† She did not make another film for Spielberg until his 1995 production of How to Make an American Quilt, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse.
‡ The son of Richard B. Matheson, the author of Duel.
§ Other owners of the home, which Spielberg still occupies, had included Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
¶ This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the story. As the film’s cinematographer, Allen Daviau, noted in a 1991 interview, “Alice Walker made it very clear in her depiction of Mister and his family, his house and so on, that this was not a poor black man, this was a well-to-do, middle-class to upper-middle-class, landowning black family. This was to be extremely apparent in the house itself, the way the house was furnished, the tableware, the linen. These people shopped in Atlanta. She was very specific about this, and said, ‘I don’t want it misinterpreted. These people were well off. They had money.’ The instructions were followed to show it this way, and Steven was personally attacked because he ‘failed to depict the poverty.’”
|| Walker vetoed Spielberg’s choice of Melissa Mathison as screenwriter, finding no “chemistry” with her. The author’s own adaptation, which dealt far more explicitly than the film with the sexual nature of Celie’s love for Shug Avery, was published in her 1996 book about her experiences with the filming, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult.
** Only the scenes set in Africa were storyboarded. Some were filmed by Spielberg in a village built in Newhall, California; the rest were filmed by producer and second-unit director Frank Marshall on location in Kenya.
FIFTEEN
“AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE”
IF HE COULD GET THE HANG OF THE THING HIS CRY MIGHT BECOME “TO LIVE WOULD BE AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE!” BUT HE CAN NEVER QUITE GET THE HANG OF IT …
– JAMES M. BARRIE, PETER PAN
A WEEK before Max was born in 1985, Spielberg vowed that “the child is going to change my life…. I want to be like most parents. I want to drive home in bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic, which means I’ve got to leave the office by five-thirty to hit the peak traffic hours. And that’s going to change everything I do.” Fatherhood did bring profound changes to his life. “Steven’s a great father—I sometimes can’t get him to go back to work!” Amy said when Max was a year old. “He’s cut his work week to four days; he doesn’t want to miss anything at home. He changes dirty diapers, which he vowed he’d never do, and he gets up in the night with the baby.”
Those habits have persisted. He said in 1994, “I’ve grown up more because I have kids, because my kids don’t want me to be a kid. They want to be a kid, and in a sense they have directed me to be more of an adult than I probably ever could do for myself.” Being a father deepened Spielberg’s work as a filmmaker, teaching him to accept adult responsibilities in every aspect of his life. But his final passage from boy to man was not smooth or easy.
• • •
SPIELBERG’S sideline as a producer of other directors’ movies kept his workload heavy following his founding of Amblin Entertainment. From 1984 through 1990, when he began cutting back on his producing chores, his name appeared on nineteen feature films as producer or executive producer, other than the films he directed. In that same period, he produced an ambitious but unsuccessful sci-fi/fantasy series for Universal TV and NBC, Amazing Stories (1985–87), and started his long-running Warner Bros. TV animated series Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–present).*
Spielberg began conceiving grandiose plans of running his own Hollywood production company as early as the 1970s. “He said he wanted to do what Walt Disney had done, except that he would do it for all audiences,” recalled Warner Bros. president Terry Semel. After E.T., Spielberg rejected offers to run Disney and three other major studios, preferring to be what The Wall Street Journal described as a “one-man entertainment conglomerate.” “After Max was born,” he explained, “the ambition wasn’t there as much. It became, in some ways, a real choice. I realized that I could be a Disney, but that I would be a terrible father, or I could forget Disney and be a great father.”
Whether it was wise to spread himself even as thin as he did with Amblin was debatable. In addition to taking up time he could have devoted to directing, his work as a producer has often exhibited dubious artistic taste along with uneven commercial results. How he fares as a partner with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen in his own fully fledged studio, DreamWorks SKG, which they founded in 1994, and how that ambitious venture will affect his directing career, remains to be seen.
