While Lucas has created a financial and production empire with his Star Wars franchise, Spielberg has avoided sequel-mania except for Raiders. And the reason has to do with that long ago stroll in Hawaii. Without putting anything in writing, the two men agreed over a handshake that if Raiders hit big, Spielberg would direct two sequels. As much as he dislikes repeating himself (the proof being that there’s no E.T. 2), Spielberg lived up to the handshake deal, even though directing one of the Raiders’ sequels prevented him from making a film that would win its director an Oscar (Barry Levinson for Rainman).
“I made George a promise that if the first [Raiders] was successful, I would do two more. It wasn’t a contract. It was just sort of a friendly handshake. But George is one of my closest friends, and I take that as a promise,” he said.
With the exception of losing Rainman, keeping his promise wasn’t a burden. In fact, although the handshake deal required only two sequels, Spielberg has gone on record saying he’d love to do a fourth installment. Plus he loves working with Lucas so much he has even volunteered to direct Star Wars 4: “I’d love to do the fourth Star Wars.” Spielberg is not a snob. “I’m not interested in developing a single style like Marty [Scorsese] or Brian [De Palma]. I’ve alwasy been eclectic. I just want to do something that challenges me.” Harrison Ford, who has become a classy actor since piffle like Raiders movies, isn’t a snob either. He also has signed on for Indy 4. But his love of pulp films goes only so far. He won’t be joining Spielberg for the fourth Star Wars. Ford revealed to this author, “I would never do another Star Wars. I think my character in those films has gone about as far as he can go.”
After the excesses of 1941, which weren’t all that excessive, Spielberg felt he was on a probation of sorts. He had to prove he wasn’t a profligate director. He may have gone over budget on 1941, but he was no Michael Cimino.
Lucas was his fiscal chaperone on Raiders.
“George knows how to put the most on the screen for the cheapest price,” the director told Time magazine in 1982. “He did more than anyone to help me make a movie on budget. While we were preparing Raiders, he would tell me, ‘You’ve got a $50 million imagination with a $10 million budget behind it.’ ”
Spielberg, under Lucas’s watchful eye, would bring Raiders in for under $20 million. Lucas told him point-blank, “You’ve got $20 million. Make it look like $30 million.”
“George really is a producer-director. He taught me about creative shortcuts, how to give an audience an eyeful with illusions of grandeur,” Spielberg said.
One of the ways Lucas forced Spielberg to pare costs was by demanding extensive storyboarding, which is drawing each scene in advance like a comic strip. Storyboards allow the director and the production team to mentally film each scene before the cast, crew, and props are all in (expensive) place. Spielberg actually storyboarded 80 percent of Raiders before principal photography began. His preplanning was so well thought out he eventually used 60 percent of his storyboard illustrations.
Raiders came in under budget and ahead of schedule, a tonic change after the excesses of 1941. Lucas and Spielberg achieved miracles of economy. Paramount had given them eighty-seven days in which to shoot the film, with severe penalties if they went over schedule. Instead, the team wrapped the film after only seventy-three days. The studio also had agreed to a $40 million budget, but the film ended up costing only $20 million. No word on who got to keep the surplus, the studio or the filmmakers.
Other economies may have been apocryphal. And according to author Tony Crawley, shots from the 1975 blimp epic, The Hindenburg, made their way into a thirties street scene. Richard Edlund, who was in charge of special effects, said the story was pure myth and insisted that miniatures were used to shoot the street scene in question. However, the submarine in Raiders was borrowed from the 1981 German classic, Das Boot. Footage from 1972’s Lost Horizon was purchased and incorporated in scenes where a DC-3 flies over the Himalayas.
Spielberg didn’t resent his mentor’s penny-pinching. “George is my brother,” said Spielberg who was introduced to Lucas in 1967 by their mutual friend, Francis Coppola. “George knows me better than anybody.”
