Much of the press coverage generated by Hook came for reasons that had little to do with the story of Peter Pan growing up. The gargantuan scale of the production made it a prominent symbol of 1990s runaway excess in Hollywood, with lavish sets filling nine stages on the Sony lot in Culver City. Although, as usual, Spielberg kept the sets closed to most of the press, a constant flow of Hollywood celebrities made Hook the town’s “in” attraction after filming began on February 19, 1991, continuing into the summer.
Spielberg, Hoffman, and Williams did not take salaries for the film. Their deal, negotiated by the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), instead called for the trio to split 40 percent of the distributor’s gross revenues from all markets. They were to receive a total of $20 million from the first $50 million in gross theatrical film rentals, with TriStar keeping the next $70 million in rentals before the three resumed receiving their percentage. As Medavoy pointed out at the time, if Spielberg and the two stars “went out and got their regular salaries, they would have gotten a lot more than the aggregate of 40 percent of $50 million. A huge amount more. I think it was a fair deal for everybody.” Medavoy’s explanations did not stop the absurdly exaggerated gossip around Hollywood that the film would have to gross as much as $300 million to $500 million to see any profits.
When Hook opened with less than expected box-office numbers in December 1991, many people wrote it off as a bomb. With a production cost variously estimated at between $60 million and $80 million, far in excess of its original budget of $48 million, it is often regarded as one of the most conspicuous money-wasting debacles in Sony’s profligate Hollywood spending spree. In fact, says Medavoy, “Sony made a lot of money on that picture. It did better overseas, but it did just an enormous amount here [the total worldwide theatrical gross was $288 million]. The video sold well. The studio will do somewhere between $40 million and $50 million profit.” As for Spielberg, Hoffman, and Williams, “They made a lot of money,” Medavoy says. “But so did everybody else.”
Medavoy points out that Hook also was designed as a way for Sony to say to Hollywood, “Take notice. The studio is open for business, and it’s going to do big movies.” Unfortunately, that attitude seemed to infect everyone on the set, including Spielberg. Although he had been practicing frugality ever since his “rehab” on Raiders of the Lost Ark, he became intoxicated with the sheer scale of the production|||||| and reverted to the kind of indulgence that characterized his work on 1941. Hook ran forty days over its seventy-six-day shooting schedule. Among the other contributors to the laborious shooting pace were the notoriously perfectionistic Dustin Hoffman, the physically and emotionally overwrought Julia Roberts, some amateurish child actors, elaborate special effects, and crowd scenes with hundreds of extras and Stuntmen. But Spielberg said, “It was all my fault…. Nobody else made it go over budget. I began to work at a slower pace than I usually do…. For some reason this movie was such a dinosaur coming out of the gate. It dragged me along behind it…. Every day I came on to the set, I thought, Is this flying out of control?”
*
HOOK “gets the prize for the most lavish, extravagant, opulent ode to simple joys and basic values ever made,” quipped Village Voice reviewer Georgia Brown. The more intimate scenes, particularly those revolving around Peter’s relationship with his son, are so far superior to the spectacle scenes that it almost seems as if another director made the rest of the movie. The lifeless and garishly photographed scenes in the pirate village, the overly ornate and pointlessly cluttered production design,**** the slapdash construction of the Neverland sequences, and the forced humor involving the punkish Lost Boys betray what New Yorker reviewer Terrence Rafferty called “a profound weariness in Steven Spielberg’s attitude toward his art and his audience. In this version of Peter Pan, the imagination seems like a burden—a terrible, crushing obligation.”
Spielberg intends the audience to come away feeling that Peter is freed of his anal-retentive, Type-A behavior by immersing himself in the carefree behavior of childhood. The director’s confused notion was that Peter “rescued his past. He rescued that memory of himself as a child and carried that best friend with him the rest of his life. It will never leave him again.” But the movie actually seems to be saying the opposite—that Peter needs to get his infantile tendencies out of his system for once and for all, through this one last monumental effort of regression, before he can go back to his family and behave like a mensch. Saving his children from Captain Hook requires that he give up his wish “to be a little boy and have fun.” “I can’t stay and play,” Peter sadly tells the Lost Boys, although he carries away from Neverland a renewed sense of the importance of play in everyday life and an awareness of the futility of a life devoted exclusively to greed and ambition.
The troubled relationship between Peter and his son, so full of echoes of Spielberg’s relationship with his own father, is the emotional heart of the film. An orphan himself, raised by his Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith), Peter says, “I knew why I grew up. I wanted to be a father.” But he is a terrible failure as a husband and father, so “obsessed with success” at the expense of his family (as Captain Hook puts it) that he takes a business call during his daughter’s school performance of Peter Pan and sends an assistant to videotape his son’s Little League baseball game. When he promises to attend games in the future, adding, “My word is my bond,” his son bitterly replies, “Yeah—junk bond.” Scarcely repressing his hostility toward his father, Jack nevertheless retains a tender core of wounded love that he finally is able to express when his father stands against the devious, child-hating Captain Hook.
