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ANOTHER low-budget moviemaker whose work Spielberg admired was Joe Dante. After making Piranha, Dante directed The Howling, a 1981 black comedy about werewolves. Spielberg cast its leading lady, Dee Wallace, in E.T., and hung a poster from the movie on the wall of his production office. A few months later, Dante and producing partner Michael Finnell were struggling to put together projects from their small Hollywood office, a dump they called “Cockroach Palace,” when a script arrived unannounced from Steven Spielberg.
Gremlins was a horror yarn by the then-unknown young writer Chris Columbus. Dante remembers thinking the script “must have come to the wrong address. I thought, This is incredible—this guy [Spielberg] doesn’t know I’m alive! It came at a time when I was dead broke. The Howling was a big hit, but it wasn’t for me. My career seemed pretty much stalled. If it wasn’t for Steven, I probably would have made twenty-seven more low-budget movies. I think he has a genuine desire to be able to give directors a chance. He loves being the mentor and having protégés.” Explaining why that is so, Spielberg reflected in 1986, “I have instant recall about how I felt when I wanted to be a movie director and there was nobody around who wanted me to be one…. All people see a reflection of themselves when they’re helping other people. I can’t deny, and no one can, that there is vanity involved in helping a young person achieve his goal. The vanity is a chance to get started a second time, to project oneself into the young filmmaker’s own career and to feel what it was like to get that first break all over again.”
Despite his elation at being tapped for stardom by Spielberg, Dante was aware of all the “negative publicity about Steven being responsible” for the direction of Poltergeist. “I have no idea how true that was, but it was certainly something that was in the back of my mind: ‘Am I going to be making my picture or somebody else’s picture?’ Steven was very sensitive about those allegations. He said, ‘I can’t do that, because if I do that, nobody will want to work here.’”
Gremlins dealt with little furry creatures going on a rampage in a Capraesque small town, and it has been interpreted as Dante’s sly parody of Spielbergian cuddliness gone amok, “E.T. with teeth.” Asked if that was intentional, Dante replied, “Yes, and Steven cooperated entirely with it. He got the joke right away.” Many people were surprised to find Spielberg’s name attached to a movie about vicious little monsters, but those who knew him personally recognized that he secretly shared Dante’s gleeful, boyish penchant for that kind of ghoulish comedy. Gremlins represented “something Steven would like to do—get that side of his E.T. personality out—except he doesn’t really want to do it himself,” Dante observed. “… He once said he wanted to make movies he didn’t want to direct, to express different sides of his personality without having to invest a year in them. But I don’t think he was quite prepared for how wacky Gremlins was. I remember sitting with him in a Warner Bros, screening room, and I saw him in the row behind me hitting his head [again and again] while he was watching the movie.”
Spielberg originally conceived Gremlins as a low-budget movie, made outside the studio system, “which is why he came to me,” says Dante. “He really wanted to do it down-and-dirty.” But it soon became apparent that filming scenes involving elaborate puppetry would be expensive and time-consuming, and Gremlins escalated into a major Warner Bros, production, costing $11 million by the time of its release in 1984. With little to do while Chris Walas was busy on the nine-month job of designing the gremlins, Dante and Finnell found themselves diverted onto a more imminent project Spielberg was developing at Warners, Twilight Zone—The Movie.
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WHEN Rod Serling sold the syndication rights to his Twilight Zone series—a decision he later regretted, since the show has never stopped running—he kept the right to make a feature film version of the series. Inspired by the 1945 British anthology film Dead of Night, Serling first pitched studio executives the idea of making a Twilight Zone “trilogy” he would host. His outline said that it would be “shot in black & white for a budget of under a million dollars. The stories are separate and distinct, but have a background thread that moves one into the other.” At one time, Serling planned to include “Eyes,” the story Spielberg eventually filmed for Serling’s Night Gallery pilot in 1969. Serling also tried a different approach, taking one of the most memorable Twilight Zone programs, “It’s a Good Life” (based on a Jerome Bixby story about a little boy with sinister powers), and expanding it into a feature-length screenplay.
