Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  TEN

  “A PRIMAL SCREAM MOVIE”

  WHO WANTS TO BE KNOWN AS A SHARK-AND-TRUCK DIRECTOR?

  – STEVEN SPIELBERG, 1973

  IN November 1973, with The Sugarland Express completed and awaiting release, Spielberg told an American Film Institute seminar that “when you make your first feature in this town, you’re incredibly hot, and if you have a good agent, he’ll make your next three deals—before your film comes out. Then, if your film comes out and it crashes … you’ve got three films in which to redeem yourself. I have a terrific agent [Guy McElwaine], and he has created the greatest hype…. At four studios, he’s got me carte blanche to do whatever I want for a reasonable sum of money.”

  “Carte blanche” was something of an exaggeration. Spielberg was eager to direct Peter Stone’s screenplay The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, from the thriller novel by John Godey about the hijacking of a New York subway train. After a rough-cut screening of Sugarland, United Artists production chief David Picker acknowledged Spielberg’s promise. But Picker considered Pelham “director-proof” and opted instead for the journeyman Joseph Sargent, who had succeeded Spielberg on UA’s White Lightning. Then Spielberg passed up another picture that Sargent went on to direct. Richard Zanuck and David Brown offered him MacArthur, a screenplay by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins about the controversial career of General Douglas MacArthur. Spielberg claimed he rejected the film because he was wary of the logistical problems involved in staging World War II and the Korean War, but Zanuck thinks he “just didn’t care for the subject.”

  Spielberg knew how important it was to choose his projects with care in that formative period of his feature career. On the heels of Sugarland, another failure, particularly an artistic as well as a financial failure, could have been a catastrophic setback for the young director. It was around this time that, according to Brown, Spielberg “turned down a script given to him by one of the biggest stars in the world because he didn’t think the star was right for the role. In explanation, the young director said, ‘Look, if I ever make a picture again, I’m not going to make those kinds of compromises or I will have a very short career.’”

  Spielberg’s choosiness paid off when he made a development deal for his dream project. An unofficial remake of his 8mm sci-fi feature Firelight on a far grander scale, the film that would become Close Encounters of the Third Kind was even more deeply personal to Spielberg than The Sugarland Express. “I would have gone to great lengths to make it—whether I did it here in this country, or elsewhere,” he said. “Somehow I would have found the money. It’s a movie I’d wanted to make for over ten years.”

  He first considered making a documentary about people who believe in UFOs, or a low-budget feature, before realizing that “a picture that depended a great deal on state-of-the-art technology couldn’t be made for $2.5 million.” Close Encounters evolved from a short story he wrote in 1970 called “Experiences,” about a “lovers’ lane in a small midwestern town and a light show in the sky overhead that these kids see from inside their cars.” Borrowing a famous phrase from the ending of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, Spielberg retitled the project Watch the Skies before making a development deal with Columbia Pictures in the fall of 1973.

  *

  DURING postproduction on Sugarland, Spielberg had become friendly with the young producer Michael Phillips, who was at Universal producing The Sting for Zanuck/Brown along with his wife, Julia, and Spielberg’s friend Tony Bill. Michael Phillips found Spielberg “an eager kid who continually bubbled with enthusiasm. He was interested in everything, not just films, he wasn’t one-dimensional. He was always interested in new technologies, and he was one of the first people to get hooked on video games; he was the first filmmaker to install a Pong game or a Tank game on his dubbing stage. He was full of genuine love of movies, and he didn’t seem to have much competitiveness with other filmmakers; this distinguished him from the group. And he had this incredible film under his belt called Duel.

  “We became friends by having lunch every day at the Universal commissary and talking about our favorite science-fiction films, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still. He said, ‘I want to invite myself over for dinner and pitch you a story.’ All he said was that it was about ‘UFOs and Watergate.’ It focused on the cover-up of the truth that the government was hiding from the citizenry about UFOs and Project Blue Book [the long-classified U.S. Air Force study of UFOs]. It was very, very different from what we wound up making, and I don’t think it was anywhere near as good as it wound up being.”