After kidnapping Jack and his sister Maggie (Amber Scott)—the latest in a long string of child abductions in Spielberg movies—Hook woos them from their family allegiance with a lecture entitled “Why Parents Hate Their Children.” Hook’s arguments are so persuasive because they are so accurate. “Jack and Maggie are gone because Peter has wished them gone,” Henry Sheehan noted in Film Comment. “Hook is merely the agent of Peter’s most secret, repressed desires, and as such is his mirror image. When Peter first confronts Hook and is taunted by the mustachioed pirate into attempting a rescue, his failure to do so is deeply ambiguous, the result partly of physical shortcoming [ironically, a fear of heights] but also partly of nerve and, hence, desire.” In one of the most quietly affecting scenes in the movie, Peter’s wife Moira (Caroline Goodall) chides him by saying, “Your children love you. They want to play with you. How long do you think that lasts? Soon Jack may not even want you to come to his games. We have a few special years with our children, when they’re the ones who want us around. After that you’re going to be running off to them for a bit of attention. So fast, Peter—it’s a few years, then it’s over. You are not being careful. And you are missing it.”
That is the lesson Peter Banning learns in Hook, and it is one Spielberg took to heart in his own life, even while he was being pulled in the other direction by his own obsession with success. In learning to take the responsibility of fatherhood, Spielberg also learned to take greater responsibility as an artist.
“So,” Granny Wendy tells Peter, “your adventures are over.”
“Oh, no,” he replies. “To live—to live will be an awfully big adventure!”
* Aside from the phenomenally successful ER (NBC-TV, 1994–present) and his animated series for children (which also include the droll and sophisticated Animaniacs), Spielberg’s record as a TV producer has been disappointing. Such prime-time series as seaQuest DSV, Earth 2, and Champs have not added to his luster.
† When he was a teenager, Spielberg talked his way into an interview with one of his idols, John Ford. After showing the nervous youngster his collection of Western prints and growling, “When you understand what makes a great Western painting, you’ll be a great Western director,” Ford ended the brief meeting with a succinct piece of advice: “And never spend your own money to make a movie. Now get the hell out of here.” That advice governed Spielberg
’s career until the founding of DreamWorks, but it’s worth noting that even before he met Ford, Spielberg spent his parents’ money to make Firelight.
‡ Spielberg was an executive producer on The Goonies and received story credit for the Amblin production, with Chris Columbus receiving screenplay credit.
§ Sheinberg did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this book.
¶ He said in his acceptance speech, “I’m resisting like crazy to use Sally Field’s line from two years ago” (“I can’t deny the fact you like me. Right now, you like me!”).
|| Spielberg may have been miffed over Welles’s mischievous comment to the press that “the sled he bought was a fake.”
** Menno Meyjes wrote the teleplay, based on a Spielberg story originally titled “Round Trip.”
†† Harold Becker originally was to have directed the film, with former studio president Robert Shapiro producing; Shapiro eventually became the executive producer.
‡‡ Also in 1987, Spielberg helped convince Columbia Pictures to support the Robert A. Harris-Jim Painten restoration of Lean’s mutilated masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, which was completed triumphantly in 1989. The project kindled Spielberg’s passion for the twin causes of film preservation and the moral rights of filmmakers, which he has championed along with Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and other filmmakers. As Spielberg put it in 1988, “Moral rights are essential to protect future generations from the kind of big-business greed that doesn’t care about the desecration of timeless treasures.”
§§ One day in England, Spielberg was shooting in an abandoned gasworks serving as the initial detention camp “where the boy did an Oliver Twist and went up and asked for more. It was very strange,” assistant director David Tomblin recalls, “because that was the day David Lean came down. I said, ‘We’re doing some remakes on Oliver Twist.’”
¶¶ Stoppard wrote the first draft of the screenplay when Harold Becker was attached as director. Spielberg hired Menno Meyjes to do an uncredited rewrite before Stoppard was brought back to write the final shooting script.
|||| A set built near Trebujena, Spain.
*** Boam receives sole screenplay credit, with Lucas and Meyjes sharing story credit.
††† Amy and Bruno have a son, Gabriel, who was born in 1990.
‡‡‡ Jerry Belson and Diane Thomas were among the writers. Ronald Bass worked on the shooting script, but Belson did the final draft and received sole screen credit.
§§§ Spielberg’s witty use of the lovely old Jerome Kern ballad as the love song of the two smoke-eaters came about after the director was denied the use of Irving Berlin’s haunting “Always.” In a telephone conversation with Spielberg, the ninety-four-year-old Berlin said he “planned to use it in the future.”
¶¶¶ His stated reason for bowing out of the project was that he felt Anne had been “standing in my shadow long enough…. I began to consider the fact that if I directed it, people wouldn’t give Annie any credit.” She and Ross received Oscar nominations for the screenplay.
|||||| An Amblin Entertainment film, it was produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Gerald R. Molen (Amblin’s production manager, who also served in that capacity on Hook).
