Knowing that critics and his Hollywood colleagues were “just waiting in ambush to tear me apart,” Spielberg chose not to attend the film’s predictably deadly premiere at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Instead he took Amy Irving on a vacation to Japan, where he wouldn’t have to face the first batch of devastating reviews, such as Charles Champlin’s in the Los Angeles Times, which was headlined “Spielberg’s Pearl Harbor.” Describing 1941 as “the most conspicuous waste since the last major oil spill, which it somewhat resembles,” the usually benevolent Champlin was provoked into a rare display of wrath: “What characterizes 1941 is its abiding cynicism, which arises, however, not in a considered contempt for the world’s follies but out of an apparent indifference to and withdrawal from anything but spliced celluloid. It offers a nihilism based not on a rejecting rage but on an arrogant indifference to values.” Michael Sragow of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner used even harsher rhetoric, calling it “a movie that will live in infamy…. 1941 isn’t simply a silly slur against any particular race, sex, or generation—it makes war against all humanity.”
Spielberg later complained that “it was like the critics thought I was Adolf Eichmann.” By almost any standard of critical taste and judgment, the attacks on the film were richly deserved. But the unusually hostile reaction of some critics also may have reflected a gleeful desire to see its precociously successful young director receive his comeuppance. “Maybe 1941 will finally force a few reevaluations of this wunderkind,” wrote Stephen Färber of New West. In the “cult of puerility” that had taken over Hollywood in the 1970s, Farber declared, 1941 stood alone as “the most appalling piece of juvenilia yet foisted on the public.” Spielberg could not resist the director’s favorite dodge of passing the blame to his writers, who, he told The New York Times, “caught me at a weak moment…. I’ll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie.” As he had done after publicly disparaging Peter Benchley’s source material for Jaws, Spielberg “came to us and asked us to forgive him,” Gale recalls. “He’d given an interview to some magazine and he said he’d blamed the whole movie on us—[implying,] ‘These writers just kinda buffaloed me into doing it.’”
1941 was not the box-office disaster its reputation might suggest. With a worldwide gross of $90 million, it actually turned a profit, and it found somewhat more favor among viewers in other countries who enjoyed its jibes at American jingoism, a response that caused Spielberg some discomfort. While the film’s alarming extravagance gave Hollywood serious concern about Spielberg’s reliability, the damage it did to his critical reputation would have a far more long-lasting effect. Its failure cast a retrospective cloud over the childlike vision of Close Encounters and the technical cunning of Jaws, encouraging critics who harbored lingering doubts about those aspects of his earlier films to castigate Spielberg as emotionally arrested and overly infatuated with technique for its own sake.
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WHEN George Lucas, in 1977, first told him the story of an intrepid, somewhat disreputable archeologist searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant, Spielberg was intrigued by the sheer fun of it, the opportunity to do “a James Bond film without the hardware.” But by the time he began shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark in June 1980, Spielberg had a more urgent agenda. Hoping to “make some amends for going way over on 1941, Close Encounters, and Jaws,” he had to prove he could “make a movie responsibly for a relatively medium budget that would appear to be something more expensive.” Michael Finnell, a producer who later made three films for Amblin Entertainment, recalls that Spielberg “used to say he was born again after 1941.”
Working as a hired hand for Lucas, a conservative and highly disciplined producer, Spielberg used Raiders of the Lost Ark as a form of professional “rehab,” veteran film business analyst A. D. Murphy wryly observes. At the time preproduction began on Raiders in the fall of 1979, Lucas was riding the crest of Star Wars and finishing work on its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. Joining forces with Lucas and his production company, Lucasfilm, enabled Spielberg to assuage Hollywood’s fears that Raiders would turn out to be another 1941. But several studios still passed on the opportunity to become involved, despite the fact that Lucas and Spielberg were responsible for four of the top ten box-office hits at that point in film history. The problem was that the two filmmakers were demanding what Spielberg called an “unprecedented profit definition” for their joint venture.
