Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  By now it was a cliche to describe Spielberg as Peter Pan, the movie mogul who refused to grow up. He knew early on that creepy sells. So would Indiana Jones’s whip and even his trademark fedora, although no one was wearing hats in the early ’80s.

  Not that he needed more money, but Spielberg’s savvy insistence on marketing toys based on Raiders and his following films would earn him 10 percent of every E.T. doll and dinosaur action figure. It doesn’t take a calculator to figure out roughly how much his merchandising has earned him. The rule of thumb is that a kids-oriented film like Hook takes home in merchandise an amount equal to its gross. Jurassic Park grossed almost $1 billion. Spielberg personally earned 10 percent of a billion dollars selling plastic velociraptors et al.

  As his former agent, Guy McElwaine, once said, “Steven is a businessman.”

  A man who by his own admission still counts on his fingers, Spielberg disagrees that he’s some kind of natural MBA. Typically, he defers to his mentor. “George Lucas is much more business-oriented than I am. He is a business genius, as well as a great conceptualizer, and I’m much more of a hard-working drone. I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and getting into it. I think George has fun thinking up ideas and then sitting back and saying, ‘OK, go off and make it. It’s your movie now.’ ”

  After the sobering debacle of 1941, Raiders and its $363 million take put Steven Spielberg back on top, a position he would occupy with few missteps up to the present day. After Raiders, a criticial and box-office success, it seemed almost impossible that the director could ever top himself in either sphere, the affection of the public or the press.

  But with his next film, he not only topped himself in spades, he made one of the most beloved movies of all time. And in the process, he also made the most commercially successful film up to date.

  Again, comparing himself to his best friend and mentor, Spielberg put his finger exactly on his particular talent. “George is king of outer space. I’m king of outer space when it arrives on earth.”

  His next film would prove that he deserved his self-ascribed royal title.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Best of Times,

  The Worst of Times

  IF EVER A YEAR EPITOMIZED THE OPENING LINE of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, for Steven Spielberg it had to be 1982.

  That year was indeed “the best of times and the worst of times.” It saw the release of his E.T.—The Extraterrestrial, the number-one money-maker and critics’ darling. It was also the year in which he became embroiled in the Twilight Zone tragedy, which involved the death of two child actors on a film he produced and codirected.

  “This has been the most interesting year of my film career,” he said with understatement. “It has mixed the best, the success of E.T., with the worst, the Twilight Zone tragedy. A mixture of ecstasy and grief. It made me grow up a little more.”

  The year started out great for the director. Even before E.T. came out, the normally cool Rolling Stone magazine got all hot and bothered praising the filmmaker: “At 34, Steven Spielberg is in any conventional sense the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system and the galaxy.”

  Perhaps E.T. would be his biggest hit up to that time because it was also his most autobiographical. That may seem like a strange description for a film about a reptilian creature from outer space, but the film’s themes of loneliness, fear of separation, and longing for friendship came straight from Spielberg’s own lonely, peripatetic childhood.

  “My films say exactly what I am. When I look at E.T., I say, ‘That was what I was like in 1981.’ I don’t believe people who say that their films have nothing to do with themselves. In a way, every film is an autobiography, since you express your emotions through it and you impart your experiences.”

  The human hero of E.T., ten-year-old Elliot, is also the young Steven Spielberg, traumatized by his parents’ divorce, longing for a friend his own age, wishing the family would stop moving every couple of years. He later would say E.T. was borne of longing for an older brother and a father who had slipped away.

  “What inspired me to do E.T. more than anything else was that my father was a computer expert and he kept getting better jobs. And we would go from town to town. And it would just happen I would find a best friend, and I would finally become an insider at school, and at the moment of my greatest comfort and tranquility . . . we’d move somewhere else. There was always the good-bye scene. E.T. reflects a lot of that. When Elliot finds E.T., he hangs on to him. He announces in no uncertain terms, ‘I’m keeping him,’ and he means it.”

  The immediate impetus for creating E.T., however, came from Spielberg’s loneliness as an adult.

