The film’s most pervasive credibility problem is that the writers divorced the Los Angeles “air raid” from much of the social context that would have made it meaningful. While the characters’ hysterical fear of “Japs” is exploited for what Milius gleefully referred to as “politically incorrect” farce, the most significant omission is any mention of the rounding-up of Japanese-American residents of Los Angeles and their deportation to internment camps, a process that was beginning in earnest during the week the actual shelling took place. The movie was backdated to the day and night of December 13, 1941, to heighten the proximity to Pearl Harbor. Purely for comic effect, the screenwriters took the license of throwing in Los Angeles’s 1943 zoot-suit riots, while barely alluding to the anti-Hispanic bias that led to those riots. Acknowledging the true extent of the racist paranoia in wartime California would have made the film’s satire of war hysteria much more troubling and incisive.
But Spielberg admitted, “I really didn’t have a vision for 1941.” It would have been a better film, he now thinks, if it had been directed by Zemeckis, who has described his own vision of 1941 as “very dark and very cynical.” Indeed, if Zemeckis had prevailed, the film’s ending would have written a new chapter in the annals of darkness and cynicism: Jitterbugging delinquent Wally Stephans (Bobby Di Cicco), having become the bombardier on the Enola Gay, drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as revenge for losing a USO dance contest. That ending was “too outrageous for everyone,” Zemeckis regretted. “No one would listen to me.”
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THE screenwriters’ reckless conflation of historical events undermines the memorable scene of Major General Joseph W. Stilwell (Robert Stack) watching Walt Disney’s Dumbo in a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard. This scene was inspired by a letter Stilwell wrote to his wife from Washington, D.C., about his activities with his personal aide on December 25, 1941: “[W]e had Christmas dinner—and a good one—at a restaurant—and dissipated further by seeing Dumbo. I nearly fell off my chair when the elephant pyramid toppled over. We sat through the film twice.”
Stilwell at the time was based in Monterey, California, as commander of the Third Army Corps, with responsibility for California coastal defenses from San Luis Obispo south to San Diego. He was in the Los Angeles area briefly in December, and though he encountered “strange cases of jitters” and some “wild, farcical and fantastic” rumors of imminent danger, no civil unrest occurred during his visit, nor was there any outside the Washington theater where the real-life general watched Dumbo. Considered in isolation, the scene in 1941 of Stilwell tearfully watching the baby elephant being caressed by its imprisoned mother is a strangely charming expression of childlike tenderness, evoking the power of entertainment to provide solace in time of war. But the unspoken (and no doubt unintended) implication that Stilwell is criminally oblivious to his duties makes nonsense of the historical character and undercuts Stack’s dignified portrayal of Stilwell as one of the few sane individuals in the movie.
The role originally was offered to John Wayne, who read the script and “spent an hour trying to persuade me not to direct it,” Spielberg recalled. “I’m so surprised at you,” Wayne told him. “I thought you were an American, and I thought you were going to make a movie to honor the memory of World War II. But this dishonors the memory of what happened.” Another conservative icon, Charlton Heston, passed on the part for the same reason. “I never saw it as an anti-American film,” Spielberg insisted. “… What’s wrong about sticking a pie in the face of the Statue of Liberty from time to time, if it’s in the spirit of humor?”
Spielberg also offered the role to the legendary B-movie director Samuel Fuller, a former World War II infantryman, but Fuller objected that he bore no physical resemblance to Stilwell. Casting Fuller instead as the cigar-chomping commanding officer of the Southern California Interceptor Command, Spielberg finally turned to his shooting buddy from the Oak Tree Gun Club. With a military haircut, wire-rimmed glasses, and a minimal amount of makeup, Robert Stack bore an uncanny resemblance to “Vinegar Joe.”
When they went on location at the downtown Los Angeles Theatre to shoot the scene of Stilwell watching Dumbo, Spielberg asked Stack if he wanted drops for his eyes to help himself cry.
“If I remember Dumbo, it was a great scene,” Stack replied. “If I look at Dumbo, I can do it without acting.”
“I want the scene run for Bob!” Spielberg said. “Roll it!”
