Capshaw rarely used a stunt double, and all her creepy costars were real. She insisted, “Let me say this: all creatures, great and small, were real. I think this movie came out of a contest. You know what pajama parties were like when you were young—how you’d get together and tell awful stories? Well, I think Steven and George must have done that one night and then put all of it into the movie!”
Although he was attached to Amy Irving while filming Temple of Doom, he couldn’t resist praising his leading lady’s professional accomplishments. The personal stuff would come later, when he was available for other things besides film directing and coaching.
“Kate’s a natural comedian,” he said. “A cross between Lucille Ball and Ann Sothern.”
For her part, Capshaw was otherwise engaged—involved with her live-in lover, Armyan Bernstein, who wrote and directed Capshaw in Windy City.
Despite the bugs, Capshaw was a good sport about the hard shoot. They worked twelve-hour days in jungle temperatures that zoomed to 130 degrees. Capshaw wasn’t made of steel all the time, however. At one point during filming, she burst into tears and refused to embrace a fourteen-foot boa constrictor.
“The animal trainer assured me I had nothing to worry about, and a lot of people came up and told me such snakes were harmless, but it didn’t help,” she recalled. “And I was terrified that my fear would somehow communicate itself to the snake, which would then turn dangerous.”
Spielberg turned into her knight in shining armor. “Seeing me in tears, Steven came up and said, ‘I won’t make you do it!’ He scrapped the scene, and on the plane back to London he wrote that other scene where we’re in a clearing and all those animals. keep scaring me. I’m afraid my fear of snakes must have cost Steven a couple of hundred thousand dollars shooting that new scene.”
For Capshaw, making Temple of Doom was a scream—literally. “I felt that some days all I did was shriek, and it was exhausting. It wasn’t hard to play Willie Scott, who is always bitching about things, because it was hot, the bugs were disgusting and the elephant was a pain in the butt.”
After filming E.T., Spielberg felt an emotional letdown because he missed working so closely with children. When it came time to make Temple of Doom, he decided to throw in a lot of kids because he had enjoyed the E.T. experience so much. However, most of the kids were depicted in the movie as slave laborers. It was also the director’s decision to write in a child sidekick for Harrison Ford. After an open casting call in Chinatown and looking at thousands of Asian children from around the country, he settled on a Vietnamese child named Ke Huy Quan, a product of the open casting call.
“I wanted a kid in this movie,” he explained. “I thought Harrison would be great bouncing off a pint-size kid. I’ve seen Harrison with his own kids, and he’s a fabulous father.”
Spielberg finds communicating with pint-size thespians much more sympatico than with their older counterparts. “I’m not as articulate with adult actors. Kids are the best when they’re adlibbing, and I work extremely well with that kind of improvisation.”
(Teri Garr, who played Richard Dreyfuss’s much put upon wife in Close Encounters, would agree about Spielberg’s problems with adult actors. She told me, “He treats his actors like marionettes. When you want to discuss motivation with him, he just says, ‘Stand there and do this.’ ”)
The critics were incensed by the film’s violence. One critic for a local Los Angeles station, the curmudgeonly Gary Franklin, took special pleasure bad-mouthing both Raiders and its sequel. He complained that the first made light of Nazis, turning them into cartoons instead of mass murderers. The sequel was just too violent. In May 1984, when Lucas and Spielberg were imprinting their hands and feet in wet cement outside Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, the director used the occasion to toss a barb back at his critic.
A reporter asked Spielberg who he thought should see his film. Spielberg responded, “I think everybody can see this film except Gary Franklin.”
Franklin happened to be at the publicity stunt, covering it for his station. When Lucas defended the film’s violent content by saying there was a disclaimer in the ads that the film “might be too intense for younger children,” Franklin shouted over the heads of his fellow reporters, “Like tearing the heart out of a person’s chest?”
Violence wasn’t the only thing the critics disliked. Capshaw’s Willie Scott, many complained, was a gross, misogynistic stereotype, the female sidekick as disposable bimbo. Even the normally gentle Los Angeles Times film critic Sheila Benson harumphed, “She seems to have been hired for her shriek.”
It’s probably inaccurate to call Spielberg’s depiction of Willie Scott misogynistic. If anything, he was guilty of displaying his trademark, one-dimensional characters. You didn’t have to be a female to be less than multidimensional in a Spielberg film. Indiana Jones was no Willie Loman or even Oscar Madison. First and foremost, Spielberg was a technical director. You need split-second timing where a boulder intersects with the hero? You got it. But at this time, with the exception of E.T., which was seeming more and more like an artistic fluke after the adolescent Poltergeist and Temple of Doom, when it came to shading characters, Spielberg had only two colors in his palette: black and white. In the future he would delicately dissect black lesbians and nice-guy Nazis, but at present, women were for screaming and men were for cracking whips.
Capshaw at first was inclined to agree with the critics. “When I first read the script, I didn’t like Willie Scott. I thought she was snotty and pretentious. I didn’t know how I was going to play her. Usually, I love the woman I’m playing, and I find all the things in myself that I can fill her up with. I didn’t know where to go to find Willie Scott, because I didn’t experience myself as being anything like her,” the actress said.