But Serling found no takers for a Twilight Zone movie before his death in 1975, and it was not until several years later that Warner Bros, chairman Ted Ashley revived the idea of a multipart Twilight Zone feature, acquiring the rights from Serling’s widow, Carol. Fruitless attempts were made at the studio to develop the project until Ashley’s successor, Terry Semel, mentioned the idea to Spielberg, whom he was trying to lure into a long-term, nonexclusive relationship with Warners, similar to Spielberg’s long-standing relationship with Universal. Spielberg responded with immediate enthusiasm to the prospect of paying homage to a TV series that had been one of the formative influences on his youthful imagination.
Spielberg thought a big-screen Twilight Zone anthology would not only appeal to baby boomers and the many other fans of the series, but that it also would be a perfect opportunity for a collaboration with his friend John Landis, the irreverent director of Animal House and The Blues Brothers. In April 1982, Spielberg and Landis agreed to produce Twilight Zone—The Movie together (each taking 5 percent of the gross profits) and to direct separate segments of what ultimately became a five-part feature, costing a total of about $10 million. Landis planned to write original scripts for his own two segments (including a brief prologue featuring Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks). To write the rest of the film, Spielberg brought in Richard B. Matheson, the author of Duel and one of the principal writers of Serling’s TV series.
The first script Matheson wrote for the Twilight Zone movie was based on a Halloween story Spielberg had been planning to direct for MGM. Matheson described it as the story of “a bully who’s mistreating all these young trick-or-treating kids, and the supernatural world gets him for it. Creatures—real live monsters—start chasing him around.” Eventually, the bully finds that his monster mask cannot be removed from his own face. This revenge fantasy was put aside when Spielberg decided to remake a I960 Twilight Zone program, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” about neighbors consumed with the paranoid fear that one of them may be an alien infiltrator in human guise. Serling’s nightmarish fable of prejudice and xenophobia offered Spielberg an opportunity to explore in far more serious form the feelings of scapegoating and exclusion he had felt while growing up Jewish in mostly WASP suburbia.
“The concept was that all the stories were going to connect,” explains Joe Dante, who was brought aboard after Landis. “Characters were going to recur in various segments, so it would seem like one movie, not an anthology. One of the mistakes I thought they were making was that they were remaking old episodes. Everybody knew the shows, and the shows depended on these O. Henry twist endings, so everybody knew how they were going to come out. But that was the concept, take it or leave it. My idea was a different take on the short story ‘It’s a Good Life’ was based on. I didn’t want people to be able to recognize, at first, what episode it was based on.”
In Dante’s brilliantly stylized version, one of the most surreal pieces of filmmaking ever released by a major studio, the little boy (Jeremy Licht) “wishes” people he doesn’t like into “cartoonland,” literally turning them into cartoon characters. The house he rules is a cockeyed vision reminiscent of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and his family behaves in the frenzied, goofy manner of Warner Bros, animated characters. “When the picture came out,” Dante says, “people were constantly saying to me, ‘Your picture is about Steven,’ because it’s about this little kid who’s always getting everything he wants. I suppose you could read it that way, but that
wasn’t the intention.”
The fourth director was chosen in very off-the-cuff fashion. Australian filmmaker George Miller, visiting Warner Bros, to oversee the U.S. release of his futuristic fantasy Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior), dropped into Spielberg’s office, where he found “they were having a meeting to discuss The Twilight Zone. I remember Steven was there, Kathy Kennedy, and a few others, and they invited me to sit down. Up to that time, it had been planned to do three stories [not including the prologue], and now they’d decided to do a fourth. ‘Why don’t you do one?’ someone said. I wasn’t sure they weren’t having me on at the time.” Miller found himself directing John Lithgow in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” Matheson’s story about a neurotic man whose terror of flying escalates when he sees a monster crouched on the wing of the plane. Although a tour de force of visual storytelling, Miller’s segment focused so squarely on the physical details of the man’s anxiety attack that it jettisoned the original version’s ambiguity, a suggestion that the monster may exist only in the man’s disturbed mind.
