While making Close Encounters, Steven publicly admitted he had no time to do anything but “eat, shoot your movie, plan your shots for the next day, sleep, and forget women.” When Amy visited him on the Mobile location that summer, he confided to Julia Phillips, “I wish she hadn’t come. She keeps crying and I keep wanting to say, ‘Don’t you understand, I’m fucking my movie.’”
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TO follow the personal epiphany of Close Encounters, Spielberg considered several projects, including a pirate movie he had been developing for Twentieth Century–Fox with screenwriter Jeffrey Fiskin. Spielberg described it as a sixteenth-century action yarn “in the old Errol Flynn tradition,” about a love triangle involving a woman and two half-brothers, a peasant and an aristocrat. He dropped the project after Universal’s 1976 pirate movie Swashbuckler sank without a trace.
Spielberg came much closer to directing a comedy-drama about Negro leagues baseball players, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. The Motown-Universal film was based on the 1973 novel by William Brashler and adapted by Sugarland Express writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins. When the director originally hired for Bingo Long, Mark Rydell, dropped out because of a disagreement over budget limitations, Universal offered Motown the services of Spielberg, then in postproduction on Jaws. Spielberg was enthusiastic about the project, but as producer Rob Cohen explained, “The trouble was that as Jaws’ opening got nearer and nearer, Steve became less and less available. We were set to begin shooting within about a month of that, and there were a million things to be done. We couldn’t postpone production because we had a play-or-pay deal with James Earl Jones, so we simply had to have another director.” Spielberg was succeeded by another former Universal TV director, John Badham.
Spielberg’s youthful fondness for The Twilight Zone was reflected in his interest in William Goldman’s novel Magic, a spooky tale about a ventriloquist controlled by his dummy. Reminiscent of the 1962 Twilight Zone program “The Dummy” with Cliff Robertson, as well as the Michael Redgrave episode in the 1945 British thriller Dead of Night, Magic was a project Spielberg coveted before Richard Attenborough was hired to direct the United Artists release. “I had talked to Robert De Niro about playing the part that Anthony Hopkins wound up playing,” Spielberg recalled. “… I had it in my mind how I would have made that film, and I thought it would have been pretty good. After a year had gone by, and Dickie’s film opened in theaters [in 1978], I went to see the picture and realized that it was a hell of a lot better than what I would have done.”
Spielberg also considered directing a live network TV production of Reginald Rose’s teleplay Twelve Angry Men with a cast of both men and women. In his senior year at Saratoga High, Spielberg had worked on a stage production of the jury drama, which was first presented on CBS’s live Studio One series in 1954 and was made into a 1957 film (titled 12 Angry Men) by director Sidney Lumet. In the end, however, Spielberg was seduced by the prospect of working with two young comedy writers whose motto was “Social Irresponsibility.”
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IN 1973, a USC film school class visited Universal for a prerelease screening of The Sugarland Express. Afterward, student filmmaker Robert Zemeckis asked Spielberg to watch his black comedy A Field of Honor, about a newly discharged mental patient driven to a murderous rampage by exposure to the everyday violence of American society. “[M]y God, it was spectacular for a film student in his early twenties to have made such a picture with no money, with police cars and a riot and a lot of crazy characters … all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Great Escape,” Spielberg said later. “I saw that picture and I said, ‘This man is worth watching.’”
Following their graduation from USC, Zemeckis and writing partner Bob Gale wrote TV scripts for Universal and collaborated on two unproduced feature screenplays. One was Tank, about a group of dissidents who steal a Sherman tank from a National Guard Armory and threaten to blow up a Chicago building to protest the actions of oil companies. Tank tickled the fancy of writer-director John Milius, who recalled that Zemeckis and Gale “came in my office at Goldwyn, and they were just crazy, they were just raving wild men.”
“Boys,” growled Milius, “this script has a healthy sense of social irresponsibility. I applaud that.”
