Empire of the Sun was a major commercial disappointment, bringing in only $66.7 million at the worldwide box office, considerably less than even 1941. Spielberg said he knew going in that “my large-canvas personal film … wasn’t going to have a broad audience appeal.” But he consoled himself by feeling, “I’ve earned the right to fail commercially.”
Receiving six Academy Award nominations, all in the craft categories, Empire failed to win a single award. It was nominated neither for Best Picture nor for Best Director. Allen Daviau publicly complained, “I can’t second-guess the Academy, but I feel very sorry that I get nominations and Steven doesn’t….. It’s his vision that makes it all come together, and if Steven wasn’t making these films, none of us would be here.” Spielberg’s feelings about the critics were made clear to George Lucas, with whom he was planning another Indiana Jones movie. Lucas wanted to start the movie with a sequence showing Indy as a boy, but Spielberg initially demurred because, as Lucas put it, “Steven had been really trashed by the critics for Empire of the Sun, and he said, ‘I just don’t want to do any more films with kids in them.’”
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SPIELBERG admitted he was “consciously regressing” in making Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). If many critics and large segments of the public didn’t want him to grow up or scoffed at his attempts to do so, then he would stop fighting them. His run for cover would last for the next few years, an uneven creative period that saw him indulging in various forms of cinematic and personal regression in hopes of reconnecting with his audience.
In making Last Crusade, Always (1989), and Hook (1991), Spielberg seemed to be giving up, for the time being, on courting the critics or the members of the Academy. Part of him could not help being concerned about his future as a popular artist. He knew how fickle the moviegoing public could be, and his anxiety about maintaining a high commercial profile drove him back to escapist subject matter—a pulp adventure, a ghost story, a pirate movie—as he recycled tried-and-true material from movies past.
But there was another dimension to those movies. The battering he had taken in attempting to expand his horizons forced him to turn inward, both for self-protection and as personal compensation for playing the commercial game. Those three films examined the wellsprings of his artistic personality in a more covert fashion, treating some of his most cherished psychological obsessions within the framework of genre conventions. Rather than taking daring risks with subject matter as he had with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, he bent traditional genres to express his own style and feelings, like the studio directors he admired from Hollywood’s Golden Age. By disguising his increasingly personal filmmaking as popular entertainment, Spielberg was conducting creative experiments that would help advance him along the path toward Schindler’s List.
In light of the major changes taking place in Spielberg’s personal life during the second half of the 1980s—fatherhood, marriage, and, eventually, divorce—it’s not surprising that the most interesting and unusual thematic elements in Last Crusade, Always, and Hook revolve around troubled relationships between fathers and sons or father-son surrogates. Spielberg’s belated personal maturation forced him to examine the meaning of manhood as it applied to his own life, both as the son of a broken marriage and as the father in what would become a disintegrating marriage. The fact that he seemed to be imitating his own parents’ failure must have caused him to rethink some of his condemnatory attitudes toward his father, as well as giving him a greater understanding of the cost of his own workaholic tendencies.
The career vs. family conflict so central to baby boomer psyches figures largely in these three films, along with Spielberg’s increasingly critical examination of male characters who, like him, suffer from the “Peter Pan Syndrome.” What J. Hoberman (writing of Empire of the Sun) sarcastically called Spielberg’s “Peter Panic” became the director’s explicit subject matter in the aesthetically unsatisfactory but nakedly autobiographical Hook. Peter Pan himself finally occupied the center stage of a Spielberg movie, but the character was no longer the rebellious little boy who won’t grow up. He was a boy in the guise of a fully grown man, a perfectly miserable failure in his roles as a husband and father.
The depth of Spielberg’s involvement in his characters’ neuroses in these transitional films makes them resemble cinematic Rorschach inkblots. Spielberg went through psychotherapy around 1987, the first time he had done so since adolescence. “All my friends went to therapy and I thought that maybe I would learn something about myself, so I went for a year,” he said. “But I can’t say that I found the discoveries conclusive. Everything I learned about myself I knew already or I’d guessed for myself.” Shortly after the release of Hook, it was reported that Spielberg had met privately with psychologist John Bradshaw. Bradshaw’s emphasis on dysfunctional families and getting back in touch with one’s “inner child” made him a guru for Hollywood celebrities undergoing midlife crises. Spielberg solicited Bradshaw’s advice on the script of Hook; he also had the psychologist on the set for part of the shooting, and cast Bradshaw’s daughter in the film.
