Steven Spielberg

  Like Graham Greene, Spielberg often alternates “entertainments” with more serious films, sometimes within the same year, as he did in 1997, when he followed The Lost World with Amistad, a historical drama about a revolt of African captives and their liberation by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841. Such artistic dexterity is one of Spielberg’s strengths, and sometimes his entertainments are superior. But not that year. The Lost World, made for the wrong reasons, is a piece of hackwork that utterly lacks the original’s sense of joyous discovery. The wonders of CGI (computer-generated imagery), which allowed Spielberg and company to recreate dinosaurs onscreen so believably, had quickly become routine. Although the creatures in The Lost World are more supple and lively than those in Jurassic Park, the effects seem predictable and unexciting, especially when coupled with a virtually nonexistent storyline that generates little suspense or involvement with the characters. Possibly the worst film in Spielberg’s directing career, The Lost World proved a strikingly unworthy vehicle for his return to his craft after receiving his first Academy Award for Schindler’s List. Spielberg recognized during the shooting what a dispiriting comedown it was and said, “I beat myself up … growing more and more impatient with myself…. It made me wistful about doing a talking picture, because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie…. I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is? It’s not enough for me.’”

  Michael Crichton’s dismal source novel for The Lost World shamelessly steals even its title from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, without which the whole saga might not exist. Crichton’s novel lacks the entertainment level of the pseudo-scientific speculation in Jurassic Park and has even thinner characterizations. The gimmick of revealing Site B, a dinosaur breeding ground for the theme park, seems a transparent cheat to recycle the first book and film rather than an organic development. After some verbose but amusing expository scenes in which Jeff Goldblum’s mathematician character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, expresses anger at the deception but is lured back to try to thwart a mad scheme to bring the dinosaurs to the U.S. mainland, the movie degenerates into a series of mechanical and noisily violent scenes of chasing and mayhem. Goldblum’s sarcastic and bitter remarks over the park being turned into a franchise reflect Spielberg’s own ill-disguised contempt for the material, which is evident in the monotonous pacing, uninspired compositions, murky and dingy lighting style, and his uncharacteristically haphazard direction of actors, such as Julianne Moore, who rattles off her dull scientific lines as if she’s reading from the telephone book.

  The listless screenplay is by David Koepp, Spielberg’s go-to screenwriter for his less cerebral fare (Koepp has also worked on Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). The director paid him an ambivalent compliment in 2008: “You can smell the popcorn coming out of David’s computer when David’s coming up with original concepts.” Koepp appears in a cameo in The Lost World, being attacked by a rampaging dinosaur outside a San Diego video store (his character is listed in the credits as “Unlucky Bastard”). In this tongue-in-cheek section of the film, Spielberg comes creatively alive, escaping from the tedium of the jungle and having fun with the dino romping through a suburban neighborhood. He throws in a gag about some Japanese tourists being chased by the Godzilla-like monster, and for the Japanese release of the film, he added a close-up of one of the tourists exclaiming, “I came to America to get away from this!”

  The Lost World contains one entirely fresh element, and ironically, it drew some criticism. Malcolm has a black adolescent child, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), who is simply presented as his daughter without further explanation. Some reviewers actually complained about this admirably matter-of-fact way of depicting an unconventional and modern family relationship; that this kind of criticism surfaces whenever Spielberg deals with black characters seems more a reflection of reviewers’ biases than on the director’s genuine level of empathy for social outsiders. When Kelly starts complaining to Malcolm that he’s too busy and selfish to fulfill his fatherly responsibilities, the Spielbergian family theme shows signs of becoming a knee-jerk plot device he trots out on all occasions. But there are a few moments of genuine emotion between father and daughter. When they are in peril on the island and Malcolm assures the terrified girl, “I’m coming right back—I give you my word,” she replies, “But you never keep your word.” Spielberg’s cut to a large close-up of her face at that moment is a heart-wrenching frisson, a momentary jab of truth in an otherwise inconsequential movie.

  *

  THE second DreamWorks release, Amistad (1997), received a mixed critical reception and was one of the least commercially successful films of Spielberg’s career. “I got calls from relatives consoling me on the Amistad grosses on the second weekend,” Spielberg ruefully recalled. “… I said, ‘Hey, have you seen the movie yet?’ ‘Uh, no.’” The film’s searing examination of race and abolitionism in pre–Civil War America seemed to stir less emotional reaction in the media than a damaging controversy over a lawsuit by an African American novelist who claimed that the film was stolen from her book. Spike Lee and others denounced Spielberg for his effrontery in dealing with a historical event that had largely been ignored by American historians and filmmakers. Reviewers and audiences alike seemed eager to retreat from the film’s unsparing look at slavery and the moral issues surrounding it; the lawsuit provided them a welcome out from grappling with the actual story, as well as another opportunity for Spielberg haters to bash him for his presumption. As he said, “People seemed more interested in asking me questions about the lawsuit than about the content of Amistad.” The subtext Alice Walker discerned in the criticism of his film of her novel The Color Purple (“What makes this Jewish boy think he can direct a movie about black people?”) overwhelmed the reception for Amistad as well. Despite all those distractions, Amistad is a film for the ages, one of Spielberg’s most eloquent and moving works.