The burly, bombastic, yet genial Milius was an unabashed war freak who loved to goad Hollywood liberals with his retro politics, which were somewhere to the right of John Wayne’s. “I just absolutely hate liberals and people who are civilized,” Milius proclaimed in a 1975 Daily Variety interview with the author of this book. Spielberg had a clipping of the article delivered to Milius’s office, attached to a wooden carving board with a hunting knife stuck through a piece of raw, bloody meat.
Milius’s A-Team Productions had a deal to produce movies for MGM, and Zemeckis and Gale were hired to write a World War II movie titled The Night the Japs Attacked. Although objections from Japanese-Americans forced Milius to change the title (temporarily) to The Night the Japanese Attacked, the script offered something to offend virtually everyone in its broad lampooning of anti-Japanese hysteria among Los Angeles residents in the early days of the war. Spielberg changed the title to The Rising Sun and, finally, 1941.
The two Bobs began hanging out with Spielberg and Milius on Thursday nights at the Oak Tree Gun Club in the Newhall Pass north of Los Angeles. Milius had introduced Spielberg to the sport of skeet shooting, a male-bonding ritual for Milius and his fellow Hollywood gun enthusiasts. “There are numbers of gun owners—collectors, hunters, sport shooters—in the film community, plus many more who keep firearms for protection,” National Rifle Association spokesman Charlton Heston, also a friend of Milius’s, wrote in his 1995 autobiography, In the Arena. “I suspect, in fact, that there are more filmmakers who are closet gun enthusiasts than there are closet homosexuals. Steven Spielberg has one of the finest gun collections in California, but never refers to it, and never shoots publicly. Can you imagine the most famous filmmaker in town worried about his reputation?”
Spielberg, who had learned to shoot from his father while growing up in Arizona, still visits the Oak Tree Gun Club. “He’s a darn good shot,” says club member Robert Stack, himself a world-class target shooter. “He has terrific reactions. Clay target shooting is a very subtle, highly sophisticated sport; it takes a lot of nerve. He shot some very good scores.”
Evenings with the boys at the Oak Tree Gun Club also involved a stop along the way at a hamburger joint called Tommie’s. “Steven had this cheap Super-8 camera,” Milius recalled, “and he had all these films of us eating at Tommie’s and covering ourselves in chili and throwing up on the car, doing Bigfoot imitations, wonderful stuff. Great howling mad evenings out there at the range, out of which came 1941.”
In his only partly tongue-in-cheek introduction to a comic-book version of the movie, Spielberg wrote, “I was immediately attracted to [the script] because of its highly illiterate nature—it appeared to have been written by two guys whose only excursions into literature had been classic comics. My initial instincts were not far off: I subsequently learned that the sole writing experiences of the authors had been spray-painting the walls of public buildings with profanity and ethnic slurs. I continued to read their first-draft screenplay at a local junk-burger dive in the San Fernando Valley. Moments of the script were so funny that I vomited from laughter. It was this feeling of nausea that I felt moved to translate into cinematic imagery.”
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RETURNING to Los Angeles from five weeks of rewriting 1941 on the Mobile location of Close Encounters, the two Bobs began work on a script satirizing Beatlemania. The first of many films Spielberg has produced without directing, I Wanna Hold Your Hand follows six New Jersey teenagers journeying to New York City in February 1964 to take part in the frenzy surrounding the American TV debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. While borrowing unabashedly from A Hard Day’s Night and American Graffiti, Zemeckis and Gale tempered their nostalgia with sly insinuatio
ns about the repressed sexual hysteria underlying American teenagers’ obsession with the long-haired Liverpudlians.
Spielberg set up the movie with Sid Sheinberg, who agreed to let Zemeckis make his directorial debut at Universal. I Wanna Hold Your Hand was filmed on studio back lots for a modest $1.6 million in late 1977, with a cast of mostly unknown young actors and with doubles used to stand in for the Beatles. “Steven would come down to the set a lot when we were shooting,” Gale says, “and he’d make suggestions to Bob about how to block the scene. He’d say, ‘Here’s how you can play all this in one shot.’ Boy, it was great, because Steven was so good at that. He would quietly make a suggestion to Bob, or Bob would say, ‘Steven, help me out here.’”
