Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Pregnancy made Irving less career driven, which bode well for her relationship with Spielberg.

  “I love to work, but I know having children will be a better project than any movie or play could ever be. I have a feeling that after I have children, it won’t be the last you’ve heard of me, but you’ll hear of me less.”

  Motherhood confirmed her prediction. After her son was born, she stayed home longer than she originally planned, eight months. “It’s just that considerations for accepting a job changed: Is it good enough to disrupt my family for?”

  Still, the siren song of her acting career continued to. play during her pregnancy, but Spielberg was always there to puncture her insecurities.

  “When Steven and I would be with a group of friends, all of them talking about their rather intriguing next projects, I could get a little insecure. But when I voiced any of these feelings, my husband always confirmed that mine was the most important ‘project’ of all.”

  In the full flush of his wife’s pregnancy, Spielberg waxed ecstatic about the relationship. “Amy has managed to hold my attention for almost eight years now,” he said somewhat presumptuously. “What’s truly amazing about her is that I have not yet managed to figure her out. Mystery can be very romantic.”

  After being so involved with the minutiae like maternity dresses, it wasn’t surprising that when it came time to have the baby, Spielberg continued to exercise his hands-on approach. He in effect directed the birth of his son. He participated in the natural childbirth—by snapping photos during the delivery!

  He immediately became an indulgent parent. “My mom spoiled me. I’ll spoil the baby. Amy will be strong with Max, and I’ll be the pushover.”

  She was indeed. Irving laid down the law. There would be only two television sets in the Spielberg household. Shades of his own childhood, when mom and dad put a blanket over the television. The two-television rule was “hard for me,” Spielberg complained, “because I’m used to a TV in every room.”

  Irving didn’t disagree with that assessment, calling her husband, “the fun parent.” But he was always a hands-on parent. “Steven is great,” Irving said. “I hear other mothers talk about how their husbands won’t do anything to help out. Steven will stay up all night with Max.” Still, Spielberg confessed that he rarely changed diapers. That’s what nannies are for.

  As far as he was concerned, Max couldn’t have timed his arrival any better. “I had Max when I was thirty-seven and had already reached the top of my career,” he said, inaccurately, since Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park were nearly a decade away. “I was ready to be a full-time father. If I’d been twenty-four, for example, I wouldn’t have been quite so batty about him as most of my energy would have been concentrated on my career.”

  Years later he would impishly admit that while his second wife was trying to get the kids to bed, he’d be thinking up ways to let the kids stay up late.

  Fatherhood, however, didn’t make him any less romantic. While Irving was filming the television-movie Anastasia in Austria a year after Max’s birth, he showed up unannounced—and unexpected—on the set with a fabulously extravagant gift—a Fabergé egg, circa 1914, with the initial “A” on it. The egg hadn’t been personalized for Irving. The “A” stood for its original owner, the same Russian archduchess, Anastasia, she was playing in the television production.

  The year 1985 was very fertile for the director, professionally and personally.

  As he would put it, “1985—It was the best year of my life: my marriage to Amy, the birth of our son, Max, The Color Purple and the other movies, Amazing Stories.”

  During his favorite, fertile year, he also produced Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, and the monster hit, Back to the Future, which would be another lucrative sequel franchise for a studio.

  Less successfully, he produced the television anthology series, Amazing Stories, his first failure since 1941.

  Amazing Stories would be the beginning of a dreadful relationship, with a medium he adored. But before Amazing Stories got a chance to die a two-year death on national television, the director would enjoy a personal triumph, his most sophisticated and adult film to date, about two black lesbians and all the awful men in their lives!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Color Versatile

  WAY BACK IN 1974, BEFORE Jaws HAD EVEN been released, Spielberg already was worrying about being labeled an action director. He said at an American Film Institute seminar shortly before Jaws made him the premier action director, “I’m already boxed into [action]. And I’m trying to get myself out. I’m interested in movement, I love movement, but when you’re known, they put you in a box and they say, ‘You’re this kind of film director, so we’re only going to offer you action pictures that involve machines and movement.’ I would not like to do this for the rest of my life. I’d like to do a personal story.”

  In 1985, Spielberg would dramatically break out of the box he had been placed in. Whether it was “personal” was another matter, and one of acrimonious debate.

  When it was announced that Steven Spielberg would make a film with a predominantly black cast, a joke made the rounds in Hollywood: “Yeah, it’s called Close Encounters of the Third World.”

  Even after the transcendent subtlety of E.T., no one except Warner Brothers thought Spielberg, the ultimate white-bread director, could bring Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about black lesbians, The Color Purple, to the big screen.

  Least of all the would-be director. He asked the man who would coproduce it, record mogul Quincy Jones, “Don’t you want to find a black director or a woman?” The color-blind Jones sagely responded, “You didn’t have to come from Mars to do E.T., did you?”

  Even the author of the source material was bullish on his participation. He remembered discussing his inappropriateness for the project with Alice Walker, who reassured him just as powerfully as Jones had.

  “She gave me some background,” Spielberg recalled. ‘ “You know it’s a black story. But that shouldn’t bother you, because you’re Jewish and essentially you share similarities in your upbringing and your heritage,’ ” Walker told him.

