Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Spielberg had high hopes for the series and took full credit for its content. “TV stands for Tender Vittles. That’s what we’re givin’ ‘em, folks, Tender Vittles. I’m essentially able to say yea or nay to what is or isn’t amazing to me. At the end of each show, people should look at each other if they loved it and honestly say, ‘That was an amazing story!’ ”

  People said a lot of things about the new show, but “amazing” wasn’t one of them. The Nielsens went from unimpressive at the start to dismal by the end of the two-year ordeal. The critics searched for new adjectives to describe awful.

  The Washington Post’s Tom Shales wrote, “I hear America asking, ‘What was so amazing about that?’ ” after Spielberg’s autobiographical episode about the train aired.

  The critical drubbing Spielberg took for his excursion onto the small screen snowballed into a reassessment of his big screen efforts.

  Pauline Kael asked rhetorically, “Why are movies so bad? One hates to say it comes down to the success of Steven Spielberg, but it’s not so much what Spielberg has done but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilization of the culture. Spielberg with his TV series now rips off his own things. I can’t think of any other director who’s started paying homage to himself so early.”

  Satirizing Tartikoff’s 800-pound gorilla analogy, the Los Angeles Reader called the show an “800-pound turkey.”

  Susan Seidelman, the director of quirky, little comedies such as Desperately Seeking Susan, weighed in with, “Spielberg’s success has definitely influenced the attitudes of movie people. They’re just not interested in the movies anymore. They’re more interested in the E.T. toys and bedspreads.” When Seidelman was a student at New York University’s film school in 1976, she said, “Everyone was imitating Godard and Bergman” but those glory days were gone “and it’s all because of Spielberg. He’s brilliant. I’m an admirer of what he does. But there are bad side effects. I get to read a lot of scripts and treatments, and now they’re all about kiddies and spaceships.”

  Spielberg himself seemed to worry that he might have returned to the same creative well one too many times when he said during Amazing Stories’ second season: “If you’re here working every day, you start Xeroxing your own style. It gets incestuous.”

  For the first time in his career, negative personal stories began to surface about Spielberg, who up to that time had been portrayed in the press as some kind of “friendly elf,” as one disgruntled ex-employee described the phenomenon. (TV Guide reported that “he was a vaguely unpleasant guy sometimes. It bugs associates to see his press clippings portray some sort of friendly elf.”)

  A former employee said, “On the job, he is extremely demanding. His attitude is, ‘This is the best job in Hollywood and you’d better appreciate it.’ People are scared of him and he assumes a huge place in people’s minds. They see him like a god.”

  Another employee described him as aloof. “He doesn’t say hello in the corridors. He doesn’t observe the social graces except when he has to.” Employees mordantly referred to Amblin, his production company, as the “Vatican.”

  TV Guide also claimed that when he soured on one employee, he simply stopped speaking to the woman until she quit. The Spielberg snub wasn’t reserved for minions. Bigger fish also have felt his wrath. He refused to say hello to two Universal executives because when they were at Columbia they passed on E.T.

  Employees at Amblin were underpaid. One associate said, “He’s afraid all his money is going to slip away.” That wasn’t quite fair. The director was notorious for insanely generous perks like an all-expense-paid vacation to Hawaii for an overworked personal assistant. He was so pleased with the job his interior decorator did on his office complex that he bought him a car.

  One agent, who not surprisingly insisted on anonymity, portrayed the director as an omnivorous mogul who wanted every project in town. “This man is not the same as the soft and cuddly characters he creates. The amazing thing about Steven is that he would truly be happiest if he owned every project in town. This is nothing new about Steven. He’s always been a very strong, very tough businessman. It’s the rule of kings. ‘I am the king, and I make the rules.’ ”

  The usually sycophantic Daily Variety quoted industry insiders who claimed Spielberg was “an intensely aggressive and acquisitive businessman who goes after projects with a tenacity that is striking even by the hardball standards of Hollywood.”

  David Vogel, one of the producers of Amazing Stories, was the only person willing to go on the record and say something negative about his patron. “He eggs you on until it drives you crazy. When he left to direct The Color Purple, I thought, ‘Oh, boy, he’s off my back.’ Then I’d get these calls from him about a script. He’s always pushing to make it better.”

  More typically, only nice things were said about the most powerful man in Hollywood. Mike Medavoy, then chairman of Tri-Star, insisted that stories of Spielberg throwing his weight around were “completely undeserved. He’s been meticulous about not doing it. This guy suffers a reputation that is unfortunate.”

