As one toy manufacturer gleefully predicted, “We think E.T. will be the next Mickey Mouse. And we expect him to be around for just as long.”
Not for nothing have critics accused Spielberg and even more so, his pal George Lucas, of making films simply to sell lucrative toys et al.
Novelist and screenwriter David Marlow said, “Whenever I watch one of Spielberg’s kiddie movies I amuse myself by predicting which one of the actors will be turned into an action figure, which one will be better as a stuffed toy and whose face will end up on the side of a lunch bucket. You have to do something while you’re watching all that greasy kid stuff.”
But greed just isn’t a motivating factor for a man who is conservatively estimated to have a personal fortune of $1 billion. The proof is that for years he resisted putting E.T. out on video because he felt the film should only be experienced on the big screen.
He only agreed to release the video in 1988 after one too many fans of the film buttonholed him, demanding to know when E.T. was coming out on home video. “It got to be a burden of popular demand. All over the world, it was the number one question people would ask me: ‘When is E.T. coming out on video?’ Everybody from my nieces and nephews to people on the street were badgering me. It was not studio pressure.” And it wasn’t greed, since as one industry analyst soberly noted, “The man is richer than God.”
Three years earlier, he had pronounced himself an implacable enemy of the video revolution, a revolution that would literally double his personal fortune after he finally embraced it. “I am not crazy about [video],” he said in 1985. “For one thing, I like to know that it takes two people to carry a film to a movie theater because the cans are so heavy. But when I sit down upstairs and just pull out a cassette of Close Encounters—and I know what went into it, tears and blood and four years of my life—and I can hold it in one hand, and hold it for two years without my hand getting tired because it doesn’t weigh anything—there’s something about that that bothers me. I think what I am trying to say is that I believe in showmanship.”
Despite his misgivings about video, the man with the golden gut foresaw its commercial potential even while loathing the medium itself. He had it written into his contract for E.T. that he would earn 50 percent of the video take. At the time, there were relatively few VCRs in American homes, and his demand for 50 percent must have seemed to the studio bean counters like half of nothing.
“I saw that video was going to be a very important ancillary market and in many cases the primary market for film,” Spielberg said long before anyone else realized that one day video sales would more than equal the revenue from theaters.
Fortunately for Universal’s stockholders, Spielberg finally overcame his aversion to video. When E.T. was released on video in 1988, it sold eleven million copies in advance orders alone. His prescience paid off in a big way. His take of the video added $70 million to Spielberg Incorporated.
Just as aesthetic considerations made him stall E.T.’s video release, Spielberg has refused to make a sequel to his hit. In fact, he has refused to capitalize on any of his successes, except for Raiders of the Lost Ark, which simply represented his living up to a handshake deal he made with his best friend, George Lucas.
“I’m not about to join the Wall Street generation,” Spielberg said in the middle of the Me decade, when urged to make E.T. 2.
Not everyone was bullish on this avatar of Mozart. Like Karen Allen in Raiders, the female star of E.T. got into a public feud with the director, an unwise move. Dee Wallace Stone, who played the mother in the film, was miffed when the director asked her to forgo star billing, even though she was one of the stars of the film and her modulated performance provided much of E.T.’s emotional pull. The actress agreed to do without a credit that said, “Starring . . . ,” but asked that she be featured prominently in the movie ads. Her plea was rejected.
Stone also had problems with the director’s obsessive secrecy. Cast and crew were forced to sign contracts promising not to discuss the script with anyone. Usually, such stipulations are verbal. Stone asked for an exemption in the case of her husband, which Spielberg, apparently not so obsessive, agreed to. Still, she complained that his Howard Hughes-like obsession with secrecy “almost got to the point of ridiculousness. But if you go through an eighteen-month pregnancy, you don’t want somebody naming the baby before you do,” she said.
At about this time, Spielberg confessed to a reporter, “I’m suspicious of women.” It was a curious confession to make. Certainly, none of the director’s work reflected the kind of misogynism that infected his friends’ ouevres—whether it was the ham-fisted sexism of a Brian De Palma or the kinky sadism of writer-director Walter Hill. (Not to mention Tobe Hooper’s proclivity for slicing and dicing his heroines with chain saws.)
A Freudian explanation of Spielberg’s misogyny also falls flat. He always has enjoyed a close relationship with a mightily encouraging mother. And anything but a womanizer, Spielberg was no Warren Beatty using his female stars as girlfriends du jour.
An acquaintance who’s known the director for a quarter century suggests a much more transparent reason for Spielberg’s equivocal relationship with the opposite sex, especially with his on-screen employees.
“Of course he’s suspicious of women,” this source says. “You’d be too if women—wannabe actresses—were always throwing themselves at you. You couldn’t help but wonder: Are they interested in me or do they just want to be in Raiders of the Lost Ark Part 4?
“I don’t want to overstate the case, but both his wives were the aggressors in the relationship. Steven is a shy guy. And while he’s far from being a dog, he’s not exactly a young Robert Redford. He has to wonder why all these beautiful babes want to get to know him.”