“He made sure I had the setting all around me,” Stack remembers. “He didn’t say, ‘OK, you’re reacting to …’ When I made my first picture, with Deanna Durbin, they had a blackboard and they pointed to it and said, ‘There she is, she’s beautiful!’ As I was watching the scene in Dumbo, tears were starting to come. This guy was shooting with a massive camera and all that incredible equipment, but he didn’t get overpowered with the camera. Steven shot that in one take! I couldn’t believe it. He has incredible confidence. I’ve never done anything like that before, without coverage or protection. I thought, ‘This guy knows what he wants. That’s class!’”
Stack adds, “But if you want the truth, I never fully understood the script. It was a strange script. Just plain strange.”
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SPIELBERG’S fondness for Mad magazine’s “Scenes We’d Like to See” was gratified by 1941’s irreverent riffs on the patriotic fervor of vintage World War II movies. On a deeper thematic level, the script offered him a demented comic inversion of Close Encounters. Its satiric portrayal of a narrow-minded American populace overcome with exaggerated fear of alien invasion and unidentified flying objects allowed Spielberg license for his hitherto submerged sense of comic invective.
Although Spielberg rather foolishly described 1941 at the time of its release as “a celebration of paranoia”—an indication of how confused his conscious intentions were in approaching the subject—his deepest and most truly subversive sympathy is, as always, with the outsiders. While Japanese-Americans are conspicuous by their absence, the commander of the Japanese submarine, Mitamura (Toshiro Mifune, hero of The Seven Samurai and other Akira Kurosawa classics), is portrayed as a man of fierce dignity and stature, if a bit blinkered in his idea of military “honor.” (It’s fortunate that Spielberg had second thoughts about the propriety of casting John Belushi in the role.) In one of the few genuinely funny scenes in the movie, Mitamura, searching for a way to “destroy something honorable on the American mainland,” brushes off the skepticism of a subordinate who asks, “Is there anything honorable to destroy in Los Angeles?” To which the boyish navigator brightly suggests, “Hollywood!”
Mitamura’s decision to shell Hollywood to “demoralize the Americans’ will to fight” gives Spielberg the opportunity to trash the Los Angeles basin from the Santa Monica Pier to the La Brea Tar Pits and Hollywood Boulevard. Far removed in spirit from the apocalyptic vision of “The Burning of Los Angeles” in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, this gleeful fantasy of destruction is sheer juvenile indulgence on Spielberg’s part. The lovingly and lavishly rendered mayhem of riots, plane crashes, and explosions, along with the wholesale trashing of any available prop, became the movie’s mindless raison d’être. The Three Stooges served as the screenwriters’ inspiration for much of the film’s infantile humor. The director, reports Gale, was also “a big Stooges fan.”
Spielberg’s need to unwind from the pressures of filming Close Encounters led him to dream up all sorts of zany, outrageous gags for 1941, such as the self-referential opening sequence of a naked female swimmer encountering a Japanese submarine off the fog-shrouded coast of northern California. Parodying the opening of Jaws, Spielberg cast the same shapely young woman (Susan Backlinie) who had been attacked by the shark and had John Williams repeat his ominous musical theme. While mildly amusing, the scene went on far too long, and it was a bit early for Spielberg to begin paying homage to his own movies. “We wouldn’t have had the audacity to propose that,” Gale admits. “And we have a lot of audacity.”†
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br /> Spielberg’s impulses toward self-conscious stylization made him flirt with an even more radical notion. “In the back of my mind,” he said, “I always saw 1941 as an old-fashioned Hollywood musical,” with big-band numbers written by Williams. “… I just didn’t have the courage at that time in my life to tackle a musical.” The film’s excitingly staged jitterbug contest was described by the director as “a fragment of what I wanted to do … [and] the most satisfying experience for me in making 1941.”
*
THREE months before the cameras rolled, Spielberg vowed, “I will not make this movie if it costs a penny over $12 million.” As the budget escalated well beyond that figure, Zemeckis and Gale had the quotation bound into their revised drafts of the screenplay, and Spielberg’s vow also mysteriously appeared on gag T-shirts distributed to the crew. Another T-shirt, made up by the crew members themselves during the 247 days of shooting, contained the weary sentiment, “1941 Forever … and ever … and ever.”
