Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “I thought we’d just barely got by in Indy III because the MacGuffin [story gimmick] had always been the problem,” Lucas recalled. “I felt we’d patched together something [a search for the Holy Grail] to make it seem interesting, if not compelling, but the story with the father [played by Sean Connery] carried the movie. So I said, ‘I think we’ve played this thing out.’” But when Ford appeared in Lucas’s television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in 1992, Lucas found that “the obvious suddenly dawned on me: If I did it when Indy was older, I could have it be in the 1950s. And if I did it in the ’50s, maybe we could change that into a ’50s movie—and what is the equivalent of a 1930s Saturday matinee serial in the ’50s? Science-fiction B-movies. I thought, Hey, that could be fun. The obvious thing was Earth versus the Flying Saucers, so I thought, That’s the MacGuffin: aliens.”

  But for years Spielberg resisted returning to one of his trademark genres. He finally gave in to the prodding of Lucas and the influence of the last of a series of screenwriters on the Paramount project, his reliable “closer” David Koepp. The déjà vu feeling was turned to the film’s advantage as the director approached Indy IV as a nostalgic exercise in self-parody. Spielberg’s advanced tendencies toward postmodernism, genre parody, and stylistic reflexivity became the raison d’être of this highly stylized romp through his moviemaking past, set in the year he became a filmmaker (1957) when he made his takeoff on the train wreck in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. The boy who became known in Phoenix as “Cecil B. DeSpielberg” has never lost his fondness for the genre conventions of that period, and in Indy IV he gives full vent to his childlike love of elaborate chase scenes, jungle derring-do, ghoulish horror, scary insects, alien visitations, and ingenious mechanical gizmos and special effects.

  Something of a mishmash, like an anthology of Mad magazine “Scenes We’d Like to See,” the film also parodies the Cold War paranoia of 1950s films with its cartoonish plot about a sinister Soviet spy (Cate Blanchett) fighting Indy to discover the secrets of alien mind control. The look of Blanchett’s character is modeled equally on the spy Natasha Fatale in the 1959–64 Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series and on Joan Crawford, the villainess in Spielberg’s first professional directing effort, his “Eyes” segment of Night Gallery. And as part of his postmodern, late-career retrospective of his own work in Indy IV, which also includes takeoffs on Firelight, Close Encounters, and Poltergeist, he mounts a covert critique of the brutality and racism that marred the first two installments of the Indiana Jones saga.

  Lucas rejected a script Spielberg wanted to film, Frank Darabont’s Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods (2003), which included many of the elements used in the final storyline of Indy IV and brought back the character of Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy’s love interest from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Lucas felt the draft needed work, and indeed, its relationship between Marion and Indy is essentially a rehash of their tedious love/hate sparring from the first film. Spielberg worked for a while with his frequent collaborator Jeff Nathanson before turning again to Koepp. The final screenplay, while reuniting Indy and Marion, gives further weight to Spielberg’s career-long fixation with healing broken families, making the couple more mature and less combative and introducing the character of Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), the son Indy never knew he had conceived with Marion.

  The youthful actor, who previously appeared in the DreamWorks films Disturbia and Transformers, ably captures the punkish attitudes of the ’50s (his look is modeled on Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One). LaBeouf has the vulnerability necessary to make Mutt’s reunion with his father and their uneasy relationship emotionally affecting, but he lacks Ford’s effortless charisma. The film teases the audience with the possibility that Mutt might inherit the lead in future installments of the saga, but it’s a sign of Spielberg’s ambivalence that he holds back from passing the torch definitively. Henry Jones Sr. appears briefly in Darabont’s script, but Sean Connery declined the opportunity to reprise his role because he preferred to remain in retirement (he’s seen in the film only in a photograph in his son’s house). Another major change in the final script is that Darabont’s standard-issue Soviet and German bad guys are replaced with the more colorful Spalko, portrayed with riveting panache by Blanchett in a Louise Brooks–style helmet haircut.

  Perhaps the film’s weakest story element is the one Spielberg resisted, the paranormal gimmickry of the crystal skulls. The prolonged solution to their mystery serves mostly as a deus ex machina excuse for an overblown special-effects finale, complete with the flying saucer Spielberg had earlier fought so hard against including. Since Stalin had a fascination with the paranormal as a possible weapon of Cold War dominance, Lucas thought the skulls would serve as this film’s equivalent of Hitler’s obsession with the powers of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders. But contrary to Lucas’s belief that the skulls are more compelling than the Holy Grail, they hardly carry the iconographic weight of that mythic object or the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Crystal skulls evoke not biblical imagery but such New Age fantasies as Erich von Däniken’s theories about the influence of ancient extraterrestrial visitors on human development. One wag referred to the film as Indiana Jones and the Terrible Title; Spielberg rejected Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds, an allusion to J. Robert Oppenheimer, because it sounded “too heavy.”

