Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “Nobody else could have gotten any studio to say yes to this project,” Spielberg said. “… I don’t boast ever about my own accomplishments, but that was the time I said, well, thank God that I was able to become some kind of a nine-hundred-pound gorilla so I could have the ability to get this project off the ground…. One studio executive who shall remain nameless said, ‘Why don’t we just make a donation to the Holocaust Museum—would that make you happy?’ I blew up when I heard that.” That was a “message,” Spielberg felt, which “capped my resolve to make the movie immediately.”

  MCA president Sid Sheinberg gave the director the go-ahead to make the picture with only one condition: he had to make Jurassic Park first. As Spielberg acknowledged, “He knew that once I had directed Schindler I wouldn’t be able to do Jurassic Park.”

  • • •

  IN the late 1980s, Spielberg bought a screenplay Michael Crichton based on his youthful experiences as a Harvard Medical School intern in the emergency ward of Massachusetts General Hospital. ER eventually would be transformed into Spielberg’s first prime-time hit TV series. “We were talking about changes in my office one day [in October 1989],” Spielberg recalled, “and I happened to ask him what he was working on, aside from this screenplay. He said he had just finished a book about dinosaurs, called Jurassic Park, and that it was being proofed by his publisher. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had a fascination with dinosaurs all my life and I’d really love to read it.’ So he slipped me a copy of the galleys; and I read them and I called him the next day, and said, ‘There’s going to be a real hot bidding war for this, I’m sure.’

  “But Michael said he wasn’t really interested in getting into a bidding war. He wanted to give it to someone who would make the movie. So I said, ‘I’d like to make it.’ And he said, ‘You mean you want to produce it or direct it?’ I said, ‘Both.’ And he said, ‘I’ll give it to you if you guarantee me that you’ll direct the picture.’ But then the agency [Creative Artists Agency, which represented both Crichton and Spielberg] got ahold of it; and they, of course, encouraged a bidding war, even though Michael had kind of promised me the book privately. Before long, it had been sent out to every studio in town, and the bidding was fast and furious.”

  The novel is a hodgepodge of pulp fiction and diverting scientific speculation. Taking as his springboard the notion of cloning dinosaurs from prehistoric DNA preserved in amber, Crichton spun a yarn about a mad theme-park impresario named John Hammond who recklessly creates dinosaurs on a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica, only to see them run amok and destroy both him and the park. Although Jurassic Park borrows elements from Crichton’s own 1973 movie Westworld—a sci-fi thriller about a theme park with a murderous robot gunslinger—it is even more indebted to Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, whose very title Crichton cribbed for his sequel, filmed by Spielberg in 1996–97 as The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

  Doyle’s protagonist, a British explorer named Professor Challenger, discovers a South American plateau populated by dinosaurs and ape-men, a prehistoric world removed from “the ordinary laws of Nature.” Like Crichton’s island, most of whose denizens (notably the Tyrannosaurus rex) stem from the Cretaceous rather than the Jurassic Period, Doyle’s lost world freely mixes creatures from several geological epochs. Adapted as a silent film in 1925, the novel also was the source of Irwin Allen’s 1960 film The Lost World, at which the youthful Spielberg stampeded a Phoenix audience with his contagious vomiting prank. Acknowledging his debt to Doyle’s work, Crichton commented, “We’re both failed doctors who found storytelling more congenial than healing. Sometimes I think I’ve devoted my entire life to rewriting Conan Doyle in different ways.”

  Crichton’s human characters in Jurassic Park are pure cardboard, however, and his dinosaur action set-pieces are far less exciting than those in Spielberg’s film. But the author’s blend of pseudoscientific fantasizing with old-fashioned monster-movie hokum was tailor-made for Spielberg’s talents as a showman. As the director put it, “I have no embarrassment in saying that with Jurassic I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws. On land.”‡

  The film rights were put up for sale at a non-negotiable asking price of $1.5 million plus a substantial percentage of the gross. Over a three-day period in May 1990, Crichton weighed matching offers from Warner Bros. (for director Tim Burton), Columbia/TriStar (for Richard Donner), Twentieth Century–Fox (for Joe Dante), and Universal for Spielberg. After a day of telephone conversations with all four directors, Crichton settled on Spielberg, with Universal throwing in another $500,000 for a screenplay by the author. “I knew it was going to be a very difficult picture to make,” Crichton said. “Steven is arguably the most experienced and most successful director of these kinds of movies. And he’s really terrific at running the technology rather than letting the technology run him.”