  Celebrity attorney Bertram Fields also came to Spielberg’s defense. “Anybody who has developed a position of effective power in this business and uses it to maximize his bargaining is going to get lots of complaining. Steven is very active in going after properties, but I haven’t seen any behavior that I would call deceitful or unscrupulous.”

  Still, the persistent image of a self-obsessed executive emerged as his television career was submerging. “He never asks anybody about their personal lives,” an employee said. “His only subject of conversation is the movies.”

  As one studio executive described both his interpersonal and business skills, “He directs better than he moguls.”

  That was an assessment Spielberg himself wouldn’t necessarily disagree with. He said, “I don’t like being a general. I like to think of myself still as a journeyman director.” But he refused to accept claims that he was a tyrant, as one producer described him. On the other hand, he was no patsy either.

  “I’m not a bully and I don’t give orders,” he insisted. “I’m very collaborative, but what I try to do is inspire in people who are collaborating that they’ve got to collaborate with me better than they have ever collaborated with anybody before. And so in that sense I’m demanding. I expect the best of anybody who works here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Empire Building

  IN 1987, STEVEN SPIELBERG MADE WHAT HE called his “transitional film.” Empire of the Sun would be the film in which he made the transition from childhood to adult themes.

  Ironically, the hero of the film was an eleven-year-old. But it was about an eleven-year-old with problems that would have overwhelmed any adult.

  Spielberg’s idol David Lean had once toyed with the idea of directing Empire of the Sun, and thematically it was a project Spielberg just couldn’t resist.

  “From the moment I read the novel, I secretly wanted to do it myself. I had never read anything with an adult setting where a child saw things through a man’s eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him. This was just the reverse of what I felt was my credo. And then I discovered very quickly that this movie and my turning forty happened at almost the same time was no coincidence—that I had decided to do a movie with grown-up themes and values, although spoken through a voice that hadn’t changed through puberty as yet.

  “I was attracted to the idea that this was the death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood, which by my own admission and everybody’s impression of me is what my life has been. [Empire of the Sun] was the opposite of Peter Pan. This was a boy who had grown up too quickly, who was becoming a flower long before the bud had ever come out of the topsoil,” he said.

  Based on the autobiographical novel by science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun told the story of Jim Graham, an upper-class preadolescent who lives a lu
xurious life in the British quarter of Shanghai on the eve of World War II.

  When the Japanese invade Shanghai after Pearl Harbor, Jim’s pampered life is turned upside down. He is separated from his parents and ends up alone in a ghastly concentration camp.

  The theme of a child’s separation from his parents was old Spielberg territory. As he did in E.T. and Close Encounters, Spielberg was engaging in a little self-psychoanalysis, still exorcising old demons of his own parents’ divorce when he was fifteen.

  The separation scene is more horrific than anything the director experienced in childhood, and the scene is arguably scarier than any of his more over-the-top chills in Jaws. The boy and his parents attempt to flee Shanghai in their Rolls Royce. Unfortunately, everyone else in the city has the same idea. After their car gets marooned in a sea of humanity, they get out and try to make their way on foot.

  Big mistake. The crowd is like a tidal wave, pushing and pulling its human flotsam. As the crowd surges, the youngster is physically yanked away from his parents. His frantic and unsuccessful attempts to reunite with his hysterical parents are more terrifying than the appearance of the shark in Jaws and certainly more realistically nightmarish than any of Indiana Jones’ creepy-crawling monsters.

  That is just the beginning of poor Jim Graham’s travails. His life in the camp is something out of Oliver Twist. Graham is transformed from a supercilious aristocrat to a crafty survivor who helps his older fellow prisoners withstand torture and starvation.

  As usual, Spielberg proved himself a wiz as a director of children. Not since Henry Thomas’s performance as Elliot in E.T. had a child actor, Britain’s Christian Bale, turned in such a multifaceted performance. Graham’s transformation from snooty brat (at one point he brags that he’s writing a book on contract bridge) to a Lord of the Flies urchin was the cynosure of the film.

  Filming was almost as horrific as the subject matter. The production shot exteriors in Shanghai for three weeks, the first time the Chinese government allowed a major American film company to shoot in the People’s Republic.

  The thirteen-year-old Bale was appalled by the filth. He told me in 1987, shortly before the film’s release, “There were four or five families living in these mucky shacks that looked like a garden toolshed. We tried to go shopping for gifts, and the stores were all empty.”