Eventually she reconciled herself to playing Harrison Ford’s shrieking arm ornament. “Willie is a fun companion for Indiana,” she decided. “Had she been a classy broad who embraced the adventure, you would have had no conflict.”
Spielberg also took umbrage when others accused him of crass exploitation for making an unfelt sequel to Raiders. “Everything is exploitative,” he insisted. “Everything is trying to glean a buck from the weekend consumer. Movies are big business. In that sense, every movie is exploitative, even Bridge on the River Kwai, if it’s out to make money, if it’s out to be successful as well as make a statement and share an emotion with the audience. But there are certain pictures that are blatantly exploitative, that are terribly cast and executed, like poorly made sequels or bizarre remakes.”
Ironically, he might have been talking about The Temple of Doom and his unsuccessful remake a few years later, Always.
“They get a big following because they are very much like our TV series today. They are continuing stories, with the same cast and characters, the same ingredients, and you know what you’re going to get before you sit down in your seat.”
Making Temple of Doom wasn’t an entire loss, personally or directorially. He had always wanted to film a lavish Busby Berkeley dance sequence, but his kind of filmmaking and thematic interests seemed unlikely to ever give him the opportunity.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom finally would allow him to indulge himself. The opening number features the female lead singing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”—in Mandarin Chinese! Spielberg originally had wanted to choreograph the title song from Forty-Second Street for the opening sequence, but ultimately decided on “Anything Goes” to let the audience know it should expect anything to happen in the rest of the movie.
It’s arguably even more energetic—and definitely more frenetic—than anything Busby Berkeley ever concocted for his 1930s confections. The sequence also allowed him to continue the trend he began in the first Jones adventure by showing the climax of an imaginary previous episode, which reinforced the serial flavor of the genre he was so lovingly re-creating.
CHAPTER TEN
Turning Points
A WAT
ERSHED YEAR FOR STEVEN SPIELBERG, personally and aesthetically, was 1985. It was the year he became a father, a husband (in that order), and made his most adult, personal film to date.
His relationship with Amy Irving, which began in 1976, had been as big a roller-coaster ride as any of his films. They broke up in 1979 amid mutual career disasters, got back together again in 1983, had a child in 1985, and married six months later.
The year 1979 had been awful for both the director and his girlfriend. There was the public humiliation of 1941. And Irving’s career took a nose dive when her romantic film and first starring vehicle, Honeysuckle Rose, with Willie Nelson as her unlikely love interest, failed at the box office. (The film did earn her some of the best reviews of her career, however, with the Los Angeles Times inaccurately predicting it would be the hit of the summer.)
Licking their wounds, the couple decided to escape to Japan where, they told friends, they planned to marry to avoid the United States paparazzi. “I’ll be pregnant by April,” Irving told friends. “We can’t wait to start a family.” Within three weeks, they were back in the United States, separated. One unconfirmed story claimed they fought during the flight to Japan and broke up over the Pacific!
Irving hated their high-profile life together in the movie industry. “We lived together for four years and were engaged for three months. It didn’t work out. We weren’t ready. We’ve both grown into different people now. But I love him still.
“Our social life was going out to dinner with studio heads. I wasn’t honoring myself there. The values are movie values. They only want to be your friend if your name is above the title of your movie,” she said.
Particularly irksome was the general assumption that her career thrived because of her relationship with one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. “I knew it wasn’t true but I still resented it,” she admitted.
If anything, her alliance with Spielberg on balance hurt more than it helped her career.
“I know I’ve never gotten work because of Steven. I know I have not gotten work because of Steven. Certain directors’ egos are such that they don’t want somebody from Steven’s camp in their territory. I’ve known of instances when I was supposed to get a part, but they started to worry about Steven Spielberg getting more of a focus than them—that happens. But you know what. It was a great trade-off,” she said.
A mutual friend explained the split: “There was an awakening of sorts, and they may have realized they weren’t meant for each other.”
Spielberg was devastated by the breakup. He said, “Life has finally caught up with me. I’ve spent so many years hiding from the pain and fear behind a camera. I avoided all the growing up pains by being too busy making movies. I lost myself to the world of film. So right now, in my early thirties, I’m experiencing delayed adolescence. I suffer like I’m sixteen. It’s a miracle I haven’t sprouted acne again. The point is, I didn’t escape suffering. I only delayed it.”
Irving felt adrift as well, even though their friendship survived the end of the romance. “We did what we both had to do, and we remain great friends. In fact, we’re talking of doing a project. But I am alone—and I don’t like that situation too much.”
Spielberg remained philosophical about the double whammy of the Irving split and the fiasco of 1941. “It’s almost a good thing that everything happened at once, and I got it over with.”
The director spent about a year as an unattached bachelor and played it safe—emotionally—by dating a series of nearly underage girls. His most famous liaison was television’s Valerie Bertinelli, but it was in his mind no liaison at all. He described the relationship as “south of casual. We never got past the handshaking stage.”
In fact, all his relationships were uninvolving. “They were all nice girls, but I was playing big brother,” the emotionally wounded man said.
