Spielberg’s vaunted tendency toward optimistic uplift, which, as Henry Sheehan has suggested, is largely a cover for a more pervasive anxiety, is also a common ground for attacking the filmmaker. This criticism is largely based on serious oversimplification of his films. The deeply moving ending of E.T., for example, is far more bitter than sweet, with the child being faced with the loss of his best friend and father figure, a painful step in his maturation process (as E.T. puts it with eloquent simplicity, “Ouch”). Critics who fault Schindler’s List for focusing on the rescue of eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust while allegedly neglecting the fate of the six million Jews who were exterminated overlook a constant stream of references in the film to the larger, grimmer situation. It is the rarity of Oskar Schindler’s actions and of the survival of eleven hundred people in the midst of the Holocaust that is the major emphasis of the film, whose limited sense of optimism toward human nature is a powerful and politically charged statement refuting the commonly heard lies “I was just following orders” and “No one could have done anything about it.” The emotional and intellectual complexities of the positions Spielberg takes in his best work, when carefully examined, demonstrate the falsity of the caricatured portrait offered by his detractors.
In a 1999 article in GQ analyzing why so many critics hate “one of the half dozen greatest pure filmmakers in the medium’s history,” Terrence Rafferty suggests that Spielberg’s multidimensional talents threaten those who disdain the idea that film can be emotional and popular and at the same time deal seriously with such disturbing subjects as the Holocaust and slavery. “It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that intellectuals would be more comfortable with Spielberg if he’d stuck to the formal pyrotechnics of Duel or Jaws and hadn’t dared to venture further, into that putative ‘no man’s land between entertainment and art.’ They would be better able to accept him as an artist, of a minor, formalist variety, if he’d had the decency to stay in his place, like Hitchcock. He wouldn’t be such a threat…. Any artist who can so unhinge large numbers of late-twentieth-century literati is clearly onto something. By that standard, Steven Spielberg is the most radical filmmaker of his generation.”
But does that snobbery fully account for the vitriol, the sheer level of irrational hatred directed at Spielberg, often in highly personal terms? The rabbi who taught Spielberg in Hebrew school as a child, the late Albert L. Lewis, who served as vice president of the World Council of Synagogues and president of the International Rabbinical Assembly, told me in the 1990s that he was convinced that anti-Semitism was at the root of many of the attacks on Spielberg. This might seem an exaggeration were it not for such a slur as “the antichrist” being regarded as acceptable rhetoric from an academic in the anti-Spielberg camp. Spielberg’s more vociferous detractors focus on what they consider his inordinate success but also tend to focus obsessively on such supposed traits as his greed, his pernicious and “manipulative” influence on American culture, his emotionalism and vulgarity, his power as a propagandist, his subversive collusion with other minority groups, children, and fellow outsiders—all familiar tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Left-wing attacks that accuse Spielberg of being a malign cinematic propagandist for patriotism and patriarchy are also frequently marked by an exaggerated fear of his cultural and political influence on the supposedly ignorant and malleable masses.
In his 1906 book Charles Dickens, G. K. Chesterton eloquently states the case for the popular artist in terms that also apply to Spielberg. Writing of “a man whose public success was a marvel and almost a monstrosity,” Chesterton disagrees with the “purely artistic critic” who would contend, “The people like bad literature. If your object is to show that Dickens was good literature, you should rather apologize for his popularity, and try to explain it away. You should seek to show that Dickens’s work was good literature, although it was popular.”
To that argument Chesterton responds, “The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good…. Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern work, not because it is good or because it is bad, but because it is not the thing that they asked for…. Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted…. Hence there was this vital point in his popularism, that there was no condescension in it…. Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. This is what makes the immortal bond between him and the masses of men. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonized to produce it.”
Spielberg’s common bond with his audience has weakened in recent years as he has ventured into increasingly difficult and controversial subject areas. As a result of the thematic seriousness of his later works, and because of a certain dryness and coldness in his late style that refuses to sugarcoat his messages with the kind of leavening warmth and humor he previously was known for, Spielberg has, in effect, left much of his audience behind. That he is comfortable in doing so demonstrates that he has put to rest some of his former drive for acceptance, fueled by his insecurities over his ethnicity, or perhaps that he has achieved a level of acceptance that gives him the security not to need to please all of the people all the time. Making another Indiana Jones movie in 2007–08 seemed an exception that proved the recent rule for Spielberg, partly a way to buttress his uneven popularity and also something of an escapist respite from the political intensity of his recent work.
It’s probably no coincidence that as Spielberg has become a less consistently popular artist, he has become more acceptable to those who distrust popularity in an artist. I suppose we Spielberg scholars should be content to welcome anyone into our camp, but we should guard against a tendency to praise Spielberg for the wrong reasons and to undervalue his gifts as a popular artist. I am pleased that he still alternates his “entertainments” with more “serious” works and that some of the former (e.g., Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal) can prove superior to some of the latter. The emotional and intellectual complexities of the positions Spielberg takes in his best work, when carefully examined, demonstrate the falsity of the caricatured portrait offered by his detractors. Perhaps if some of those critics would engage in a reevaluation of Spielberg, under the influence of the new wave of critical studies, they would find that he not only is a finer artist than they have acknowledged but also is far more sympathetic with their concerns than they have previously recognized.
