Which led Richard Dreyfuss to comment on “When You Wish Upon a Star”: If you ever need an insight into Steven, that song is it.” Spielberg bristled at a few critics who called Close Encounters “Star Wars with soul.”
He insisted that the two films were “quite dissimilar. Close Encounters is an earthbound movie. Its roots are in the familiar routine of suburban life. Star Wars is a beautiful, enchanting space opera—a fantasy. . . . I want people to walk out of Close Encounters with more questions than they had when they walked in. I want them to consider the possibility that we are not alone in the universe, that the stars are not simply a kind of nocturnal wallpaper to be viewed indifferently. People should enjoy looking up at night, exercising their imagination a little more.”
In effect, Spielberg wanted his thoughtful reverie to be taken more seriously than the Saturday-matinee hijinks of Star Wars. “UFOs for me represent a cultural phenomenon rather than a fantasy one. Whether they’re real or not real, they have certainly affected everybody’s life,” he said.
On the other hand, he didn’t want his audience to feel he was lecturing rather than entertaining. “This movie is not a didactic trip concerning projects involving UFO-ology. It’s not a documentary. I didn’t want to be smart-assed. I wanted a drama about UFOs over American suburbia—UFOs as seen by ordinary people. It’s domestic. This is not Star Trek, it’s not Flash Gordon. It’s not even 2001.”
Even more encouraging than the critical praise, especially for Columbia’s nervous stockholders, was the reaction of the public, which patronized the film to the tune of $269 million.
Again, box-office clout allowed Spielberg to indulge himself. Originally, he had asked the studio for more funds to shoot additional footage. He was summarily turned down. Prerelease, there were just too many rumors that Columbia had a studio-wrecking disaster on its hands. The term most often thrown around was “Cleopatra,” which had almost bankrupted another studio.
After Close Encounters cleaned up at the box office, the studio virtually handed Spielberg its checkbook and said, “Go have fun.”
He did.
In 1979, Spielberg announced his plans to tinker with a film that was already considered an instant classic: “I will shoot some new scenes—from the original script. They were scenes I couldn’t afford to shoot. I was unable to convince Columbia to OK them because of budgetary reasons.”
Two years later, the studio released Close Encounters—The Special Edition, which picked up where the original left off and took the moviegoer inside the UFO.
As the extra footage showed, his conception of extraterrestrial technology was more spiritual than gadget-driven. The interior of the spaceship, many stories high, resembled, in one critic’s words, “a cathedral rather than a humming spaceship filled with knobs and electrodes.”
That little bit of extra footage earned Columbia an additional $50 million when the film was re-released.
Close Encounters earned rave reviews. A second version earned the studio even more money. Its box-office take even helped the studio’s position when it was sold to Coca-Cola the following year. And the film proved that Spielberg was not a one-trick pony, that Jaws was not a fluke.
He was a director with staying power.
He would need all of his staying power to help him weather his next film, which would be the biggest disaster of his career, up to that time and afterwards.
CHAPTER SIX
Pearl Harbor
Steve loves the challenge of doing big jumbo-jet pictures. He thrives on the kind of movies that require terrific planning and perfect execution.
—director and pal, John Milius
ON FEBRUARY 23, 1942, A JAPANESE SUBMARINE surfaced off the coast of Santa Barbara and fired twenty-five shells at the Richfield oil refinery. All twenty-five of the missiles missed their intended target, the huge oil storage tanks, and did only minor damage to the surrounding area. The submarine had an airplane hangar on its rear deck, from which was launched a surveillance plane that flew over Los Angeles two nights later.
After the oil refinery bombing, Los Angeles was in a panic. When the harmless surveillance plane appeared, the city went into overdrive. Antiaircraft batteries began strafing the sky. Civil defense air raid wardens shot out porch lights and even neon signs. The local army depot demanded the return of all the weapons it had loaned to Paramount Pictures for a war picture. Eight hours of chaos, including street riots, ensued.