  Screenwriter-director Paul Schrader remembers the summer of 1973 as “very heady, because every weekend a lot of people would assemble at Michael and Julia’s house” at Trancas Beach in Malibu. “We used to have a continual open house,” says Michael Phillips. “It was a place where all of us in the film community of roughly the same age would have a barbecue, swim, lie in the sun, listen to music, and talk about movies. A lot of these writers and directors helped each other. They worked on each other’s films, they would contribute scenes or dialogue, and help on the rough cuts. It was a wonderful community at that time.”

  The group included Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, John Milius, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Blythe Danner and her producer husband, Bruce Paltrow, Margot Kidder, Janet Margolin, attorney Tom Pollock (later an executive with MCA and Universal), screenwriter David Ward (an Oscar winner for The Sting), and the married screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck (George Lucas’s collaborators on the script of American Graffiti). “Even though we were relatively unknown,” Schrader recalled, “there was a real feeling that the world was our oyster.”

  After meeting the Huycks at one of those gatherings, Spielberg asked them to write a screenplay based on what Katz calls a “little weird pink book. It was a biography of the inventor of the toilet, Thomas Crapper. It was titled Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper [by Wallace Reyburn, 1969]. We came up with the great idea of doing it as Young Tom Edison.” “But like Little Big Man,” adds Huyck. The book that so tickled Spielberg’s fancy begins (quite earnestly) with these words about the British inventor: “Never has the saying ‘A prophet is without honour in his own land’ been more true than in the case of Thomas Crapper. Here was a man whose foresight, ingenuity and perseverance brought to perfection one of the great boons to mankind. But is his name revered in the same way as, for example, that of the Earl of Sandwich? … It was left to the Americans to give the man his due.”

  “We wrote a treatment,” Huyck relates, “and we gave it to our [mutual] agent, Guy McElwaine, who said, ‘Steve, if this is the kind of movie you want to do, I don’t want to be your agent.’”

  That bizarre excursion into bad-taste humor made the Huycks more skeptical when Spielberg pitched another movie idea. “Steve took us to dinner and told us he had this story he wanted us to write about things from outer space landing on Robertson Boulevard [in West Hollywood],” says Katz. “I go, ‘Steve, that’s the worst idea I ever heard. I don’t want to be told an idea about a spaceship. It’s very strange.’ He had Paul Schrader write it.”

  The troubled but brilliant Schrader, who was in rebellion from a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing in Michigan, explored his religious preoccupations in his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Spielberg briefly expressed interest in directing Schrader’s dark, semiautobiographical screenplay Taxi Driver, which became the controversial 1976 Robert De Niro film directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by the Phillipses for Columbia. Spielberg agreed to serve as a back-up director on the film, a condition Columbia insisted upon before allowing Scorsese to begin shooting; Spielberg’s only other involvement was to make suggestions on the rough cut.

  Spielberg chose not to offer Watch the Skies to Universal. “He wanted to get away from Universal a little bit,” Michael Phillips explains. “He didn’t want to be a captive of Universal. He’s been consistent with this—he’s been
incredibly loyal [to Universal], but he makes movies with all the studios, he works with everybody. He had other people in town that he was friendly with. He used to play cards every week with Alan Ladd Jr. [Twentieth Century-Fox’s feature-division executive in charge of creative affairs], and that’s why we started to go to Fox first [with Watch the Skies].” In her waspish Hollywood memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, Julia Phillips took a more jaundiced view of Spielberg’s first steps at becoming a mogul: “Steven was hanging out with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies…. We got Steven outta Guy [McElwainel’s house in the Bev Hills flats, and on to the beach, where people were still discussing art and greatness, and were occasionally smoking a joint.”

  After initial discussions with Fox, Spielberg and the Phillipses concluded that the studio had insufficient enthusiasm for Watch the Skies. The producers suggested offering the project to an executive with whom they all had a friendly relationship, David Begelman, the recently hired president of financially shaky Columbia Pictures.* “We went with Columbia because David was ready and able and willing to step up at a level of a commitment that made us think he was going to stand behind the film,” Michael Phillips says. “It was a big bet, and he took it. David was a believer in Steven from Duel.”