Lucas felt equally comfortable working with Spielberg. He never tyrannized the director about the budget, and Lucas’s decisions were suggested gently, never dictated. Lucas recalled, “He’s a perfect director for me to work with. We just think the same way about everything. He’ll go a little overboard one way, and I’ll go overboard another way, but there’s no conflict. There’s nobody ramming ideas down the other person’s throat. We have a great time together. He keeps saying it’s my movie and I’ll get blamed for it, and I keep saying it’s his movie and he’ll get blamed for it.”
Lucas gave Spielberg an analogy to help guide him in making Raiders. “George wanted what I’d call an ‘automat’ film. ‘This is a movie I want to see. Here’s five bucks. Get it to pop out.’ ”
Spielberg explained his economies: “I did a lot of cutting in my head, and for the first time I used a second-unit director who added some great things of his own. The crew wanted an A picture, I wanted a B-plus.
“I brought them down to my pulp eye level.”
Spielberg had wanted 2,000 extras to excavate the buried temple of Tanis. He settled for 700 and used a wide-angle lens to literally flesh out the crowd. Miniature “extras” also populated the background of the excavation site. The director, however, refused to cut corners when it came to the snakes, even though he had a powerful phobia for those reptilian creatures. Spielberg demanded and received 4,500 snakes from Denmark to torment Karen Allen on a soundstage at London’s Elstree Studios.
As much as he may admire, even envy, auteurs like David Lean or his friend Martin Scorsese, sometimes—most of the time—Spielberg just likes to have fun.
“There were two ways I could have made this movie,” he said. “I could have done it as a neo-Brechtian film noir with multiple shadows out of Carol Reed or Orson Welles, like The Third Man or Touch of Evil.” Michael Eisner must have had cardiac arrest when he read that.
“But then I realized that what could be a turn-on for me could wreck a gravy-train movie. I just worked to tell the story. But I was happy making this movie, largely because George Lucas and Harrison Ford both were full-time collaborators. Harrison had seven ideas to my five.”
Never the most effusive of conversationalists, Ford returned the compliment: “He makes working fun. He’s so secure about what he’s doing we welcome input from Steven.”
Every Spielberg film has one defining image. In Jaws it was the giant white swallowing Robert Shaw whole. In E.T. it was the creature racing through the sky in a bicycle basket, framed by the moon in the background. In Raiders of the Lost Ark it was, indisputably, the rolling boulder that almost flattens Indy in the film’s opening sequence. In real life, the rock, which at twelve feet high was life-sized and definitely not a miniature, almost crushed the man who played Jones. Spielberg shot the scene from five different angles, two shots per angle. That meant Ford had to flee the rock ten times. The boulder wasn’t as heavy as it seemed (it was made of fiberglass, wood, and plaster), but it still weighed 300 pounds, enough to turn a slower-footed Ford into a doormat.
Spielberg later said, “Harrison had to race the rock ten times. He won ten times and beat the odds. He was lucky. And I was an idiot for letting him try.” Despite the implied apology, Spielberg failed to explain why he simply didn’t use a stunt double with the trademark fedora pulled down to disguise Ford’s identity.
Spielberg welcomed input from his leading man, even when that input had an unusual origin that had nothing really to do with the concept or plot of Raiders.
Harrison’s lower-intestinal tract problems created one of the funniest scenes in the film. While shooting in Tunisia, the actor contracted a case of the turistas. He was in no mood to shoot a complicated scene that required him to confront a sword-wielding bad guy.
Ford asked the director if
the scene could be shot in an hour. Spielberg jokingly replied, “Yeah, if you shoot him.” And that’s exactly what happened. The swordsman, before attacking Indiana, does an elaborate ballet with his weapon, twirling it around like a drum majorette on speed. Rather than fight him on his own terms, using a sword, Ford simply pulls out his gun and shoots his opponent dead. It’s unexpected. It’s funny. And it allowed the diarrhea-plagued Ford to spend only an hour shooting.
Spielberg didn’t have such a happy collaboration with his other star, Karen Allen, who played the gin-swilling heroine. The role originally was intended for the director’s then girlfriend, Amy Irving, but by the time he got around to casting it, they had split.