Two USC film students, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, learned about this historical event while looking through old Los Angeles newspaper clips at the university’s library. They used the incident from the days just after the hysteria engendered by Pearl Harbor as the springboard for an over-the-top comedy about an imagined Japanese attack on Los Angeles.
It was called 1941.
A comedy that sounded like a mainland version of the tragic Pearl Harbor attack sounds like a high concept from hell, and the film would prove hellish for its director, Steven Spielberg.
Somehow, this unlikely script found its way into the hands of Spielberg’s buddy, writer-director John Milius (Apocalypse Now). But Milius decided to direct the surf and turf epic Big Wednesday and passed the script of 1941 on to his buddy.
Spielberg recalled the very moment his ill-fated association with the film began. “John got the kids [Gale and Zemeckis, who later would direct Forrest Gump] to bring me the script, and they caught me at a weak moment. I was in the middle of editing Close Encounters and in a mood to be cheered up. They cheered me up all right. Reading the screenplay was about as tasteful an experience as reading Mad magazine. But the immediate spirit of heightened comic fantasy grabbed me. Besides, I always wanted to do a comedy like Hellzapoppin, which I must have watched 100 times on television late-night movies when I was a kid.”
The director immediately found a historical reference to another incident of American paranoia, a subject that had always intrigued him, whether it was fear of fish in the water or aliens in the sky.
The script for 1941 recaptured a moment, he said, “when we all lost our minds, thought we were being invaded by Japanese commandos, spent every last bullet shooting at clouds for eight hours straight. It’s much like the Orson Welles broacast of The War of the Worlds in 1938, except it really happened in Los Angeles.”
But verisimilitude does not necessarily translate into good film subject matter.
The bottom line was that the script, however tasteless, reduced him to giggles. “Whatever it is, it’s the craziest son-of-a-bitch film I’ve ever been involved with. I just laughed myself sick,” he said.
More ominously, he added, “It’s a real risk for me because it’s not the linear story form that I’m used to working with.”
MGM owned the rights to the script, but Spielberg didn’t want to work for the studio. So he took the script to Universal where, as part of his Jaws deal, he was still obligated to direct one more film for the studio.
Despite the box-office performance of Jaws, Universal balked at the cost of making the film, about $20 million. Encouraged by the dailies on Close Encounters, which Spielberg was in the process of editing, Columbia agreed to cofinance the production in partnership with Universal.
The film was a go. And it would almost be a goner for the director’s career.
Spielberg hadn’t become the hottest, savviest director in Hollywood for nothing. From the beginning of 1941, an inner voice, the same one that had told him to make Jaws and Close Encounters, was screaming at him, “Don’t make this movie!”
Prophetically, he said before filming began, “Comedy is not my forte. I don’t know how this movie will come out. And yes, I’m scared! I’m like the cowardly lion, and two successes back to back have not strengthened my belief in my ability to deliver.”
The director didn’t listen to the inner voice saying beware. He must have been desperate to lighten things up after the heavy lifting of Close Encounters and its logistical nightmares.
“I kept saying to my
self from the first day, ‘This is not a Spielberg movie. What am I doing here?’ ” he later realized with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight.
“Then I’d get hooked on the utter craziness of the characters, like John Belushi’s mad aviator who was obsessed with being the first pilot to shoot down a Japanese Zero [plane] over the continental U.S. Compared to what Belushi does in 1941, his role in Animal House makes him look like the dean of students at Harvard.
“Then I’d backtrack and say to myself, ‘John Milius should be directing this picture.’ John is Hemingwayesque, with a little touch of Genghis Khan, which I am not.”
The film was so decidedly over the top that Spielberg jokingly considered changing the title to Apocalypse Then.
His suspicion that he should not be directing 1941 is especially signficant because of when he came to this realization. Spielberg already was bad-mouthing his baby before it was released. His golden gut, which had reshaped the Jaws novel and written Close Encounters, hadn’t totally deserted him with 1941. It had just been delayed. He hadn’t realized what a deep hole he had stepped into until it was too late to back out.