Art Murphy of Daily Variety warned in the early 1980s that by attaching his name to films he did not direct, Spielberg ran the risk of confusing the public and cheapening his reputation. Since many people outside the industry are unclear about the difference between what a producer does and what a director does, they might assume Spielberg had as much to do with such stinkers as The Goonies (1985), The Money Pit (1986), Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), and The Flintstones (1994) as he did with such classics as Close Encounters, E. T., and Schindler’s List, and wonder why his work has seemed to fluctuate so widely in quality. But by and large, as far as the public is concerned, Murphy’s dire prediction does not seem to have been borne out. The public is more intuitive and discriminating (as well as more forgiving) than Hollywood tends to recognize, and Spielberg’s box-office appeal as a director has not been tarnished appreciably by his association with many mediocre or downright awful films as a producer or executive producer. The better films bearing his name, such as Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), have helped enhance his image. Such smaller-scale, quietly affecting Amblin films as Gary David Goldberg’s Dad (1989), Jocelyn Moorhouse’s How to Make an American Quilt (1995), and Don Bluth’s animated feature An American Tail (1986) have broadened Spielberg’s image and made the public more receptive to his own ventures into more challenging emotional material.
There can be little doubt, however, that Spielberg’s critical reputation, which became increasingly problematical when he started directing more “adult” movies in the 1980s, suffered as a result of his producing sideline. Critics’ fixation on the image of Spielberg as an emotionally arrested filmmaker, despite mounting evidence to the contrary in recent years, is not easily dispelled when the title “Steven Spielberg Presents” precedes such movies as Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), The Little Rascals (1994), and Casper (also 1994), the kind of derivative, assembly-line product that gives family entertainment a bad name. Much of Spielberg’s producing output has been aimed at teenagers or subteens, and most of his protégés, who tend to ape his style shamelessly, find it next to impossible to duplicate his knack for visual and emotional wonderment. Young Sherlock Holmes, an uncharacteristically formulaic early effort from director Barry Levinson, was so derivative of other Spielberg special-effects extravaganzas that one reviewer called it Indiana Holmes and the Temple of the Goonies. “It used to be that when a director’s hits were copied he was far from happy about it; he understood that his pictures were being devalued —cheapened,” Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “But Steven Spielberg ‘presents’ Young Sherlock Holmes…. Spielberg has said that he had ‘virtually nothing to do’ with this movie except to offer some advice on the special effects, and there’s no reason to doubt that. But didn’t he even look at the script?”
Another unfortunate side effect of such mediocre Spielberg movies is that they and their often offensively crass merchandising have helped foster a perception that Spielberg is not only a commercially minded filmmaker but a greedy one as well. Why else would he want to waste his time making such a lumbering, unfunny dinosaur of a comedy as The Flintstones? Spielberg may have been trying to signal his disdain for the work of director Brian Levant by jokingly changing his own screen credit to “Steven Spielrock Presents,” but with all of his vast wealth, does he really need more money badly enough to make such a movie? Or, as Kael wrote of George Lucas when they
made Raiders of the Lost Ark, is Spielberg still so “hooked on the crap of his childhood” that he feels a compulsion to keep replicating it on the big screen, in all its unalloyed dreckiness?
As an executive producer, Spielberg is motivated largely by the fact that he “just likes movies and wants to make movies he would like to see, movies he doesn’t want to spend a year of his life on,” says Michael Finnell, who has produced three films for Amblin. Spielberg’s ability to spawn so many productions while still managing to focus on his own personal projects is a byproduct of his remarkably overactive metabolism. His Amblin partner Frank Marshall, who served as line producer on many of the company’s films along with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, once said of Spielberg, “He has an idea every thirteen seconds. I have to figure out how serious they are. If he wants to do something, I figure out how to make it possible financially. Steven doesn’t think in monetary terms.”
