Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Jaglom wasn’t impressed with that logic and retorted, “An artist by definition isn’t facile, pandering to everybody. An artist tries to get people to understand something about the human condition and be true to himself in doing it. He hopes everybody will appreciate it. That’s different from trying to calculate what everybody will appreciate.”

  Not everyone in the industry acted as though Spielberg had betrayed West Point to the British. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, one of the most influential film critics in the country because of his syndicated television show, hailed the film as a “feminist Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickelby of the South” because of its horrific Dickensian depiction of poverty and abuse.

  Warner Brothers issued an outraged press release, saying, “The company is shocked and dismayed that the movie’s primary creative force—Steven Spielberg—was not recognized” by the Academy.

  To make up for the domestic brickbats, Spielberg, like a prophet who is not honored in his own land, received an honor in Britain—the Fellowship of the Academy Award—that had only been given to Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, and his personal idol, director David Lean.

  Barry Diller, the Attila the Hun of movie moguls, made a rare statement actually praising someone. Commenting on the Oscar snub, Diller said, “There are always high prices to pay for success, but to have his peers act this way is an unflattering reflection on themselves. Certainly everyone has the right to vote his own way, but to deny him is an act of meanness.”

  More understandably, Universal chief Sid Sheinberg expressed indignation over the snub in not one but two lead items in Army Archerd’s overly friendly column in Daily Variety.

  Spielberg remained philosophical about the snub—and hopeful about the future. “The most coveted respect I get is from my peers. I’ve been honored six times by the Directors Guild, so when I get a DGA nomination, that’s recognition enough. Still, I’d love an Oscar. I’d never snub an Academy Award. I’m not Marlon Brando. I’ll never send someone to accept an Oscar for me.”

  What most enraged the critics was the director’s soft-pedalling of the book’s lesbian elements. The New York Times summed up the critical reaction, labelling the film “shallow.” Spielberg admitted, “I downplayed the lesbian scenes. I confined them to just a series of kisses. I wasn’t comfortable going beyond that. In the book, which handles the scene beautifully, Shug actually holds up a mirror to Celie’s private parts. But a scene like that plays at least 150 times bigger on the screen, and I just couldn’t do it. Marty Scorsese could do it; not me. Any woman director would have done that brilliantly. And I was afraid of it. I didn’t know how to direct actors to do that.”

  The novel dealt with such horrific experiences as rape coupled with incest, spousal abuse, and alcoholism. The director did a typical Spielbergian take on these elements and managed to find the positive in an otherwise horrendous situation. “The incest, the rape, the brutality are more the surface than the foundation of the book. What attracted me was the underlying sweet optimism. The idea that this sweet girl will grow up to be a strong person with a full sense of her own worth,” he said.

  Maybe it was simply lack of screen time, but Spielberg also cut down the amount of male-bashing that took place in the original novel. As one pundit said, “It would have been a six-hour movie if he had included all the potshots Alice Walker took at men in the book.”

  The most disappointed group was Spielberg’s hard-core fans who loved the director’s mix of sci-fi and fantasy with a heady dollop of chills and thrills. All those elements were sorely missing in The Color Purple.

  One Spielberg aficionado at a preview screening was said to have kept searching the top corner of the screen until an exasperated companion asked what he was looking for. “I’m waiting for the Mother Ship to descend,” the disappointed fan explained.

  Spielberg also was criticized for hiring a Dutch-born writer, Menno Meyjes, to adapt this most American of novels. The screenwriter defended his hiring, saying, “The authenticity was handled in the book. Besides, all people are the same underneath.”

  Meyjes, who would go on to write the third installment of Indiana Jones, also defended the PG depiction of sex between the two female stars. “The foremost experience was of love, not sex. Anything more graphic would have been distracting.”

  One important voice in the debate lined up squarely behind the director: Alice Walker, the author of the book. Spielberg later said that one of the fringe benefits of making The Color Purple was that “I get two lovely letters a month from Alice Walker.”

  Unlike the critics and gay activists, Walker obviously didn’t object to the PG treatment of her book’s sexuality. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Walker said she was particularly impressed with Spielberg’s special trip to visit her home in a working class neighborhood of Eatonton, Georgia. She wasn’t impressed by the block long limo he showed up in but with his intuitive understanding of her work. “He really loved the people in the book. He had internalized the anguish, the struggle, and the liberation of Celie [Whoopi Goldberg’s character] and everyone.”

  The mutual admiration continued when Walker visited the shoot in North Carolina. “When I got to the set and saw him working, he was excruciatingly sensitive to detail. Not just physical things, but also emotional complexity and truth. He was incredibly good with people,” Walker said.

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, however, wasn’t intimidated by the whole Hollywood megalith that had transplanted itself to rural North Carolina. Before signing away movie rights to the book, she had it written into her contract that at least half the cast and crew had to be either women, black, or other “Third World” people.

  To this day, Walker keeps a photograph of Spielberg directing a scene from The Color Purple on a shelf in her living room.