  Spielberg’s strong emotional commitment to civil rights in his adolescence led to a lifelong loyalty to such causes as well as to adopting two African American children, Theo and Mikaela, with his wife, Kate Capshaw. He said during the shooting of Amistad, “I am making this film for my black children and my white children. They all need to know this story.” Other Spielberg works with black protagonists include the “Make Me Laugh” segment of the Night Gallery television series and the “Kick the Can” segment of Twilight Zone—The Movie. Also, his documentary on American history, The Unfinished Journey, made for the misnamed America’s Millennium CBS-TV special and presented live as part of a multimedia show at the Lincoln Memorial on December 31, 1999, features many African Americans, includes Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Maya Angelou as narrators, and has a lengthy section dealing with the civil rights movement (along with such other Spielberg obsessions as World War II, pop culture, and air and space flight). Giving Jeff Goldblum a black daughter in The Lost World is further evidence that Spielberg not only talks the talk but walks the walk. His long-standing identification with “aliens” of all kinds is a reflection of that integral part of his personality; La Amistad, the ship bringing the captives to America, has antecedents in films as varied as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941. It is to Spielberg’s great credit that attacks such as those leveled at him for The Color Purple and Amistad have not made him abandon his exploration of racial themes or discouraged him from delving into other potentially inflammatory social issues.

  Choreographer and producer Debbie Allen, who is African American, pitched the idea of making Amistad to Spielberg in 1994 because she thought Schindler’s List demonstrated his affinity for the project. Hearing about the captive leader Cinqué made Spielberg think of the American black activist Donald DeFreeze, who assumed that nom de guerre in the 1970s as the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Spielberg admitted he had never heard of the story of the Africans who survived the harrowing Middle Passage in a slave ship before rebelling against their Spanish captor
s, sailing La Amistad to the coast of Connecticut; the event became a cause celebre of the abolitionist movement. “Really?” Spielberg asked Allen. “Did that happen?” She had to persuade Spielberg to overcome his anxieties about another backlash like the one that beset him when he made The Color Purple. “Steven, that was then, this is now,” she told him. “I think things will be looked at differently.” From that point on, “Steven was so committed and passionate,” she recalled. “From the beginning, we were on the same page.” Spielberg said that when she told him the story, “I immediately thought that this was something that I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to my son [Theo], ‘Look, this is about you.’”

  Allen told the author of this book in 1997, before the film opened, that she had come across the story at her alma mater, Howard University, in 1978, when she found a book of essays edited by John Alfred Williams and Charles F. Harris in 1970, Amistad I. She said she optioned William A. Owens’s 1953 novel Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad in 1984 and became determined to make it into a film (it is listed as “a major source of reference material” in the film’s end credits), but received many turndowns before Schindler’s List convinced her Spielberg would be right for the project.

  However, novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud had submitted her 1989 historical novel Echo of Lions to DreamWorks in 1988, through her editor at Doubleday, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. DreamWorks passed on the project, and when Chase-Riboud later learned it was making a film on the subject, she objected and demanded payment and screen credit. After settlement negotiations with DreamWorks failed, the $10 million copyright infringement lawsuit ensued in October 1997. Chase-Riboud told the press, “I absolutely feel my intellectual property has been kidnapped. Therefore, I’ve been stolen—mentally if not physically. This isn’t the 19th century. The United States is no longer a plantation.” DreamWorks attorney Bertram Fields responded, “Miss Chase-Riboud acts like she owns a piece of American history. It’s like saying we can’t write about George Washington.”

  Echo of Lions does contain many elements similar to the film, but DreamWorks lawyers argued that is inevitable when two works deal with the same historical subject. The film’s dramatic scenes, characters, and dialogue differ substantially from the novel, but in some significant ways the film seems to closely track Chase-Riboud’s fictional account, from the character of a black abolitionist printer (although DreamWorks pointed to a black abolitionist minister as a model, the top-billed Morgan Freeman plays a printer in the film) to the key detail of a captive pulling a nail from the deck of the Amistad to pick the locks on their chains, an incident in the film’s opening sequence. Furthermore, Chase-Riboud alleged that the film’s credited screenwriter, David Franzoni, had been involved with Dustin Hoffman’s company in developing a film version of Echo of Lions, and that Franzoni had admitted reading her book, although he denied having done so. (Spielberg offered Hoffman the role of ex-president John Quincy Adams, who defended the Amistad captives before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his schedule did not permit it; the part went to Anthony Hopkins.)

  After a long and bitter trial-by-press, which involved countercharges by DreamWorks attorneys that Chase-Riboud had plagiarized material from Owens’s Black Mutiny and a failed attempt by Chase-Riboud to obtain an injunction to block the film’s release, the novelist finally reached an agreement with DreamWorks in February 1998 (no financial settlement was reported). She issued a statement exonerating the company from blame: “After my lawyers had a chance to review DreamWorks’ files and other documents and evidence, my lawyers and I concluded that neither Steven Spielberg nor DreamWorks did anything improper, and I instructed my lawyers to conclude this matter in a timely and amicable fashion. I think Amistad is a splendid piece of work, and I applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the courage to make it.”