After filming, Allen bad-mouthed the director in an interview, to the virtual end of her career. When it came time to make the Raiders sequel, Ford was invited back. Allen was not.
GQ said in an August 1984 interview that her ideas about her character, Marian Ravenwood, didn’t make a “dent in the little Los Angeles Dodgers helmet that Steven Spielberg wears on the set. Talking about the experience, and the fact that Kate Capshaw replaced her as the female lead in the Raiders sequel, Allen smiles philosophically, ‘They told me in the beginning the stories were really about Indiana Jones, that the woman’s role would change. Well, I’m not wild about the idea of sequels anyway.’ ” Spielberg wasn’t lying when he said the female roles would change. When it came time to cast the female lead in Raiders 3, he didn’t even rehire his wife to return from the second installment!
That same month Allen told Marquee magazine that she fought “tooth-and-nail” over the character of Marian. Spielberg saw Marian as a “damsel in distress,” which was 180 degrees away from Allen’s interpretation. “I fought like hell for that character,” she said at the time. “In the first bar scene they made her tough and then afterwards made her this frail little creature in a dress—a basket-case.”
Although she claimed the director eventually accepted her input, she fearlessly told Marquee that she simply found him “difficult. He is the kind of director who plans it all out in his head and the people he works with are just there to fulfill his plan.”
Shades of Teri Garr complaining that Spielberg was just a master puppeteer, pulling strings rather than directing flesh and blood.
By 1988, her career having degenerated to Equity waiver productions in Los Angeles, Allen wanted to get the word out that she really never had a problem with the most powerful man in the movie industry. In an interview to promote a production of The Glass Menagerie in a hole-in-the-wall theater on a stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood that is plagued by male prostitutes, Allen said backtracking, “I liked Steven, but we didn’t always agree on things. My approach to working was quite different and because of that we came in to conflict from time to time, but it wasn’t anything major. I remember reading an article in Newsweek or Time. It said something about my being bad-mouthed by Steven. If I was ever bad-mouthed by Steven in the press, I missed it.”
Casting director Mike Fenton suggested what went wrong between the director and his heroine. “We would never send an actor with a star mentality to Steven. He doesn’t have an ego, and he just doesn’t have time for that sort of thing. He just loves making movies.” Or as Spielberg said, “I never want to make a movie with someone who’s been on the cover of Rolling Stone.”
Spielberg also hinted at what soured the relationship with his leading lady. (He would have a much better relationship with his leading lady in the sequel, Kate Capshaw, the future Mrs. Steven Spielberg!) “Karen Allen told me, ‘I’m from the Al Pacino school of acting.’ I told her, ‘You’re going to get introduced to the Sam Peckinpah school of action.’ I threw snakes at Karen, I set her on fire. I tossed a tarantula on her leg,” he said, sounding just like the young boy who so gleefully tormented his sisters by locking them in the closet with glowing skulls. “But I always kissed Karen gently after every take.”
Even at the relatively modest budget of $20 million, Raiders was still a gamble for the money men. As the Saturday Review pointed out long before the film tore up the box office, “Budgeted at $20 million, Raiders may sound like a cut-rate item by Spielberg’s standards, but today’s advertising and distribution costs require that the film bring in $50 million to finish in the black.” The magazine need not have worried. Raiders would gross almost $100 million more than Close Encounters, a whopping $363 million.
As Lucas inelegantly described, “We are the pigs,” he said shortly after Raiders was released. “We are the ones who sniff out the truffles. The man in the executive tower cannot do that. The power lies with us—the ones who actually know how to make movies.”
After Spielberg turned over his cut of Raiders to Lucas, the producer screened it in front of an audience. It was the first time Lucas had seen the completed film. The next day, Lucas telephoned Spielberg and said, “I’ve got to tell you, you’re really a good director.”