  While making Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia, an overwhelming sense of loneliness plagued the director. His girlfriend at the time, Kathleen Carey, a music industry executive, was at work in California. His best friend George Lucas was also back home in California. Even the amiable Harrison Ford was unavailable for companionship on the set because he was holed up in his trailer, suffering from the umpteenth bout of diarrhea.

  “I remember wishing one night that I had a friend. It was like when you were a kid and had grown out of dolls or teddy bears or Winnie the Pooh, you just wanted a little voice in your mind to talk to. I began concocting this imaginary creature, partially from the guys who stepped out of the Mother Ship for ninety seconds in Close Encounters. Then I thought, ‘What if I were ten years old again, where I’ve sort of been for thirty-five years anyway, and what if he needed me as much as I needed him? Wouldn’t that be a great love story?’ So I put together this story of boy meets creature, boy loses creature, creature saves boy, boy saves creature, with the hope that they will somehow always be together, that their friendship isn’t limited by nautical miles.”

  It wasn’t just the little green men from Close Encounters who inspired Spielberg to make E.T. One of the human actors in the film urged him to make a movie about one of his favorite subjects, children. “Francois Truffaut helped inspire me to make E.T., simply by saying to me on the Close Encounters set, ‘I like you with keeds. You are wonderful with keeds. You must do a movie just with keeds.’ He kept saying, ‘You are the child.’ ”

  And although Spielberg was happy to concede that Raiders of the Lost Ark was nothing more than cinematic popcorn, he was longing to make something a bit more nutritious. “Action is wonderful, but while I was doing Raiders I felt I was losing touch with the reason I became a movie-maker—to make stories about people and relationships. E.T. is the first movie I ever made for myself,” he said.

  With box-office hits like Raiders and Jaws, Spielberg had nourished the studio’s stockholders, not to mention his own portfolio. But by this time, he was more interested in nourishment for his soul. His films by now had grossed more than half a billion dollars, but as Jack Nicholson asks the billionaire pervert (John Huston) in Chinatown, “How many steaks can you eat? How many yachts can you buy?” Spielberg wanted to make a film for the archives, not just the safety deposit box. Something small and personal that would also, hopefully, make a zillion bucks as a by-product of his personal aesthetic needs.

  E.T. was conceptualized as a small, personal film. Low budget. Even the original title was unassuming—A Boy’s Life. And for the first time in his career, Spielberg, the control freak, decided to make a film without storyboarding every scene first. “I was afraid I would kill the naturalness of the kids in the performance if I spent too much time premeditating the picture on paper. All my movies prior to E.T. were storyboarded. I designed the picture visually on paper . . . a nd then shot the paper! After I designed Poltergeist, I decided I was tired of spending two months with a piece of paper and pencil and a couple of sketch artists interpreting my stick figures. I decided to wing E.T. Winging E.T. made it a very spontaneous, vital movie. I realized I didn’t need the drawings for a small movie like E.T. I would never wing Raiders II, but I could improvise a more perso
nal picture like E.T.”

  Spielberg was intrigued with his own creation—the glimpse of the extraterrestrials he allowed us to see in Close Encounters after the studio gave him the extra cash and he went inside the ship to give us more.

  But he wanted to see even more. And show us more. He started out by shrinking the gigantic spaceship from Close Encounters and creating a small, Jules Verne-type craft for little E.T.

  Then reality set in. How can you make a film about a human-acting nonhuman creature without getting into the huge expense of all the special effects needed to create such a creature?

  E.T., the movie, may have contained cheap sentiment, according to some hard-boiled critics, but E.T., the audioanimatronic creature, didn’t come cheap. The puppet, created by Italy’s Carlo Rambaldi, cost $1.5 million.

  Spielberg gave Rambaldi specific instructions on conceptualizing E.T. “I told Carlo to build a monster who would also be strange, humanoid and comprehensible to youngsters.”