  With understatement, he added, “I had some anti-Semitic experiences when I was growing, including prejudice and everything else that I had to go through at one particular high school. So I read the book and I loved it, but I didn’t want to direct it. Then I picked it up again about a month and a half later, and I read it a second time. And I couldn’t get away from certain images.”

  It was his in-house producer Kathleen Kennedy who brought the project to his attention. Kennedy recalled, “I always believed he would feel confident at some point to do other things. That’s why I brought him The Color Purple. After he read it, he said, ‘I love this because I’m scared to do it.’ ”

  Indeed, The Color Purple seemed like a project he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot wand, which is exactly why he went for it. “The Color Purple is the biggest challenge of my career. When I read it, I loved it. I cried and cried at the end. But I didn’t think I would ever develop it as a project. Finally, I said, ‘I’ve got to do this for me. I want to make something that might not be everybody’s favorite, but this year at least it’s my favorite.’ The Color Purple is the kind of character piece that a director like Sidney Lumet could do brilliantly with one hand tied behind his back. But I’m going into it with both eyes wide open and my heart beating at Mach 2.”

  Spanning the first forty years of this century and set in rural Georgia, The Color Purple focused on an oppressed black woman named Celie. During her teens, Celie is raped by her father and has two children by him. He sells the children at birth and then sells his daughter to a vicious farmer (Danny Glover, in a career-making role), who treats her more like a slave than a wife.

  During her ordeal, Celie draws strength from two other black women: her sister, a missionary in Africa, and her husband’s girlfriend, with whom she has a lesbian affair. Celie eventually trium
phs over her tyrannical husband and becomes her own woman.

  The story sounds more appropriate for public television, off-Broadway or a black repertory group. Instead, a director whose name was synonymous with special effects decided to make an extremely low-tech movie: no flying saucers, cuddly extraterrestrials, or obnoxious gremlins. Just raw emotions like pain, anger, and love.

  Warner Brothers already owned the rights to the novel when Spielberg expressed interest it. The studio feared that the movie was uncommercial, so Spielberg, who some have claimed can be awfully greedy during contract negotiations, agreed to work for scale—only $40,000 in 1985. And when the film ran overbudget, he even kicked back his forty grand to Warner Brothers. The studio had expressed concern that the film wouldn’t make any money, so Spielberg went out of his way to shoot it as cost effectively as possible. Warners needn’t have worried. The film, budgeted at a minuscule $15 million, went on to earn $142 million in the United States and Canada alone!

  Although Spielberg admitted he was “scared” to make the film, he didn’t think The Color Purple was all that much of a stretch. “The human element has been present in all my films, especially E.T.,” he said. But he conceded that the film was “a departure for me in that it deals with emotional crisis and tremendous growth. It’s as if I’ve been swimming in water up to my waist all my life—and I’m great at it—but now I’m going into the deep section of the pool.”

  Spielberg’s movie characters normally didn’t experience growth. Teri Garr already had gone on record complaining that he treated his actors like puppets, telling them by way of direction, “Just do it.”

  But Spielberg retired his puppet strings and became an actor’s director to make this character-driven project. “I want the audience to feel every color of Celie’s rainbow,” he said.

  It also helped that he had made a personal effort to understand the actor’s craft by studying it firsthand.

  “I spent two years in acting classes,” he said when asked at an AFI seminar how he managed to achieve such rapport with his cast. “I wasn’t studying to become an actor. It was—if anything—a vent for psychological frustrations. I studied dutifully for a while. I grew to be concerned with the actor’s understanding of the movie the director wants to make. Usually the actor entertains a totally different concept of the movie, and that’s where many of the battles begin. And I think that the director’s first accomplishment, if he ever accomplishes this, is to get the actor to understand the director’s vision of the piece. If the actor can’t understand it that way, then you shouldn’t hire the actor. Unfortunately, the way the business is structured, all the idealism is taken out of it.”

  By the time he came to direct The Color Purple, the mega-director could afford all the “idealism” he wanted to cast the film exactly the way he wanted to—even if it meant hiring a first-time film actress and the host of a local talk show for the lead and a pivotal supporting role.

  The Color Purple was a relief for Spielberg’s more sophisticated fans, who felt guilty enjoying his previously high-tech, lowbrow films. All along, the director’s potential had been tantalizing by what it promised, but until E.T., it had failed to deliver literate, sophisticated filmmaking. He had managed to coax an incredible performance out of a polyurethane dummy from outer space. Just think what he could do with a flesh-and-blood creature if the actor were the main character instead of backup for a rubber puppet.

  Spielberg fell in love with Whoopi Goldberg, who would play Celie, when he saw her perform her stand-up comedy act on Broadway. She later auditioned for the role, strangely, by performing part of her act in his office.

  “Whoopi is more than special. It’s kind of scary. She has a gift. I cast her after she performed her one-woman show for me in my office. I’m sitting there watching this person who is going to arrive, who is going to be a major movie star,” he said, accurately predicting her later superstar success when for a brief while she would be the highest paid actress in an industry notorious for underemploying African Americans of either sex.

