Although he regarded Attenborough’s gesture as “an honorary Oscar,” Spielberg reflected a few hours before the Academy Awards ceremony, “I’ve been around long enough to know that people who deserve Oscars don’t always win them…. If the Academy decides to give me an Oscar someday, I’ll be glad to accept it. But I don’t think I’ll get it for a film that I really care about. E.T. is my favorite movie, although it’s not my best-directed film. That’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
*
PERHAPS it was just a coincidence that Spielberg’s next film after Twilight Zone—The Movie featured a twelve-year-old Asian boy and dealt with the rescue of a village of lost children. Perhaps the horrifying images that filled Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—images of enslaved Indian children, people being burned alive by an evil cult, a man’s heart being ripped from his chest—were not a reflection of any inner turmoil on the part of the director. Perhaps the film’s nightmarish sequence depicting a drugged Indiana Jones as an evil, menacing father figure was nothing but a plot device. Perhaps Temple of Doom was just what Spielberg said it was, a “popcorn adventure with a lot of butter.”
But the film’s unusually gruesome and disturbing imagery, coming in the wake of the Twilight Zone tragedy, gives cause to wonder what was going on in Spielberg’s subconscious while he made his return to feature-length filmmaking following the event he said made him “sick to the center of his soul.” Spielberg himself added the character of Short Round to the story as Harrison Ford’s sidekick, casting the Chinese/Vietnamese child actor Ke Huy Quan. “I wanted a kid in this movie,” the director explained. “…I wanted this mission to come from Indiana’s heart.”
The film’s screenwriters, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, insist they did not find Spielberg in a dark mood when they spent five days blocking out the storyline with him and George Lucas at Lucas’s home in northern California. Any personal obsessions of Spielberg’s that can be found in the movie are “unconscious,” Katz feels. As well as recycling unused ideas from the scripts of Raiders of the Lost Ark (the escape from the airplane, the mine chase sequence) and Lucas’s then-unfilmed project Radioland Murders (the opening musical number), Temple of Doom borrows liberally from old movies. The idea of the kidnapped children emerged at the story meeting when someone suggested, “What’s weird about the village? No children. It’s like Village of the Damned.” The writers attribute the morbidity of Temple of Doom to the desire of both Spielberg and Lucas to do “something very different” from the sunlit derring-do of Raiders.
“I had some worries about making the same film, only trying to do it better—I didn’t want to spin my wheels,” Spielberg said. “I had to make this film different enough to make it worth doing, yet similar enough so it would attract the same audience. I had to satisfy myself creatively.”
The sequel (on which Lucas gets story credit) originally was titled Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death, until it was decided that Temple of Doom would sound less of a “downer.” “Steve wanted to do a very dark movie,” Huyck recalls. “This was going to be his nightmare movie.” Publicly, Spielberg attributed that to his producer: “When George Lucas came to me with the story, it was about black magic, voodoo, and a temple of doom. My job and my challenge was to balance the dark side of this Indiana Jones saga with as much comedy as I could afford.”
But even the comedy in Temple of Doom is the stuff of nightmares, from the early sequence of Indy, Short Round, and Indy’s blond girlfriend Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) plunging in a rubber raft from a pilotless airplane to the squirmy scenes of Willie covered with crawling bugs and being served a revolting dinner of “Eyeball Soup” and “Snake Surprise.” Katz considers the movie “boy’s adventure time. We didn’t see it as being that realistic. We saw it as being sort of funny. We had a lot of fun sitting around thinking of the most disgusting meal you could eat—monkey brains.” Forced into the same helpless, bullied position occupied by Spielberg’s kid sisters when he was tormenting them in childhood, the audience may giggle uncomfortably at such sights and feel relieved when the ordeals of Temple of Doom are over, but it is a strange kind of “fun” Spielberg is inflicting on his paying public. If the imagery of a film serves as a window into the soul of the filmmaker, then what was filling Spielberg’s soul in 1983 was (in his words) “torchlight and long shadows and red lava light … a lot of spooky, creepy, crawly, nocturnal imagery…. I always try to bring my own terrors and fantasies to a film.”
If such a thing is possible, Temple of Doom could be described as an impersonal personal film. While tapping into Spielberg’s subconscious, it does so in the slick, mechanical manner he adopts when he wants to skate lightly over the surface of his material and avoid dealing consciously with its implications. It is Spielberg in his theme park mode, using a plot as merely a springboard for a safe, enjoyable thrill ride, without genuine danger or emotional involvement. After the dazzling panache of the opening in a Shanghai nightclub, a wide-screen homage to Busby Berkeley in which Kate Capshaw sings Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” in Chinese, the film soon degenerates into lurid, melodramatic claptrap, stirring little emotional involvement other than a frequent sense of disgust. While touching on some of Spielberg’s personal obsessions, it does so only to trivialize them; one need only compare the glibly picturesque treatment of child slavery in Temple of Doom with the angry passion that suffuses every frame of the forced-labor camp scenes in Schindler’s List.
“I wasn’t happy with [Temple of Doom] at all,” Spielberg said in 1989. “It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom.”
