Steven Spielberg

  Universal insisted that Spielberg and the producers provide commercial insurance for the offbeat film by signing a major female star to play Lou Jean. After meeting with several female stars, who all passed on the script, Spielberg became convinced that Goldie Hawn, best known as the giggling blond sexpot of the Laugh-In TV series, had the blend of scatterbrained charm and underlying mulish obstinancy the part required. “I always thought she was a dramatic actress, for she took her comedy very seriously,” Spielberg recalled. “So I met with her—we had a great afternoon—and you could tell she was thousands of kilowatts smarter than the people of Laugh-In had ever allowed her to demonstrate.” Winner of an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower (1969), Hawn had her own production deal at Universal, and she had been turning down scripts for a year before agreeing to star in The Sugarland Express. She was paid $300,000 on a film that, according to Gilmore, cost about $3 million.

  Spielberg and Universal hoped the public’s affection for Hawn would help them accept a character whose actions worked against audience sympathy. The filmmakers also thought that in the wake of her Oscar, audiences would be intrigued to see Hawn in a demanding, three-dimensional role that was more dramatic than comedic. Spielberg said in 1974 that her Lou Jean would come as “a real surprise to those who only see her as a pie-in-the-face type. She takes herself seriously as a person and is mostly concerned with how far to reach inside a character.”

  For Hawn, the “most exciting” aspect of the project was the director. “Think of the career Steven’s got ahead of him,” she said.

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  WHEN he rolled the cameras on January 15, 1973, Spielberg had just passed his twenty-sixth birthday, making him a year older than Orson Welles was when he began shooting his first feature, Citizen Kane. Zanuck vividly remembers Spielberg’s first day of shooting on location in Texas:

  “I had told the production people, ‘It’s his first day. Let’s start him off slow. Do something relatively simple until he breaks in.’ He’d never worked with a crew this big. I didn’t want to be there for the first shot; I wanted him to think he was running the show. So I deliberately took my time getting there. I got there about eight-thirty. Jesus, by the time I’d gotten out there, he had already laid out the most complex shot I’ve ever seen in my life! I walked up to the production manager and said, ‘What is this? We’re supposed to be starting him off with something simple!’

  “By then I had run Duel a couple of times, and something with Joan Crawford [‘Eyes’], and I had been with him for three or four months on a daily basis, but it was a small body of work, and you never do know until that day, standing there with a hundred people doing things, whether a guy has it or not. I knew right then and there, when I saw him in action, that he knew what he was doing. He was very definite in his opinions. He was in command. I could sense it, because I had been around long enough with a lot of great directors—the Robert Wises, the William Wylers, the John Hustons—and I knew almost immediately that he had knowledge and command and ability, and an innate, intimate sense of the visual mechanics of how you put all these pieces together so that the final result is very striking.

  “I still don’t think anyone I’ve ever worked with knows the mechanics as well as he does. It’s like trying to read the mind of a master chess champion who’s got all the moves. Like an old-time director did, he knew the capacity of all the lenses and equipment. He knew how to move the camera, when to move it, when not to move it, how to have it move in different ways, how to move people around—he just knew it.”

  “Sugarland was his first real location shoot,” recalls art director Joseph Alves Jr., who had worked with Spielberg on The Psychiatrist and Night Gallery. “Steven didn’t realize how much other departments could do for him, that he didn’t have to do all the visual things himself. When you’re young, especially when you do your first little films, you have to do everything yourself. But to rely on others gives you choices. That was something he discovered on Sugarland, as opposed to television, when we didn’t spend much time together.

  “On Sugarland, Steven and Bill Gilmore and I went to Texas and drove around together on the initial scout, [four] weeks before we began shooting. I remember when we came back from scouting one day having solved a lot of problems. Within a thirty-mile radius [of San Antonio], we found a number of locations that all sort of fit together. To have that change of topography and less travel time allowed him to have more time to work with his actors and more time to work visually. He said, ‘Gosh, you guys are doing a lot of work for me.’ We told him, ‘Well, that’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s what we’re hired for.’ He said, ‘Oh. OK.’ He realized that if people do these things, it could relieve the pressure he was under.”

  Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-born cinematographer who shot Sugarland, says it was “probably the only time when Steven worked as a director that he worked as a conductor and was relying on the expertise of his collaborators. He knew what he wanted, and still he was open—if there was a better way to do it, he would listen. He didn’t seem like a novice—he already knew the business, he knew a lot—but I could still help him. He was not experienced enough to know everything. I caught him during Sugarland Express when he was just learning—I think he learned more on Jaws, and by the time we did Close Encounters he knew everything. On Sugarland, Steven gave a one hundred percent chance to collaborate. Everybody had a good relationship with Steven. He asked the impossible with a smile on his face. How could you say no?”

  “Vilmos and I were almost brothers on our movie,” Spielberg said at the time. “I’d heard about this crazy Hungarian who lights with six foot-candles [an extremely low level of light] and who’ll try absolutely everything…. It’s an enormous help when egos don’t clash and you can creatively exchange thoughts—not on just the momentary problems, but on conceptual ideas as well. Vilmos is the kind of cameraman whom I’d invite into the cutting room, because he would have something to contribute. I would never do that with any other cameraman that I know.”

