say the least. He was a proud man who would not beg for what he wanted. “George does not ask people more than once,” says Howard Kazanjian, who was producer of More American Graffiti. “If you say no to him, you don’t get asked a second time.” George never said thank you, and the people who worked for him thought he was cold and remote. Most of the time he had no contact with them at all, didn’t know who they were. Recalls Huyck, “When George and Gary Kurtz, who was also not Mr. Warmth, got to England, they offended the English crew because they just don’t know how to deal with people.” Lucas, looking back on the production later, observed, “I realized why directors are such horrible people, because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice, to be delicate. I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people.”
Once again, George was not terribly helpful to the actors. The dialogue was awful. As Harrison Ford famously told him, “George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” Lucas’s kit bag of moves contained only two instructions: “O.K., same thing, only better”; “Faster, more intense.”
Huyck and Katz visited their friend on the set in London. Recalls Katz, “George would sit on the edge of his bed every morning—he had these terrible foot infections. We would sit with him; we didn’t think he would even make it to the set. We walked him around, tried to convince him not to kill himself. He was so disappointed he couldn’t get anything he wanted, the crew was making fun of him. The cameraman was surly, would say, ‘Bring the dawg in, put light on the dawg,’ talking about Chewbacca. George kept saying, ‘I just can’t take this,’ and we kept saying, ‘Come on, George, you can do it, you can get up, you can get to the set.’ He was really in a very fragile state. The final insult was the English crew voted the last day of the movie whether they were going to do overtime. They voted no. He hasn’t directed since.”
The problems that afflicted the script wouldn’t go away. When Luke, Han, and Princess Leia were trapped on the Deathstar, George complained, “I got fifty storm troopers shooting at three people from ten feet away, and nobody ever gets hurt. Who’s gonna believe this?”
Spielberg offered to shoot second unit on Star Wars, figure out a way for the storm troopers to die in a spume of green vapor. “George wouldn’t let me,” he remembers. “He was always more competitive with me than I was with him. He kept saying, ‘I’m sure Star Wars is going to beat Jaws at some point, or if not Star Wars, something else.’ I was admiring and jealous of his style, his proximity to audiences. But he did not want my fingerprints anywhere around Star Wars.” Spielberg put down Lucas because Lucas never moved his camera, just plunked it down on sticks and shot what happened in front of it.
When he returned from London, Lucas was about as depressed, upset, and bitter as his friends had ever seen him. He called it a $10 million trailer, kept saying, “I only got 30 percent, 30 percent.” Initially, the plan was that Marcia would not edit Star Wars; she would take some time off, get pregnant. But she never did get pregnant, and George, unhappy with his English editor, who was cutting to create a campy effect, asked Marcia to take over. She was working on the climactic battle scenes at the end, when Scorsese called, shortly after Christmas 1976. His editor on New York, New York had died. “I’m fucked,” he said. “I really need you. Could you come down to L.A. and help me out?” Says Paul Hirsch, who was cutting Star Wars with her, “Marcia respected Marty above all other directors, and didn’t believe in Star Wars terribly much. It was not her thing.” So she went. “She abandoned George to work on this serious, artistic film,” says Katz. “For George, the whole thing was that Marcia was going off to this den of iniquity,” adds Huyck. “Marty was wild and he took a lot of drugs and he stayed up late at night, had lots of girlfriends. George was a family homebody. He couldn’t believe the stories that Marcia told him. George would fume because Marcia was running with these people. She loved being with Marty.”
One day, Lucas stopped by Scorsese’s editing room. In a rerun of the dispute over the ending of Alice, he told Marty that he could gross an additional $10 million if De Niro and Minnelli walked off into the sunset a happy couple instead of going their separate ways. “When I heard him say that, I knew I was doomed, that I would not make it in this business, that I cannot make entertainment pictures, I cannot be a director of Hollywood films,” recalls Scorsese. “’Cause I knew I wasn’t going to do it. I knew that what the two characters had gone through in that film, I had gone through in my own life, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to face myself or them if Bob and Liza were to go off together.”
TO HIS CREDIT, Spielberg resisted studio pressure to do a sequel to Jaws. Sequels were considered dećlassé, and for all his commercial inclinations, he was too much a child o
f the ’70s to sully his hands with an exclusively pecuniary enterprise. Of course, Universal went ahead without him, and Jaws 2 became the first example—quickly followed by the Rockys—of a practice that would fly in the face of all that the New Hollywood stood for.
Close Encounters began principal photography in May 1976, about a month after Lucas started Star Wars. Spielberg was nervous. “I didn’t think it was going to do well,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if I was the only person interested in UFOs. I didn’t know if anyone in America could identify with a man who gives up his entire family, including his children, perhaps never to return.” He had managed to land François Truffaut for the role of the scientist. Truffaut liked Spielberg, but condescended to him; he couldn’t resist pointing out that Steven’s favorite French directors were Claude Lelouch, best known for smarmy romances, and Robert Enrico, who made a couple of commercial pictures with Lino Ventura. He was also amused by the idea that Spielberg had seen Philippe de Broca’s That Man from Rio nine times. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “I knew that what he was after was a grand cartoon strip and that I could put back in my suitcase the book by Stanislavsky that I had bought for the occasion.” Once, during production, when Steven was arguing with Vilmos Zsigmond, the DP is reputed to have said, pointing to Truffaut, “Why don’t you turn the film over to a real director!”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 49