  In a largely unsuccessful attempt to flesh out Crichton’s characters, Spielberg commissioned rewrites by Malia Scotch Marmo, who had worked on Hook, and David Koepp, the writer of Robert Zemeckis’s black comedy Death Becomes Her. Only Crichton and Koepp received screen credit for the script of Jurassic Park; Marmo said her principal contribution was to make Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and the children, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello), more assertive. The crucial change introduced in Koepp’s shooting script was giving Crichton’s protagonist, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), a deep-seated hostility toward children, providing a source of dramatic tension that does not exist in the novel (Crichton’s Grant “liked kids—it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs”).

  Even before the first script was written, Spielberg, in a departure from his usual order of procedure, was busy storyboarding his favorite sequences from the novel with production designer Rick Carter and several other illustrators. “We basically set up what the scenes were going to be about,” Carter explained. “Once [Spielberg] knows what the space is—that’s very important, to know where things are—he’ll just start playing a projector in his head. He’s open to contributions and he’ll talk it through, but he’ll actually draw these funny little frames which are incredibly detailed if you know how to look at them.” When hired to do his rewrite in the spring of 1992, Koepp found the storyboards “enormously helpful. It was like having a large portion of the movie just handed to you, to be able to walk around and soak up the feel of what the movie was supposed to look like.”

  Spielberg’s careful planning kept the complex production running smoothly. “From the beginning, I was afraid that a movie like Jurassic Park could get away from me,” he said. “There had been other pictures—1941, Jaws, and Hook—where the production simply got away from me and I was dragged behind schedule. I was determined not to let it happen this time. So I walked away from a lot of takes where, on my last picture, I might have stayed for four or five more…. I probably drove everyone to the brink of insanity in order to complete this movie on budget and on schedule.”

  Officially, the final production cost was reported at about $60 million, but Forbes magazine later estimated that the film’s actual negative cost (including $20 million for interest and overhead) totaled $95 million. Principal photography began on the Hawaiian island of Kauai on August 24, 1992, and was completed in Hollywood on November 30, twelve days ahead of the original eighty-two-day shooting schedule. Even Hurricane Iniki, which struck Kauai on September 11, the last scheduled day of the three-week location shoot, barely caused a bump in the production. Spielberg and company, who rode out the storm in the ballroom of the Westin Kauai Hotel, resumed filming on the Universal lot four days later. The day of the hurricane was the thirteenth birthday of actress Ariana Richards. She recalled that “the storm knocked part of the roof in, but nobody was hurt. Steven Spielberg kept all of us kids entertained by telling ghost stories, so it actually turned out to be a pretty good birthday.”

  *

  THE sense of wonder that is part of Spielberg’s raison
d’être elevates his Jurassic Park to an imaginative level far beyond Crichton’s cold-blooded speculations on paleo-DNA cloning. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould criticized the movie for trying to pass off a dinosaur revivification premise that amounts to “heaping impossibility upon impossibility.” But the achievement of Spielberg and his special-effects wizards in conjuring up believable images of long-extinct creatures is genuinely “spectacular,” Gould wrote. “Intellectuals too often either pay no attention to such technical wizardry or, even worse, actually disdain special effects with such dismissive epithets as ‘merely mechanical.’ I find such small-minded parochialism outrageous. Nothing can be more complex than a living organism, with all the fractal geometry of its form and behavior…. The use of technology to render accurate and believable animals therefore becomes one of the greatest all-time challenges to human ingenuity.”