  But by then the damage had been done to Spielberg’s reputation, since many writers seemed to assume his guilt. How the case would have fared if it had gone to trial is a matter of conjecture. When U.S. District Court Judge Audrey Collins turned down the request for an injunction, she stated, “At this early stage, the court cannot conclude that plaintiff [Chase-Riboud] has established a probability of success. Nevertheless, … the court determines that plaintiff has raised serious questions going to the merits of her copyright infringement claim.”

  Whether this undecided dispute should invalidate the aesthetic worth of Amistad is a matter of individual judgment, though it might be noted that Citizen Kane was also the target of a copyright infringement suit. It ended in a hung jury, and RKO settled out of court; that long-forgotten episode has done nothing to damage the reputation of the film or its director, Orson Welles. But Chase-Riboud’s attacks on Spielberg’s integrity found receptive ears among many who are predisposed to discredit this popular filmmaker’s intermittent forays into historical subject matter; even Schindler’s List provoked some viciously personal attacks on the filmmaker, as his 2005 film Munich, dealing with Israeli retribution for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, would do as well.

  Amistad is generally accurate historically, dramatizing the court battles compellingly and capturing the brutality of the Middle Passage in sequences as devastating as the representations of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List. But Amistad takes some liberties for dramatic emphasis. The final screenplay was written by Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who greatly improved the dialogue and enriched the dramatic texture. DreamWorks sought to credit him with Franzoni, but Zaillian was denied after a Writers Guild of America arbitration. Roger Baldwin, the lead lawyer for the captives, was in reality a distinguished middle-aged man and future governor of Connecticut, not the scruffy hustler played by Matthew McConaughey, whose character was changed to make him more of a surrogate figure for the contemporary audience as well as a closer identification figure for Spielberg himself. The film’s harsh portrait of white abolitionists seems one-sided, and it plays unacceptably loosely with history when it says that seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were Southern slave owners. In fact, five members of the court in 1841 were Northerners, and one of those was the lone dissenter in the Amistad case. Adams’s eleven-minute argument to the court is an artfully condensed, paraphrased version of what he actually said in a speech lasting eight hours over two days.

  Criticism of the film for focusing more on the white characters than on the captives is not accurate because Cinqué (magnificently played by African actor and model Djimon Hounsou) and the other Africans are allotted a great deal of screen time, are shown speaking their native Mende language, and are always at the center of the dramatic developments. An extended sequence shows Cinqué relaying astute legal suggestions to the exasperated Adams from his prison cell, and Cinqué’s meeting with Adams at the former president’s home in Massachusetts (an invention, since the two never met) is the film’s dramatic centerpiece. When Cinqué says that he will summon his ancestors to be with him at court, and that “they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all,” Spielberg’s slow tracking shot toward the silent, pensive Adams is deeply moving, since it shows him recognizing his true historical destiny as a great man’s failed son who is then given a second chance, through these African captives, to shape history. When Cinqué asks Adams what words he used to persuade the court, Adams replies, “Yours.” The Morgan Freeman character, Theodore Joadson, is deeply involved in the captives’ defense efforts. Although some reviewers complained that the role is underwritten, they ignore Freeman’s great silent close-up showing quiet pride when Adams praises him for his heroic rise from slavery. Joadson’s hesitance in challenging Adams too bluntly is realistic in the context of the times, and yet he does so to a degree that both irritates the ex-president and helps shame him into action. It would have been historically false to show black characters controlling their destiny in that era any more directly, but Zaillian’s final screenplay respects the subtlety of their involvement and influence.

&nb
sp; These Spielbergian “aliens” improve the lives of those they encounter, just like the aliens who bring transcendence to the lives of ordinary Americans in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg’s characteristic focus on the positive influence of outsiders, and their struggle for acceptance, is played out in many variations in Amistad, showing how they influence their lawyer to concentrate on their human rights rather than simply on the property issues of the case; inspire a judge to defy a corrupt presidential order; and bring out the best in a cantankerous ex-president whose sympathies for abolitionism, not fully expressed in the past, become his life’s mission. The film focuses constantly on issues of communication, another key Spielberg theme; in place of the musical tones in Close Encounters that enable the extraterrestrial visitors to communicate with earthlings, the visitors from another continent in Amistad manage to make a human connection once their insular American sympathizers finally take the trouble to learn their language. The breakthrough comes after they engage a Mende translator, Covey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former slave who winds up going back to Africa with the freedmen. The central importance of language in this “talking picture” is demonstrated in the Spanish-language title, meaning “friendship” as well as serving as a pun for “friend ship.” By sharing language, the lawyers and abolitionists are able to connect with the Africans as people with individual histories, heeding the urgent question posed by Adams: “What is their story?” Once their story begins to be told, Amistad becomes increasingly centered around the narrative dynamics created by Cinqué and his fellow captives.