Although initially developed under Milius’s deal at MGM, 1941 was made as an unusual joint venture of Columbia and Universal. “Spielberg didn’t want to make the movie at MGM,” Gale explains. “He had just made Close Encounters for Columbia. Steven had an interesting theory, which was to make your next picture for the same studio you were working on your current picture for, because that would keep them honest about wanting to promote it. Dan Melnick was running MGM at the time we developed 1941; Melnick didn’t like the script at all—he didn’t get it. Then Melnick ended up at Columbia; after [David] Begelman left, he was running the store [as head of worldwide production]. I remember Melnick saying, ‘I don’t understand this script, I don’t think it’s funny, but I guess if both Milius and Spielberg say this is gonna be a good picture, we’ll do it.’ So that’s how it got to Columbia. At the same time, Sid Sheinberg was putting a tremendous amount of pressure on Steven to do his next picture at Universal: ‘You gotta make another picture for me, Steven. You owe me.’”‡
The two studios shared all costs and proceeds on 1941, with Universal handling U.S. and Canadian distribution and Columbia distributing the film overseas. Completed at a cost of $31.5 million, 1941 was one of the most expensive films made up until that time, more than $5 million over its $26 million budget (and a whopping $20 million over its original cost estimate). Although 1941 had an executive producer, John Milius, and a producer, Buzz Feitshans, Spielberg admitted 1941 went “capriciously and lavishly over-budget and over-schedule, which was all my fault…. We would have been better off with $10 million less, because we went from one plot to seven subplots. But at the time, I wanted it—the bigness, the power, hundreds of people at my beck and call, millions of dollars at my disposal, and everybody saying, Yes, yes, yes…. 1941 was my Little General period.” 1941 became a textbook example of what can happen when a director coming off two successive hits (both of which had gone well over budget) has no one willing or able to say “no” to him.
Columbia’s production president John Veitch, the executive directly responsible for the film, told Zemeckis and Gale he would let Spielberg do whatever he wanted because he was a “genius.” Although Veitch’s faith in Spielberg’s creative instincts had been triumphantly borne out by the artistic and commercial success of Close Encounters, such license allowed the misconceived 1941 to spiral out of control, giving free rein to Spielberg’s worst instincts. “If you’re going to go over budget, you want to go over budget with someone like Steven,” Veitch contends. “He’s not going over budget because he’s being careless or because he’s going to get a scene no matter how much it costs or how long it takes. Steven’s dedication is to getting the finest picture possible.”
The runaway atmosphere of the production was exacerbated by factors beyond Spielberg’s control, including the fact that Belushi and Aykroyd could only work three days a week because they were commuting to New York for Saturday Night Live. Rampant cocaine use also was a major problem. According to Bob Woodward’s book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, the actor’s heavy use of cocaine often made it hard for him to remember lines and forced him to work in short, unpredictable bursts of energy. On one occasion, Belushi arrived on the set an hour and a half late, “so drugged up that he nearly rolled out of the car onto the ground.” Angrily confronting Belushi in the star’s trailer, Spielberg told him, “You can do this to anyone else, but you can’t do it to me. For $350,000 [Belushi’s salary] you’re going to show up.” Spielberg delegated associate producer Janet Healy to watch over Belushi, but as Woodward reported, “Healy didn’t find John’s drug use unusual compared to that of some other members of the cast and production crew. She counted twenty-five people on the set who used cocaine at times.”
Spielberg may have been one of the soberest members of the 1941 company, but his “dedication to getting the finest picture possible” escalated into a near-addiction during the eighteen months of production, with more than a million feet of film cascading through his cameras. This time he did not rely on an extensive use of optical effects to help create his grandiose illusions. “I had it, waiting half a year to see film on Close Encounters, so I decided to make a picture the way they used to make ’em,” Spielberg explained. “… I’ve had it with matte work and motion-control cameras. Everything here is done the way it would have been done by D. W. Griffith…. I’m going to make this one as physical as possible.” As a result of that questionable decision, the largely studio-bound production ran up extraordinary expenses for the staging of full-scale gags and the construction of elaborate miniature sets.