  Spielberg and Zsigmond usually ate breakfast and dinner together on location, energetically discussing their plans for the day. One morning when they were having breakfast at The Greenhouse along the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio, Zsigmond introduced Spielberg to a pretty young waitress. “I wanted to take her out,” Zsigmond recalls, “but she was only interested in Steven. She told me, ‘I want to meet your friend.’ I said to Steven, ‘This girl’s in love with you.’ It became a friendship, and he took her to Hawaii [after the filming]. She came to Hollywood, and he dated her for a long time. He was surprised, actually, that this girl really liked him. It was something new in his life. He was shy in those days.” Years later, when San Antonio film critic Bob Polunsky asked him about his memories of making The Sugarland Express, Spielberg replied with a smile, “I fell in love in San Antonio once, on the Riverwalk.”‡‡

  Before shooting began, Spielberg spent many hours with his cinematographer comparing their tastes in movies. “We both liked Citizen Kane, we both liked European movies, we liked Fellini,” Zsigmond found. Spielberg greatly admired Zsigmond’s daringly offbeat work with director Robert Altman on such films as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye. The impressionistic visual style of those films, which freely used natural source lighting, diffusion, extreme variations in light intensity, and long lenses to compress spatial planes, was a major influence on The Sugarland Express.

  Freeing himself from the visual constraints of television, Spielberg shot for the first time in the Panavision wide-screen format, composing richly textured, multilayered images. But he strove for a grittier, less self-consciously stylized look than Altman’s, telling Zsigmond that what he wanted was “European lighting” with “a documentary feeling.” He and Zsigmond watched documentaries together, examining them for creative solutions to the problems of location shooting. They agreed to shoot as much as possible with natural lighting and live sound, and to avoid using process photogr
aphy§§ for the many scenes inside cars. Spielberg hoped to encounter plenty of rain and to shoot scenes through moving windshield wipers, trying everything to remove Goldie Hawn’s “Tinkerbell” aura. Little rain materialized, but the wintry conditions in Texas gave the film a suitably overcast look. “We considered it an art piece,” says Zsigmond.

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  THE Texas Department of Public Safety, understandably concerned about how its image would withstand a movie about the Bobby Dent affair, initially refused to cooperate with the filmmakers. While location sites in Louisiana and other states were considered, Bill Gilmore eventually persuaded DPS officials that the film “wouldn’t portray their people in a bad light. I’m sure I said whatever I had to.” That half-truth enabled the filming to proceed along Texas roads, but the film company still had to assemble its own fleet of vehicles for the pursuit of the police car in which Lou Jean and Clovis (William Atherton) are traveling with their hostage, Officer Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks). Gilmore bought 23 cars at a police auction and rented 17 others from non-DPS sources (the original chase involved more than a hundred police and civilian vehicles). After the film was released, DPS director Colonel Wilson Speir reacted with outrage, insisting that “no law enforcement officer of this department or any other police agency in Texas would conduct himself in such an unprofessional manner.”

  Both Duel and The Sugarland Express are road movies, constantly in motion, but in contrast to the earlier film’s elemental simplicity, Sugarland is almost baroque in its logistical complications. “What is surprising,” wrote Newsweek reviewer Paul D. Zimmerman, “is Spielberg’s breathtaking command of action, the visual sweep he achieves with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, the vision, satiric but strangely beautiful, of an America on wheels.” To help keep his bearings, Spielberg, as he had done on Duel, had a mural made showing the progress of the chase. He also had Joe Alves storyboard some of the scenes, although much of the action was improvised on location, again with the expert help of stunt coordinator Carey Loftin.

  For filming in and around Officer Slide’s patrol car, the wheels were removed from a vehicle and it was mounted close to the ground on a flatbed trailer. Not content to shoot only with locked-down or handheld cameras, Spielberg and Zsigmond set up tracks on a platform attached to the vehicle, using a small dolly to film tracking shots alongside the car in motion. They went even further with the help of the newly manufactured, highly compact Panaflex camera, which was so mobile and quiet that it allowed for shots of astonishing dexterity inside the car, with the camera mounted on a sliding board that served as a makeshift tracking device. The Panaflex arrived during the last two weeks of shooting after the Panavision Corp. chose the Sugarland company over a hundred and thirty other applicants to give the camera its “acid test” under production conditions. Although he shot the film largely in continuity, Spielberg saved some of the most complex highway shots until the end of filming in order to use the Panaflex.

  “We did things on Sugarland that had never been done before,” marvels Gilmore. “We shot a 360-degree pan inside a car with dialogue. That had never been done before. It was the first film that had a dolly shot inside a car, [moving] from the front to the back seat. We did a dolly shot into the back seat at thirty-five miles per hour! We were awed by Steven’s knowledge and his basic instincts when it came to doing things with a camera.”