Moviemaking, not formal psychotherapy, has always been Spielberg’s preferred method of working out his personal problems. He may have shared his psychological discoveries somewhat sketchily in Last Crusade, confusedly in Always, and clumsily in Hook, but for viewers alert to reading nuances between the lines, those films are fascinating because they reveal so much about their maker.
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FULFILLING his obligation to George Lucas for a final movie in the Indiana Jones trilogy meant that Spielberg had to abandon Rain Man. He had been working for several months in 1987 with Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and screenwriter Ronald Bass, developing the project about an autistic savant and his mutually enriching relationship with his outwardly normal but (in Spielberg’s words) “emotionally autistic” younger brother.
Spielberg was not yet satisfied with the script of Rain Man by the time he left to begin preproduction on Last Crusade, which had to begin shooting in May 1988 to ensure its scheduled Memorial Day weekend release in 1989. Barry Levinson eventually took over the direction of Rain Man, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Hoffman), and Screenplay (Bass and original writer Barry Morrow). “It’s a shame that people who are involved with a film in its interim can’t have their name[s] connected with it,” Bass said. “Spielberg really did a tremendous amount.” Though he could not have helped feeling somewhat jealous over the Oscars Rain Man received, Spielberg was not alone in finding the film “emotionally very distancing. I think I certainly would have pulled tears out of a rather dry movie…. I was very upset not to have been able to do Rain Man, mainly because I’ve wanted to work with Dustin Hoffman ever since I saw The Graduate.”
Lucas initially suggested making Indy III “a haunted-house movie.” He had such a script written by Romancing the Stone screenwriter Diane Thomas before her death in a 1985 car accident, but, Lucas said, “Steven had done Poltergeist, and he didn’t want to do another movie like that.” Fearing further accusations of racism, Spielberg and Lucas both rejected the script they commissioned from Chris Columbus about an African Monkey King (half man, half monkey). Taking the safest route, they finally decided to reuse the cartoonish Nazi villains from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Menno Meyjes’s draft about Indy’s quest for the Holy Grail, a plot device suggested by Lucas, left Spielberg dubious.
Spielberg recalled telling the producer that he would make a movie about the Holy Grail, “but I want it to be about a father and son. I want to get Indy’s father involved in the thing. I want a quest for the father.” In the film, Indy’s father, Dr. Henry Jones, a professor of medieval literature, is cut from a sterner, more Victorian code of right and wrong. Unlike his son, whose interest in precious objects stems from a mixture of greed and intellectual curiosity, the elder Dr. Jones has a truly religious obsession with finding the Holy Grail. “I wanted to do Indy in pursuit of his father, sharing h
is father’s dream,” said Spielberg, “and in the course of searching for their dreams, they rediscover each other.”
Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam gives a different account of how the storyline evolved. Boam, who wrote the final draft,*** worked mostly with Lucas, since Spielberg was busy on Empire of the Sun. The father-son story “came from George,” the writer insists. “I think maybe George has his own father fixation. I don’t think Steven had a personal point of view to impose on the material at all. Steven knows these are George’s movies. Steven has no problem with that. He approaches them as what John Ford used to call ‘a job of work.’” In the earlier draft of Last Crusade by Meyjes, “the father was sort of a MacGuffin [a Hitchcockian device that provides an excuse for the plot],” recalls Boam. “They didn’t find the father until the very end. I said to George, ‘It doesn’t make sense to find the father at the end. Why don’t they find him in the middle?’ Given the fact that it’s the third film in the series, you couldn’t just end with them obtaining the object. That’s how the first two ended. So I thought, Let them lose the object—the Grail—and let the relationship be the main point. It’s an archeological search for Indy’s own identity. Indy coming to accept his father is more what it’s about [than the quest for the Grail].”