But that image is somewhat illusory, a bit of Spielbergian public relations to distract the paying customers from the fact that, as Sid Sheinberg once told The Wall Street Journal, “Steven’s as good a businessman as he is a director.” Spielberg is renowned—and sometimes deplored—in Hollywood for driving hard bargains with everyone from technicians to actors to studio chiefs. In recent years, his standard deal has been a remarkable 50 percent of the distributor’s gross on his pictures (compared with the 5–to–15 percent even major stars can command, with only a few going higher). The studios also fully finance Spielberg’s films, even though the copyright is owned or shared by Amblin or one of its subsidiaries. “Steven gets the studios to carry the risk and he takes in the money,” observed Jeffrey Berg, chairman of International Creative Management.†
From the time he worked his way out of his remaining obligations to Universal in the early eighties, Spielberg has taken care to avoid being pinned down to any one studio. Even his own DreamWorks allows him to take directing jobs elsewhere. While ensconced for many years in his cozy headquarters on the Universal lot, Spielberg freelanced projects all over town, but concentrated his work at two studios, Universal and Warner Bros.
*
THE Warners connection came through his close friendship with Steve Ross, the late chairman of the board of Time Warner. Ross was the most colorful, and controversial, of the film industry mentors to whom Spielberg has attached himself. There can be little doubt that Spielberg’s growing interest in becoming a movie mogul during the eighties was largely a result of their mutually enriching friendship. And if Spielberg imbibed some of Ross’s piratical attitudes along with his largesse, that would hardly have been surprising.
From their first meeting in 1981 until Ross’s death in 1992, Ross carefully cultivated his and Time Warner’s relationships with Spielberg, whose association with the company became a crucial element in its success and stability. Biographer Connie Bruck reported that Ross “was determined to find a means to loosen the Universal-Spielberg bond and bring Spielberg to Warner Bros. Spielberg would have been an alluring asset for the Warner studio at any time, but the early eighties were especially fallow.”
“I had typecast what a CEO was—I’d never met one before, and I wasn’t far off, because I’ve met them since—and in my mind, they looked like J. C. Penney,” Spielberg recalled. “And suddenly here was this older movie star. We quickly found out what we had in common: my favorite movies were made between 1932 and 1952 and those were his favorites, too. Steve to me was a blast from the past. He had silver-screen charisma, much like an older Cary Grant, or a Walter Pidgeon. He had style in a tradition that seems to have bred itself out of society. He had flash. He was a magnetic host—eventually, that became his calling card. And at Acapulco, he was the weekend.”
Assuming the roles of Spielberg’s best friend and idealized father-figure, as well as business mentor, Ross began educating Spielberg in the finer aspects of life as a Hollywood mogul. Studio president Terry Semel recalled that when he introduced them, Spielberg “was a young man, in his early thirties, with no business sophistication. He found Steve, who was much older, so fascinating. Steve Ross was into things we knew only a little about—art, planes, homes.” Wooing Spielberg with lavish gifts and hospitality (he once sent the company plane to fly Spielberg’s dogs from California to New York), Ross went so far as to insist that Spielberg become his neighbor in East Hampton, setting the real-estate deal in motion almost before Spielberg knew what was happening.
The Spielberg-Ross relationship resulted in Spielberg making eleven feature films for Warners during the executive’s tenure, including The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, as well as the studio’s TV series Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs (the latter began airing after Ross’s death). Spielberg also lent his name and talents to more ephemeral projects aimed unabashedly at glorifying the house of Ross. When the executive’s wife, Courtney Sale Ross, produced Strokes of Genius, a 1984 TV series of documentaries on artists, Spielberg donated his services as director for the introductions, hosted by Dustin Hoffman. Spielberg himself was one of the hosts of the 1991 TV special Here’s Looking at You, Warner Bros. And when Columbia Pictures vacated the former Burbank Studios in 1990 and Warners reclaimed sole ownership of the lot, Ross tapped Spielberg to serve as an executive producer for a “Celebration of Tradition,” an outlandishly decadent super-A-list party costing $3 million. While being driven through the lot on trams, guests watched spectacular musical numbers being performed in the studio streets before arriving at a soundstage transformed into Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca, with the added attraction of bathing beauties diving into a swimming pool for a Busby Berkeley–style homage.