  In the two decades since Star Wars and Close Encounters were released, science-fiction films have accounted for half of the top twenty box-office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre, “There was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction—it was a B genre,” Phillips recalls. “The conventional wisdom was, ‘Science-fiction films never make more than $4 million, except for 2001, and that’s an exception.’ But Columbia needed a hit. Had they not been in such desperate financial condition, maybe they would have been less needy, less aggressive, but here they had a shot. They could see that if it all worked out well, they had a chance for a big, big hit.”

  Intrigued by the unorthodox spiritual overtones implicit in mankind’s yearning for contact with extraterrestrial life, Paul Schrader was hired by Columbia on December 12, 1973, to write the screenplay of Spielberg’s UFO project, for which the writer was to receive $35,000 and 2.5 percent of the net profits. Watch the Skies originally was scheduled to begin shooting in the fall of 1974. But as Phillips recalls, “We went through a lot of trouble getting the script in its final form. We were struggling with it for a couple of years. Steven came to us one day [in 1973] and said, ‘Listen, would you mind terribly, I really need the money, this picture’s being delayed and I’ve got an offer to do a movie about a shark. It will take me six months. Then I’ll get back and finish Watch the Skies.’ We said, ‘Oh, no, that’ll be fine, we’re stuck here anyway.’”

  *

  SHORTLY after Spielberg returned from the Texas locations of The Sugarland Express, he spotted a copy of an unpublished novel in his producers’ office and “stole the galley proofs off Dick Zanuck’s desk! I said, ‘I can make something of this. It’ll be fun.’” But for Zanuck, Brown, and Universal, Spielberg was not the first choice to direct Jaws, the film that would become the biggest moneymaker in motion picture history.

  The idea for the novel began germinating in the mind of author Peter Benchley during the summer of 1964, when he read a small item in the New York Daily News about Long Island shark fisherman Frank Mundus, who had harpooned a giant shark weighing an estimated 4,500 pounds. Mundus would become the prototype for Captain Quint, the obsessed shark-hunter in Jaws. As a youth, Peter Benchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of novelist Nathaniel Benchley, had spent summers in Nantucket going on shark-fishing expeditions with his father and brother. His awareness of the power of sharks to strike awe and terror into movie audiences was heightened by his viewing of Peter Gimbel’s 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death. That same year, Benchley, who was working as an associate editor at Newsweek, accepted the first $1,000 of a $7,500 advance from Doubleday and began writing his first novel, a thriller about a great white shark feeding on human prey off the coast of Long Island.

  Before the galley proofs reached Universal and several other movie studios in 1973, Jaws had been turned down by ABC as a TV movie, because the network figured it would cost too much to produce. That decision was made before the book stirred a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry with its paperback auction: Bantam Books bought the paperback rights for a staggering $575,000. “There was a lot of heat around town on this book,” recalls Peter Saphier, who was Jennings Lang’s right-hand man at Universal. “It was given to me on a Wednesday [April 11, 1973] by Benchley’s agent [John Ptak of International Famous Artists], and I read it over the weekend. I thought, This is going to be a smash movie—send it to Lew Wasserman. We had to move quickly. Jennings was a consummate packager, and when I gave him the report on Monday, he said, ‘I’ll call Lew. I’ll call Leonard Hirshan [a William Morris agent] and send it to him for Paul Newman.’ I wrote a note to Lew and—thinking of the old man and the sea—I suggested Alfred Hitchcock to direct.”

  On April 17, the Universal story department, which generated a reader’s report on every property offered to the studio, rendered its opinion. To Saphier’s astonishment, “They didn’t like it! If the story department liked a property, they would stamp on the first page ‘Recommend,’ or they would stamp ‘Possibility.’ If they didn’t like it they wouldn’t stamp it at all. They didn’t stamp it at all. I thought, Oh, God, they’re killing me.” But by the following day, Zanuck and Brown had read the synopsis by studio reader Dennis McCarthy, and they called Wasserman to express their strong interest in the project.