*
THE first negative reaction came even before shooting began, when Spielberg and Lucas were refused permission to shoot location scenes in India. Indian government officials, Katz recalls, were offended by the storyline because they “thought it was racist.” With its stereotypical Indian villains and its lurid relish in depicting bloodthirsty Thuggee rituals, Temple of Doom went far beyond the casual racism of Raiders of the Lost Ark, paying mindless homage to the worst aspects of Gunga Din and other past examples of Hollywood cultural imperialism. As a result, most of the location work had to be done in Sri Lanka, with matte paintings and miniatures filling in for the village, the temple, and the palace of the boy maharajah. Other location shooting took place on the island of Macao, in Hong Kong, and in northern California, Arizona, Idaho, and Florida, but 80 percent of Temple of Doom was shot on soundstages at EMI-Elstree Studios in London.
Principal photography on Temple of Doom began in April 1983 and finished a week behind schedule in September, because Harrison Ford had to return to the U.S. for treatment for a previously sustained back injury. Despite budgetary inflation, which made the sequel cost $28 million, almost $8 million more than the original, Spielberg continued to take pride in his frugal and often ingenious shooting methods. When scenes inside a moving car were shot at Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for a car-chase sequence set in China, it turned out that the background plates filmed earlier in Hong Kong by the second unit had been shot at the wrong angle. Assistant director Louis B. Race recalls that Spielberg “came up with an idea he said he’d used on a film as a kid [Firelight]. He’d taken Christmas tree lights and put them on a clothesline and run them through the background. It’s what’s known as ‘poor man’s process.’ So at ILM we built a tubular metal lazy Susan and put the car in front of it. We hung pieces of cardboard cutout for the window. We had beer signs in the background modified to look Chinese, and we spun the lights around on the lazy Susan behind the window. The location manager, Dick Vane, turned to me and said, ‘You ever get the feeling that you’re making films in somebody’s garage?’”
With the Twilight Zone crash fresh in his mind and a child actor involved in many of the action sequences, filming most of the film in controlled studio conditions made Spielberg feel more confident about safety
concerns. Discussing the underground-mine chase sequence in an interview with American Cinematographer, Spielberg stressed that he had achieved its sense of danger and speed through various forms of cinematic illusion. “What we actually did,” he said, “was build a roller-coaster ride on the soundstage. And it really worked. It was safe. It was electrically driven. You could take rides in it.” Some of the shots involved miniature mine cars with puppets standing in for the actors. “Movies are unharnessed dreams,” Spielberg reflected, “but if they become too costly, or if danger is a factor, or it will take ten years to get there, you have to pull back on the tack and compromise your dream.”
*
WHEN Temple of Doom was screened internally, “Everybody was appalled” by its violence, screenwriter Gloria Katz recalls. “Everybody was saying, ‘Steve, let’s take it down,’” adds Willard Huyck. “At such a late point, it was very difficult to make changes. There were some changes having to do with the intensity of the violence.”
Ever since the institution of the Motion Picture Association of America rating system in 1968, there had been controversy over the MPAA’s lenience toward violence in films, particularly in those released by major studios. Jaws and Poltergeist, which received PG ratings, often were cited as examples of films that were too violent for young children. “I don’t make R movies! I make PG movies!” Spielberg declared while making a successful personal plea to the MPAA’s Classification & Rating Appeals Board in May 1982 to overturn the R rating originally assigned to Poltergeist. Despite the opposition of the MPAA toward changing the system, there was increasing support in the industry for an intermediate rating between PG (parental guidance) and R (restricted for children unless they attend with a parent or an adult guardian).
“I’ve been advocating a fifth rating for a long time, along with many other filmmakers and studio executives,” a more subdued Spielberg said in 1984. “But we just don’t have the strength to get it through…. The responsibility to the children of this country is worth any loss at the box office.” When Temple of Doom and Gremlins received PG ratings around the same time, both movies became battlegrounds in the debate about cinematic violence, all the more so because of their commercial success. In another rash of bad publicity, Spielberg came in for some harshly personal attacks in the press.
Part of the outcry against Gremlins was the false expectation, encouraged by the advertising campaign, that the movie was another feel-good children’s fantasy like E.T. The most notorious scene in Gremlins shows a housewife chopping up gremlins in a blender and exploding them in a microwave oven. Joe Dante remembers getting “vitriolic” letters from people whose “big worry was that somebody was going to put his little brother or his poodle in the microwave. I think people are smarter than that. It didn’t happen.” But before the film’s release, Spielberg persuaded the director to tone down some of the bloodier scenes of humans attacking gremlins, telling him, “I don’t know if they’ve done anything bad enough to deserve this.”
Spielberg also publicly admitted that he would be inclined to put his own hand over the eyes of a ten-year-old child during the lengthy passage in Temple of Doom depicting torture and human sacrifice. Temple of Doom was denounced by People magazine film critic Ralph Novak as “an astonishing violation of the trust” audiences placed in Spielberg and Lucas as makers of family entertainment. “The ads that say ‘this film may be too intense for younger children’ are fraudulent,” Novak complained. “No parent should allow a young child to see this traumatizing movie; it would be a cinematic form of child abuse. Even Ford is required to slap Quan and abuse Capshaw. But then there are no heroes connected with this film, only two villains; their names are Spielberg and Lucas.”