“I hate to talk like a mercenary,” Spielberg said at the time of the film’s release in 1981, “but George came over to my house when we decided to make the picture and he said, ‘Let’s make the best deal they’ve ever made in Hollywood. And let’s do it without the agents, just you and me.’ We wrote it out on lined note paper and shook hands over the table. And then we presented that to our agencies and said, ‘This is the deal we want. Now, fellows, go try to make it.’”
The Lucas-Spielberg proposal was presented to the studios not by their agents but by their lawyer, Tom Pollock (who later became the head of Universal Pictures), Lucasfilm president Charles Weber, and Howard Kazanjian, who was executive producer with Lucas on Raiders. The proposal dared to assault standard Hollywood financial practices at several especially sensitive points. Chief among them was that while the distributor would be expected to put up the movie’s budgeted $20 million negative cost, it would receive no distribution fee and take no overhead charge. Those items usually accounted for more than 50 percent of the gross film rentals (the amount returned to the studio after exhibitors take their share). Besides demanding large sums of money up front, Lucas and Spielberg also wanted enormous shares of the distributor’s gross, a demand that was especially unusual for a director in that era. And while the distributor would be allowed to recover the entire negative cost of Raiders from gross film rentals before Lucas and Spielberg started to receive their shares of the gross, Lucasfilm eventually would assume full ownership of the movie.
Not only were the studios taken aback by such chutzpah, they were dubious about the apparent cost of shooting the film. Lawrence Kasdan’s flamboyant screenplay paid homage to grade-Z serials on a spectacular scale more in keeping with the grandiose fantasies of Star Wars and Close Encounters. “A lot of people looked at that first scene with the huge rock and thought it would cost $40 million just by itself,” said then Paramount president Michael D. Eisner.
Such were the filmmakers’ track records, however, that when the proposal was circulated, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Disney expressed interest (Fox, which had made Star Wars under the previous regime of Alan Ladd Jr., passed on Raiders, as did Universal’s Ned Tanen). Frank Price, president of Columbia’s film division, was eager to establish a working relationship with Lucasfilm, “but Columbia did not have a strong distribution system,” Kazanjian says. “We knew we could make a deal somewhere, or we knew we could sell financing, or we knew we could make the picture. What we couldn’t do was distribute the picture, and we wanted the best distributor.” Closing the deal with Paramount took a year of contentious negotiations. Some at the studio “thought Michael Eisner was crazy,” Kazanjian remembers. “Barry Diller [Paramount’s board chairman and chief executive officer] thought he was crazy. But he did it. And they made a ton of money on it.”
Paramount insisted on taking distribution and overhead fees, but those reportedly amounted to only about half of the industry standard, and the studio agreed to assume the entire negative cost, as well as letting Lucasfilm own the negative. Paramount wanted outright ownership of sequel rights but finally agreed that Lucasfilm would have to be involved in the making of four possible sequels.¶ Spielberg received a $1 million directing fee for Raiders and a sizable percentage of the gross; Lucas personally received a $1 million fee for serving as executive producer, in addition to his company’s large share of the gross. Lucas and Spielberg also received “very handsome” bonuses for completing the film just under the $20 million budget, Kazanjian says. “It was George’s bonus, but he split that with Steven as an incenti
ve, and said, ‘Half of it is yours if you bring this in on budget.’”
“We built in tremendous penalties if they went over, and they agreed without hesitation,” Eisner said. “I figured either they don’t care or they’ve got this thing figured out…. You don’t make standard deals with these kinds of people…. If we got shafted on this agreement, we would like to be shafted two or three times a year in this way.”
