Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  Set in the fictional town of Freeport, Arizona, Firelight focuses on scientist Tony Karcher (Robert Robyn) and his wife, Debbie (Beth Weber), whose marital problems threaten to disrupt Tony’s career, and the obsessed UFO expert Howard Richards (Lucky Lohr), whose quest to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life has won only grudging support from his skeptical patrons in the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the abductees are a dog named Buster, a squad of National Guardsmen, and a small girl named Lisa (played by Nancy Spielberg), whose disappearance causes her mother (Carolyn Owen) to die from a heart attack. Lisa’s abduction by an overpowering red light descending in her backyard is strikingly similar to the scene Spielberg calls his “master image,” the abduction of little Barry Guiler by the unseen UFO—also represented by a flaming red light—in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Various locations around Phoenix were used for Firelight, including the desert around Camelback Mountain, Sky Harbor Airport, the Baptist Hospital, the National Guard Armory, the Middleton Institute of Electronics, Dick Hoffman’s radio shack and orange grove, and the home of cast and crew members Beth and Jean Weber. But much of the “American Artist Productions” film was shot in and around the Spielberg house, with the family carport used as a studio for both interior and “exterior” shots. Steve and Arnold gave the shoestring production the illusion of a Hollywood spectacle with ingeniously designed visual effects. These included various optical tricks to conjure up supernatural firelights and the filming of some elaborate miniatures, including a map of the area with flashing lights to show where the firelights were attacking, an Arizona town under glass, and a papier-mâché mountain for a stop-motion sequence of firelight disintegrating National Guardsmen, tanks, and jeeps.

  Much of the summer shooting took place at night, because of the heat. After school resumed, Steve had to film mostly on weekends, working around school and work schedules and Arcadia High’s staging of See How They Run and I Remember Mama. Postproduction, including postsynchronization of dialogue and recording of a musical score, continued until the March 1964 premiere. “I used the high school band to score [the] movie,” Spielberg recalled. “I played clarinet and wrote a score on my clarinet and then had my mother (who played piano) transpose it to her key. We made sheet music, the band recorded it, and I had my first original soundtrack.”

  “It was a huge undertaking,” marvels Rick Cook, who now writes science-fiction novels. “He wrote a professional-looking script, he had to be the production manager, he had to scare up props, he had to convince actors to be in it—although that wasn’t too hard—he had to juggle everything. He was the damnedest promoter. He knew how to get things out of people, and he did it without being pushy or obnoxious. He was not a braggart, he was not one who would talk about what he was going to do. He just did it. He knew what he wanted, he was young and kind of attractive, and it was a matter of enthusiasm and dedication being contagious.”

  *

  SPIELBERG has suggested that the emotional core of E.T. is a response to his parents’ divorce and his longing for a friend/brother/father, even one from another world. So it is logical that Firelight, made during the time when he was actually living through the trauma of the impending divorce, sprang from the same emotional needs as E.T. and Close Encounters. The metaphors of childhood and rebirth pervade those films, as indeed they do the entire science-fiction genre.

  “Close Encounters was actually a remake of Firelight,” says Jean Weber Brill, who did the makeup for Firelight. “There were scenes in Close Encounters that were almost direct copies from Firelight, such as the lights appearing on the highway and the scene when the little boy looks out the door at the bright light. The storyline of Close Encounters was very similar, but obviously rewritten and more sophisticated.”

  Firelight introduces the themes of supernatural intruders, suburban alienation and escape, broken families and abducted children, scientific adventure, and spiritual renewal that would become familiar in Spielberg’s mature work. The young couple on the run in Firelight also point toward the Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon characters in Close Encounters, and the earlier film’s UFO expert, Howard Karcher, is an older, more fallible, less blissful version of François Truffaut’s Lacombe. But unlike Close Encounters, which radically departed from sci-fi movie tradition to depict its extraterrestrials as benign rather than menacing, Firelight derives in large part from the mood of anxiety and paranoia that characterized the genre in the 1950s, when Spielberg became hooked on sci-fi. “It was a Cold War movie,” says cast member Lucky Lohr. “They talk about it being his [first] version of Close Encounters, and it was, in a sense—a sky movie, about sky gods—but the ‘cinematic vision’ of Firelight owed more to horror movies about aliens dusting humans.”

