Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “Every film I find out a little more about myself,” Spielberg said after completing Sugarland. “I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces. A personal movie for me is one about people with obsessions.”

  For a director who so often has been accused of sentimentality, Spielberg started his feature career with a remarkably unsentimental character study, as well as an unsparing mockery of what Vincent Canby in his New York Times review called “the American public’s insatiable appetite for sentimental nonsense.” Lou Jean and Clovis are lionized as folk heroes by people in towns they pass along the way, who line the roads, waving at them and shoving presents into the car, mistaking these two dimwits for genuine symbols of rebellion against an authoritarian state.¶¶ In satirizing the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the Texas chase, partially whipped up by media sensationalists, Spielberg said he was inspired by Billy Wilder’s vitriolic 1951 film Ace in the Hole, about an unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who keeps a man trapped in a cave to turn his plight into a media event.

  To screenwriter Hal Barwood, The Sugarland Express is about “how Americans find it very easy to confuse notoriety with fame.” Such a confused sense of values was a symptom of the major social issues of the time—the social disintegration caused by the war in Vietnam, the loss of respect for authority, the breakdown of the family, and the widespread recourse to violence—and while Sugarland does not address the root causes directly, it is a vivid metaphor for the chaos resulting from those problems. But Sug arlanďs critique of American society is not easily classifiable politically. Spielberg’s relatively isolated personal and artistic development tended to keep him out of step with his generation’s rebelliousness, and led him to make a withering critique of the romantic, anarchic excesses of the road movie. His film, in which the young couple on the run is less sympathetic than the lawman directing the chase, would not appeal to left-leaning viewers expecting to have their antiauthoritarianism pandered to and their own social prejudices unexamined. Yet it also would alienate right-leaning viewers with its equally scathing critique of the other trigger-happy lawmen and their gun-crazed vigilante followers.

  Although he had been uncomfortable with European critics’ attempts to read social meanings into the more clearly allegorical Duel, Spielberg strove more consciously for social meaning with The Sugarland Express. Generally allowing his themes to emerge organically from the action rather than from verbal rhetoric, Spielberg was less successful when he tried to explain his intentions to the press: “I wanted to make Sugarland because it made an important statement about the Great American Dream Machine…. And it was meant to say something about the human condition which, obviously, isn’t terribly optimistic.”

  Because the theme was so downbeat, Matthew Robbins said that he and Barwood consciously strove for “distancing” effects in their screenplay. They employed a “kaleidoscopic” viewpoint so the audience would not experience Clovis’s death as a “shattering event…. There were still other figures who were sympathetic in the movie to cling to.”

  Spielberg’s compassionate direction of the actors tended to downplay the comic aspects of the script and heighten the dramatic aspects; contrary to what the writers intended, Clovis’s death is indeed a “shattering event” for the audience. Spielberg also carried the script’s “kaleidoscopic” approach even farther, not so much for distancing purposes but to heighten the complexity of the film’s perspective, through his daring multiplicity of visual points of view and the resulting audience empathy with various secondary characters, including Officer Slide and Captain Tanner, compensating for the audience’s distancing from the central character, Lou Jean. The emotional residue from his parents’ divorce may have prevented Spielberg from viewing Lou Jean’s motherly impulses as anything but destructive, and led him to look more kindly on the well-intentioned but essentially impotent males she has under her control.

  Viewers accustomed to films that ask them to identify with a single character—in Hollywood parlance, to “root” for a hero or heroine—inevitably were confused and upset by the complexity of tone in The Sugarland Express. Spielberg himself seemed to have second thoughts about his approach after the film’s commercial failure, sketching out in 1977 how “if I had it to do all over again I’d make Sugarland Express in a completely different fashion.” He said he wished he had done the first half of the film entirely from the viewpoint of Captain Tanner, “from behind the police barricades, from inside his patrol cruiser. I would never see the fugitive kids, only hear their voices over the police radio, maybe see three heads in the distance through binoculars. Because I don’t think the authorities got a fair shake in Sugarland…. Then [in] the second half of the movie I would have told the entire story inside the car and how really naive and backwoodsy these people are and how frivolous and really stupid their goals were.”

  That simplistic remake might have been more successful at the box office, but it is not the film Spielberg actually made. The director’s multifaceted point of view makes it possible to experience an unusually wide and subtly inflected range of human emotion.

  • • •

  SPLELBERG finished shooting in late March 1973, five days over his fifty-five-day schedule; production manager Bill Gilmore says the delays were all attributable to the weather and the shortness of the winter days, which caused them to lose the light early. After editing the film that summer with Edward Abroms and Verna Fields, Spielberg completed postproduction on September 10. Sugarland’s musical score was the first composed for Spielberg by John Williams, who became a regular member of the director’s creative team. Spielberg had greatly admired Williams’s “wonderful Americana scores” for two Mark Rydell films, The Reivers and The Cowboys: “When I heard both scores I had to meet this modern relic from a lost era of film symphonies…. I wanted a real Aaron Copland sound for my first movie. I wanted eighty instruments, a colossal string section. But John politely said no, this was for the harmonica—and a very small string ensemble.”