  Rambaldi’s creation employed two control systems, one mechanical, operated by unseen puppeteers, the other electronic, which gave the creature such lifelike mannerisms that some critics seriously suggested the puppet deserved a best actor nomination at Oscar time. The electronics allowed E.T. to wrinkle his nose, inflate his chest, and roll his eyes. The electronics even created independently operated eyebrows for the quizzical look that made him seem more animated than some actors. For broader movements, there was another puppet with a midget inside an E.T. suit.

  The cost scared off at least one studio. Showing the same lack of foresight that had every studio except Paramount passing on Raiders, Columbia passed on E.T., because the studio had decided to make a more personal sci-fi film, a modest success called Starman, a similarly themed story about an extraterrestrial who finds tough times on planet Earth. The studio also feared that E.T. would only appeal to children, not the best demographic for creating a blockbuster.

  Even more important than the technical wizardry that would make a polyurethane puppet seem alive was the casting of his human companion, Elliot, the suburban youth adrift in a fatherless home and friendless school.

  The hunt for Elliot took on the proportions of the search for Scarlett O’Hara. Spielberg interviewed more than 300 kids and couldn’t find a single one artless enough to create the crucial character.

  “Many of them were remarkable, but they weren’t real. They thought before they felt. Then just a few weeks before we were to start shooting, Henry Thomas walked in,” Spielberg said.

  The director had summoned the youth after seeing him turn in a bravura performance as one of Sissy Spacek’s children in Raggedy Man.

  Their first meeting did not bode well for their future collaboration.

  “He gave a dreadful reading,” the director later recalled. “I could see he was petrified. But when I asked him to improvise a scene with our casting director, he transformed immediately into Elliot.

  “You can hear my voice on the the videotape before we could turn the camera off, saying, ‘You’ve got the job, kid.’ I was blown away by this nine-year-old. Then I came to realize that he’s an adult actor, not a nine-year-old. He’s a very controlled, methodical performer who measures what he does and feels what he does and yet broadcasts it in a totally subtle way. He’s just a once in a lifetime kid.”

  Thomas later would prove himself even more adept at the kind of improv that so impressed the director during his audition. During a break in a scene, he ad-libbed one of the movie’s funniest lines when he offered his extraterrestrial houseguest a Coca-Cola. It was product placement of the most ingenuous kind. Thomas apologized for the ad lib. Spielberg loved it and told him to do it again, this time with the cameras rolling.

  Time magazine underlined the importance of the young actor to the film: “Thomas is largely responsible for making the scenes between a boy and a pile of steel and foam rubber glisten with feeling.”

  Other critics fell in love with E.T. as much as the public. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby enthused, “E.T. may become a children’s classic of the space age . . . as contemporary as a laser beam, but full of the timeliness and longings expressed in children’s literature of all ages.”

  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it “two thumbs up, way up,” adding, “E.T. is a reminder of what movies are for . . . some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting about E.T. is that in some measure it does all of those things.”

  Life magazine called Spielberg “the most fabulous 34-year-old since, say Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.”

  Spielberg’s number-one fan, Michael Jackson, even weighed in, admitting, “I must have seen E.T. around 40 times, and Jaws a good hundred or so. You feel loved in his films.”

  Even the vitriolic Pauline Kael, who had compared watching Raiders of the Lost Ark to being consumed by a Cuisinart, waxed rhapsodic: “Spielberg has earned the tears that some people in the audience—and not just children—shed. The tears are tokens of gratitude for the spell the picture has put on the audience. Genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors.” Even rarer—the image of the macho Kael shedding a tear over anything.

  The critical hosannas must have been particularly gratifying after all those years of being called a technocrat and ticket taker at the roller-coaster ride. Especially since he felt E.T. was so autobiographical. The critics were praising when they rhapsodized over E.T.

  E.T. had a curious effect on the bachelor. After working with so many children on the set, he said, “I have this deep yearning now to become a father.”

  Spielberg generously attributed much of the film’s emotional heft to the fact that for the first time in his career he employed a disproportionate number of women on the film. “I had a lot of women working on the set. So many key positions were filled by women it was amzaing. Not because they’re women, but because they were good. And it gave a real maternal feeling to the set. And I’m a sucker for that, because I grew up with three younger sisters, and a mother and her female friends, and I just remember feeling more comfortable on the E.T. set because of all the women there. It was much easier as a working environment. It was really like a womb to make that movie. It was a very, very warm womb.”