Spielberg’s longtime producer, Kathleen Kennedy, recalled how happy his mentor’s praise made him. “There aren’t a lot of people around who can say that to Steven. Who’s going to tell the President of the United States that he’s doing a good job? But when George tells you, that’s it,” Kennedy said.
Spielberg’s box-office performance proved that he knew how to make movies, but by now he was getting tired of all the carping that his films were big on plot, but short on character.
Actor Klaus Kinski was offered the lead Nazi role in Raiders, but found his character and the script lacking, describing the latter as “the same tired old shit.”
Spielberg hated this short-on-character analysis. Displaying a rare hint of anger, he retorted, “If a film works, it’s usually because of the characters and not the special effects. Empathy with people in a film is important because you sure can’t empathize with a shark or ninety police cars or a spaceship. Indiana Jones is not a cardboard hero but rather a human being with ordinary frailties.”
Indiana was no Willie Loman, but Spielberg was right to reject the characterization of his character as a papier mache construct. All you have to do is compare all the tics and eccentricities of Indiana Jones to the ultra one-dimensional character of a James Bond or Mel Gibson’s cartoonish Lethal Weapon cop to accept Spielberg’s plea that there’s more to his characterizations than whips and spacecraft.
Lawrence Kasdan, the respected director of such classics as Body Heat and The Big Chill, paid his dues as the writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kasdan recalled their story conferences as a “friendly tug of war” in which he tried to add depth and a certain nastiness to the Jones character. Spielberg and Lucas, in contrast, wanted more action and spectacles, Kasdan insists. “I became worried that the thing was becoming a straight action piece,” Kasdan said with regret, “which is probably the way it turned out.”
Still, although Kasdan, the writer, may not have been impressed with his boss’s writing skills, Kasdan, the director, praised Spielberg, the filmmaker. “I don’t think anyone in the world moves a camera better than Steven does. I don’t think anyone else has that kind of innate talent for what really works in terms of exciting the eye.”
Although the villains, even the Nazis, were mostly cardboard heavies, Raiders stands out as one of Spielberg’s most violent films. He lays the blame for the high body count squarely on his best friend, George Lucas. “My violence is more psychological. George can outviolence me any day. To me, the moments that are exciting are the ones that occur just before the trigger is pulled—the threat is more horrific than the shot. In Duel, what’s scary is this big truck bearing down on Dennis Weaver’s Valiant; the only blood you see is when Dennis bites his lip.
“Raiders is more in George’s vein. It’s the only film of mine in which scores of people are violently eliminated,” he said years before making his most violent film, Schindler’s List.
At this point in his career, he refused to take his work seriously. Echoing the complaints of many critics, Spielberg admit
ted with perfect equanimity, “Raiders is like popcorn. It doesn’t fill you up, it’s easy to digest, it melts in your mouth, and it’s the kind of thing you can just go back and chow down on over and over again.”
Despite the eventual box-office bonanza of Raiders, preview audiences hated it. Or in industry terms, “It didn’t test well.”
When Spielberg read the audience preview cards that said “icky insects” and “Karen Allen is too butch,” he went into a panic. After a similar disastrous preview of 1941, it must have seemed to Spielberg, in the words of Yogi Berra, like “déjà vu all over again.”
Spielberg later confessed that he fled the theater during one sneak of Raiders, fearing the worst.
Now we know he had nothing to fear. In fact, box office wasn’t the only success he enjoyed from Raiders’ popularity. The film began an entirely new ancillary market for Spielberg, one that would enrich him nearly as much as the films themselves.
It’s called merchandising.
Toys for tots. All the ancillary stuff that kids demand their parents buy after they’ve seen the film. You’ve seen the film, now buy the junk—so the marketing strategy goes.
It was a strategy that the savvy artist-entrepreneur tried to use way back during the release of Jaws. Spielberg begged Universal to market toys based on Bruce the shark.
The studio, to its later horror, turned him down flat, reasoning no sane child would want to play with the creepy creature that devours half the cast of the film. Studio executives aren’t children, and they didn’t realize that creepy sells in the youth market.
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