  In the fall of 1973, the film was ready for its first public preview. “The studio was very pleased with The Sugarland Express,” veteran Universal publicist Orin Borsten recalls. “He wasn’t sharpening his talent on it—he was a full-blown talent.” “You cannot believe the excitement [there was] within our ranks over Sugarland,” says production executive Bill Gilmore. “It was so innovative for its time, so exciting, we thought it was going to win the Academy Award for best everything.”

  Sugarland was previewed on a double bill with Peter Bogdanovich’s Depression-era comedy Paper Moon in San Jose, the northern California city adjacent to Spielberg’s former hometown of Saratoga. Spielberg attended with Zanuck, Brown, Gilmore, Barwood, Robbins, and a delegation of Universal executives.

  “The audience loved the first half,” Gilmore recalls. “Goldie Hawn was a piece of fluff and she was involved with two nincompoops [Clovis and Officer Slide]; it was all a romp. But when the two sharpshooters came on the scene—we cast two real Texas Rangers [Jim Harrell and Frank Steggall] as sharpshooters—I can remember the audience gasping, ‘Oh my God, this is life and death, real flesh and blood.’

  “From that moment on, we lost them. I think the mistake was that the audience perceived the film to be another Goldie Hawn piece of fluff, and she brought with her that goodwill. When we became deadly serious, about three-fifths of the way through the film, they sat there in stunned silence. They didn’t know what they were looking at. They didn’t want to hear about it. That taught me a lesson. We should deliver what they think they are going to see.”

  Some of the audience members left in tears. And there were some, Barwood recalled, who “walked out with blue murder in their eyes.”

  Zanuck and Brown wanted to leave the film as it was, but Spielberg persuaded them to let him cut it from 121 to 108 minutes and recut some of the intended moments of comedy in the first half of the film, when he had held for laughs that hadn’t come. With th
e new version, the reaction was dramatically different at film industry preview screenings in the fall and winter. As a result of those screenings, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “word went around the Hollywood circuit that a major new director and film were on the horizon.”

  But with its fears of the film’s lack of commercial appeal confirmed by the disastrous San Jose preview, Universal changed the release plans. Originally scheduled for Thanksgiving release, Sugarland was delayed to avoid competing with such major commercial entries as The Sting (a Zanuck/Brown production for Universal) and Warner Bros.’ The Exorcist. The plan then was to open Sugarland in February at one theater in Los Angeles and one in New York, but Spielberg already was worried that Universal would quickly go wider if the openings weren’t successful. At that time, films with any kind of prestige usually were opened in a few theaters in major cities before being released gradually across the country, in what was known as a “platforming” release strategy. Opening a film unusually wide (a “saturation” release) tended to indicate that the studio had little regard for its quality and wanted to get its money quickly, before negative word of mouth could spread. Universal finally decided to forego showcase runs for Sugarland, opening it in 250 theaters across the country on April 5. Box-office results predictably were disappointing, a modest $7.5 million gross in the United States and Canada, and an additional $5.3 million overseas. The film eventually made a small profit after being sold to television.

  In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter three weeks after Sugarland opened, Spielberg complained that Universal had failed to capitalize on the Hollywood screenings. “There was a huge four-month gap between those initial screenings and the release,” he said. “The immediacy of the word of mouth wore off.” But it is unlikely that opening any earlier would have helped, for Hollywood’s appreciation of Spielberg’s directorial talents wouldn’t have translated to the mass audience, and hosannas from leading American and British reviewers made little impression on the public.

  *

  SPLELBERG “could be that rarity among directors, a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks,” Pauline Kael proclaimed in The New Yorker. “In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.”

  Combining his review with a profile of the director, Newsweek’s Paul D. Zimmerman also heralded “the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new filmmaker.” Dilys Powell of the London Times, who had spotted Spielberg’s talent when Duel played in overseas theaters, wrote, “One is apt to fear for the second film of a promising young director, but for once anxiety was unnecessary.” While noting thematic similarities between Duel and Sugarland, Powell was pleased to find that this time, “The human element has pushed into the foreground.”

  Dissenting critics were outnumbered, but Stephen Farber’s vituperative commentary on the film in The New York Times helped set the tone for subsequent critical attacks on the director. “Kael and some other gullible critics have probably been intimidated by Spielberg’s youth, and by his technical facility,” wrote Farber. “… The Sugarland Express is a prime example of the new-style factory movie: slick, cynical, mechanical, empty…. Everything is underlined; Spielberg sacrifices narrative logic and character consistency for quick thrills and easy laughs…. The Sugarland Express is a ‘social statement’ whose only commitment is to the box office.”

  Even Kael’s review expressed some concern about Spielberg’s future development: “Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he really doesn’t care if a movie has anything else in it…. I can’t tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound.”

  *

  “IT did get good reviews,” Spielberg said of The Sugarland Express, “but I would have given away all those reviews for a bigger audience.” That disappointment left Spielberg somewhat wary of overtly “personal” filmmaking and more dedicated than ever to surefire crowd-pleasing entertainment.