Stone’s career went downhill after E.T., and she ended up emoting opposite a collie in a syndicated television version of Lassie. Asked if she had been blacklisted by the director, she chose the resonant, “No comment.”
Spielberg suffered a much bigger snub at Oscar time. E.T. received as many nominations as the year’s “quality” picture, Gandhi, but won in only a few technical categories. Even in losing, Spielberg showed he had more than a touch of class. The winner of the best director Oscar that year, Mark Rydell (for On Golden Pond) said, “I was very touched by Steven Spielberg’s admission that he voted for me. I wish I had that kind of class. Remarkable.”
Spielberg was indeed a gracious loser. The day after the Oscars, he told the Los Angeles Times: “If the Academy decides to give me an Oscar some day, I’ll be glad to accept it. But I don’t think I’ll get it for a film that I really care about. E.T. is my favorite movie, although it’s not my best-directed film. That’s Close Encounters.”
He was also philosophical about the reason for losing. “There’s always a backlash against anything that makes more than $50 million in film rentals,” he said.
After his good friend was snubbed by the Academy for E.T., the normally reticent George Lucas publicly defended Spielberg. He was even willing to bad-mouth the Academy and Gandhi!
In 1983, he told Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, “We all knew, Steve included, that he wasn’t going to win. The only question was whether or not he should go and sit through losing. I think he made a wise decision to go. But I’m saddened by his not winning. I think he was the best director there, and E.T. was the best film. . . . I wish there was a more professional organization voting that tried to reward professional excellence. Gandhi [which shut out E.T. at the Oscars that year] is good, but there are a lot of flaws in it. It looked to me like [director Richard Attenborough] had a 12-hour story that he cut down to three hours, leaving out everything but the crowd scenes.”
If E.T. was the zenith of Spielberg’s professional life, two months after its release he experienced the nadir of his personal life.
On the last day of shooting one episode of an anthology film based on the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, a helicopter crashed
into three of the film’s actors, Vic Morrow and two small children of Asian descent.
Spielberg was the producer of the film and the director of one of the anthology film’s segments. The segment in which the crash occurred was directed by John Landis (Animal House).
Landis was ordered to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter. Although he ultimately was acquitted, the tragedy cast a pall on what was the best year of Steven Spielberg’s life.
At first, it seemed that he would be implicated in the negligence that allowed two underage actors to be filming in the wee hours of the morning in distinct violation of union roles.
The rumor that Spielberg had been present when the tragedy occurred gained weight when one of the chauffeurs on the set, Carl Pittman, said in a deposition that the director had asked to use his car after the incident: “Mr. Spielberg was on the set. In fact, I didn’t want him to have the car. I wanted to keep it there in case anyone else needed the car. At this point, no one knew how many people were injured,” Pittman told the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide and National Transportation Safety Board in secret sworn testimony leaked to Daily Variety, which printed excerpts from the deposition.
Pittman said he was particularly disturbed by Spielberg’s demeanor after the children’s death. “I had to walk away from Spielberg. I was mad enough at him that I had to walk away from him. He was too cold about it.”
Everyone else on the set thought Pittman was hallucinating. The rest of the cast and crew swore that Spielberg had been nowhere near the Indiana Dunes location outside Los Angeles. Of the thirty-two crew members interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board, only Pittman claimed a Spielberg sighting.
The studio was quoted as saying, “Warner Bros. categorically denies that Steven Spielberg was on the set the night of the unfortunate accident. Nor was he on the set of the Landis segment at any other time. Any statements to the contrary are simply not true.”
The studio, Spielberg, and eight other individuals were slapped with a $100 million lawsuit by the parents of one of the children.
Although Spielberg was exonerated, he still felt some responsibility for the tragedy. And he even took a backhanded swipe at the director of the segment, Landis. “No movie is worth dying for. If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, ‘Cut!’ ” he said.
In a sworn deposition to the National Transportation Safety Board, which was also reprinted in Daily Variety, Spielberg testified, “I was never at the Indiana Dunes location of Twilight Zone on the night of the accident or at any other time. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing it true and correct, executed at Los Angeles, California, this first day of Dec. 1981.” The letter was written on Spielberg’s personal stationery.
Later, he would admit, “The accident cast a pall on all 150 people who worked on this production. We are still just sick to the center of our souls. I don’t know anybody who it hasn’t affected.”
In counterpoint to the tragedy of The Twilight Zone deaths, an amusing example of the movie industry’s power politics also took place the eventful summer of 1982.
It’s a story about a powerful mega-director, a minor-talent director, and a studio’s marketing strategy. It’s also an abject lesson in, as the old saying goes, when you’re hot, you’re hot, when you’re not, you’re not.
After E.T., Steven Spielberg was hotter than a supernova. The same summer that E.T. made box-office history, another film he produced and cowrote, but did not direct, also was released.
It was a finely crafted ghost story, Poltergeist, about evil spirits who take over a placid suburban tract home, abduct its four-year-old occupant, and generally wreak hell on earth.
