Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “There’s a scene in the movie when the DeLorean is in the barn and the kid has a comic book, and it’s called Space Zombies from Pluto. Sheinberg said, ‘Change that to Spaceman from Pluto, and have the kid say, “Look, it’s a spaceman from Pluto!” And in the scene when Marty intimidates George McFly by saying, “My name is Darth Vader—I’m an extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan,” have him say that he’s a spaceman from Pluto.’ We were saying, ‘He’s serious about this, Steven. What do we do? We don’t want to change the title of this movie.’ Steven said, ‘OK, I know what to do.’ So Steven dictated a memo back to Sid, and the memo said something like this: ‘Dear Sid, Thank you for your most humorous memo of such-and-such a date. We all got a big laugh out of it. Keep ’em coming.’ Steven said, ‘Sheinberg will be so embarrassed to tell us that he was serious about this that we’ll never hear from him about it again.’ And he was right.”§

  Spielberg has admitted that in his relationships with directors, he has “found out that not everyone is like Bob Zemeckis.” As a result, he said in 1992, “Producing has been the least fulfilling aspect of what I’ve done in the last decade.” He began scaling back his producing in the nineties partly for that reason and also because he finally recognized that his name was appearing on too many inferior movies. Furthermore, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy were becoming restless and wanted to start their own independent company; Marshall also was branching out into directing, starting with second-unit work for Spielberg before making his solo debut in 1990 with Amblin’s horror comedy Arachnophobia.

  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Spielberg its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1987, an honor given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” That award was generally regarded as more a gesture of apology by the Academy for past slights of his work as a director than a genuine measure of his highly uneven track record as a producer.¶ Far too willing to encourage his many protégés to make faux Spielberg movies rather than express their own individual visions, he has not been responsible for developing even half as many first-rate talents as B-movie meister Roger Corman. Spielberg may have given the world at least one genuine original, Zemeckis, and elevated Dante to A-picture status, but he has given his imprimatur to a host of forgettable talents as well. Could it be that he has a problem fostering genuine competition? The occasional films Amblin has made with major directors, such as Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), Peter Bogdanovich’s Noises Off (1992), and Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County (1995), have been solid pieces of craftsmanship but not among those directors’ most important work. In some cases, including Cape Fear and Madison County, Amblin’s productions have been projects Spielberg seriously considered directing before losing interest.

  Spielberg occasionally has reached out to help one of the legendary directors whose work has given him inspiration. He and George Lucas found financing and distribution from Warner Bros. for a 1990 film by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, Dreams. But no such support was forthcoming when Orson Welles, near the end of his life in 1985, invited Spielberg and Amy Irving to lunch at the West Hollywood bistro Ma Maison. Welles hoped Spielberg would finance his stalled project The Cradle Will Rock, in which Irving had agreed to play Welles’s first wife. Just a few months earlier, Spielberg had spent $60,500 to buy a Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane as “a symbolic medallion of quality in movies. When you look at Rosebud, you don’t think of fast dollars, fast sequels, and remakes. This to me says that movies of my generation had better be good.” But rather than offering to help Welles with The Cradle Will Rock, Spielberg spent most of their luncheon asking questions about Citizen Kane. “Why can’t I direct an Amazing Stories?” Welles later wondered. “Everybody else is doing Amazing Stories.”||

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  AMAZING Stories was Spielberg’s “elephant burial ground for ideas that will never make it to the movie screen because they are just too short-form. And if I didn’t exorcise them in one form or the other, they would just float around in my head and mess me up later in my life.”

  “This man is a fountain of story ideas,” says Peter Z. Orton, story editor during the series’ second season. “When I first got on the show, they gave me a looseleaf binder of story ideas. I realized when I got a quarter of the way through that they were all by Steven. That notebook I saw was about three inches thick. When people ask me to describe Steven, I say, ‘He’s a guy you’d swear had just drunk four cups of coffee, but that’s just him.’ He gets his enjoyment out of his work. He’s there at seven in the morning making matzohs and he’s there until nine or ten at night. Ten to fifteen percent of what he says is way over the top, about fifty percent makes you think, and twenty percent is absolutely great. If you wait long enough, he’ll have a genius idea.”

  Launched with loud fanfare and great expectations by NBC-TV in the fall of 1985, Amazing Stories was touted as a blend of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, filtered through the visionary talents of Steven Spielberg. But Spielberg’s anthology series, a highly uneven mixture of fantasy with often leaden doses of whimsy, soon proved an expensive, embarrassing dud, like most of his TV ventures before he finally managed to strike gold in 1994 with the hyperkinetic medical series ER.

  Speculating on the failure of Amazing Stories to find an audience, Orton offers the theory “that when people watch television, what they’re looking for are continuing characters. The anthology shows that succeeded had a modicum of continuity. They had the same host, Walt Disney or Rod Serling, who would be there at the beginning of every show. At the time there was some discussion of Steven Spielberg hosting Amazing Stories. He nixed that idea. He felt, ‘I don’t want to be mobbed every time I go out.’ He tends to be a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. He likes to let the work speak for itself.” Spielberg also vetoed the network’s suggestion of calling it Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, saying, “I don’t want my name to give it that false continuity.” He might not have the same qualms today, since he has become increasingly comfortable over the years appearing in public and promoting his work.