  “I don’t know where Steven got the ideas he tried to do, because I had never seen shots like that,” Zsigmond says. “Steven realizes the moving camera is essential for movies. I feel the same way. That’s what gives you the third dimension, which is the way movies should be. If you lock down the camera, it’s like seeing everything with one eye. It’s like shooting in a theater. Movies should be untheatrical. The first time when the camera approaches the police car, we found two roads that converged. With me in the camera car paralleling, getting closer and closer, we go into a close shot. It was a very difficult shot to do, and it was fun to do.”

  Spielberg and Zsigmond shared a dislike for the crudely obvious use of the zoom lens that was then in fashion, so they frequently employed the Altmanesque device of zooming and panning simultaneously, a fluid technique that disguises the fact that the camera is zooming, yet allows the camera to change perspectives rapidly and with a more subtly disorienting effect on the audience. Spielberg also made striking use of a combined zoom and dolly movement near the end of the film, when the car with the principal characters slowly approaches the house of the baby’s foster parents. The camera dollies forward, toward the window and over the shoulder of a sharpshooter, while simultaneously zooming back from the car coming from the distance, framed by the window curtains. This was the technique Hitchcock had used to create James Stewart’s subjective “vertigo effect” in Vertigo, and which Spielberg later would use to create a celebrated moment of terror in Jaws.

  At that critical moment before the climax of Sugarland, Spielberg’s use of that camera technique “suspended animation for fifteen seconds,” Gilmore notes. “As Steven moved in, he zoomed out, so the foreground and background were juxtaposed, with the people in the car and the sharpshooter all in the same relation to each other. With two tools fighting against each other, he literally froze time. To this day, I am absolutely in awe of that shot.”

  Spielberg already seemed to have “the experience of a man forty years old,” Zsigmond said in a location interview with American Cinematographer. “The way he directs a film makes you think that he must have many features behind him…. I can only compare him to Orson Welles, who was a very talented director when he was very young…. Most young directors, when they get their first film, somehow get timid; they pull back; they try to play it safe, because they are afraid that they will never get another chance to make a feature. Not Steve. He really gets right into the middle. He really tries to do the craziest things. Most of the shots he gets he could only dream about doing, up until now.”

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  PERHAPS the most impressive achievement of Spielberg’s direction is that it never lets the spectacle of the chase overwhelm the personal drama inside the car involving Lou Jean, Clovis, and Officer Slide. It was the depth of his feelings about the characters, particularly about Lou Jean, that kept Spielberg plugging away for four years to make something “a little more personal” than the other, less commercially risky projects he was being offered at that formative stage of his professional career.

  “A lot of Steven was in that movie, more than in some of his other movies,” Zsigmond believes. “He didn’t think about commercializing The Sugarland Express. He just wanted to make a good movie with good characters. I think Steven has never been better.”

  Although the fugitive’s wife was only mentioned in passing in the newspaper article that triggered Spielberg’s interest in the Dent affair, she became his central dramatic focus in the film, emerging as a largely unsympathetic character, a symbol of mother love gone berserk. The film reveals, if not a streak of latent misogyny, a fear of women in the youthful Spielberg, and a deep ambivalence about mothers. It also introduces a recurring theme of Spielberg’s films, that of the irresponsible parent. Lou Jean and Clovis, petty criminals both, behave so desperately to get Baby Langston back because they know they have failed so miserably in their parental obligations.

  The DPS officer leading the pursuit, Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), recognizes that Lou Jean and Clovis are not hardened criminals but “just kids.” Tanner is more mature and a benevolent father figure, but he too is a failure, abandoning his principled attempt to avoid violence. Most painfully, after giving his personal word of honor to trade Baby Langston for Officer Slide, Tanner has to go back on his word to bring the chase to an end. A familiar face from John Ford Westerns, the weatherbeaten Johnson embodies the rectitude of a nineteenth-century lawman, but in the debased environment of this contemporary Western-on-wheels, he also represents the obsolescence of the cowboy code of honor.

  In a 1993 essay on Spielberg’s films, �
�A Father Runs from It,” Henry Sheehan observed that “at the bottom of many of the movies lies a dark and forbidding desire to be rid once and for all of one’s responsibilities, one’s family, one’s children. It is that keenly felt urge, usually buried deep within the movies, that gives Spielberg’s films their anxious drive and the climaxes their sense of overwhelming relief.” Lou Jean’s compulsive need to reunite her family at all costs expresses the childlike pain Spielberg continued to feel over his own family breakup, for which, at the time it occurred, he primarily blamed his mother. In his depiction of Lou Jean as a child-woman can perhaps be seen his boyhood recognition that his own mother was “just like a little girl who never grew out of her pinafore.” His depiction of the disastrous results of Lou Jean’s impulsive, deluded behavior reflects a level of mature understanding in the twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker—his recognition of the impossibility of putting the pieces of a shattered family back together. Spielberg’s examination of irresponsible parent figures and broken families, from The Sugarland Express to Schindler’s List, has led him to film terrifying images of the primal trauma of children being separated from their parents, and to explore the unbearable grief on both sides. The irrational behavior, even madness, that can result from such trauma is the profoundly unsettling emotional core of The Sugarland Express.