Despite their triumphant dealmaking, Spielberg was not entirely enthusiastic about making the film. It took so long to put the deal together that by the time Raiders was a “go” project, he had lost a certain amount of interest in it and “wanted to move on to smaller, more personal projects.” “George and I would go down and visit Steven on the set of 1941,” Kazanjian recalls, “and we would discuss Raiders. And we weren’t really getting a firm commitment out of him that he would direct it. We started even looking at, or thinking about, other directors, because Steven had not committed. We never got a firm commitment until almost the very end, when we said, ‘OK, folks, in about three weeks we’re going to start preproduction and we’re ready to go. Yes or no?’ Steven loved the project, but he had a lot of things going.
“One of the challenges we had was that Steven owed one picture to Universal, and [Sid] Sheinberg kept saying, Tou can’t do Raiders of the Lost Ark, you owe a picture to me.’ Also at that time, there was a lawsuit over Battlestar Galactica [Fox, at Lucas’s urging, sued Universal for copyright infringement over the TV series, claiming it was a copy of Star Wars]. So that even angered Sid more. Universal passed on Raiders: that wasn’t a Steven picture, that was a George Lucas picture. It was only at the last minute that Sid released Steven and said, ‘OK, you can do it.’”
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“IF I could be a dream figure,” Lucas once declared, “I’d be Indy.” The character of Indiana Jones, an improbable amalgam of archeologist, soldier of fortune, and playboy, was the kind of heroic surrogate a bright, nerdy kid would create after watching a Saturday matinee program of cliffhanger serials.
Lucas and Spielberg decided to collaborate on Raiders of the Lost Ark after discovering that they shared a nostalgia for the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the serials they cited as inspirations were Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Don Winslow of the Coast Guard, Blackhawk, and Commando Cody. Those two-fisted adventure yarns depicted a world in which good and evil were clearly distinguishable and virtually nonstop action took the place of the more emotionally complicated dialogue and “mushy stuff” that dominated movies made for adult audiences. For two filmmakers who clung stubbornly to boyish behavior and preoccupations but were uncomfortably aware that they were no longer boys, such regression was a tempting response to the increasingly vexatious responsibilities of adulthood.
In the early 1970s, Lucas began outlining four stories featuring “a shady archeologist” who wears a 1930s-style fedora and carries a bullwhip, like Zorro or Lash La Rue. The character was named Indiana after a female Alaskan malamute owned by Lucas’s wife, Mareia. Indy also had what Lucas called his “Cary Grant side,” a fondness for wearing top hat and tails and lounging around drinking champagne with slinky blondes. The first director Lucas approached to work on the project, fellow Bay Area filmmaker Philip Kaufman, added a weightier theme. He proposed that Indy search for the lost Ark of the Covenant of Hebraic Law, the sacred cabinet in which the broken tablets containing the Ten Commandments were stored. “There was an old doctor I went to [as a boy] in Chicago who was obsessed with the lost ark’s legendary powers,” recalled Kaufman. “And books have been written about Hitler’s search for occult artifacts, which he thought would make him omnipotent.”
Lucas’s own passionate interest in mythology and the supernatural, which is also at the heart of his Star Wars saga, was stimulated by the notion of sending Indy on a quest for a legendary object with transcendent spiritual significance. But the element of Jewish mysticism in Raiders probably never would have occurred to Lucas, who was raised as both a Methodist and a Lutheran. Kaufman put Raiders aside in 1974 to work on another movie, and Lucas bought him out after Spielberg expressed interest in the dormant idea three years later; Kaufman’s lawyers had to insist on their client sharing a story credit with Lucas, over Lucas’s initial objections.
Raiders is by no means a simple pastiche of old serials. “When George and I first began talking about this project,” Spielberg recalled, “we sat in a screening room at Universal and saw Don Winslow of the Navy—all fifteen episodes—and we were bored out of our minds. I’d already said, yes, I’d do this for George. But I was so depressed that I walked out of the theater thinking, ‘How can I get out of this?’”
“These things sure don’t hold up after twenty-five years,” Lucas remarked as they left the screening room.
