Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Years later, with a slew of hits under his belt, Spielberg could be less defensive and more philosophical about his one and only genuine screen embarrassment. “1941 is a film I look at fondly, but when it was released it was like the critics thought I was Adolf Eichmann. They were that tough on me. Until then I thought I was immune to failure. But I couldn’t come down from the power high of making big films on large canvases. I threw everything in, and it killed the soup. 1941 was my encounter with economic reality. I’ll spend the rest of my life disowning this movie. I definitely feel that the film has now reached the highest level of its incompetence.”

  The director had come face to face with the Peter Principle.

  In hindsight and with the benefit of maturity, Spielberg was even ready to concede that his own ego had propelled 1941’s excesses: “I should have done E.T. right after Close Encounters,” he admitted years later. “But I had just finished this giant film [Close Encounters], and I was in a giant frame of mind. I wanted to do a little film, an intimate film. They said, ‘Anyone can make a little film. We want you to make big films.’ It was capricious of me, but I agreed. The budget on 1941 went from $15 million to $26 million. We would have been better off with $10 million less, because we went from one plot to seven subplots. But at the time, I wanted it—the bigness, the power, hundreds of people at my beck and call, millions of dollars at my disposal, and everybody saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ I plunged into 1941 with such wild abandon that I didn’t really focus on the story I was telling. On about the 145th day of shooting I realized that the film was directing me. And finally it just outgrew its Calvins and became this great white elephant. 1941 was my ‘Little General’ period.”

  Spielberg tried to hide his disappointment with gallows humor, but the pain showed through despite the gags. “I’m like a ballplayer who finally ends his hitting streak. I’m supposed to feel relieved. Anybody have a pistol I can borrow?” he said. He waited an entire year before reading the scathing reviews of 1941. But even so, “friends” called to tell him what the critics had to say about his flop.

  Not everyone felt that Spielberg had committed the cinematic equivalent of a war crime.

  David Denby in New York magazine wrote glowingly, “He’s made a celebration of the gung-ho silliness of old war movies, a celebration of the Betty Grable-Betty Hutton period of American pop culture. In this movie, America is still a very young country—foolish, violent, casually destructive, but not venal. That we joke about a moment of national crisis shows that we are still young—and sane.”

  The only problem was that very few people seemed in on the joke.

  The turn of the decade, from 1979 to 1980, was not a good time for what Spielberg called, with typical self-deprecation, his “mousepack,” a reference to Frank Sinatra’s more famous ratpack. The Spielberg mousepack consisted of friends and colleagues who would swap scripts with one another and even do free rewrites. It was an off-campus group of film students whose continuing education extended beyond their college years and lasted a lifetime.

  Martin Scorsese, John Milius, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Landis were the most famous members of the pack. Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg would screen each other’s film in rough cut, exchange profit participation points, and trade ideas back and forth. As one critic said at the time, “Not since the German migration to Hollywood in the ‘30s has there been such a group of filmmakers unified by age, upbringing and taste.”

  By the end of this decade, pundits were saying the mouse-pack should crawl back into its rathole.

  Cimino had the most embarrassing fiasco, an out-of-control Western called Heaven’s Gate that was hell for United Artists, which went bankrupt in the film’s red ink. Coppola earned good reviews but failed to turn a profit with his expensive Apocalypse Now, which cost a million more than 1941. John Landis, borrowing Spielberg’s 1941 star, John Belushi, flopped with his $30 million Blues Brothers, despite a platinum-selling soundtrack.

  The Saturday Review accused them of creating “movies that tarnished their makers’ glory and prompted accusations of excess and self-indulgence.”

  There’s an old but inaccurate saying in Hollywood: You’re only as good as your last picture. Actually, the studios will give a star or a director several chances to fall flat on his face before consigning him to television movies—or in the case of actresses, supporting roles as nurturing mothers. (See Sally Field’s career.)