The Indiana Jones movies all begin with a cliffhanger action sequence whose underlying function, Boam explains, is to “tell us something new about Indiana Jones.” For Last Crusade, Lucas suggested, “What if we learn about his childhood?” The film opens in 1912 with the adolescent Indy, played by River Phoenix, on a trip to Monument Valley with his Boy Scout troop. Besides performing outlandish feats of derring-do atop a speeding circus train, young Indy acquires his trademark fedora hat and whip and his passion for archeology.
Despite Spielberg’s nostalgia for his own formative days as a Boy Scout, “George felt Steven wouldn’t go for it,” Boam recalls. “Steven felt, ‘I’m always doing movies about children. I did Empire and E.T.’ Then Steven asked his wife [Amy] and his friends and his business associates—he was kind of polling his constituency—and said he would do it. I think Steven was most captivated by the idea of the circus train. He had a lot of fun coming up with different gags. Steven is very good with little touches. He is inspired by what is there—he’s able to make it a little funnier, a little more exciting, but he waits until the recipe is written and the meal is cooked, and then he puts his little spices in it. He’s very specific about what he wants. He doesn’t have any ‘nagging qualms that he can’t put his finger on,’ like many people do. When he likes what you’ve done, he really shows his enjoyment. It’s so gratifying to delight him. There’s nothing in the least bit cynical or jaded about him. He responds like a kid with a popcorn box on his lap.”
As so often happens with directors, though, Spielberg may have become so delighted by his writers’ contributions that he began to think he had come up with at least some of them himself. Once he seized on the father-son relationship, he shaped it according to his own emotional need for a more combative relationship. Lucas thought of Indy’s father as a rather ineffectual old gent, “a John Houseman kind of person.” Spielberg wanted Sean Connery. The ruggedly sexy Scottish actor, in a sense, already was the father of Indiana Jones, since the series had sprung from the desire of Lucas and Spielberg to rival (and outdo) Connery’s James Bond movies. Connery proves more than a match for his cinematic son, ordering him around and condescendingly calling him “Junior.” The elder Jones, Connery observed, is “eccentric, self-centered, and quite selfish. He does not have the Saturday Evening Post mentality of fatherhood. He’s quite indifferent to his boy’s needs.” At one point, Indy complains that in his childhood, “We never talked.” His father retorts, “You left just when you were becoming interesting.”
In the film’s most memorable comic exchange, which was improvised by the actors, Indy is shocked to realize his father also had an affair with Elsa (Alison Doody), the sinuous blonde who turns out to be a Nazi spy. “I’m as human as the next man,” the elder Dr. Jones insists. “I was the next man,” his son replies. Spielberg had to overcome his own qualms about having Indy and his father sleep with the same woman, an obvious Freudian stand-in for Mom (in an even darker twist, the film also suggests that the treacherous Elsa has slept with Adolf Hitler). When Connery learned that the director, expressing concern about how women would react, had excised his sexual relationship with Elsa, Connery insisted on putting it back into the script. “I didn’t want the father to be so much of a wimp,” he said. In a cocky bit of screen-hero one-upmanship, Connery added, “Aside from the fact that Indiana Jones is not as well-dressed as James Bond, the main difference between them is sexual. Indiana deals with women shyly. In the first film, he’s flustered when the student writes ‘I love you’ on her eyelids. James Bond would have had all those young coeds for breakfast.”
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a graceful piece of popular filmmaking, bursting with the sheer pleasure of cinematic craftsmanship and gratifyingly free of the racist overtones that blighted the two previous films in the series. Released by Paramount on May 24, 1989, to then-record opening figures, Last Crusade was Spielberg’s biggest hit since E.T., with $494.7 million in worldwide gross on a production cost of $44 million. It was respectfully received by most reviewers, including the author of this book in Daily Variety.