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THE disenchantment Spielberg anticipated in his new working arrangement as a Paramount employee quickly came to pass. It was not long into 2006 when he and his DreamWorks partners found themselves fighting studio executives over their annual funding allotment, which they managed to get increased from $300 million to $400 million, and over the issue of credit. Paramount squabbled with DreamWorks about how to promote their joint productions and how much prominence each label should have. However petty that may have seemed, it was an issue that went to the heart of power in Hollywood and touched a raw nerve for a filmmaker who had surrendered a large part of his independence and felt he was being treated with a lack of respect. As a result, Spielberg experienced a “rude awakening” in his first six months at Paramount, the Hollywood Reporter observed. Tensions escalated when David Geffen thought Paramount chairman and chief executive officer Brad Grey was taking too much credit for the DreamWorks musical Dreamgirls. It was obvious to Hollywood observers and the financial community that this shotgun marriage didn’t have a future.
The films DreamWorks made for Paramount were an eclectic bunch, as ever, but despite the intramural friction, t
hey were of somewhat higher overall caliber (with some notable exceptions) than the slate DreamWorks had turned out in its final throes of independence. The potpourri of DreamWorks/Paramount films included the overwrought, overly contemporary-feeling adaptation of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road; The Kite Runner, a subtly rendered, heartbreaking story (from the novel by Khaled Hosseini) of a young Afghan writer tormented by his betrayal of a childhood friend; the sometimes gripping but often mawkish story of a Los Angeles Times reporter befriending a mentally ill homeless man, The Soloist; and a witty and knowing, if repetitive, spoof of Hollywood war movies, Tropic Thunder. DreamWorks also made a pair of offbeat musicals: Dreamgirls, with its sensational Oscar-winning performance by Jennifer Hudson enlivening uneven, self-indulgently flashy direction by Bill Condon, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, stylish and haunting, if excessively explicit in its ghoulishness, muting the black-comic aspects of this Stephen Sondheim adaptation. And then there were such lowbrow excursions as the gimmicky and infantile, yet occasionally engaging, family comedy Hotel for Dogs; Eddie Murphy playing a morbidly obese black woman for cheap and stereotypical laughs in the appalling Norbit; and, most egregiously, the Michael Bay action fantasy Transformers and its sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
When Bay returned to his alma mater, Wesleyan University, in 2007 to show the first Transformers to film students, one of them asked what statement the director intended to make with the film. “Statement?” replied Bay. “Guys, seriously. It’s about giant robots.” Bay’s remark disarmingly captured the frank mindlessness of his film about Hasbro action toys magnified to gargantuan proportions. Transformers sets up its premise entertainingly but then indulges its special-effects action gimmickry with moronically relentless excess. Its blockbuster box-office gross amounted to $700 million worldwide, a figure surpassed by its far more hyperkinetic, bloated, and incoherent 2009 sequel. Such unrelenting assaults on the senses kept the bills paid at DreamWorks, but lowering himself to that level tarnished Spielberg’s name when his credit as executive producer appeared onscreen. In earlier times, Spielberg fostered the careers of such gifted and original directors as Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis, but his indulgent patronage of Bay at his most unrestrained (David Denby of The New Yorker called him “the stunningly, almost viciously untalented Michael Bay”) signals a disheartening willingness to pander to the worst tendencies in modern cinema. If that is the price, is it worth being a mogul?
The most memorable DreamWorks productions in this period, by contrast, resulted from Spielberg’s backing of an older director who shares his classical approach to cinematic style. Spielberg was a producer on the ambitious pair of films Clint Eastwood directed about Iwo Jima, told from the perspectives of both sides of the grisly World War II battle. Flags of Our Fathers, based on the moving book by James Bradley and Ron Powers about Bradley’s father and the other men who raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, deals less with the battle than with the way the flag-raisers were exploited for propaganda purposes on the home front and had their lives distorted in the process. That theme, with its echoes of Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York (1941), was unusual enough, but far more audacious was Letters from Iwo Jima, an intense, claustrophobic look at the desperate fight to the finish by the Japanese from their subterranean caves. Concentrating on the anguished commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), and his attempts to sacrifice himself and his men with honor, the film is based on his book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief. It has an almost entirely Japanese cast, plays in Japanese with English subtitles, and makes no concessions to American war-movie conventions or commercial expectations.
Eastwood, whose brisk efficiency as a filmmaker outpaces even Spielberg’s, made the two films back-to-back, shooting the island battle scenes in Iceland. Released jointly by Paramount and (outside the United States) Warner Bros. in the fall of 2006, the pair of films were critically praised and moderately successful commercially. The DreamWorks deal with Paramount guaranteed DreamWorks free creative rein on films with budgets under $85 million; the Eastwood films cost a relatively modest combined total of $74 million, $55 million of that for Flags. Spielberg’s patronage of his seventy-six-year-old colleague showed DreamWorks at its best, producing distinctive, thoughtful films that would have had a hard time finding a home elsewhere in Hollywood.