  At this point in Spielberg’s career, it was too soon to compose a eulogy. RIP 1941. He wasn’t just as good as his last picture, a certifiable bomb. He was also as good as his previous two megahits, Close Encounters and Jaws. By Hollywood’s loose rules, Spielberg would be allowed to make a few more 1941-scale bombs before being forced to return to the living graveyard of feature film directors, episodic television.

  “There was a sort of watchful waiting as far as Steven’s career was concerned at the time,” says a former studio executive who was active in the business at the time. “Most people at the studios were willing to consider 1941 an aberration. How could the creator of such transcendent images as the descending mother ship or eye-covering scares of a bulimic shark turn out such dreck as John Belushi belching for laughs?

  “He wasn’t even down for the count by this time, but another embarrassment would have been a TKO, and if it was followed by another witless comedy he would have been kayoed to Palookaville, which at the time was another name for The Love Boat or The Dukes of Hazzard. That’s a scary thought, isn’t it? Steven Spielberg directing Luke and Bo Duke in rough terrain car chases?”

  Of all the mouses in the pack, Steven Spielberg would make the quickest recovery. After 1941, he’d be back on top within a year—and stay there for the next fifteen!

  The ultimate fates of the rest of the mousepacketeers are paradoxical. It’s not surprising that Spielberg, a master showman, would survive a setback like 1941 and triumph with box-office hits. But the enduring success of another mousepack member was not so easy to predict back in the late seventies. Among serious connoisseurs of filmmaking, Martin Scorsese is considered the greatest artist of the mousepack. Although Spielberg has one undeniable masterpiece under his belt, Scorsese seems to crank one out every other year or so. Just when you think he’s stuck in a rut with one too many examinations of Italian-American gangsters, he treats us to a costume drama, The Age of Innocence, with nary a Mafioso among its intriguing characters. The same director who elicited grotesque humor from Robert De Niro chopping up an adversary and stowing him in a car trunk in Goodfellas was just as adept at dissecting the social eviscerations of New York City’s haute monde circa 1870.

  The other members of the mousepack didn’t have such happy follow-up stories to their once promising careers.

  After his art house movie about the Vietnam War, The Deerhunter, Michael Cimino tried to go mainstream with middlebrow thrillers like The Desperate Hours and Godfather-style ripoffs like The Sicilian. These days Cimino is more famous for the films he doesn’t make than those he does. Blurbs in the trades always seem to be announcing a film to be “helmed” by Michael Cimino that never gets made. A notorious perfectionist, Cimino has virtually perfected his directing career out of existence.

  Francis Ford Coppola was most like Spielberg in being able to combine mass entertainment with great art. For a while early in his career, Coppola seemed to combine the individual strengths of both his pals, Spielberg and Scorsese. He could shoot a Mafia rubout as scary as any shark attack but intercut the murder with scenes of a church baptism that elicited favorable comparisons to Eisentein’s Odessa Steps montage. Over the last fifteen years, however, he has descended into such self-indulgent experimentalism as One From the Heart or embarrassing self-hommages as the third Godfather film. The gore of Dracula, his only commercial hit since Godfather II, was a sad reminder of the aesthetic use he once had for blood and guts. In his next venture, Coppola is set to direct Robin Williams in a comedy called Jack,
about a ten-year-old boy in a forty-year-old body. He also was producing a four-hour miniseries based on The Odyssey for HBO.

  John Landis was the most unlikely member of the mouse-pack, the closest thing in the gang to a hack. It still surprises film theoreticians that the director of National Lampoon’s Animal House was ever accepted as an aesthetic buddy by the auteurs of Raging Bull and The Conversation. Landis finally has found his fitting artistic niche as the producer and director of a cable sitcom, Dream On, about an immature, sex-obsessed yuppie. Landis is still awaiting his big-screen comeback in a much-postponed farce starring Tom Arnold, called, no doubt prophetically, The Stupids. As one exceptionally cold-hearted Hollywood observer has said, “The Twilight Zone movie wasn’t the real tragedy in John Landis’s life.”

  Perhaps the reason a man of limited ability like Landis was welcomed into this clique of outsized talent was, as the director’s cousin Dr. Bruce Landis told this author, “John is a really nice man.”