Some reviewers, however, found the film distasteful when it mixes cartoonish jokes about Nazis (“Nazis! I hate these guys,” Indy snarls) with such real-life elements as a book-burning at a Party rally attended by Hitler (who gives Indy his autograph). “The idea about book-burning was Steven’s,” Boam reports. “He said, ‘I really want to do a scene of them burning books.’ At the time I thought, This must be a warming-up for Schindler’s List. But I had no idea what Schindler’s List was going to be like.”
With all its masterly technique, and the added sparks emanating from the father-son relationship, Last Crusade is mostly a lark, a holiday outing for a director emotionally wrung out from his two previous films. It is also a farewell to a certain kind of soulless action filmmaking, pushed about as far as it can be along the scale of cinematic ambition (even if Spielberg still talks nostalgically from time to time about doing a fourth Indiana Jones movie). “I’ve learned more about movie craft from making the Indiana Jones films than I did from E.T. or Jaws,” he said at the time Last Crusade was released. “And now I feel as if I’ve graduated from the college of Cliffhanger U.”
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ON April 24, 1989, Spielberg and Amy Irving announced they would divorce after three and a half years of marriage. “Our mutual decision, however difficult, has been made in a spirit of caring,” they said. “… And our friendship remains both personal and professional.”
They agreed to share custody of their son, Max, maintaining homes near each other in Los Angeles and New York to facilitate their joint parenting responsibilities. Amy also received a large settlement. Although the amount was never officially announced, it was reported that she may have received a sum approximating half of her husband’s net worth. At the time Spielberg made his first appearance on the Forbes 400 list of the nation’s wealthiest people in 1987, his net worth was estimated at “well over $225 million.” Press estimates of Amy’s golden parachute ranged from $93 million to $112.5 million.
The competing stresses of their professional careers were among the primary factors in the failure of their marriage, which had been the subject of rumors in the press for months before the announcement. “I started my career as the daughter of Jules Irving,” she said in 1989. “I don’t want to finish it as the wife of Spielberg or the mother of Max.” Writer-director Matthew Robbins has recalled, “It was no fun to go [to their house], because there was an electric tension in the air. It was competitive as to whose dining table this is, whose career we’re gonna talk about, or whether he even approved of what she was interested in—her friends and her actor life. He really was uncomfortable. The child in Spielberg
believed so thoroughly in the possibility of perfect marriage, the institution of marriage, the Norman Rockwell turkey on the table, everyone’s head bowed in prayer—all this stuff. And Amy was sort of a glittering prize, smart as hell, gifted, and beautiful, but definitely edgy and provocative and competitive. She would not provide him any ease.”
For much of their final months as a married couple, Steven was in London and Spain making Last Crusade, and Amy was on the New York stage in Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca. They previously had agreed to alternate their work assignments, with neither accepting a job that would keep them apart while the other was working. Amy gave up film offers to spend an “isolated and miserable” time in Spain with Max and Steven for Empire of the Sun, and Steven accompanied her when she appeared in director Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 film Crossing Delancey. When Amy accepted her role in the Fugard play, however, Steven did not want to pass up the opportunity to make Last Crusade. They flew back and forth across the ocean to visit each other whenever they could, but found the situation “impossible,” Amy said. “Everything suffered…. I used to think I could do it all before Max was born. Now everything’s changed.”
She admitted five years after the divorce that she had never managed to shake the “loss of identity” she felt as the wife of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmaker: “During my marriage to Steven, I felt like a politician’s wife. There were certain things expected of me that definitely weren’t me. One of my problems is that I’m very honest and direct. You pay a price for that. But then I behaved myself and I paid a price too.” Part of what made her uncomfortable, evidently, was their complicated, hectic, and extravagant lifestyle. A woman whose idea of heaven has long been her relatively modest adobe home in Santa Fe, Amy never became accustomed to running four additional households: their estates in Pacific Palisades and East Hampton, beach house in Malibu (which was damaged by fire in July 1988 but subsequently rebuilt), and Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan. “This is not really my style,” she complained. “We’re surrounded by live-in help and tennis courts and vegetable gardens…. the last thing I want is to be ‘the lady of the house.’”
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