At a cost of almost $400,000, two takes were filmed of a full-sized P-40 fighter plane crashing at sixty miles an hour onto a street at the Burbank Studios decorated to resemble Hollywood Boulevard during the 1941 Christmas season. The master shot of the riot sequence involved numerous crashing vehicles, Stuntmen doubling as zoot-suiters, and several hundred extras in period costumes, including 650 in military uniforms, stampeding on cue when Milius fired a rifle into the air. For the film’s ending, Spielberg had an actual full-sized house built at a cost of $260,000 and dropped off a beachfront hillside, with seven cameras capturing its descent.
The spectacularly detailed miniatures built by Close Encounters modelmaker Gregory Jein included a panoramic aerial view of the San Fernando Valley; the Hollywood Boulevard canyon where the dogfight occurs; and Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel blasted free by Japanese shells rolls into the ocean. Impressive as the miniatures are on screen, they required extensive use of fog effects to make them believable. That meant smoke had to be used in all the other scenes for matching purposes. Although cinematographer William A. Fraker created a subtly fantastic mood in the scenes involving miniatures, his lighting in other scenes sometimes appeared fuzzy and overexposed.§
The entire first month after filming began on October 23, 1978, was spent working on the miniature set featuring the Ferris wheel. Shooting on miniatures went for weeks following the conclusion of principal photography on May 16, 1979. “Steven fell in love with his miniature footage, which, in my opinion, is the best miniature stuff ever filmed,” Gale says. “But he used every single shot he did of the dogfight, in some way, shape, or form, and I think that sequence is probably about 30 percent too long. How many times can you watch the planes go up and down the street? Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, and I think that’s what happened in 1941.”
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SPIELBERG’S disenchantment with 1941 was evident long before its first exposure to an audience. “Comedy is not my forte,” he admitted during the shooting. While editing the film, he bluntly called it an “utter horror…. I can’t correct the overall conceptual disasters about 1941, but I can fix little pieces here and there that I think will help speed the pace. If you can’t do anything about it, then you’re at the mercy of what comics call ‘the death silence’: you expected a laugh and all there is is a hole.”
Following the first preview on October 19, 1979,
at the Medallion Theater in Dallas—where Spielberg had had such success previewing Jaws and Close Encounters—the opening was delayed from November 16 until December 14 while 1941 underwent what Daily Variety called “surgery.” “When we opened with that sub surfacing and the [Jaws] music and so forth, the people started to applaud, they flipped,” Veitch recalls. “Leo Jaffe [Columbia’s chairman of the board] was sitting next to me; we thought we had something very special. Then it started to dissipate. By the time the picture ended, we knew we were having some problems with it. They applauded, but it was not the thunderous applause that you were hoping to get after a Steven picture. I think the audience expected a lot more than what was on the screen.”
In the lobby after the preview, Sid Sheinberg put his arm around Spielberg and said, “I think there’s a movie somewhere in this mess. There’s a really good movie, and we should go off and find it.” “The rest of the executives from Columbia and Universal,” Spielberg remembered, “didn’t even want to talk to me.” The angry director said at the time that the preview had taught him one important lesson: “I learned not to invite Universal and Columbia executives and sales people to previews anymore. Let them stay home and watch Laverne and Shirley on TV. I’ll preview my pictures and make the changes.”
A second preview was held in Denver, where the film played “a little better,” says Veitch, “but still by that time the word was out.” Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn finally emerged from the cutting room with a 118-minute release version of 1941, 17 minutes shorter than the version previewed in Dallas. Many of the discarded scenes turned up later in the expanded ABC-TV version and in the restored 1996 laserdisc version released by MCA Universal Home Video, which runs 146 minutes. Although the restoration is somewhat less frenetic and more coherent than the theatrical version, the essential foolishness of the concept remains impervious to change. But Gale was correct in observing that the director’s prerelease editing tended to sacrifice character development for spectacle: “Steven got scared of the movie. Steven had a certain amount of impatience about not wanting to take the time to set things up. When he got nervous that it was taking too long to get to be night in 1941, he’d start lopping out chunks of exposition, not realizing how important some of the stuff was. Bobby Di Cicco is not in the movie enough, and he was intended to be the central character. Steven played against the wrong-side-of-the-tracks aspect of his character. Steven was always afraid of those kind of guys; they were the ones who used to pick on him. So he was afraid about how to make that kind of character into a hero.”
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