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  SPIELBERG’S somewhat retro visual style for Indy IV is partly an attempt to emulate the look he and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe achieved on the first three films before Slocombe retired. Although the physical-effects sequences for Indy IV were complicated to shoot, and some computer-generated imagery was used, the director and his latter-day cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, deliberately avoided the overreliance on CGI that makes so many modern action and fantasy films look like animated films. Lucas related, “I came off Star Wars where most of the sets were digital, with mostly tiny sets and bluescreens, and Steven said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to do the real deal.’”

  As a director who began making silent movies for the first few years of his career and started working professionally during the late 1960s, Spielberg has become one of Hollywood’s last remaining classical stylists as well as one of the few holdouts who still edits on film (with Michael Kahn, who has been working with him since Close Encounters). Although Spielberg’s lighting style became more modern when he started working with Kaminski and began using desaturated color rather than the richly classical romantic color favored by the great Allen Daviau, who shot Amblin’, E.T., The Color Purple, and Empire of the Sun, Spielberg’s imagery continues to have a sculpted depth and intricate texture that puts him in the tradition of such Golden Age directors as Ford, Hawks, and Curtiz, rather than the flagrantly unreal, cartoonlike look favored by many directors today. Spielberg’s characteristically elaborate mise-en-scène, which often gets the equivalent of three or four shots in one, is the antithesis of today’s hyperkinetic, rapid-cutting style.

  “I go for geography,” Spielberg explained after making Indy IV. “I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting…. Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure. I tried very hard, and I hope I succeeded, in not reinventing the genre, because that would not make it an Indy movie. I just didn’t want to reinvent Indy in a way that would deny that these movies are more based on 1930s Hollywood pictures than anything else.”

  Finding the style for the film took some thought, said Spielberg, who likes to find a fresh visual approach for each film he directs: “It took probably a whole week to figure out how to be a little lighter on my feet with
the camera. What was hard for me was taking the subject matter seriously in a lighter way, because I’ve been making so many movies that have dealt with moments from history, not all of them playful, some of them deadly serious, and I wanted this movie to jitterbug its way through our narrative legend and not be too somber.”

  But since this is a late Spielberg work, its light tone cannot help being intermingled with darker elements. Indy IV is far more politically aware and sophisticated than its proto-Reaganite progenitor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and as such offers a case study of how Spielberg’s vision has evolved over the years. The American authorities in Indy IV behave with a thuggishness that is emblematic of the Cold War era as well as providing one of the film’s disturbingly contemporary overtones. Even the archpatriot Indiana Jones, who defiantly tells the Soviets, “I like Ike,” becomes disillusioned with his country this time around, when he falls victim to McCarthyism.

  The film’s wittiest sequence, in which Indy finds himself in a “Doom Town” nuclear test site, parodies government films of the era while annihilating a quintessentially Spielbegian suburban neighborhood as the Howdy Doody show plays on a television set to a family of test dummies. Evidently suggested by an earlier draft of the Robert Zemeckis–Bob Gale screenplay for Back to the Future, the gag about Indy saving himself from an atomic blast by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator and being propelled through the sky is on the same level of black-comic absurdity as the government building a typical American town only to destroy it. The sequence inspired a new slang expression, “nuking the fridge,” referring to film or television franchises that stretch credulity to the breaking point, but enjoyably orchestrating farfetched gags has always been a feature of the Indiana Jones series.

  The racism that marred the first two films is replaced in Indy IV by an almost apologetic treatment of Jones’s former activities—he protests that he is not (any longer) a “grave robber,” and his quest is to put back a stolen artifact, trusting its alien originators, no matter the consequences. The film’s darkest overtones are such thinly veiled references to the post-9/11 world as Jones’s college dean (Jim Broadbent) lamenting, “I barely recognize this country anymore,” and Dr. Spalko saying, “We will change you, Dr. Jones—all of you, from the inside. We will turn you into us. And the best part? You won’t even know it’s happening.”

  The older Indiana Jones, with more “mileage” on his body and soul, reflects Spielberg’s own maturation process. Portraying the character as a man more interested in family life than in looting ancient tombs and slaughtering the natives allows Spielberg to indicate a deepening wisdom on the part of a character who began his cinematic life as a rickety construct of archeologist, adventurer, and playboy. The saga that began as an adolescent fantasy for its thirty-four-year-old director has reached the stage of Indy marrying his former romantic sparring partner and accepting his role of father, just as the sixty-one-year-old Spielberg who made Indy IV has, in a sense, become the father he formerly rebelled against. Although some of the more vocal Indiana Jones fans recoiled from these adult developments, and reviewers were largely belittling, the Paramount film’s box-office performance ($783 million in worldwide gross) triumphantly vindicated the enduring popularity of this saga with an action hero who could be collecting Social Security.

  Karen Allen was present when Spielberg took a telephone call during filming on September 19, 2007, to learn that he had become a grandfather. “When we made the first film,” she recalled, “Steven had never been married, never had any children. In many ways Steven is the same man, but he has also changed now that he has a family. The first time I worked with him, I saw the filmmaker; now I also see the man himself.”

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  IT was a sign of the straitened financial times in Hollywood and the country at large that Spielberg found himself turning overseas for funding in 2008. DreamWorks Studios made a deal with a thriving Indian entertainment conglomerate, Reliance Big Entertainment, a division of Reliance ADA Group, to produce its films independently. But the deal took more than a year to consummate.