It can be argued, on the other hand, that subteens are the natural audience for the outlandish violence and gore of Temple of Doom, just as they were for the horror comics that provoked such overwrought outrage in the 1950s. Spielberg often is mistakenly accused of having an overly sunny view of life, but the phobias he has wrestled with since childhood have deeply affected his work. Whether children are traumatized by nightmarish imagery when it is presented in an unrealistic context or whether they find it cathartic in helping them deal with their own fears, as they do with the gruesome violence in fairy tales, is a matter on which child psychologists sharply disagree.
In The Uses of Enchantment, his 1976 book on the psychological implications of children’s fairy tales, Bruno Bettelheim observed that “the dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist…. [and] the prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most: his formless, nameless anxieties, and his chaotic, angry, and even violent fantasies. Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant and wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child—that he should be exposed only to the sunny side of things. But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.”
The uproar resulting from Temple of Doom and Gremlins led in short order to the MPAA’s creation of the PG-13 rating, which cautions parents that “some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.” The PG-13 rating has helped filmmakers avoid the stark editing choices previously dictated by the lack of an intermediate rating between PG and R, and it has helped ease some of the pressure on Hollywood from groups calling for greater censorship of sex and violence on screen.
*
MAKING Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom may have been a cathartic experience for Spielberg personally. Although he paid a price in public opprobrium for making such a grisly film, it may have helped him deal with the living nightmare of Twilight Zone—The Movie.
Like so many other irresponsible father figures in Spielberg’s work, Indiana Jones in Temple of Doom must exorcise his adult weaknesses and undergo a purifying test of character in order to be worthy of his fatherly responsibilities. Before he can rescue the lost children, Indy must be freed from his murderous trance, brought on by the forced drinking of blood during the ritual of human sacrifice. “Tempted by the violent cruelty of adulthood, Indiana is called back to childhood’s innocence by his surrogate son [Short Round],” observed critic Henry Sheehan in Film Comment. What is crucial for Indy “is that he abandon the corrupt world of adults and once again affirm his essential child-ness. The film even closes with a shot of Indiana and Willie—happy, it seems, at being a mom—being engulfed by a tide of laughing children.”
At age thirty-seven, Steven Spielberg finally was ready to become a father.
* When the author of this book informed Truffaut that Spielberg’s movie about children also would feature an extraterrestrial, Truffaut laughed uproariously.
† $399 million in 1980s dollars, not adjusted for inflation. Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park broke E.T.’s worldwide record gross of $701 million.
‡ Cobb had been a designer on several films, including Star Wars and the Special Edition of Close Encounters.
§ Rambaldi, who designed the alien Puck for Close Encounters, built the two marvelously supple animatronic creatures used for 90 percent of the shots involving E.T. The rest of the scenes were performed by little people inside a Rambaldi-designed E.T. costume. Rambaldi’s screen credit reads simply, “E.T. Created by Carlo Rambaldi.”
¶ Mathison made no public response to that letter, and she did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this book.
|| Spielberg announced Reel to Reel as a Columbia project in 1983, but by then he only planned to produce it, with Michael Cimino directing. That odd pairing never materialized.
** Spielberg was slated to appear on the cover of that issue before being bumped by war in the Falkland Islands. His first appearance on the cover of Time did not come until 1985.
†† Since then, five more children’s biographies of Spielberg have been published, as well as three other adult biographies, Philip M. Taylor’s Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and
Their Meaning (1992); Frank Sanello’s Spielberg: The Man, The Movies, The Mythology (1996); John Baxter’s The Unauthorised Biography: Steven Spielberg (1996); and Andrew Yule’s steven spielberg: Father to the Man (1996).
‡‡ That became a major embarrassment for another candymaker, Mars, which had turned down an opportunity to have its M&M;’s used in the movie. Mars thought E.T. was an ugly creature that would frighten children.
§§ On the other hand, televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, in 1985, denounced E.T. as “a beast from Hell” and accused Spielberg of being an “agent of Satan.”
¶¶ The name may be a sly nod to Warner Bros, cartoon director Friz Freleng.
|||| The story bears a striking similarity to “Little Girl Lost,” a 1962 Twilight Zone program written by Richard B. Matheson, who based it on his own short story about a six-year-old girl who rolls under her bed and disappears into another dimension. “That was based on an occurrence that happened to our daughter,” Matheson said. “She didn’t go into the fourth dimension, but she cried one night and I went to where she was and couldn’t find her anywhere. I couldn’t find her on the bed, I couldn’t find her on the ground. She had fallen off and rolled all the way under the bed against the wall. At first, even when I felt under the bed, I couldn’t reach her…. After the shock is over, as with Duel, you start to come up with a story.” Matheson says that before making Poltergeist, Spielberg asked him for a videotape of “Little Girl Lost.”
Steven Spielberg Page 54