  Women reached all the way to the top of the moviemaking heap. One of the producers was his longtime collaboartor, Kathleen Kennedy. The screenwriter was Harrison Ford’s wife, Melissa Mathison. Mathison, a former reporter for People magazine, was critical in helping Spielberg overcome his fears of making such a personal film.

  He later said, “Making E.T. was like taking off my shirt in public. There are a few things about my body I’m not proud of. One of them is I have very thin arms. The other thing is I have no hair on my chest. And it’s terribly freckled. I have the chest of Woody Allen. And I’ve always been a little embarrassed to bare that. Woody loves to show off his emotional inadequacies, which is what makes him a master at what he does. But I’ve always been ‘afraid to do that.”

  Very afraid. In fact, after telling Mathison his concept for E.T., he added, “But you know something, I may not be ready to make this movie now.”

  Mathison persuaded him. “You are ready to make this movie. But if you don’t try, nobody will know, including yourself.”

  Mathison was an invaluable advisor as well as screenwriter. And she had the courage to stand up to her boss. “None of us is afraid to tell Steven he is wrong,” she insisted. “He’s a softy, as big a sap as anyone. But he rarely lets that show in his movies. He kept fretting that E.T. was too soft, until finally he stopped worrying about pleasing the men in the audience.”

  Box-office records. Effusive reviews. And the whole thing cost only $10.5 million! And that included the cost of all those rubber puppets!

  Spielberg’s success was acknowledged by one source that must have been especially delicious since the praise from his old mentor, George Lucas, acknowledge
d that the pupil had surpassed the teacher.

  Six months after the release of E.T., Lucas took out a full page ad in Daily Variety on January 19, 1983. The ad contained an illustration of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker hoisting E.T. on their shoulders. The caption underneath took the form of a letter from Lucas to Spielberg. It read: “Dear Steven, Congratulations to you and your Extra-Terrestrial buddy. This week E.T. moved ahead of Star Wars to take first place in domestic film rentals. E.T.’s adventure on earth and his gift of intergalactic friendship continues to touch us all. May the Force always be with you. Your Pal, George Lucas.”

  E.T. was a bonanza for Universal and the director. The film grossed $700 million, making it the biggest hit in the history of the movie industry (until another Spielberg film eleven years later knocked it out of first place). Years later when an angry stockholder would quiz Lew Wasserman, chairman of MCA/Universal, about the $5 million the studio lavished on Spielberg’s production headquarters on the backlot, the octagenarian executive dismissed the complaint, explaining, “Don’t worry about it; it’s the box office on E.T. from Venezuela!”

  But the theatrical revenue was just the beginning of an avalanche of riches that fell on the studio and the filmmaker. Merchandising from the film, toys, and other items brought in another $1 billion. And Spielberg’s deal called for him to earn 10 percent of every toy, action figure, and pillow case featuring E.T.’s reptilian mug. He took merchandising as seriously as filmmaking. He had it written into his contract that he had approval on every single product. He also demanded that manufacturers submit samples so he could assure their quality.

  There were two best-selling novelizations of the film’s story line. And stuffed dolls. And talking dolls that capitalized on E.T.’s vibrato phrases like “phone home” and “Eeeel-iot.” Atari came out with a video game. Hallmark weighed in with greeting cards from outer space. Two record albums were pressed. Sheets, bedspreads, pillow covers, draperies, bathrobes, nightgowns, pajamas (footed and unfooted for E.T.’s littlest fans), T-shirts, lunchboxes, baseball caps, Halloween costumes, Christmas tree ornaments, girls and even women’s underwear, chalkboards, posters, bubble gum cards, stationery, pushpins, magnetized stickers, knit caps, scarves, and the director’s personal favorite, an E.T. clock whose belly glows and whose head rises when the alarm sounds.