There was a two-year affair with a Warner Records executive, Kathleen Carey. But still hurting, Spielberg took the relationship slowly. Comparing his previous relationship to his current one, he said, “Amy and I must have been together for a year and a half before we got to be friends, but Kathleen and I were friends before we were lovers. That makes a real difference.”
Carey, whom one magazine described as a “pretty, slight blonde woman,” provided an emotional counterbalance to a life that up to that time had been all work, work, work. She said, “Steven inspired me in my career, and I help him to be a more rounded person. He was always so busy working before he never had time for real relationships. He needs friends, not people telling him how wonderful he is.”
Spielberg agreed. “She has taught me that there’s a life after movies.”
It’s hard to determine how serious their relationship was since they never lived together. Anyway, it was over within two years, just in time for Spielberg to bump into Irving in India.
Irving was on the subcontinent shooting an HBO movie, The Far Pavilions. “One night, in front of three friends I made a wish,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I wish I’d have a visitor and I want it to be Steven.’ ” A few hours later, her assistant told her, “Steven Spielberg arrives in the morning.”
Irving surprised him at the airport. He was in the country to scout locations for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. At least the movie wasn’t a total loss, since it reunited him with his first love.
Their first meeting after the breakup was touchy. He recalled that there was “love in her eyes, and anger in mine. But we fell in love again.”
Irving’s recollections were more upbeat. “From that moment, I knew. Now we’re really in love. And here I am with the Prince of Hollywood. I guess that makes me the Princess.”
It was only a few years since they had first split, but both had matured. Irving was less competitive with her mate. Spielberg was more emotionally open. The couple moved in to Spielberg’s comfortable, but not palatial, home in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills—the house that Jaws built, as he put it. Irving promptly redecorated the place in Southwestern style, which she had fallen in love with when she’d lived in Santa Fe.
A year after they reunited, rumors in the press percolated that Spielberg had dumped Irving for actress Debra Winger. Spielberg dramatically scotched those rumors during a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone. In the middle of the interview, Winger telephoned, and Spielberg refused to take the call. When Irving called a while later, he interrupted the interview to chat with her.
A year after that, the relationship climaxed in the most romantic of settings. They were walking hand in hand in the garden of Claude Monet’s house, now a museum, in a Paris suburb. Irving remembered the romantic incident for a very specific, unromantic reason. “Just as we arrived, the rain stopped, so we were able to walk around the garden. When we walked inside it started pouring again. Then, during lunch, a double rainbow appeared outside our window. It was very magical . . . and then I threw up. That was the first time I realized I was with child.”
In honor of the event, Spielberg bought a painting by Monet, which he hung on their living-room wall. The double rainbow, the Monet garden—Irving was right when she said, “Fall in love with Spielberg and you fall into a Spielberg movie.”
The marriage proposal was the antithesis of romantic, however. Film critic Roger Ebert quotes Spielberg as saying, “I was sitting in a bubble bath . . . Amy had stuff on her face. It wasn’t very romantic. More like the Marx Brothers.” Then a nasty note enters the recollection, which doesn’t sound at all like the director. After he proposed, according to Ebert, Spielberg realized, “I knew Amy would say yes because she’d already asked me to marry her seven or eight times!”
One of the reasons this anecdote doesn’t ring true is that in so many other interviews Spielberg pronounced himself gaga over Amy. In the September 1984 issue of Cosmopolitan, which named them couple of the month, he thrilled, “I’m intolerably happy! I’ve been dedicated to films before. Now for the first time in my life, I’m committed to another person.”
Spielberg wanted to direct the wedding the way he directed a film—with lots of visuals and drama. “When I asked Amy to marry me, we began to plan a wedding in France, in Monet’s garden.” It would be a Monet painting come to life, just like the one hanging on the living room wall. “But then we found out you had to live in France for thirty days before you could get married there, so we went from the very romantic to the very unromantic.” Although still cinematic. “We got married like the characters in a Frank Capra film, before a wise old judge in Santa Fe.”
They were married on November 27, 1985. The birth of their first child, Max, preceded the wedding by six months. Even before the baby was born, Spielberg was feeling paternal, predicting the child would have a major impact on him. “I have a baby on the way, and the child is going to change my life.”
After his son was born, he explained how becoming a father had changed his priorities. “For one thing I don’t think I’ll make any films with kids for a while. Because I’m so satisfied having Max, I don’t want to substitute surrogate children in my pictures to be a surrogate daddy. Before I had Max, I made films about kids; now that I have one, I’ll probably start making films about adults.” Spielberg was wrong about that. His next film would star a twelve-year-old as the sole lead. But that was two years away.
In the meantime, Spielberg wasn’t just a hands-on dad, he was a hands-on mate even during the pregnancy. Irving remembered his behavior while she was expecting. “He doesn’t want to miss a thing. He was in Los Angeles when I bought my first maternity dress, and he was furious when I told him. He said, ‘I wanted to be there.’ When I heard the fetal heartbeat for the first time, he said, ‘We’ve got to go back to the doctor so I can hear the heartbeat, too.’ When the baby comes, Steven will have somebody to share his toys with. And he’s got a lot of them. He’s going to be a great father!”
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