In those days, Spielberg disclaimed any ambitious plans to act like a mogul or to supervise his own slate of projects with other directors. “My own theory about producing is, I’ll produce films that I would have otherwise directed,” he said in 1980. “… Movies slip away—you can’t do everything. But I like to think I can do everything, I want to do everything.”
The production of the charming, energetic I Wanna Hold Your Hand went smoothly, and though it was not a box-office success, the film gave Spielberg the gratifying experience of testing his hand as a producer while giving a break to another young director. Spielberg’s first mentor, Chuck Silvers, had asked him to remember to put something back into the industry once he became successful. Spielberg was doing just that.
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SPIELBERG planned to take a few weeks from preproduction on 1941 to knock off a low-budget comedy about children, After School, from yet another script by Zemeckis and Gale. The impetus for the project (sometimes referred to by Spielberg as Growing Up) came from François Truffaut, whose view of Spielberg’s true talents was diametrically opposed to the conventional Hollywood wisdom. Truffaut was celebrated for his films with children, including The Four Hundred Blows and Small Change. While acting in Close Encounters, Truffaut frequently urged Spielberg to make an American equivalent of Small Change: “You must make a movie about keeds. You must stop all this big stuff and make a movie about keeds! If it’s the last thing you do!”
Summoning the two Bobs, Spielberg said, “I want you guys to write a movie I’m really passionate about—about kids.”
“Great, Steven,” they replied. “What about ’em?”
“That’s it,” Spielberg said. “Kids.”
According to Gale, that was the extent of the guidance they received on the subject from Spielberg.
After talking with Spielberg in February 1978, Variety claimed that the film would be “a personal story of his own young adulthood.” In fact, Zemeckis and Gale were drawing from their adolescent experiences. “Zemeckis and I being the renegades we are—certainly we were more so then—we thought that to make it really interesting, it should be rated R, and we wrote it that way,” Gale says. “We swore like truckdrivers when we were twelve. A lot of kids do that, and we thought that would be the way to go. It was the classic nerds-against-jocks story. The nerds had a dogshit bomb on a radio-controlled car.” Spielberg found their concept amusing and provocative. “I don’t want to make a movie about children that’s dimples or cuteness,” he said. “… It’s my first vendetta film: I’m going to get back at about twenty people I’ve always wanted to get back at.”
Shooting was to begin that May for Universal, with a budget of only $1.5 million. Spielberg planned to use a cast of unknowns between the ages of eight and fourteen, shooting in a semi-improvisatory fashion and letting the kids contribute their own experiences to the screenplay. The writers set After School in Zemeckis’s hometown of Chicago, but Spielberg shifted the locale to his far more sedate hometown of Phoenix. Before preproduction could begin in earnest, Spielberg got cold feet about the screenplay. “I think it was a little too much for Steven,” says Gale. The turning point came when Spielberg asked cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to shoot After School. Deschanel “read it and hated it. He said, ‘This is disgusting.’ Steven didn’t really have a focus on what After School was going to be. The movie that he really wanted to make about kids turned out to be E.T.”
Spielberg explained his decision to drop the earlier movie about kids by saying, “I hadn’t grown up enough to make Grouting Up.” But he ruefully admitted a few years later, “I wanted to do a little film—not Annie Hall, because I haven’t met my Annie Hall yet, but a small film, an intimate film. They said, Anyone can make a little film, we want you to make big films. It was capricious of me, but I agreed…. I plunged into [1941] with such wild abandon that I didn’t really focus on the story I was telling, to know whether it was funny or simply stupid or whether the film was getting too overblown.… On about the hundred and forty-fifth day of shooting, I realized that the film was directing me, I wasn’t directing it.”
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“WE realize now that no one in his right mind would have tackled our story,” Zemeckis said after 1941 finished shooting. “But we didn’t reckon on Steve.” Outwardly, at least, Spielberg seemed like one of the sanest young filmmakers in Hollywood of the late seventies, even one of the squarest. Yet part of him wanted to fit in with that era’s “wild and crazy” humor, typified by John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and the rest of the Saturday Night Live crowd. “I must say that there’s a part of me, in my nice, conservative life, that is probably as crazy and insane as Milius and the two guys who wrote that script,” Spielberg said in a 1996 documentary about the making of 1941. “… I really thought it would be a great opportunity to break a lot of furniture and see a lot of glass shattering. It was basically written and directed as one would perform in a demolition derby.”