Landis’s main segment was the story of a bigot named Bill Connor (Vic Morrow), who, to his horror, finds himself successively in the place of a German Jew persecuted by Nazis in occupied France, a southern black lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, and a Vietnamese fired upon by American troops. After Terry Semel and another Warner Bros, executive, Lucy Fisher, urged Landis to find a way of redeeming the mean-spirited character, he wrote a scene in which Morrow would rescue two Vietnamese children from their firebombed village. Landis’s script for what he considered “the only political or moral episode in the film” was reminiscent of Serling at his preachiest and most heavy-handedly ironic.
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BEFORE dawn on July 23, 1982, George Folsey Jr., associate producer of the Twilight Zone movie, telephoned his production secretary, Donna Schuman. “There has been an accident,” he told her. “Actually, the worst possible thing has happened: Vic and the kids have been killed. A helicopter fell on them.”
Veteran actor Vic Morrow, six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, and seven-year-old My-Ca Dinh Le had been killed instantly at 2:20 A.M., during the filming of the firebombing of the Vietnamese village. The gruesome accident, which occurred at the Indian Dunes Park location site near Saugus, forty miles north of Los Angeles, led to the filing of criminal charges of involuntary manslaughter against director Landis, Folsey, and three others involved in the filming, unit production manager Dan Allingham, special-effects coordinator Paul Stewart, and helicopter pilot Dorcey Wingo. Landis, Folsey, and Allingham were each charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, resulting from child endangerment, and three additional manslaughter charges were filed against Landis, Stewart, and Wingo, resulting from their “gross negligence” on the set.
It was the first time in the history of Hollywood that a director had ever been charged with a criminal act because of a fatality on his set. If convicted, Landis could have faced up to six years in prison, and the others faced up to five years. Landis, Allingham, and Folsey offered in 1985 to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to illegally employ the children, in exchange for dropping the manslaughter charges against them and dropping all charges against Stewart and Wingo, but that plea bargain was rejected by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. After a long, controversial, and bitterly divisive trial on the manslaughter charges, Landis and his fellow defendants were acquitted on May 29, 1987. In January 1988, however, the national board of directors of the Directors Guild of America reprimanded Landis, Allingham, and the movie’s first assistant director, Elie Cohn, for conduct “unprofessional, inconsistent with their responsibilities, and extremely prejudicial to the welfare of the DGA.”
Because the two nonprofessional child performers had been hired illegally and were used in violation of child-safety laws, fines were levied against Warner Bros, and the defendants by the California Labor Commission and the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health. The families of the three victims collected multimilllion-dollar settlements of their civil lawsuits against the studio and the filmmakers (including Spielberg). Warners also paid several million dollars in legal fees to the defendants’ attorneys.
The accident had a sobering effect on many people in Hollywood, making the industry somewhat more safety-conscious, if still less than entirely responsible about putting performers and crew members at risk. The accident has had little dampening effect, however, on the career of John Landis, who has worked virtually nonstop in films and television ever since the accident. In striking contrast, Stephen Lydecker, a camera operator on the Twilight Zone movie who testified against Landis, found himself “tagged as a troublemaker” and blacklisted after twenty-six years in the film business (he turned to a career in real estate). Much of the industry did not want to deal with the disturbing allegations about Landis’s behavior on the Twilight Zone set, because to do so honestly would have meant changing some of Hollywood’s basic attitudes about the license it grants to money-making directors.
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ONE of the pre-dawn telephone calls Landis made after the crash was to his fellow producer on the film, Steven Spielberg. According to Landis, the first question Spielberg asked him was, “Do you have a press agent?”