  Firelight expresses the lack of confidence some of the more liberal sci-fi movies of that era displayed toward the U.S. government’s ability to cope with alien invasion. The movie has a typical postnuclear age skepticism about scientists. Spielberg’s portrayal of ufologist Howard Karcher’s callousness and obsessiveness, and his depiction of Tony Karcher as a husband with an eye for another man’s wife (Helen Richards, played by Margaret Peyou), may reflect the young filmmaker’s problems in dealing with his father’s career and his parents’ unsettled marriage.

  Spielberg’s vision of alien life is also somewhat ambiguous. His sense of the healing possibilities of higher intelligence links the movie with the more optimistic strain of science fiction exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s classic novel Childhood’s End and Robert Wise’s film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In a twist ending showing the influence of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone series on Spielberg’s early artistic development, it turns out that the aliens in Firelight are transporting Freeport and its residents piece by piece to their planet, Altaris, to serve as a miniaturized zoo. As Arizona Journal reviewer Larry Jarrett wrote, “The meaning of all this is brought to light when three shrouded spacefolk explain via their conversation that they are higher forms of life who have taken the life of earthpeople and given them a sort of brainwashed heaven. The reason for this is to save the entire universe from the destructive nature of we earthpeople.”

  Spielberg’s Altarians, who feel threatened by humankind’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, are divided on the wisdom of brainwashing humans to eradicate their past tendencies toward violence, hatred, and prejudice. The dilemma Spielberg proposes (like Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange) is that those tendencies are inevitable consequences of free will. Firelight ends with the aliens flipping a coin to decide whether to begin by reprogramming the capitalist countries or the Communist countries (a somewhat irrelevant question in the overall scheme of things, but one that reflects the film’s Cold War origins). The audience never finds out which way the coin will land, and is left wondering whether the interplanetary zoo will become a prison or a place of spiritual rebirth for the human race, a new Garden of Eden in outer space.

  *

  “STEVE’S parents were totally behind the film,” Jean Weber Brill remembers. Leah not only kept the cast and crew supplied with snacks, but cheerfully put up with “constant commotion at her home” weekend after weekend, The Arizona Republic reported. She even allowed Steve to set up a flashing red light by the carport door to signal the neighbors to keep quiet while filming was in progress. “The things we did in this poor woman’s house!” Jean marvels.

  Since the time in Cincinnati when he so enjoyed seeing the mess made by his mother’s exploding pressure cooker, Steve had been fascinated by the pop-art potential of kitchen mayhem. He dreamed up a comical scene for Firelight in which Beth Weber’s inept maid (Tina Lanser) forgets to watch the pressure cooker while making dessert. “His mom actually loaded [thirty cans of] cherry pie filling in her pressure cooker and let him blow it up,” Jean recalls. “We spread cherries all over the cabinets, the floor, the face of the actress. It was a real mess—it was fun.”

  For some night exterior scenes a
round Camelback Mountain, Steve used a light meter to guide him in the filming method known to professionals as “day for night”—putting a blue filter over the lens to turn daylight into night. For the visual effects involving the firelight, Steve ingeniously employed a variety of simple but effective techniques. Charles G. (Chuck) Case II, now a federal bankruptcy judge in Phoenix, played a love scene with Dede Pisani in the orange grove behind Dick Hoffman’s house. The scene ends with the young couple being chased by a firelight and Case calling the police. “The firelight was just a red gel on a light,” Case recalls. “It descended from the trees, and the illusion was effective. In the film it really looked like something strange was happening.”