Ross rewarded Spielberg’s professional favors with unusually generous film deals and stock options. The other stockholders did not complain about this special treatment. Explaining the hidden benefits of letting Spielberg use the company’s Acapulco villa, Ross once said, “Look, Spielberg goes down there on the company plane and wakes up in the middle of the night after a nightmare. He can’t sleep, and in the morning he gets up and writes the script for The Goonies.‡ That’s worth tens of millions to us.”
Perhaps even more important to Ross, Spielberg threw his power and prestige behind the executive during periods of upheaval at Warner Communications Inc. and its successor, Time Warner. At a WCI shareholders meeting in 1987, Spielberg said, “I am too secure in my line of work, and too fat as a result of it, to be seduced by deals and perks and promises. I have settled down to live and work in only two houses…. MCA and WCI.” He said he had decided to do so because of his “respect and admiration … for two people in particular, Sidney J. Sheinberg and Steven J. Ross.”
*
SPIELBERG’S involvement as producer has varied greatly from film to film, ranging from his virtual takeover of the directing of Poltergeist to his far more tangential involvement as executive producer on movies with strong directors he respects, such as Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, Don Bluth, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood. On their movies, Spielberg has regarded himself largely as the filmmakers’ advocate, protecting them against studio interference. Describing Spielberg as “a perfect executive producer” on Back to the Future, Zemeckis said, “The most important thing he does is create an atmosphere for you to comfortably create a movie. He says, ‘It’s your movie—but if you need me, I’m here.’ He respects the filmmaker’s vision. He lets you do the movie the way you see it.”
Spielberg’s reluctance to play the heavy with other filmmakers, even mediocre ones, sometimes has led him to be too much of a hands-off executive, when a firmer hand might have been more advisable. “The worst thing about working at Amblin,” Richard Benjamin said while directing The Money Pit, “is that one day I’m going to have to leave it and go back to the real world.” That film’s screenwriter-producer, David Giler, says Spielberg’s greatest strength as an executive producer is that “he’s got final say. He doesn’t really have to ask anybody else. You convince him, it stops there.”
Spielberg�
�s popular instincts enabled him to go against conventional Hollywood wisdom when he produced the original Back to the Future. The biggest hit Amblin has produced, other than the films Spielberg himself has directed, it grossed $211 million in domestic box office. But the rest of Hollywood had turned thumbs down on the script by Zemeckis and Gale, believing that movies about time travel never make money. “Steven was the only guy who said, ‘I want to do this,’” Zemeckis recalled. “And I said, ‘Steven, if I do another movie with you that fails, the reality of the situation is that I will never work again.’ And he said, ‘You’re probably right.’ A lot of lean years went by because I had done two movies that he executive-produced [I Wanna Hold Your Hand and the 1980 black comedy Used Cars] and they did no business. The word was getting around town: Bob Zemeckis can’t get work unless Steven Spielberg is the executive producer.” After Zemeckis finally directed a hit movie away from Spielberg’s company, Romancing the Stone, he took Back to the Future back to Spielberg, who set up the deal with Sid Sheinberg at Universal.
Spielberg also participated in the painful decision to replace the star of the movie (Eric Stoltz) with Michael J. Fox after five weeks of shooting, a decision that necessitated the scrapping of $4 million in footage and proved a serious setback to Stoltz’s career, but added a crucial element to the picture’s box-office chemistry. “We’ve got to do something drastic, because this isn’t funny,” Spielberg said after the worried director showed him the Stoltz footage. Spielberg blamed himself for not voicing his reservations earlier, “but I didn’t do anything about it [at first] because I thought it was up to Bob to make his movie.”
“I’ll tell you a great story about how Steven earned his executive-producer fee on Back to the Future [a reported $20 million],” adds Gale. “Sid Sheinberg will deny this story, because he doesn’t remember it, but it’s a true story. Sid Sheinberg didn’t like the title Back to the Future. Every other executive at Universal thought it was a great title, as did Steven, as did we. And Sheinberg would not get off [the idea] that Back to the Future was a bad title. He said, ‘It’s not hip, like Ghostbusters was hip.’ So he sent us a memo and he said, ‘My suggestion for the new title of this movie is Spaceman from Pluto. Here are some notes I have regarding the script and how we can make reference to this in the movie.’
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