Then his commercial pragmatism quickly reasserted itself: “I was appalled at how I could have been so enthralled with something so bad. And I said, ‘Holy smokes, if I got this excited about this stuff, it’s going to be easy for me to get kids excited about the same thing, only better.’”
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LAWRENCE Kasdan was writing TV commercials for a Los Angeles advertising agency when Universal bought his original screenplay Continental Divide for Spielberg in late 1977. An aficionado of the films of Howard Hawks, Kasdan conceived Continental Divide in the spirit of Hawks’s smart, sassy, unsentimental romantic comedies such as Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. Kasdan’s script paired a rumpled big-city newspaper columnist with a reclusive ornithologist he tracks down in the wilderness for a personality profile. Spielberg said he bought the script with plans to direct it, but as Kasdan puts it, “Steven buys everything and he owns everything. The first thing he says is always, ‘I might direct.’ He talked about it for about ten minutes.”
Spielberg’s interest helped trigger a bidding war that saw the final purchase price of the script escalate to $250,000. “He wanted me to write Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Continental Divide was a kind of carrot,” Kasdan says. “When I met Steven for the first time before he bought it, they were shooting I Wanna Hold Your Hand at Universal, and Steven was hanging around. We sat down on a curb. He said, ‘I really like your script. I don’t know who’s going to do the movie, but the person I really want to talk to you is George Lucas. He and I are going to do this adventure film, and you are the perfect guy to write it. But I want to warn you, he’s excited about you, and he’s going to want you to write More American Graffiti. Don’t do that.’ These guys were desperate for writers—two months ago I had been an advertising writer!”
What Spielberg and Lucas were looking for, Kasdan realized, was “someone who could write Raiders in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero. So that’s what got me the job.”
Continental Divide did not turn out well. Kasdan’s script was reworked by Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Jack Rosenthal. After casting difficulties and tense arguments between Spielberg and Universal production chief Ned Tanen, the studio refused to let Robbins direct, continuing to hold out hope that Spielberg would take over the reins. But Spielberg washed his hands of the project, selling his right to direct for $100,000 and 5 percent of the profits. He took an executive producer credit on the 1981 release along with Bernie Brillstein, manager of the male lead, John Belushi. Under the lugubrious direction of Englishman Michael Apted, the romantic chemistry between Belushi and leading lady Blair Brown not only failed to reach combustion, but seemed virtually nonexistent.
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KASDAN, Lucas, and Spielberg met for story conferences on Raiders of the Lost Ark from January 23 to 27, 1978. Their nine-hour daily brainstorming sessions at the Sherman Oaks home of Lucas’s assistant Jane Bay were tape-recorded and formed the basis for Kasdan’s six months of work on the first-draft screenplay.
Spielberg and Lucas had clear visual ideas for some scenes they wanted to see. “We want to have the boulder” was one of their instructions to Kasdan: for the
thrill-packed opening sequence of Indy fleeing a booby-trapped cave, Spielberg invented the memorable image of the hero being pursued by a giant boulder. Lucas’s wish list included a submarine, a monkey giving the Hitler salute, and a girl slugging Indiana Jones in a bar in Nepal. Out of the story conferences also came a hair-raising chase through a mountain in a mine train and an elaborate sequence of Indy escaping from a Shanghai palace with a precious artifact, jumping from an airplane in an inflatable rubber raft, and making his way down a river. Eventually eliminated in preproduction for budgetary reasons, those two sequences wound up being adapted for use in the 1984 sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
While Lucas and Spielberg dwelled on gags and set-pieces, Kasdan emphasized the need to round out Indy’s personality. “I became worried that the thing was becoming a straight action piece, which is probably the way it turned out,” the writer said in 1981. Spielberg acknowledged that Kasdan “didn’t stick with our story outline a hundred percent…. Larry essentially did all the characters and tied the story together, made this story work from just a bare outline, and gave it color and some direction.”
Steven Spielberg Page 47