  Arnold Spielberg explains how Steve showed “the firelight picking up Nancy [his little sister]. She was crawling along the ground. He had her crawl from here to a tree, and he timed it in his head, backed up the film, then reexposed the same thing, but with a firelight coming right down to where Nancy was. In order to get this effect of a whirling piece of flame, of energy, he took two glass plates and a red gel and put Vaseline between the plates. Sue or Anne would take the plates and pull them back and forth, and that would make the jelly wiggle and move, and then he’d film through it. If you imagine a bunch of clouds in fast motion whirling around, that was his effect of firelight. And it came out! It looked like it took her and she disappeared.”

  “I was intrigued by the contraptions he dreamed up,” says crew member Warner Marshall. “The one I remember most vividly was a scene in his parents’ carport with Carol Stromme. Somebody was sitting on the hood bouncing the jeep, and he had pulleys with a couple of white Christmas lights—a clothesline of lights would move past the jeep so it would look like the jeep was driving in the country passing a house. He had floodlights shining down on the jeep to make it look like moonlight. He had a big piece of cardboard with triangular holes in it that would pass in front of the light to make shadows. He conceived all that! It made a heck of an impression on me when I was fifteen years old—this guy really knew what he was doing. But he didn’t exude an air of a guy who knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. He was humble and kind of quiet.”

  Perhaps the most remarkable visual effect was Steve’s use of a series of quick lap-dissolves in showing the attack of the firelight on the UFO expert (played by Lucky Lohr). “He collapsed on the floor and we filmed him disintegrating,” recalls makeup artist Jean Weber Brill. “We filmed the scene in the Spielbergs’ front room. Steve had the camera on a tripod and we filmed about eight frames at a time, then we would change the setup and the makeup and film another eight frames. We did that all day long.”

  “They had red and brown makeup and wet Kleenex on my face,” Lohr remembers. “I had a cold at the time, so I was shivering. I thought I was being a real trouper. At the end of the scene, Steve pulled out a plastic skull, moved me out, set the skull down, and shot a couple of frames of the skull.” Spielberg redid that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the blazing light from the Ark hits the Nazi villain Toht (Ronald Lacey) and disintegrates him right down to his skull.

  During the months-long filming process on Firelight, the sixteen-year-old director “could be firm, he could coax people, but he did everything from an emotional place of such calm that I never had trouble doing what he wanted,” Lohr says. “He’d say in a low-key voice, ‘Luck, I want you to do this or that,’ and it would move swimmingly. I might have screwed up, but I never got a sharp word from him. I never saw anybody get a sharp word from him.”

  Even when the two actors originally cast in the lead roles (Carol Stromme and Andy Owen) quit after the first two weeks of shooting, Spielberg did not become discouraged. He recast the parts with Beth Weber and Bob Robyn and reshot the opening scenes in December. “I remember the energy level starting to flag, people starting to wonder, ‘Gee, do I want to spend my entire Saturday doing this?,’” says Warner Marshall, who also played a National Guardsman in the film. “He was having a great time. He’d say, ‘I want to get this one last thing. Would you mind staying?’ He was extremely gracious. He created an atmosphere where everybody had an affectionate respect for him. He wasn’t anywhere in the forefront of Guys and Dolls, but when he made Firelight, everybody grew to really love him.”

  “We had so much fun filming Firelight,” says leading lady Beth Weber Zelenski. “Steve was methodical, thorough, and pleasant to work with. It turned out very professionally considering what he had to work with. There were a couple of times when I didn’t exactly know what to do. He’s much better now with actors than he was then, and it was a brand-new thing for me, being in a film. But Robert Shaw [who acted in Jaws] said that Steven Spielberg is a man with a heart, which is what struck me too.”

  *

  STEVE had experimented with sound effects and music accompaniment on other films,† but the synchronized soundtrack of Firelight was a remarkably ambitious undertaking. “I got some guys from GE” to help him, Arnold says, “and I put all the sound together for him.” After editing many hours of 8mm film down to his final cut running two hours and fifteen minutes, Steve set up a microphone in his living room with the assistance of sound technicians Bruce Palmer and Dennis LaFevre. He brought in the actors to postsync their dialogue on the Bolex Sonerizer as the film was projected on a wall.