  They soon found themselves in what Zanuck remembers as “a fierce bidding contest.” Columbia expressed interest on behalf of veteran producer-director Stanley Kramer, but the final bidding came down to Warner Bros. and Universal. “We did everything,” Zanuck said. “We got down on bended knee. We made a lot of promises that, happily, we lived up to…. The other people had as much money as we did. It got down to who was going to make the better picture. We convinced [Benchley] that we would.” In a deal concluded on May 1 between Ptak and Universal, Zanuck/Brown agreed to pay the author $150,000 and 10 percent of the net profits for the book and $25,000 for his screenplay adaptation.† “Jennings, frankly, erupted when that happened,” Saphier says. “He felt it should have been our picture, under our wing.”

  A few days later, when Saphier was having lunch in the studio commissary, Zanuck and Brown thanked him for finding Jaws. “We figure on making it as a low-budget picture for about $750,000,” they said. Saphier expressed skepticism that a film made on the water—traditionally regarded as a nightmarish environment for filmmakers—could be shot so cheaply. The producers thought for a moment and replied, “Maybe a million.” Brown later admitted that after acquiring the book, he and Zanuck “experienced a panic of unpreparedness. If we had read Jaws twice, we might never have made the movie. Careful analysis could have convinced us that it was too difficult to make.”

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  ZANUCK and Brown initially thought the best way to ensure themselves against the production problems posed by Jaws was to hire an experienced action director. The first director with whom they discussed the picture was John Sturges, whose films included not only the classics Bad Day at Black Rock and The Great Escape but also The Old Man and the Sea, a travesty of the Hemingway novel filmed mostly in a studio tank, with Spencer Tracy sitting in front of a process screen. That was exactly the kind of film the producers came to realize they did not want to make of Jaws. They decided to offer the job instead to Dick Richards, who was in his late thirties and had made his feature debut at Fox in 1972 with a Western about a teenaged cowboy, The Culpepper Cattle Company.

  “Part of the deal, if we were to buy this book, was that it would be much appreciated if we took an IFA director,” Zanuck recalls. “We had a gentleman’s agreement with Mike Medavoy [Spielberg’s former agent, then hea
d of the motion picture department of IFA]. They came up with several names. We went back [to New York] to meet with Benchley, and we brought this director [Richards] with us to lunch at ‘21.’ The director kept referring to this thing as ‘the whale.’ After he’d done it three times, I said, ‘For God’s sake, this is a fucking shark!’ As we walked back to the office after this disastrous lunch, I said to Mr. Brown, ‘We gotta renege. No way this guy who thinks a shark’s a whale is going to direct this picture.’ I called Mike. It was a tough call. Mike said, ‘This is a big renege. I’m going to lose the client.’ I said, ‘Your client should know the difference between a whale and a shark. I can’t go out to sea with this man.’”

  Spielberg by then had made his interest known, and the producers, delighted by his work on The Sugarland Express, were beginning to think it might be better not to work with a more experienced Hollywood hand. “The studio visualized having one of those guys out there,” Zanuck says. “It probably would have made more sense from an economic standpoint, and we would sleep better at night, but we wanted to make something that would knock everybody’s socks off.” “We were looking for a film as well as a movie,” said Brown, “and that’s why we selected Steven Spielberg.”

  His signing was announced on June 21, 1973. But not before Spielberg, too, began having second thoughts. “Steven got very excited about it, and then got very scared,” Zanuck says. “It became a question of ‘How do you make the son of a bitch?’ It’s one thing to read the book and another to build the shark.” Jaws co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb reported that Spielberg also was “afraid of being typed as an action director who specialized in contests between brave men and insensate killers. ‘Who wants to be known as a shark-and-truck director?’ was his complaint.” Spielberg “was reluctant to take on Jaws because he recognized it would be primarily a commercial movie and not necessarily a distinguished film, and he is a serious filmmaker,” Brown said shortly before Jaws was released in 1975. “Dick and I convinced him, and I think he now realizes he did make a film as well as a movie—not that he doesn’t respect the big commercial movie and regard it as a necessary part of his career.”