Shortly after joining Paramount, Spielberg staged a major talent raid on his rejected suitor, Universal. In February 2006, he hired Stacy Snider, who had served as chairwoman at Universal since 1989, as his new head of production at DreamWorks. She and Spielberg had first worked together when she was the production chief of Tristar Pictures and he was developing his 1998 Amblin production The Mask of Zorro. Their rapport on his projects at Universal, where he had hoped they would work closely if GE had bought DreamWorks, led him to persuade Snider to leave her powerful post to become chief executive and co-chairman of the DreamWorks imprint (sharing the latter title with Geffen). Spielberg claimed that Snider had “a unique combination in a film executive in that she recognizes a need to make commercial movies, but she also aspires to make art.” With Snider running the daily creative affairs of the company, a duty once shared by Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who were spending more of their time producing, Spielberg was protected from some of the more onerous burdens of being a mogul.
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SPIELBERG showed a certain detachment from Hollywood reality in June 2006, barely three months after completing his deal with Paramount, when he gave an impolitic interview on a cable TV talk show hosted by prominent film industry players Peter Guber and Peter Bart. Spielberg said that Paramount executives “know they were the second choice. I waited at the altar for GE to buy DreamWorks.” He regretted that though he and his partners had reached a “handshake deal” with GE, “They could never make the numbers work.” Daily Variety commented that Spielberg expected DreamWorks would “operate as an entirely separate entity from Paramount Pictures” and that it would “retain its independence.” Spielberg declared on the talk show, “Gail Berman is running Paramount Pictures, and that’s separate from DreamWorks Pictures. And that’s something we’re trying to get the town to understand. Stacey Snider is running DreamWorks Pictures.” Five months later, Spielberg wishfully declared, “Paramount treats us as we like to see ourselves, as an independent film company.”
Such statements were hardly calculated to smooth over troubled feelings between feuding Paramount and DreamWorks executives. They may have been part of Spielberg’s game plan to defy his new owners by throwing around his considerable weight. But the ploy backfired. What the town understood, to the contrary, was that such declarations of independence by Spielberg were consistently being rebuffed by his new masters. The growing bitterness of their relationship eventually became public knowledge; Paramount’s Brad Grey was described by film industry reporter Kim Masters as “a mortal enemy” of DreamWorks. After things fell apart, Daily Variety wrote, “Spielberg and Snider thought they were a satellite company working alongside Paramount—even serviced by the studio on some level. But Grey made it clear that he considered DreamWorks to be not a sibling company but one of several labels answering to him, like MTV Films or Paramount Vantage. Furthermore, Spielberg took issue with the fact that he was not paid a salary for the day-to-day running of DreamWorks with Snider.”
Nor were Spielberg’s filmmaking priorities a comfortable match with Paramount’s. In 2006, Spielberg declared his intent to make more small-scale prestige pictures than DreamWorks had before, a move he seemed to consider a perk of working for a studio with deep pockets. He said, “I would love to go off and make a picture like Capote or George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.” One of the projects Spielberg considered directing at Paramount was The Trial of the Chicago 7, from an Aaron Sorkin script about the circus-like trial of anti–Vietnam War activists on charges stemming from protests around the time of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention
. Although DreamWorks managed to push a few of its prestige projects past its Paramount overlords, those films did not prove as award-worthy as the ones Spielberg had cited as role models, and such a goal did not win favor with a studio focused, like the other Hollywood majors, almost entirely on the bottom line. To Paramount, the most attractive component of the DreamWorks deal was not its ability to make a high-minded film such as The Kite Runner or Revolutionary Road but the lowbrow Transformers franchise. Daily Variety noted in 2008 that when Paramount bought DreamWorks, “analysts thought Viacom had overpaid for the mini-major. But it soon became clear that Grey had brokered a better deal than anyone had anticipated. For famed dealmaker Geffen, seller’s remorse set in quickly. DreamWorks pics boosted Par to No. 1 in market share with $1.5 billion in 2007”—buoyed in part by the hefty grosses of the initial movie about giant robots.
It was not long before Spielberg and his partners began looking longingly at their early-exit clauses. Geffen left first, in October 2008. Spielberg’s contract with Paramount was to expire in 2010, but he had the right to terminate it by the end of 2008. By the middle of that year, DreamWorks was actively shopping around for another home.
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WFTER the emotional ordeal of Munich and the beating he took in the media for making it, Spielberg took three years’ break, mostly concentrating on being a mogul, before returning to his primary occupation as a director. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) perfectly exemplified his willingness to make an occasional “movie by popular demand.” Fans of the Indiana Jones saga had been clamoring for years for a follow-up to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, even though that 1989 film had ended pointedly with Harrison Ford riding into the sunset. The increasingly complex careers of Ford, Spielberg, and producer George Lucas made it harder for the three to agree on any one of the numerous storylines bandied about in the subsequent decades. Finally, Ford, who realized better than anyone else that as a man in his sixties he was stretching the limits of credibility for an action hero, persuaded his collaborators to compromise their disagreements over a story that Lucas was intent on filming.
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