  “The soundtrack of the voice was lip-synched on the film,” Arnold explains. “But all the special effects and the music and the background noises were on tape. The sound on the tape machine would slip out of sync with the motion, and when we showed Firelight at the Phoenix Little Theatre, I was working with him like mad in the projection booth to try to make it in sync.”

  Steve had made the actors follow his script fairly closely during shooting, but at some points in the dubbing process he had to resort to lipreading to understand what they were supposed to be saying. “It took a lot of sessions, trying to get the hang of it and not have it look stupid,” Warner Marshall remembers. “But when Firelight was shown at the Phoenix Little Theatre, on a big screen, with bright colors, sound, it didn’t look at all what you would expect from a group of goofy high school kids. To me, and to most of the people in the audience, it seemed incredible.”

  When he first saw the final print of Firelight with the cast in his living room, Spielberg later recalled, “I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t what my dad wanted for me: I wanted Hollywood.”

  The day after the premiere of Firelight, he and his family left Phoenix and moved to California.

  • • •

  “POKE a Hollywood legend with the needle of fact and it usually blows up in your face,” TV Guide noted in a 1972 profile of Spielberg. Although the magazine insisted that Spielberg’s story of his first visit to Universal Studios “checks out as truth,” that oft-told tale can’t survive a poke from the needle of fact.

  In one of his earliest tellings of the tale, to The Hollywood Reporter in 1971, Spielberg claimed: “One day in 1969, when I was twenty-one [sic], I put on a suit and tie and sneaked past the guard at Universal, found an empty bungalow, and set up an office. I then went to the main switchboard and introduced myself and gave them my extension so I could get calls. It took Universal two years to discover I was on the lot.”

  In a previous (1969) interview with the Reporter, Spielberg had said, “Every day, for three months in a row, I walked through the gates dressed in a sincere black suit and carrying a briefcase. I visited every set I could, got to know people, observed techniques, and just generally absorbed the atmosphere.”

  And in his 1970 interview with Rabbi William M. Kramer for Heritage-Southwest Jewish Press, Spielberg confessed, “To get by the guard at the gate I lied a lot.”

  Spielberg also claimed (to Time magazine in 1985) that the visit occurred when he wandered off a tram ride on the Universal Studios Tour during the summer of 1965. He said he was looking around the soundstages when he was stopped by Chuck Silvers of the Universal editorial department: “Instead of cal
ling the guards to throw me off the lot, he talked with me for about an hour.” Silvers became interested in seeing his movies, Spielberg recalled, “so he gave me a pass to get on the lot the next day.”‡

  “I’ve heard a lot of stories about how I met Steven,” Chuck Silvers says with a wry smile, before telling what he calls “the most accurate one.”

  The soft-spoken, avuncular Silvers, born in 1927, started in the film business as an assistant editor at Republic Pictures, working on John Ford’s The Quiet Man and other films, before moving to Universal in 1957. At the time he met Spielberg, Silvers was assistant to David O’Connell, editorial supervisor for Universal TV, and had been given a special assignment to reorganize the studio’s film library. The temporary quarters of the library were on the second floor of a functional building adjacent to the headquarters of the editorial department.

  Silvers says he doesn’t remember the exact date when he met Spielberg, but says that “Steven was probably fifteen to sixteen years old. He was still in high school,” and visiting Universal on a break from his school in Arizona. Spielberg was in postproduction on Firelight at the time of his meeting with Silvers, which would mean that the meeting occurred sometime between the fall of 1963 and March 1964, when he was sixteen or seventeen (and, as Silvers put it, “looked a couple or three years younger than he was”). In his Arizona Journal review of Firelight that March, Larry Jarrett wrote, “Steve plans to go to the coast this summer with the hopes of working for Universal International. It seems he knows the head librarian Chuck Silvers.”