**** Dean Cundey was cinematographer and Norman Garwood production designer; theatrical designer John Napier was hired as the film’s “visual consultant” after Spielberg saw his work on the musical Cats. Spielberg’s animation studio, Amblimation, has been working for years on a film version of Cats.
SIXTEEN
MENSCH
I’VE SAID TO HIM, “WHO ARE YOU? I HARDLY KNOW YOU.” BUT STEVEN JUST KEEPS GROWING IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
– LEAH ADLER, 1994
WHEN he went to Poland in 1993 to make Schindler’s List, Spielberg was “hit in the face with my personal life. My upbringing. My Jewishness. The stories my grandparents told me about the Shoah. And Jewish life came pouring back into my heart. I cried all the time.” The anguish he felt while making Schindler’s List was translated directly to the screen. While immersed in his re-creation of the Holocaust, the viewer can readily understand why the filmmaker felt “constantly sickened” and “frightened every day” on location in Poland. To the almost overwhelming burden of paying witness to the history of his people was added the personal burden of finally coming to terms with himself. Schindler’s List became the transforming experience of Spielberg’s lifetime. Making the film after more than a decade of hesitation and avoidance was the catharsis that finally liberated him to be himself, both as a man and as an artist, fully integrating those two, sometimes distinct-seeming halves of his personality.
What made the day-to-day experience in Poland bearable was what made it possible for him to undertake the project: the presence of his family. Before undertaking his “journey from shame to honor,” Spielberg “had to have a family first. I had to figure out what my place was in the world.” His second wife, Kate, accompanied him to Poland with their five children.* His parents and his rabbi also paid visits to the location of what Jewish Frontier reviewer Mordecai Newman called “Spielberg’s bar mitzvah movie, his cinematic initiation into emotional manhood.”
When he finally accepted his long-overdue Academy Award for directing Schindler’s List, Spielberg thanked Kate “for rescuing me ninety-two days in a row in Kraków, Poland, last winter when things got just too unbearable.” He told the press he “would’ve gone crazy” without his family there. “… My kids saw me cry for the first time. I would come home and weep, not because I was feeling sorry for anybody—I would weep because it was so bloody painful.” Every couple of weeks, he said, “Robin Williams would call me with comic CARE packages over the telephone to try to get me to laugh.”
Even in those depths, Spielberg was never far from his more familiar niche as a crowd-pleasing commercial filmmaker. Three nights a week, he came home to the small hotel he had rented for his family in Poland, switched on a satellite dish situated in the front yard, and worked on Jurassic Park, which had finished principal photography barely three months before Schindler’s List began filming on March 1, 1993.
Because Schindler’s List had to be filmed while it was still winter in Poland, Spielberg left many of the final postproduction chores of his dinosaur movie in the hands of George Lucas. But he reserved for himself the final decisions about the creation of computer-generated dinosaurs and the movie’s soundtrack. High-tech communication methods and computer technology enabled him to see evolving images at Industrial Light & Magic in northern California, along with such friendly faces as those of special-effects wizard Dennis Muren and producer Kathleen Kennedy (who shared producing chores with Gerald R. Molen). Each night when they were finished, composer John Williams would transmit his score, which Spielberg played on large speakers. All this interaction was transmitted from California to Poland and back again, scrambled to avoid piracy.
Spielberg’s schizoid, “culturally dislocating” existence working on both films simultaneously was “an unusual set of circumstances, and all my own doing. I don’t regret it, but I spend two hours on Jurassic Park, and it takes a while to get back into Schindler’s List.” That bifurcated focus perfectly expressed the duality of his artistic personality at a crucial turning point in his career. His career-long balancing act between the somewhat arbitrarily defined poles of artist and entertainer, while never quite so stark as it was during those months in 1993, had made Spielberg a great popular artist. Even if the purely crowd-pleasing side of his nature often seemed dominant, his strengths as a filmmaker, like Dickens’s strengths as a novelist, have always been drawn from that duality. Taking respites from the horror of Schindler’s List to play with fantasy dinosaurs also may have helped keep him from becoming immobilized by despair while going about the task of re-creating the Holocaust in places where it actually occurred. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the abil
ity to function.”
A three-hour, black-and-white film about the Holocaust was a highly risky commercial proposition for Universal. Although a few Hollywood films had been made on Holocaust issues,† no major-studio film had ever dealt with the subject with such a level of uncompromising, brutal realism. “I guaranteed the studio they’d lose all their money,” Spielberg recalled. “I told them that the $22 million it was costing to make the film, they might as well just give it away to me to make this film, because they were never going to see anything from it. That’s how pessimistic I was that there was a climate ready to accept [what is] essentially a movie about racial hatred. I was happily wrong.”
Not wanting what he called “blood money,” Spielberg offered to forego any salary and defer his lower-than-usual percentage of the gross film rentals until Universal recouped its production cost. All the money he earned from the film (which ultimately became a considerable box-office success) has been donated, through his Righteous Persons Foundation, to Jewish organizations and to such historical projects as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Spielberg’s own nonprofit Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
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