  Amazing Stories never lived up to the grandiose promise of its title, borrowed from the venerable pulp magazine that inspired Arnold Spielberg’s boyhood interest in science fiction. “I like stories that were the sort told to me when I was sitting on my father’s knee at four or five years old,” Steven said. But TV critics were quick to seize on the title as a handy battering ram against Spielberg. Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote in his review of the first program, “I hear America asking, what was so Amazing about that?” Indeed, the sense of wonder that Spielberg conjures up so naturally in his best theatrical films was largely absent from the overly literal-minded, often fatally hokey series. Ironically enough, it was the stories themselves (many of them credited to Spielberg) that constituted the weakest element of Amazing Stories. Even so, it was hard to shake the suspicion that in writing off the series as hastily and completely as they did, the critics were betraying an eagerness to see the cocky, fabulously wealthy wunderkind fall flat on his face.

  That was especially unfortunate because the opening program was the underrated “Ghost Train,” an eerie and poignant vignette directed by Spielberg and photographed by Allen Daviau. Inspired by Spielberg’s childhood memory of hearing an unseen train speeding each night through his neighborhood in New Jersey, as well as by his love for his Grandpa Fievel, “Ghost Train” (written by Frank Deese) tells the story of a seemingly blinkered elderly man (Roberts Blossom) who tenderly convinces his grandson (Lukas Haas) that he must board the ancient express taking him to his rendezvous with death.

  “The most amazing thing about the first episode, in fact, was that Steven Spielberg directed it,” wrote David Blum in New York magazine. Amazing Stories proved that “the emperor is naked,” L.A. Reader television critic Michael Kaplan charged just a few weeks after the premiere. Kaplan claimed Spielberg had already “squandered a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to reshape a commercial medium that has opened itself up completely to one man’s artistic vision.”

  Spielberg was his own series’s worst enemy, feeding the press’s antagonism with what was widely perceived as an arrogant approach to publicity. Not only did Spielberg follow his habitual practice of keeping sets off-limits to virtually all members of the media—with the exception of two reporters from Time preparing that magazine’s Spielberg cover story—but he even refused to allow NBC to preview Amazing Stories programs for TV reporters and reviewers, claiming that to do so would rob the series of its ability to surprise the audience. The network later persuaded him that he had made a serious mistake.

  His secretiveness provoked an all-out attack profile by Richard Turner in the August 2, 1986, issue of TV Guide, perhaps the single most negative piece of writing ever published on Spielberg. Turner, then the Hollywood bureau chief of the nation’s most widely distributed magazine, painted Spielberg as autocratic, paranoid, and stingy in his dealings with employees and the press, and as a “consummate Hollywood insider” who bullied network executives into acceding to his demands. “Spielberg tends his public image carefully,” Turner wrote, “and it’s no coincidence that stories about him are almost universally positive.” The reality, charged Turner, was that people who worked with him “were scared. Scared? Of Steven Spielberg? That beneficent troll, that kindly gremlin whose gentle fantasies transport millions? Scared? They were terrified.” Sid Sheinberg told the Los Angeles Times he had to read Turner’s article two or three times because “at first, I couldn’t believe what I was reading…. It characterized Steven as being greedy, cold, and selfish. But that’s not the Steven Spielberg I know. You’re talking about someone I’ve known for seventeen or eighteen years.”

  Spielberg’s remarkable deal with NBC helped bring about the resentment in Hollywood, particularly after Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment, described Spielberg as behaving like an “800-pound gorilla.” Without even having to make a pilot, Spielberg was guaranteed a two-year commitment for Amazing Stories, ensuring that forty-four shows would be broadcast no matter how the series performed in the ratings. He was granted creative carte blanche, having to conform only to network standards and practices, which in his case were relaxed considerably. The average budget for each half-hour program was a lavish $1 million, as much as the average hour-long dramatic program on television at that time; NBC put up $750,000 per show, with Universal making up the difference.

  Many Amazing Stories directors were Spielberg protégés, such as Joe Dante, Phil Joanou, Kevin Reynolds, and Lesli Linka Glatter. The unusually generous budgets and shooting schedules helped attract such major feature directors as Scorsese, Eastwood, Zemeckis, and Irvin Kershner. While directing “Ghost Train,” Spielberg invited his idol, David Lean, to visit the set. The famously perfectionistic Lean could not resist the temptation to offer a suggestion: “Don’t you think on the next take that it would be absolutely marvelous if the debris fell a beat sooner than it had on the first two takes?” “Absolutely!” said Spielberg, yelling to his special-effects crew. “Drop the day-bree a beat sooner!” Then he asked Lean, “Would you like to do one of these?”

  “Well, dear boy,” Lean replied, “how many days do you give a director?”

  “Between six and eight,” said Spielberg.

  “Oh, my,” said Lean. “Well, if you perhaps add a zero after the six or the eight, I’ll consider.”