  George Lucas never felt comfortable directing films, as evidenced by the fact that his last directorial effort was in 1977. He has settled into an apparently happy life as a techno-mogul, the producer of other people’s high-tech films. Fans who enjoyed the wistful subtlety of a character-driven film like American Graffiti may regret Lucas’s retirement from the directing field. It’s also just a bit sad to compare his best friend’s career trajectory to his own. Where Spielberg matured from mechanical sharks to mechanized genocide, Lucas’s latest project is said to be Star Wars 4.

  John Milius, who was basically the mousepack’s writer-inresidence, did his best work as a writer rather than director. His most impressive credit is the screenplay of Apocalpyse Now. Two years ago, the trades announced Milius was set to direct a Viking epic called The Northmen, a project which mercifully never got off the ground.

  Milius, who physically resembles a beefier Hemingway, recently adapted Tom Clancy’s cold war thriller Without Remorse, which he also was supposed to direct. That project also has stalled, despite the fact that Clancy’s books invariably become blockbusters (Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October for instance). Milius is perhaps best known for his gun collection and the writers’ group he founded, called Armed and Literate. He also must be the only person in the world to count both Steven Spielberg and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf as close friends. Spielberg admirers can only be grateful he didn’t hire Milius to adapt Schindler’s List.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Raiders of

  the Box Office

  ONE OF SPIELBERG’S HAPPIEST MEMORIES from his childhood was the Saturday afternoons he spent at the Kiva Theater in Scottsdale, Arizona. The standard fare began with a newsreel, a preview of coming attractions, ten cartoons, a Republic Pictures serial like Tailspin Tommy or Spy Smasher, then two feature films.

  After the disaster of 1941, it may be psychologically accurate to say that the director retreated to the comforting memories of those suburban matinees because his next film would be an affectionate, big-budget re-creation of Saturday afternoon serials. But instead of Tailspin Tommy, Spielberg’s hero would be a fellow with an equally resonant monniker, Indiana Jones.

  The idea for Raiders was hatched on a beach in Maui, where Lucas and his then wife Marcia were taking their first vacation in ten years. Star Wars had just come out, and the Lucases were basking in the glow of a box office that was nearly radioactive. Spielberg soon turned up on the tropical island to help his pal celebrate. Together, these two adults constructed an elaborate sandcastle on the beach. While shoveling sand, Spielberg mentioned that he wanted to make a James Bond-style movie with a swaggering playboy character in the lead. Lucas confided he wanted to make a homage to Saturday matinee serials. They decided to combine their concepts and came up with the rough outline of Raiders. (The playboy concept would fall by the wayside after the stoic Harrison Ford was cast.)

  Another momentous event occurred while the two men were playing in the sand. Spielberg casually suggested they trade profit percentage points in one another’s films. Lucas good-naturedly agreed. Spielberg gave Lucas one point from his take from Close Encounters, and Lucas forked over the same from Star Wars. Spielberg made out like a bandit from this casual swap, since Star Wars did more than double Close Encounters’ business.

  An industry observer doesn’t feel, however, that Spielberg was being disingenuous when he suggested the trade. “Both men had been reading each other’s scripts over the years, doing free rewrites, making suggestions. No money ever exchanged hands. The trade was a nice way of saying ‘thank you’ to each other for all their help over the years, although Steven got a lot bigger ‘thank you’ than George did.”

  Lucas would really regret his largesse when he made a similar swap with his good friend, director John Milius, who got an even bigger bargain than Spielberg when he traded one point in his flop surfing epic, Big Wednesday, for one point in the billion dollar Star Wars.

  Though George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had been friends for years, aside from reading each other’s scripts and doing an occasional rewrite gratis, they had never collaborated on a film before.

  Their first project together wouldn’t advance the art of cinema, but they would have a great time making it. In fact, years later, Spielberg would say of the experience, “I can’t stand to watch Jaws. It was such a painful experience. But I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark over and over again.”

  Raiders of the Lost Ark even sounds like the title of one of those Saturday afternoon serials that had so enthralled Spielberg growing up in Scottsdale.