  Ironically, it was a Jew from white-bread Scottsdale, Arizona, who introduced Walker’s work to her own family. Before the film was released, the author claimed none of her relatives ever bothered to read her books. “That’s how my family read me in the first place,” she said. “They’d never read me. But when they saw the movie, they thought, ‘Gee, there must be something to this.’ ”

  The Academy’s snub of The Color Purple was Walker’s fault, not Spielberg’s, the novelist generously insisted. It was her vicious portrayal of black men, which the film graphically dramatized with beatings and rape, that turned off Academy voters. “I don’t think they could accurately judge The Color Purple because I frankly think they were intimidated by the controversy about the film’s portrayal of black men. . . . If they had real integrity they would take a stand if they thought it was good. And it was good,” Walker said.

  Spielberg had enjoyed the biggest success of his career with E.T., the only film up to that time that he didn’t storyboard. He obviously hoped lightning would strike twice and decided not to sketch out his next film as well. “I did not storyboard The Color Purple at all because I wanted every day to be a new experience for me. Usually, I make my movies in my head, as you would design a house,” said the director who once said that if he hadn’t become a director, he would have been an architect. “And sometimes the best sequences were those that I did not have storyboards for because someone got sick or we had to change plans. I’ve enjoyed ‘winging it’ in my movies more than the planned scenes.”

  Despite its brutality and relative sexual frankness, The Color Purple oddly paralleled Spielberg’s private life while he was making the film.

  Referring to his on-again, off-again relationship with Amy Irving, he said, “Just as our breakup coincided with the unhappy experience of 1941 (and Honeysuckle Rose), this time everything coincided with the great experience of making The Color Purple.

  “We figured it out later that Max was conceived on the day Menno Meyjes started writing the screenplay. Max was born on the same day we were shooting young Celie’s birth scene in the movie.

  “This movie is important to me. There were so many pa
rallels with the movie and my life. I had been taking Lamaze classes while Amy was pregnant, and there I was, directing a fourteen-year-old girl in the childbirth scene, telling her what I had learned in my classes, telling her she was having twin peaks, about which she knew nothing, and the phone call came that Amy was in her fourth hour of labor.”

  The eerie coincidences continued as the filming of the birth scene and his wife’s delivery progressed. “Just as we were pulling the rubber baby out from the bed, the phone call came and one of the assistant directors ran in and said, ‘Your baby’s on the way. Your real baby is on the way.’ It was a wonderful moment in my life,”

  It was a golden period in Spielberg’s life. He and his prickly wife were still very much in love and devoted to one another. “She spent the entire time with me on The Color Purple in Monroe, North Carolina, and that’s not a fun place to spend three months,” he said.

  The year 1985 was golden in another way. Actually, green is the operative color. That year, Spielberg came into his own as the producer of films directed by other people. And as a producer, he showed he had the same Midas touch which had made him the most successful director of all time. In 1984, he produced a monster hit about monsters, Gremlins. The next year, he scored an even bigger hit, producing Back to the Future, directed by his protege Bob Zemeckis. Goonies, an uninspired adventure about preteens and pirates, also fared well at the box office. Less stellar was the box-office performance of Young Sherlock Holmes, a wonderfully inventive and visually stunning film that nevertheless failed to grab audiences.

  Back to the Future was the number-one box-office champ of 1985. It confirmed that producer Spielberg had a golden gut even when he wasn’t directing. It also showed that he could be ruthless in the pursuit of getting things right.

  Although his official title was executive producer, Back to the Future was his personal baby. Every studio in town had rejected the complex plot about time travel until Spielberg championed it. But almost as soon as filming began, Spielberg realized he had made a major mistake in casting the lead role of Marty McFly, the intrepid time traveler who wakes up to find himself marooned in 1955.

  Spielberg had all along wanted Michael J. Fox for the role. In his early twenties, Fox had the boyish looks perfect for playing the role of a teen. Fox was also the star of a hit television sitcom, Family Ties, and it was hoped that his high level of recognition would bring in the all-important teen market. But Fox’s popularity was a blessing and a curse. The series kept him tied up until the first of the year, and Spielberg wanted to start filming long before that in time for a summer release, so he and director Bob Zemeckis hired a talented unknown named Eric Stolz. Stolz was in fact a brilliant actor. The only problem was that he thought he was doing Macbeth when the producer and the director wanted something lighter. Stolz was just too intense. The dailies played like tragedy, not light comedy. After five weeks and $4 million, Spielberg finally threw in the towel and summarily fired Stolz. He recalled with heartfelt guilt, “This was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. That was a real hard call. That made me miserable. And I’m still miserable, not about the decision, which was right, but what I should have done, which was to allow Bob Zemeckis to wait until the first of the year, when Michael was available. Michael was our first choice. He was not available due to Family Ties. I should have waited, and yet I wanted the film out for the summer. And for the record, I think Eric Stolz is a marvelous actor, in the same league with Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez and Matthew Modine.”

  Spielberg may have praised Stolz to assuage his guilt, but as usual, he turned out to be remarkably prescient. Stolz’s film career is booming, while Fox’s has stalled with one lame comedy after another.

  His consistent success as a producer must have been especially gratifying after earlier missteps including I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980).