  With its extensive employment of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Jurassic Park rendered obsolescent the traditional stop-motion miniature techniques developed by such special-effects masters as Ray Harryhausen and the original King Kong’s Willis O’Brien, as well as eclipsing the advanced go-motion techniques perfected by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. An early example of CGI could be glimpsed in one of Spielberg’s own productions, Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), for which ILM and Pixar (then the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm) conjured up a computer-animated knight springing into action from a stained-glass window. But when preproduction on Jurassic Park began in June 1990, Spielberg did not realize how far he could push CGI techniques to make his dinosaur movie “the most realistic of them all…. I thought it was possible that someday they might be able to create three-dimensional, live-action characters through computer graphics. But I didn’t think it would happen this soon.”

  Hoping the art of building mechanical monsters had progressed substantially since Jaws, Spielberg first thought of hiring Bob Gurr, designer of the King Kong attraction for the Universal theme parks, to build full-sized, ambulatory robotic dinosaurs. But it soon became apparent that the capabilities of Gurr’s creatures were far too limited. Spielberg turned to creature designer Stan Winston, who began building large animatronic dinosaurs operated with mechanized support structures, not unlike Bob Mattey’s sharks for Jaws, but far more technically advanced. Spielberg planned to augment Winston’s creatures with go-motion miniatures designed by Phil Tippett and a limited amount of computer animation by ILM. When effects supervisor Dennis Muren told Spielberg his animators could create full-sized dinosaurs with computer graphics, Spielberg replied, “Prove it.”

  “And,” marveled Spielberg, “he went out and proved it…. I’ll never forget the time that Dennis brought the first test down. I’d never seen movements this smooth outside of looking at National Geographic documentaries. But I didn’t dare call [Tippett] at that time and say, ‘Hey, Phil, we’d like to replace what you were going to do on this film—creating a hundred shots with the best go-motion ever done in history—with CGI.’ I didn’t have the heart to do it then, because I wasn’t fully convinced until I saw a [CGI test of a] fleshed dinosaur, outside in the worst sunlight.

  “When I saw that, and Phil saw that with me for the first time, there we were watching our future unfolding on the TV screen, so authentic I couldn’t believe my eyes. It blew my mind again. I turned to Phil, and Phil looked at me, and Phil said, ‘I think I’m extinct.’ I actually used Phil’s line in the movie, gave it to Malcolm [Jeff Goldblum] to say to Grant.” (When they arrive at Jurassic Park and Grant says, “We’re out of a job,” Malcolm replies, “Don’t you mean extinct?”) Tippett remained on the film as what Spielberg called “the director of the CGI dinosaurs.”§ They filled only six and a half minutes of screen time, but, as Spielberg put it, the Tyrannosaurus rex became “our star,” dwarfing the human performers in more ways than one. The sequence of the Tyrannosaurus rex attack on the children, a mixture of CGI and animatronics, so impressed Spielberg that he changed the ending (originally planned as a smaller-scale battle between two velociraptors) to bring back his star in an all-CGI climax.

  To handle his new tools, Spielberg had to take a crash course in computer technology, his father’s profession. He had resisted entering his father’s field, and that ambivalence was reflected in the movie itself. “I hate computers” is Dr. Grant’s first line, and the villain is the park’s corrupt director of computer technology, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), whose brief shutdown of the overloaded system has catastrophic consequences. As Richard Corliss observed in Time, “no film could be more personal to [Spielberg] than this one…. a movie whose subject is its process, a movie about all the complexities of fabricating entertainment in the microchip age. It’s a movie in love with technology (as Spielberg is), yet afraid of being carried away by it (as he is).”

  *

  WHEN Crichton and Spielberg first met to discuss the adaptation, Crichton assumed they would start by talking about the technical challenges involved in creating dinosaurs. But Spielberg said, ‘‘Let’s talk about the characters.”

  “And then,” recalled Crichton, “as I scribbled hastily, he went through every character in the story, outlining their physical appearances, their motivations, their hopes and fears, their quirks and foibles. Ideas about dialogue, gestures, and costuming tumbled out. Speaking very rapidly, he went on like this for an hour.

  “At last he turned to the dinosaurs, but again, he spoke of them as characters. The strength and limitations of the tyrannosaur. The quick menace of the velociraptors. The sick triceratops. Already, he had a list of telling visual touches: snorting breath fogging a glass window; a foot squishing in mud; muscles moving under skin; a pupil constricting in bright light. He was thinking about how to convey weight, speed, menace, intention. He talked about a Tyrannosaurus sprinting sixty miles an hour, chasing a car.