He was having second thoughts even before the film went into postproduction. He accurately predicted, “This is either going to be another great white shark—or on the other hand it may turn out to be a great white elephant.” On another occasion, he predicted that 1941 could be his personal Moby Dick, “my great white whale.”
The movie seemed doomed from the start. War hysteria and paranoia were not felicitous inspirations for a comedy. And matters only seemed to get worse. The original budget, which had terrified Universal at a mere $20 million, ballooned to $30 or $40 million, depending on which newspaper account you read. (Spielberg would claim it only went $7 million over budget. He angrily retorted, “It’s not enough that you fall from the twenty-seventh floor here. They want to put you up on the fortieth floor before they push you off. I bring in this picture close to budget at $26.5 million, and yet I keep reading that I overspent up to $40 million. Is it that people prefer to see a 747 crash rather than a DC-3?”)
Look magazine gleefully reported, “1941 is fast becoming the most expensive movie of all time. With only three fourths of the film finished, its costs have already reached the $40 million mark—approaching King Kong and Apocalpyse Now.”
Anticipating the furor and indignation that would overwhelm director Michael Cimino and another runaway epic, Heaven’s Gate, a year later, Look enumerated the excesses that were turning 1941 into Spielberg’s personal Pearl Harbor.
The magazine claimed that for one scene in which a plane crashed into Hollywood Boulevard, the sequence had to be reshot three times, with each crash costing $1 million, an improbability since miniatures were used. Another scene, in which thousands of Mexican and Japanese extras appeared, erupted into a real-life riot. The damage caused by the riot cost thousands of dollars and sent the film’s stars, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, “fleeing for cover,” per Look.
People magazine couldn’t resist an additional dig: “In 1979, the prodigy became a prodigal with 1941.”
Spielberg was infuriated by all this Monday-morning quarterbacking. He felt that much of the negative press coverage obsessing over the cost of the film was based on ignorance.
“When I hear criticism about the big budget of 1941, I want to ask, ‘How do you know? You weren’t there. Were you the producer? Do you know how many tanks and cars were needed in 1941? Do you know we actually used fewer than the script required, and the budget still came out to $30 million?’ ”
Despite the incendiary nature of the film, one critic noticed that 1941 was strangely sympathetic to its Japanese characters.
Typically, Spielberg was willing to take the blame for the film’s failure. “It was the most expensive situation comedy ever conceived. The film essentially missed because it was overdone. It went from a small pepper steak to a burned Chateaubriand. I tried hard to season it and wound up killing the taste.”
He was philosophical about its failure, adding glumly, “If we don’t take chances, we never learn how to fail.”
But still, all the barbs hurt. Because Jaws and Close Encounters had been such runaway hits, he felt the critics and envious colleagues were gleefully waiting for him to fall flat on his face. “They are just waiting in ambush to tear me apart,” he said with atypical paranoia. Some of the criticism was so harsh, his paranoia may have been justified. As Henry Kissinger once said, “Even paranoid people have enemies.”
“Making a so-called funny movie is a misery,” Spielberg lamented. Then, anticipating another ill-received film of his, The Color Purple, he added, “What would really hurt is if I made a very personal movie like Annie Hall and people stomped on me. Maybe 1941 will bomb, but it would kill me if I made a movie that said to people, ‘This is who I am,’ and then they hooted and jeered.” Spielberg would have to wait six years for this personal nightmare to come true when his intensely personal film, The Color Purple, was reviled by the critics.
Although the normally gentle Los Angeles Times called 1941 “Spielberg’s Pearl Harbor” and the usually kind Daily Variety called the film his “first disaster,” the commercial failure of 1941 was more perception than reality.