  Internal postmortems by the filmmakers pointed to several reasons why the public rejected the movie. “Bad title” was the diagnosis of Universal publicist Orin Borsten. “So many pictures are ruined by a bad title.” Although intended ironically, the title unfortunately played into the Goldie Hawn image that Spielberg otherwise had worked so hard to avoid. Perhaps the commercial fate of the film was inevitable once the decision was made to cast Hawn. “It wasn’t a happy picture, and people didn’t want to see her in a serious role—they wanted to see her as a goofy gal,” Richard Zanuck concludes. Stubbornly loyal to his star, Spielberg said in September 1974 that the film’s box-office failure “was not due to the presentation of Goldie as an anti-Laugh-In character, but to the promotional campaign, timing, release pattern, and appreciation of the film by the studio. It had nothing to do with Goldie being rejected by audiences.”

  Not known for sophisticated ad campaigns during the early 1970s, Universal seemed to have even more trouble than usual when it came to selling Sugarland. The trailer and the print ads vacillated between portraying it as a shoot-’em-up melodrama and emphasizing Hawn’s cuter, more comedic moments. But Spielberg was being a bit disingenuous in pinning all the blame on the studio. As David Brown recalled, “Universal gave Spielberg and us carte blanche in developing advertising and getting outside creative shops, to avoid that studio look. Our early ads were our own; Spielberg himself shot one of them. Our campaigns didn’t work.” “I now think the right graphics campaign and a plan of attack for releasing a picture are as important as finding a good script and making a good movie,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter in retrospect. But he admitted, “There’s nobody to accuse. This is an immensely difficult picture to sell.” It was an especially hard sell to the youth market because of its harshly critical view of its young female protagonist and its more sympathetic portraits of lawmen. Nor was its frontal attack on the public’s sentimental gullibility calculated to endear the film to the majority of American moviegoers. In the final analysis, the public’s rejection of The Sugarland Express probably stemmed from the single overriding fact that, as Lew Wasserman had warned, it was too much of a “downer” for the mass audience.

  But as Vilmos Zsigmond says, “It’s a shame that Steven doesn’t make people remember more of Sugarland Express. He just wants to forget it, because he thinks of it as a failure. I don’t think of it as a failure. It’s an artistic triumph.”

  *

  WHEN he received the bad news about Sugarland in April 1974, Spielberg did not have much time to sit around engaging in second-guessing or nursing his wounds. He was on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, immersed in preparations to make another film for Zanuck/Brown and Universal. This was no “art piece,” but a genre film aimed squarely at pleasing the mass audience.

  It was a modestly budgeted thriller called Jaws.

  * Four sequences (two written by Spielberg and two by Eckstein) were added in 1972 for the theatrical version, released overseas. Spielberg’s were entirely visual: the opening from the point of view of Weaver’s car as it leaves his garage and heads out onto the highway (the TV version started with the car on the open road), and the truck’s attempt to push the car into a train. The other added sequences were those of the truck coming to the aid of a stalled school bus, and Weaver on the telephone arguing with his wife (Jacqueline Scott), who is shown at home as their two sons play with a toy robot (a Spielberg touch). Although Eckstein says Spielberg made no objection at the time to the husband-wife exchange, the director later regretted shooting the scene, which Matheson considers “so soap-opera-ish and unnecessary.”

  † Universal invested an additional $100,000 in three days of shooting by Spielberg for the theatrical version.

  ‡ Dale Van Sickle did the stunt driving in the Valiant, with Weaver doing mostly the closeups.

  § Spielberg suggested cutting all the voiceovers for th
e international theatrical version, keeping only the dialogue in Weaver’s interactions with other people, but the distributor (Cinema International Corporation), would not go along with such a radical idea. Eckstein says he and Spielberg still managed to remove “a lot” of narration and other dialogue for that version.

  ¶ When it received a belated U.S. theatrical release in 1983, Duel did little business, because it had been so widely seen on television, where it still is shown frequently in its longer version. The original TV version is no longer in release.

  || That was the night Spielberg joined much of Hollywood’s elite and President Richard Nixon to honor the dying director John Ford at the first American Film Institute Life Achievement Award dinner in Beverly Hills.

  ** Barwood and Robbins previously had written seven unfilmed scripts, including Clearwater, a futuristic tale set in the Pacific Northwest. It was announced by Universal as a Spielberg/Lang project in October 1973.

  †† The town where the climactic events actually took place was Wheelock, but the filmmakers borrowed the name of the town of Sugar Land and then filmed those scenes in Floresville.

  ‡‡ Besides his new girlfriend, Spielberg brought back two other mementos from the location, the revolving neon chicken sign from the scene at Dybala’s Golden Fryers drive-in and the bullet-riddled police car, Car 2311. Spielberg installed the chicken sign in his quarters at Universal and drove Car 2311 around Hollywood before donating it to a museum.

  §§ Rear-projected scenes shot separately from the actors, who are then filmed in front of the “process screen” backgrounds to create the illusion of their presence in those scenes.

  ¶¶ The low-speed police pursuit of O. J. Simpson in 1994, with members of the public cheering and waving at him from the sides of Los Angeles freeways, made Sugarland seem prophetic.