Tobe Hooper was the nominal director. A good-old Texas boy, Hooper’s main claim to fame was directing a hideously violent cult film, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, eight years before Poltergeist. The film had achieved cult status primarily because of the protagonist’s original way of carving up victims with the help of power tools.
Hooper was a strange choice to direct a mainstream film about suburbia, but Spielberg was a big fan of Hooper’s cult film.
Unfortunately for Hooper, the studio was a bigger fan of the hottest director in town. When it came time to release Poltergeist, the studio spread the rumor that Spielberg actually had directed the film.
Studio publicists dropped hints to the press, and there was even a documentary about the making of the film that showed Spielberg clearly directing a scene, even though his credits were as producer and cowriter. Usually, the producer is the guy standing in the background, and the director is the guy calling the shots.
Spielberg may not have been the auteur of the film, but he was the author of the script. It was his conception. His baby. And much to Hooper’s discomfort, Spielberg didn’t try to quash rumors that he was the actual director.
In a circuitous way, Poltergeist was actually autobiographical. Spielberg remembered childhood reveries when he would lie in bed and stare at a crack in the bedroom wall. The youth’s overactive imagination would visualize all sorts of creepy critters from Beyond crawling out of the crack.
“I remember lying there, trying to go to sleep, and I used to always imagine little Hieronymous Bosch-like creatures inside, peeking out and whispering to me to come into the playground of the crack and be drawn into the unknown there, inside the wall of my home in New Jersey,” he said at the time of Poltergeist’s release.
The concept of Poltergeist also was stoked by the making of Close Encounters. The movie’s theme of alien abduction, a subplot in the earlier film, became the main story line of Poltergeist.
“Poltergeist was something I conceived while I was doing Raiders. I always wanted to make a ghost movie, ever since I was a kid. I loved what happened in Close Encounters when the child was kidnapped by the mother ship and taken away by his friends of equal proportion. So I kind of blended a little bit of the kidnapping of the child in Close Encounters with the research I had done about poltergeists, and made a movie about a child who’s kidnapped by ghosts in her own suburban home in middle America.”
Spielberg also made Poltergeist as a counterpoint to E.T. If the latter expressed all his hope for humanity, Poltgergeist encompassed his primordial fears.
“E.T. is a whisper. Poltergeist is a scream,” he said. “Poltergeist is what I fear, and E.T. is what I love. One is about suburban evil and the other is about suburban good. I had different motivations in both instances. In Poltergeist I wanted to terrify and I also wanted to amuse. I tried to mix laughs and screams together. Poltergeist is the darker side of my nature—it’s me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death when were growing up. E.T. is my optimism about the future and my optimism about what it was like to grow up in Arizona and New Jersey.”
Poltergeist may have owed its verisimilitude to the fact that the producer actually believed in ghosts. When an interviewer asked Spieblerg point-blank if he believed in the “stars” of his movie, he replied seriously, “Yes, I do. I absolutely do. I believe in poltergeists and UFOs. In every movie I’ve made, I’ve essentially believed in what the films were about. Even Jaws. I did believe there are sharks close to twenty-six feet long in the ocean. The largest ever caught is twenty-one feet.
“If I ever make a film about a fifty-foot woman, I’ll believe that too.”
Whether or not he directed the film, Spielberg usurped one job traditionally reserved for the director—casting. He discovered the beautiful child who is abducted by ghosts Lana Turner-style, not at Schwab’s but at the MGM commissary. Spielberg wanted a “beatific four-year-old, every mother’s dream.”
Spielberg spotted exactly what he was looking for when he saw four-year-old Heather O’Rourke at a nearby table. The director walked over and asked, “Who’s the proud mother or agent of this child?” He claimed that two hands went up immediately—the mother’s and the agent’s. He signed O’Rourke the next day.
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p; Just as he took full credit for casting a crucial role in Poltergeist, Spielberg also insisted that he was the hands-on producer, not just the titular producer. “I line produced Poltergeist,” he said proudly. “That was my production. I was very involved from the beginning.”
Poor Tobe Hooper.
The alleged director of Poltergeist found himself in a very delicate situation. He didn’t want to tick off the most powerful director in Hollywood or the studio which had given him his big break into the big time. On the other hand, he had directed the film—at least that’s what the credits said.
I interviewed Hooper shortly after Poltergeist came out in the summer of 1982 at his modest home in the San Fernando Valley. Amid memorabilia from his films, including the notorious chain saw, he fidgeted nervously when I asked him who had directed Poltergeist.
“That question isn’t good for business,” he said, neatly summing up his quandary.
Spielberg had already gone on record, saying he had “designed” the film, a nonexistent credit as far as the Directors Guild was concerned.
Spielberg’s longtime, faithful collaborator Frank Marshall, who coproduced Poltergeist, called him the “creative force” behind the project.
To the casual moviegoer who pays his money and just wants to be entertained in the dark for two hours, all the brouhaha might have seemd to be the stuff of semantics and Directors Guild arbitration.
It was and it wasn’t. With Poltergeist the number-two film of the summer, the question of who made the film was also the stuff that careers are made of. Hooper wanted the credit, literally and figuratively. But he didn’t want to anger Spielberg.
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