  With Star Wars, Lucas already had reinvented the sci-fi genre, which until then was deader than an imploded star. Spielberg would perform a similar feat on the Saturday afternoon serial, with the help of a big budget and state of the art special effects. His loving recreation also would wink but never smirk at the conventions of the genre.

  “I wanted to create that same kind of entertainment with Raiders,” he said of the serial format. “A film that took itself seriously when we had to be logical, but could be humorous without sending up anything. All the humor in the movie had to come from the characters, not the situation.”

  Raiders of the Lost Ark was the story of a crusty University of Chicago archaeologist who leaves the quiet safety of academe for the crazy world of rolling boulders, gin-swilling tootsies and cardboard Nazis.

  The Spielberg and Lucas team seemed like a sure bet, but it was a bet that every studio in Hollywood except one was unwilling to take. Maybe it was the failure of 1941 that scared them off. Maybe it was the unprecedented financial deal Lucas was demanding.

  Both men should have had the clout to pick their studio and name their price. Lucas’s Star Wars had grossed almost half a billion dollars and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, another $300 million. Jaws was the number-one hit of all time and Close Encounters had made more than a quarter billion.

  These guys were the McDonald’s of the box office.

  It was the nature of the deal Lucas was demanding that had scared off the bean counters.

  This was his precedent-setting demand: The studio to secure the services of Lucas and Spielberg would have to pay the cost of the film but would not be allowed to charge interest on the cost, a standard feature of studio financing then and now. The studio also would get no distribution fee, typically 30 percent of the film’s gross, and it would not be allowed to charge overhead, another 20 percent.

  After the studio had earned back the money it had put up for the budget, it would get 60 percent of the gross up to the first $100 million it earned. After that, the studio would split fifty-fifty with Lucas and Spielberg. Plus, just in the case the movie flopped and there were no profits to divvy up, Lucas would get up front a $4 million producer’s fee, and Spielberg $1.5 million for his directorial services.

  Spielberg later would admit, “I personally would have never been so audacious. George made me realize what I deserved.”

  “A lot of studio executives looked at that firs
t scene with the huge rock and thought it would cost $40 million just by itself,” Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, recalled. Eisner was the only studio chief willing to take the risk. When he caved in to Lucas’s financing arrangement, Eisner’s colleagues at the other studios were furious that he had set such a precedent. Now all the other Young Turk filmmakers with a big hit under their belt would be making similar demands.

  The deal may have seemed crazy at the time, but when it came close to release, Eisner’s gamble paid off for Paramount stockholders. The week before Raiders opened on June 12, 1981, the stock of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf and Western, was trading at nineteen. But when advance word of mouth rumored that Paramount had another Star Wars on its happy hands, the stock jumped two and one half points. Eisner’s gamble enriched stockholders by $187 million in just one week! Suddenly, Lucas and Spielberg didn’t seem so greedy, and Eisner seemed crazy like a fox—with an MBA.

  The studio chief later admitted that he had been appalled by 1941, but he was convinced when he agreed to finance Raiders that Spielberg wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. With an almost palpable sigh of relief, Eisner said after production wrapped, “Steven got in one or two takes what other people take ten to get. Every cent we spent is on the screen,” except for all the money that went into Lucas and Spielberg’s deep pockets.

  The idea for Raiders was hatched on vacation in Hawaii. But more than the idea for a hit film was hatched during that epochal walk in the sand. A movie franchise was born.

  A franchise (and we’re not talking Taco Bell here) is the happiest word in a studio chief’s dictionary. Franchises also are called tent poles. Like the tent poles of a circus tent, a movie franchise can support a studio’s sagging fortunes. A franchise is a film concept with sequels naturally built in. They’re like big-budget television series, but instead of running weekly on the small screen, they come out every couple of years in theaters. A movie like Die Hard is a classic franchise. There’s always a new entity that can be taken hostage (office building, airport, New York City), then rescued by Bruce Willis. (Conversely, there’s no sequel potential for a film like Braveheart, where the hero is disembowelled at the end.)