  In July 2008, Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reported “an element of shock: Hollywood could not come up with a rich enough deal for Mr. Spielberg, the most bankable director in the business and a ‘national treasure’? … For that matter, there wasn’t anybody on Wall Street willing to write a blank check for the guy with Jaws and Jurassic Park on his résumé? The pending deal with Reliance underscores some realities about Mr. Spielberg—mainly that he has become so expensive [with his large share of the gross] that few public companies can afford him…. And there’s another whisper coming from Hollywood’s highest echelons. It’s a sensitive topic—and one that Mr. Spielberg’s associates find hugely insulting—but one that bears consideration: How long before the A-list director, at 61, is a little, well, Jurassic?”

  That article, which must have added to Spielberg’s many anxieties, was written a few weeks before the U.S. economy collapsed in September and things became far more difficult for DreamWorks. The Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group, headed by billionaire Anil Ambani, initially agreed to provide up to $550 million in funding to help DreamWorks launch a new studio operation. However, the deal required DreamWorks to arrange for an additional $325–$750 million in bank financing, which it expected to obtain from a consortium of eight banks. In the old days, that would have been no problem for Spielberg, but banks in general were cutting back on lending to the film industry, and DreamWorks’ financing partner JP Morgan Chase at first could raise only a fraction of their required funding. With the crash of the financial system, DreamWorks desperately needed a source of capital besides its tentative Indian partners. DreamWorks’ only option for survival, in whatever reduced state, was an allegiance with another film studio.

  Unwisely, because of Spielberg’s lingering emotional ties with his “birthplace,” they resumed talks with Universal and even announced a deal with the GE subsidiary that October. But no paperwork was signed, and the talks stalled when DreamWorks asked Universal to raise its share of funding from $150 million to $250 million and to advance the first $100 million. After Universal refused, DreamWorks secretly began negotiations with another suitor, the Walt Disney Company. When that news leaked out in February 2009, Universal furiously aborted the talks, declaring, “DreamWorks has demanded material changes to previously agreed-upon terms. It is clear DreamWorks’ needs and Universal’s business interests are no longer in alignment.”

  “Universal’s spurning of DreamWorks was an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood,” wrote Kim Masters. It was the second time in less than three years that Spielberg had been rebuffed in an attempt to go back to the place he considered home. Now the fact that he stubbornly and sentimentally kept his offices on the Universal lot inspired mockery in Hollywood, with Variety commenting that it was “like a divorcee living in the ex’s poolhouse.”

  Left in an even more vulnerable bargaining position, and forced to use millions of their own dollars to keep paying the monthly DreamWorks overhead and its development costs (expenses it shared equally with Reliance), Spielberg and his partners quickly concluded a less favorable deal for Disney to distribute and help Reliance finance their pictures. The six-year, thirty-film deal called for Disney to loan DreamWorks $100 million and to take only a distribution fee on its pictures, but the 10 percent fee was 2 percent higher than Universal had offered. Katzenberg’s animation operation was not included in the deal, but it was nevertheless ironic that DreamWorks wound up under the umbrella of the company he had fled fifteen years earlier to found his own rival studio with Spielberg and Geffen. Although Disney hoped that the alliance with DreamWorks would help revitalize its Touchstone label for adult filmmaking, and though Spielberg’s own eminence in family entertainment made a good fit with Disney’s primary identity, industry observers still wondered whether Spielberg’s frequent penchant for edgier, sometimes ultraviolent fare might eventually come into collision with the Disney ethos.

  Th
e transition period from Paramount to Disney proved unexpectedly difficult, because Paramount played hardball in negotiations over projects DreamWorks had in development. Some remained as joint ventures for Paramount release—such as Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air; Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones; the comedy Dinner for Schmucks (a remake of the 1998 French film Le dîner de cons); and the Coen Bros.’ remake of True Grit—but to help DreamWorks buy back seventeen other projects, Spielberg personally had to put up half their cost, $13.25 million, again violating the advice John Ford had given him about not spending his own money to make films. (In all, before leaving Paramount for Disney, Spielberg had to cough up $60 million of his own money to keep DreamWorks afloat.) One of Spielberg’s pet projects, Lincoln, was put in a holding pattern after he bought it back but Paramount passed on a collaboration with DreamWorks (an option under their severance deal involving those seventeen projects). Tony Kushner adapted Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and Spielberg chose his Schindler, Liam Neeson, to play Lincoln as wartime president and father figure for a divided national family. Following in the footsteps of such other great American directors as D. W. Griffith (Abraham Lincoln) and Ford (Young Mr. Lincoln), Spielberg had declared his intent to have his Lincoln in release by the year of Lincoln’s bicentennial, 2009. The project would have had even greater currency with that year’s inauguration of the nation’s first African American president, who had announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Spielberg continued to struggle to put together funding for the modestly budgeted ($50 million) historical drama, which some viewed with skepticism because of the youthful audience’s aversion to historical subjects and the project’s thematic kinship with his unjustly maligned Amistad.