  Some Amazing Stories directors, mostly those who came from features, nevertheless managed to exceed their budgets and schedules. The series “was impeccably produced—too impeccably produced,” Dante feels. “And because the shows were so overproduced, it diminished the series.” The second show Spielberg directed, a thinly plotted World War II fantasy titled “The Mission,” was padded to fill an hour slot when his first cut clocked in eight minutes too long.

  Such disparities between the elaborate scale of production and the tongue-in-cheek wispiness of the storylines were a recurring problem. As far as Amazing Stories had any particular formula, Orton says, it was to introduce “one drop of magic” into a dramatic setting and then “develop it in a realistic way.” On rare occasions, the magic worked, such as in the haunting “What If … ?,” directed by Joan Darling from a script by Spielberg’s sister Anne. This show has what most other Amazing Stories programs lack—a powerful emotional situation leading to a satisfying fantasy presented with conviction and a minimum of gimmickry. The tale of a small boy who suffers from parental neglect and is granted his wish to be reborn as the child of a kindly female stranger, “What If … ?” touches the heart much like E.T., by providing a delicate fable of childhood pain, but it does so with a freshness and originality that never seems imitative of Steven Spielberg. On too many other Amazing Stories programs, “Steven would come up with the ideas and the people who wrote the shows would be afraid to deviate from them,” Dante observes. “They would do slavish versions of his ideas.” While lambasting Spielberg for encouraging “an infantilization of the culture” through the work of his imitators, Pauline Kael added caustically of Amazing Stories, “I can’t think of any other director who’s started paying homage to himself so early.”

  After the series finished its first season a disastrous thirty-fifth in the ratings, one of its producers, David E. Vogel, said that “the spectacular visual effects for which Mr. Spielberg is renowned didn’t work on television,” such as the locomotive crashing through the living room of a suburban ranch-house in “Ghost Train.” Tartikoff thought the series was too childish, and Spielberg vowed that in the second season, “The silly factor will be seriously minimalized,” but the series played out its run to diminishing audiences.

  Spielberg’s “The Mission” was a perfect exemplar of the “silly factor.” The director staged the crash landing of a bomber with elaborate, often dazzling camerawork, but the story built up to a ridiculous climax.** A young crew member (Casey Siemaszko) trapped in a plastic gunnery bubble under the plane draws cartoon wheels that magically materialize so the plane can land safely. Richard B. Matheson, who served as a story consultant on Amazing Stories, “had to be more honest with Spielberg than is smart to be. I told him they spent all this money on ‘The Mission,’ they had a great cast, and it was all based on this guy drawing a wheel! On The Twilight Zone, the stories were so interesting. There were not enough interesting or involving stories on Amazing Stories.”

  “Steven never could make up his mind what the show was going to be, whether it was going to be scary or whether it was going to be fantasy,” says writer and story consultant Bob Gale. “Every month Steven would change his mind about what direction we should go. Television is not a director’s medium, and it’s great that Steven got all these directors in there to do these shows, but the scripts weren’t any good. He should have spent more time getting the best writers in the world to contribute, and then worrying about the directors.”

  Spielberg expressed similar sentiments in his eloquent speech when accepting his Thalberg Award at the 1987 Oscar ceremony: “Most of my life has been spent in the dark watching movies. Movies have been the literature of my life. The literature of Irving Thalberg’s generation was books and plays. They read the great words of great minds. And in our romance with technology and our excitement at exploring all the possibilities of film and video, I think we’ve partially lost something that we now have to reclaim. I think it’s time to renew our romance with the word. I’m as culpable as anyone of exalting the image at the expense of the word…. I’m proud to have my name on this award in his honor, because it reminds me of how much growth as an artist I have ahead of me in order to be worthy of standing in the company of those who have received this before me.”

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  IN the mid-eighties, Spielberg attempted to produce a feature film for David Lean, who had returned to directing with A Passage to India after a fourteen-year hiatus. Lean was considering filming J. G. Ballard’s Empire
of the Sun. The 1984 roman à clef dealt with the author’s harrowing experiences as a boy living in Shanghai’s British Protectorate and interned without his parents in a Japanese prison camp during the World War II occupation. Spielberg initially agreed to produce Lean’s film version of Empire of the Sun for Warner Bros., which controlled the rights.††

  But the elderly director became daunted by the prospect of working in China and by the problems of adapting the novel. “I worked on it for about a year,” he told biographer Kevin Brownlow, “and in the end I gave it up because I thought, This is like a diary. It’s bloody well written and very interesting, but I don’t think it’s a movie for me because it hasn’t got a dramatic shape…. I gave it up and Steven said, ‘Do you mind if I have it?’ I said, ‘Of course I don’t.’ And he did it and I must say a bit of what I felt, I felt about his film, too.” (Spielberg subsequently agreed to produce Lean’s planned film version of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo for Warner Bros., but angered Lean in February 1987 by handing him a detailed memo suggesting changes in Christopher Hampton’s screenplay. “Who does he think he is?” Lean demanded, waving the memo at Hampton, who replied, “He thinks he’s the producer, and he is.” Spielberg withdrew from the project, Hampton said, “because he could see there would be some sort of fight between him and David and he wanted to avoid that.” Lean continued preparing Nostromo until soon before his death in 1991.)