  “Finally I could stand it no longer. ‘Steven,’ I said, ‘how are you going to do this?’

  “He shrugged, and made a little dismissing gesture with his hand. Not important. Not what we need to talk about. (Of course, it was also true he didn’t then have an answer.)

  “I said, ‘But these effects—’

  “‘Effects,’ he said, ‘are only as good as the audience’s feeling for the characters.’”

  *

  ONE of the most revealing differences between the novel and the film is Spielberg’s transformation of Hammond into a far more sympathetic figure. The director admitted that he could not help identifying with Hammond’s blinkered obsession with showmanship.¶ Spielberg underscored his affinities with the character by casting another movie director (Richard Attenborough) as the Scottish impresario.

  Spielberg also admitted that he shares the character’s “dark side,” an all-encompassing passion for his work, sometimes at the expense of family responsibilities. Another in the long line of irresponsible father (or grandfather) figures in Spielberg’s films, Hammond is so thrilled to be able to breed dinosaurs that he doesn’t stop to weigh the consequences. He even exposes his own grandchildren to mortal danger by using them as guinea pigs for his tourist park. But Hammond’s essentially kindly nature in the film—as seen in his almost maternal coaxing of a baby dinosaur from its shell—makes his conduct seem more misguided than villainous. He has no conscious wish to put the children in danger, or any thought of what might happen to them until it is too late to do anything but rely on Grant to save them.

  “The power of the film’s coupling of children and death arises almost solely from Spielberg’s obsessive invocation of it,” Henry Sheehan observed in Sight and Sound. “… The two most terrifying scenes in the film revolve specifically around the children’s near death at the hands first of a Tyranno saurus rex and then of the velociraptors. But these encounters also serve to play out the child-murder fantasies of Dr. Grant.” Grant’s first scene in the film shows him sadistically teasing a young boy with a murderous fantasy about velociraptors ripping him apart. When Tim and Lex greet the celebrated pa
leontologist with hero-worship, Grant’s response is to glower at them and wish they would disappear. He almost gets his wish. “When the Tyrannosaurus rex attacks the kids in their stalled car, [Grant] sits still in his own vehicle for what seems endless moments, watching in horror as his (barely) suppressed murder fantasy is played out in front of him,” noted Sheehan. “When he finally does leap to the rescue of the kids, he has only partially compensated for his evil wish. The film can’t end until he undergoes the exact same scenario, the velociraptor attack, that he outlined at the film’s beginning…. Given the startling effrontery of building a film around such an unspeakable wish, the complaints over Jurassic Park’s lack of ‘story’ and ‘character’ sound a little off the point.”

  Spielberg’s decision to change Hammond’s motivation from heartless greed to a childlike love of spectacle helps account for why the character, as critic Peter Wollen observed, “escapes unscathed, presumably because he is too close, in some respects, to Spielberg himself.” The children’s ordeal as they flee from rampaging dinosaurs, and Grant’s gradual acceptance of his adult responsibilities as their fatherly protector, resolve what Sheehan called Spielberg’s “continuing obsession with fathers treading the line between life-giver and life-destroyer.” In the final scene, with his arms around the sleeping children in a helicopter escaping the park, Grant exchanges a silent acknowledgment with Dr. Ellie Sattler that he finally has become comfortable with his fatherly feelings.

  Spielberg’s depiction of the dinosaurs, like his depiction of the Great White Shark in Jaws, contains equal parts of fascination and fear. The director’s ambivalence sharpens the suspense by encouraging the audience to admire and even identify with the dinosaurs (as Grant does), while also experiencing the terror of their human prey. The resulting complexity of tone produces the kind of unsettling “attraction/repulsion” ambivalence familiar from Hitchcock films. Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with dinosaurs may stem from the same underlying anxieties as his obsession with irresponsible parents. Crichton theorizes that “children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Fascinating and frightening, like parents. And kids loved them, as they loved their parents.”