Although there were far more important issues at stake than anyone’s public image, Spielberg soon had reason for serious concern about how the public would view his involvement in Twilight Zone—The Movie. Some initial news reports of the accident prominently identified Twilight Zone as a Spielberg movie, with the name of the lesser-known Landis appearing farther down in the stories. Coming only six weeks after the opening of E.T., the appalling event at Indian Dunes had the potential to undo much of the goodwill Spielberg had accumulated with his previous films. If he were held responsible in any way for the deaths—particularly those of the two children—his reputation as a maker of heartwarming family movies, often featuring children as protagonists, would have been irreparably harmed. If he were found to have been involved with the hiring of the children, his own permit to work with children could have been denied.
“It was a very emotional time for Steven,” Dante recalls. “Steven was very affected by the accident. Then he felt somewhat betrayed by it. He felt he couldn’t understand what happened, and he suddenly became the brunt [of bad publicity]. I think he deeply resented it.”
On November 5, 1982, Carl Pittman, a Teamster who drove the special-effects truck on the movie, told the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that he had seen Spielberg at the filming site on the night of the accident. In sworn testimony, Pittman said that after the accident occurred, while he was helping Landis and the parents of the dead children into cars, “Mr. Spielberg requested a car, so I got him a car—he needed to go to the phone, and I was mad enough at him that I had to walk away from him.” When asked by the investigators what caused him to say he was “mad” at Spielberg, Pittman replied, “He was too cold about it…. In fact, I didn’t want him to have the car; I wanted to keep it there in case anyone else [needed the car]—at this point, no one knew how many people were injured.” None of the thirty-one other people involved in the production who had been interviewed by the NTSB placed Spielberg on the set, however, and Landis called Pittman’s allegation “preposterous.” Pittman later admitted he probably had confused Spielberg with Frank Marshall, the film’s executive producer. The NTSB nevertheless decided to send a written inquiry to Spielberg, asking if he had any relevant information about the accident. That resulted in Spielberg’s only sworn declaration on the subject, a letter stating in its entirety:
“In response to your request, I was never at the Indian Dunes location of Twilight Zone on the night of the accident or at any other time.
“I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct, executed at Los Angeles, California, this first day of December, 1982.”
Throughout the five-year investigation and ten-month trial, no evi
dence was ever found or presented directly linking Spielberg to any criminal act relating to the accident. But despite the fact that he produced the Twilight Zone movie with Landis, Spielberg was never interviewed about the accident by any governmental agency, he was not called to testify at the trial, and he did not even have to give a deposition in the civil suits resulting from the accident. Explaining the seeming lack of interest in Spielberg displayed by the Sheriff’s Department, the lead homicide detective investigating the case, Sergeant Tom Budds, said, “There is no indication that Spielberg even knew anything about the hiring of the children.”
Spielberg’s ability to distance himself from the case, and his almost total public silence on the accident, were enough to raise lingering questions in some people’s minds. “Was the NTSB following commands from Washington in order to protect some powerful individual in Hollywood?” Stephen Farber and Marc Green asked in their 1988 book Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the “Twilight Zone” Case. “Rumors to that effect were bandied about when it was learned that Steven Spielberg had managed to avoid being questioned by the Safety Board.”
The fact that some of Spielberg’s closest associates—including his right-hand man, Frank Marshall—were involved with the hiring of the children was the principal reason such questions continued to be raised. In 1985, Landis’s defense attorney Harland Braun publicly demanded that the district attorney’s office investigate Spielberg’s possible involvement in the hiring of the children, even though the statute of limitations had expired on that matter. Charging that the office’s investigation of the crash was “consciously truncated,” Braun wrote in a November 20, 1985, letter to chief deputy district attorney Gilbert Garcetti that Spielberg “was able to deflect the investigation away from himself by simply submitting a letter stating that he was not on the set the night of the accident. His full and complete knowledge and approval of what was to take place must be assumed and never has been disputed.
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