  But all his success as a movie producer in 1985 must have been diluted by the failure of his big-time return to the medium which had given him his start.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Not So Amazing

  Stories

  STEVEN SPIELBERG HAD BEGUN HIS CAREER behind the camera as a teenager. When he returned to the medium sixteen years later, he was the king of features, and his return to the small screen was expected to be a triumph.

  After all, how hard could television be to tame after he had wrestled such technical big budget films to the ground? Television was slumming, and Spielberg was expected to bring a little class to the much put-upon medium.

  Spielberg was wooed back to television by an unprecedented offer. NBC was willing to give him $1 million per half-hour episode and an on-air commitment to run the show for two years. That was a $50 million gamble by the network. By contrast, the hit sitcom Cheers cost only $350,000 per episode at the time. Even if the series flopped, NBC would be forced to run every single episode, slowly twisting in the wind of low Nielsens for an agonizing two seasons. More understandably, the network gave him full creative control without any interference from the suits. It also promised not to monitor his dailies. In fact, the only bureaucratic entity the all-powerful filmmaker would have to answer to was the network’s standards and practices department, i.e., the network censor. As if the king of PG entertainment needed a moral watchdog!

  The network also committed to Spielberg’s vision without seeing a pilot, another unprecedented concession, like buying a car before it even made it off the drawing board, much less the assembly line.

  But Spielberg had a sterling track record: director of the number-one hit of all time. And in 1985, he had produced the number-one hit of the year, Back to the Future.

  NBC felt he could do no wrong. Or as NBC’s head of programming, Brandon Tartikoff, said slyly, “Steven Spielberg is an 800-pound gorilla,” and we all know such a gorilla is allowed to sit anywhere he wants.

  The director was not above pooh-poohing the medium that had given him his first big break. In a rather Olympian manner, he pronounced, “A feature film is a full exercise program, and Amazing Stories is like a quick hundred push-ups. It’s just a great way to keep in shape.” (Prophetically, Spielberg had once admitted he could not do a single chin-up.)

  Universal’s parent company, MCA, would produce the show. Delirious executives at the studio described the show as a “weekly series of the ordinary meets the extraordinary.”

  When the alliance between Spielberg and NBC was first announced in 1984, Tartikoff predicted, “I would expect it to be a show with a lot of fun, great adventure and imagination, with nice touches of comedy where called for. I don’t expect it to be aimed at a juvenile audience,” he said, with his eye planted firmly on the audience most coveted by advertisers, eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds. “I think younger kids will enjoy the show, but I think it will be a general-audience-pleasing show, in the same way that a lot of Steven Spielberg’s movies appeal to a broad spectrum of the movie audience. It will be sort of a throwback in some sense, to the great anthologies that were on television in the 1950s, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.”

  Even without the benefit of hindsight and the performance of other resurrected anthology shows, Amazing Stories in retrospect seemed like a crazy gamble for the network. As an anthology show, it would feature a different story and cast every week. The genre hadn’t worked in years, not since the original Twilight Zone went off the air.

  The reason continuing series do well is the very nature of their format. Each week the audience learns a bit more about the returning characters. Although sitcoms are routinely dismissed as lowbrow, after twenty-six episodes so many character traits have been revealed that the original stick figures have become multidimensional characters. An actor can get a big laugh just by repeating a line like “Dyn-o-mite” or “Oh, really?” because it has so many associations with past gags and incidents. The audience falls a little bit in love with the quirks and mannerisms of each cast member. After a hit show like M*A*S*H* has been on the air for twelv
e seasons, the principals seem like members of the family.

  No such love affair can blossom on an anthology show because each week an entire new cast of characters and stories are introduced. You have only twenty-three minutes to get to know total strangers.

  But at its launch, no one seemed to worry about the self-limiting appeal of anthology shows.

  Amazing Stories, Spielberg predicted, would be “a forum creatively for a lot of filmmakers to get together and take those little gems of ideas and thoughts that just aren’t long enough for feature films. A hundred years ago, before movies and television were invented, they were called short stories.”

  Either the Spielberg name or the chance to realize some “little gems” of their own lured some major big-screen talent to the little screen. Clint Eastwood directed “Vanessa in the Garden” from a Spielberg script about a painter and his wife, with a supernatural twist. Irvin Kershner, the director of the second Star Wars film, made an ingenious segment, “Hell Toupe,” about a hairpiece that transforms its wearers into holy terrors.

  Only David Lean turned Spielberg down, jokingly agreeing to direct a half-hour segment if he were allowed six months to shoot his miniepic.

  Spielberg directed four of the first twenty-two shows and wrote the stories for fifteen. He took valuable time out from his feature film schedule to direct an hour-long episode, “Round Trip,” about a World War II bomber mission that goes terribly wrong. It starred an unknown actor by the name of Kevin Costner.

  Another episode he directed, called “Ghost Train,” was autobiographical, about a fantasy he had growing up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, when he heard a train coming through town every night. In the episode, which is most notable for being the only time he ever directed Amy Irving, the far-off train crashes through the house, which has been built on the site of long-vanished train tracks.