When the film was released, it was estimated that it would need to earn $70 million, a huge figure in those preinflation, pre- Jurassic Park days, just to break even. An examination of Variety’s box-office totals for 1979 through 1980 shows that 1941 ended up grossing $90 million. That wasn’t Jaws- or Close Encounters-scale business, but at least 1941 didn’t lose money for Columbia and Universal.
Spielberg showed himself to be a savvy bean counter. Rather than be overwhelmed by all the criticism of his film’s perceived commercial failure, he calmly looked at the bottom line and pronounced himself—and his film—a winner. “We need $60 million to get into the black, and we’re about $11 million short,” he said after the end of its theatrical run. “But based on TV, cassette, cable and reissue money, Universal is confident the film will make that $11 million.
“Still, the critics bury their heads in the sand and say, ‘How could this film do $50 to $60 million when I gave it the worst review I’ve ever written?’ ”
As for 1941’s then extravagant budget, he added tersely, “Believe me, Hollywood is not being crippled by $30 million movies.”
The real problem of 1941’s perceived failure was one of expectation. The two studios—and the public—had had such high hopes for the film, based on the director’s last two tours de force. The combined take of Jaws and Close Encounters, by the time 1941 premiered, had grown to two-thirds of a billion dollars worldwide, more than the combined film revenues of Universal and Columbia for all its releases in 1979.
Both studios treated its golden boy shabbily. The November 6 charity premiere at the Medallion Theater in Dallas was abruptly cancelled. Studio executives leaked to the press that they were “panicky” and “nervous” about the results of several sneak previews held before the scheduled premiere.
Universal went so far as to publicly bad-mouth the film after one sneak. Spielberg was furious over this betrayal by the studio he had enriched with the biggest money-maker of all times, Jaws. He must have been feeling the awful truth of the old adage, you’re only as good as your last picture.
Asked what lesson he had learned from the disastrous sneak previews, he tartly replied, “I learned not to invite Universal and Columbia executives and salespeople to previews any more. Let them stay home and watch Laverne & Shirley on TV.”
Spielberg rejected the whole notion of relying on a small preview audience to predict a film’s box-office performance, which was disingenuous, since he has used sneaks for just that purpose to this day. “Who needs them?” he said. “This preview was for me—to analyze and correct my mistakes, as I always do. But they dragged in a computer-selected audience with a lot of staid older people rather than the younger Saturday Night Live crowd this film is aimed at.”
Spielberg took issue with the composition of the preview audience, but the preview audience was specifically made up of people aged twelve to forty-nine. The director insisted that composition “did not accurately reflect the probable audience for 1941.” Who then? Tots and senior citizens? “I expected the audience to be younger and more cosmopolitan, the same audience that responded to National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Cosmopolitan? Animal House?
As much as he hated sneak previews when they were unfavorable, he still found them a necessary evil. He told Daily Variety, in another fit of self-delusion, “It was a very good preview. I use a preview as much as I use a movie camera. It’s a process of trial and error to make the film work in the best way possible.”
Never one to lick his wounds, he used the audience comment cards to fix his film. “I jettisoned, repositioned and tightened scenes from the first forty-five minutes of 1941, the part of the film most viewers said caused the most consternation. The first forty-five minutes were very expository, and there was some restlessness and lack of laughs. My job right now is to fix those forty-five minutes. Other than that, the film is what it is.” (The biggest embarrassment of his career.)
Spielberg was so furious with Universal’s public criticism that he did not make another film for the studio for three years, although when he finally did return, he rewarded them with a monster hit that knocked Jaws out of first place, E.T.
Columbia was more savvy. Frank Price, then head of production for the studio, apparently felt 1941 was a fluke, a bad fluke, and that Spielberg’s next film could very well be another huge hit. (Price was right. Unfortunately for Price, Spielberg would make Raiders of the Lost Ark for another studio.) With Spielberg’s track record in mind, the day after the disastrous sneak preview in Dallas, Price was quoted in the trades saying, “I loved 1941.”
Spielberg Page 9