Much as Spielberg would like to claim a truly anarchic spirit, more likely it was his lifelong need to seek protective coloration through conformity that resulted in what he acknowledged was the “total conceptual disaster” of 1941. While not about to surrender enough of his self-control to embrace the self-destructive drug lifestyle of Belushi and so many other young people in show business during the 1970s, Spielberg nevertheless was uncomfortable seeming too far out of step with his generation. Time magazine aptly summarized 1941 as “Animal House Goes to War.” An elephantine postmodernist farce about World War II whose large cast featured Belushi and Aykroyd, it broadly satirized anti-Japanese hysteria in Los Angeles during the week following Pearl Harbor. Spielberg borrowed Belushi and Tim Matheson from director John Landis’s 1978 National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Landis himself played a small part as a motorcycle messenger in 1941. With its crude sexual innuendos and equally witless attempts at social satire, 1941, as Ron Pennington of The Hollywood Reporter observed, “makes Animal House look like a highly sophisticated comedy.”*
The clash of styles and sensibilities was obvious from the first day of shooting. “This is not a Spielberg movie,” the director kept saying to himself. “What am I doing here?”
Zemeckis and Gale had come across the little-known story of “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid” and the events leading up to it while doing research for Tank at the downtown Los Angeles public library. “Although 1941 is based on actual incidents that took place in southern California during World War II,” Gale wrote in his novelization of the screenplay, “in many cases the truth has been modified, embellished, or completely thrown out the window in the interests of drama, entertainment, cheap sensationalism, and getting a few laughs.”
The facts were these: On the night of February 22, 1942, a Japanese submarine lobbed about twenty shells at the oil fields on the coast of southern California, twelve miles north of Santa Barbara. The shells did little damage. One hit an oil well derrick a quarter mile from the beach, and a fuse from an unexploded shell injured an Army officer trying to disarm it a few days later. Nevertheless, the attack was the first on the American mainland by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812. Nearby Los Angeles went into a heightened stage of alert. Two nights later, shortly after 3:00 A.M., the sky over the city was filled with ack-ack rounds from a
ntiaircraft guns for forty-five minutes when unidentified enemy planes were thought to be spotted over the coastline. L.A. AREA RAIDED! screamed the Los Angeles Times in an extra edition on February 25.
Although it never was determined exactly what set off the initial barrage—probably an errant weather balloon—Angelenos reacted in an orgy of unrestrained panic. All over the city there were phantom enemy aircraft sightings, and it was incorrectly reported that four enemy planes were shot down over the city. Exploding shrapnel from 1,440 rounds of antiaircraft ammunition rained down on houses as people cowered inside for shelter or dashed madly around the darkened streets. One man was injured by an exploding shell, and five people died of heart attacks or traffic injuries during the blackout resulting from the imaginary “air raid.”
William A. Fraker, Spielberg’s cinematographer on 1941, witnessed the event as a young signalman on a Coast Guard transport ship in San Pedro Harbor. To Fraker’s eyes, “It was all so exquisite. My mouth hung open for the entire time. We couldn’t believe it was happening. From San Pedro to Malibu it looked like the Fourth of July. We didn’t think the war could have come this far.”
This bizarre event might have provided the framework for a corrosive satire of wartime jitters and racist anxieties on the homefront. One can easily imagine what Preston Sturges might have done with the story, lampooning the sheltered gullibility of ordinary Americans in the trenchant manner of his wartime comedies The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero. But social satire, however farcical in spirit, cannot depart so far from reality that it turns into outright fantasy, or much of the satirical sting is lost. Having an aerial dogfight take place over Hollywood Boulevard, to cite the most egregious example, lends visual excitement to 1941, but only adds to its unbelievability.
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