  Spielberg found her face so expressive that after casting her he cut her dialogue by 25 percent. Her face, he found, could communicate just as eloquently as the written word.

  The Spielberg-Goldberg collaboration was a match made in movie-trivia heaven. Both the filmmaker and the actress were movie buffs. Spielberg, who had had trouble communicating with actors in the past, found he could use a directing shorthand with fellow movie buff Goldberg.

  Goldberg recalled, “He could say, ‘I want Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend,’ and I would know exactly what he meant. We didn’t have to spend hours discussing it.”

  Steven Spielberg may have had prickly relationships with most of his other female leads, but he and Goldberg could cover the Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson duet, “Ebony and Ivory.”

  On the set of The Color Purple, Goldberg raved, “Steven is the best at that, bringing out humanity. He’s just the greatest, most wonderful director an actor could want. We taught him a lot as actors, because we weren’t walking on with special effects. We were there, he had to deal with us—he couldn’t cut to a boulder or something.”

  Spielberg, in Golberg’s account, is even kind to animals, even reptiles. While driving back to their hotel after a day on the set in North Carolina, he abruptly stopped their car. Spielberg had spotted a tortoise in the middle of the road, right in front of their car. He got out and moved the creature to the shoulder of the road. An observer noted that a motorcade of production’s cars then passed over the spot and would have crushed the turtle had it not been for Spielberg’s quick eye.

  Spielberg also discovered another crucial cast member, Oprah Winfrey, before she became a national phenomenon. He was struck by her animation while watching tapes of her local Chicago talk show.

  “Oprah is the secret weapon of this movie,” he said of the television personality he cast as Goldberg’s independent daughter-in-law, Sophie. “I found her on videotape. Quincy Jones [the film’s coproducer] and I were watching tapes of her TV show, saying, ‘That can’t be real, all that hurrying around, so full of life and energy and love.’ ”

  Spielberg in fact cast Winfrey solely on the basis of her talk show performance. He didn’t ask her to audition. Years later, Spielberg recalled, “I saw this fearlessness in those tapes. I certainly wouldn’t cast her today because she is svelte and picturesque, which is not the physical image of Sophie. Oprah convinced me that she was this character in our very first meeting. She has remained a good friend over the years, which is nice.”

  Another woman who was more famous in another medium, Tina Turner, managed to elude the director’s overtures. He asked the pop star three times to play Shug Avery, the singer who liberates Celie emotionally and sexually.

  Shug is Celie’s husband’s girlfriend, and despite her equivocal position in this unloving triangle, she becomes Celie’s biggest booster and helps the woman leave her abusive husband. Turner, who later would write a best-seller about her years as an abused wife, found the story line a bit too autobiographical and painfully close to home.

  “The third time she turned me down, she said she’d been through too much of this story in her own life to ever want to do it in a movie. We tested fifty to sixty actresses. I think I was always seeing Tina in the role,” Spielberg said. True to her word, when Turner was asked to play herself in the film of her autobiography, she also passed on reliving her real-life traumas.

  Spielberg may have been the ultimate white-bread director in producer Don Simpson’s mind, but he felt comfortable directing an almost all-black cast. He did, however, pay the entire race a compliment that is on a par with praising black people for having rhythm or athletic prowess when he said, “They’re the same and different. What’s different is that because of years of discrimination, I think they’re more quickly responsive and expressive of their feelings.” You can almost hear an unsophisticated cracker adding, “And they dance real good, too.”

  When
The Color Purple came out, the critics seemed personally offended that the king of techno-popcorn had dared to make such an artistic departure from his patented style. Even rarer in an industry where you never bad-mouth in public someone you may work with one day, several other filmmakers weighed in against Spielberg’s audacity.

  The normally benign critic for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, said, “He was too young to make The Color Purple. He overemphasized every emotion in sight.” Contradicting himself, Turan later said, “After E.T.’s Oscar snub, his movies got blander and blander as their popularity increased.”

  Turan’s critique was gentle compared to the barbs of Henry Jaglom, an avant-garde director whose films invariably flop.

  Although the Academy of Arts and Picture Sciences gave the film a whopping eleven nominations, it snubbed Spielberg in the best director category. The Directors Guild made amends by giving him its best directing award that year. In some ways, that was a greater compliment than winning an Oscar, since the Guild award represented an accolade bestowed by his peers, not the entire Academy membership, which includes such down-scale crafts as makeup and special effects.

  Even so, Jaglom was amazed by the Academy’s largesse: “What is astonishing to me is that they would give The Color Purple eleven nominations. I think the actors deserved the nominations, but the rest of it was such a cartoon. He took this wonderful material and turned it into a zip-a-dee-doo-dah Song of the South.”

  Another director, who more circumspectly refused to be quoted by name, weighed in with, “It’s appalling what he did with Alice Walker’s book. He either does not know how to explore relationships or he doesn’t want to deal with them. Either way, he turned The Color Purple into a two and one half hour episode of Amazing Stories.”

  Spielberg defended taking the hard edges off the novel. “If you’re a nightclub entertainer, do you want to perform for three drunks or for a packed house? Any artist wants the largest possible audience.”