  Spielberg echoed his young charge’s complaints. “Empire of the Sun was not fun to make. The subject matter, about a young boy in a POW camp, was so sad. It was like a descent into hell. And this boy was asked to do a lot of things. He was sworn at, he was abused by adults. It was hard for me to see. I suffered with the character. If there is such a thing as a method director, it was me then. But the filmmaking experience was the best I’ve had.”

  One of traumas the director put his star through had him crawling in the mud for days. When the script called for the starving POW to eat insects, he was required to eat bitter black seedlings take after take.

  “They weren’t as bad as eating insects, but they weren’t tasty,” Bale said.

  For all the film’s horror quotient, Spielberg had to suppress his natural tendency to inject humor into scary situations. It had worked well on Jaws—comic relief before the big bite—but on a fact-based film it would have been downright tacky and untrue to the spirit of the book.

  After the critical crucifixion The Color Purple had undergone—not to mention the Oscar snub—Spielberg would have been forgiven if he had retreated to the greasy-kid-stuff style of filmmaking which had worked so well before he took on black lesbians and spousal abuse.

  Instead, he decided to test the waters again, but without such a dramatic departure from his tried and true style as The Color Purple. Using an eleven-year-old character as his alter ego/star helped him make a more orderly transition from childish to adult themes.

  “I’m trying to grow up in increments,” he said a year after Empire of the Sun was released. “I don’t want to come up to the surface so quickly that I’m going to have a terrible case of the bends. Empire still had a boy in it to help with that transition to a kind of genre I would like to play around with.”

  Empire of the Sun also allowed the director to explore his favorite era, the forties. When he was much less mature, he did a slapstick exploration of the period in 1941. With only a bit more maturity, he returned to World War II with the missing bombers’ subplot of Close Encounters. Regressing, he called on Nazis to be the cardboard villains of Raiders.

  Empire of the Sun allowed him to explore his favorite era in a more sophisticated way. “I’m closer to the ’40s than I am to the ’80s,” he said at the close of that decade. “I love that period. My father filled my head with war stories—he was a radioman on a B-25 fighting the Japanese in Burma. I have identified with that period of innocence and tremendous jeopardy all my life.

  “It was the end of an era, the end of innocence, and I have been clinging to it for most of my adult life. I had been tenaciously clinging to my naivete, but I just reached a saturation point, and I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism of that period.”

  The director was of course being premature. His real exorcism of that historical period would come five years later with Schindler’s List.

  Empire of the Sun was received more kindly by the critics than his previous effort. The Color Purple was almost treated as an affront. How dare the roller-coaster king try to dramatize the African-American experience! Empire of the Sun was still identifiably Spielbergian, yet it showed a growing awareness on the part of the director that there was more to film art than rolling boulders and sight-seeing spaceships.

  The critics approved. The Los Angeles Times called Empire of the Sun his “most mature and searing work to date.”

  But the public apparently wanted the old magician back. Empire of the Sun has the weird distinction of being one of Spielberg’s best films—and his biggest flop.

  It grossed only $66 million worldwide. Even the noxious 1941 brought in $90 million.

  Empire of the Sun didn’t make the studio any money, and you don’t have to be a box-office analyst for Variety to figure out why. Empire had all the patented Spielberg elements: a child in peril, villain(s) of incomprehensible evil, separation from loved ones, and of course, a happy ending with family and friends reunited as the John Williams score swells over the closing credits. But Empire was only superficially a Spielberg-type film. The horror was perhaps too real. It’s one thing to have the kids on screen—and in the audience—groan while the pint-sized hero eats monkey brains (Temple of Doom). It’s quite another to have the youthful hero eat insects in the throes of starvation. Cartoonish Nazis (Indianas 1 and 2) supply digestible horror. Sadistic Japanese guards who inflict graphic beatings are not palatable as Saturday matinee fare. Plus the purely superstitious may think of the World War II curse that has afflicted Spielberg’s filmography. When he took the war on for laughs, he bombed. When he examined the same war in a dramatic context, the failure was only slightly less profound, commercially at least.

  Spielberg was philosophical about the film’s disappointing performance at the box office. “At this point in my career I think I’ve earned the right to fail commercially. I knew going in that Empire of the Sun wasn’t a very commercial project,” he said.

  That must have been a startling revelation to the film’s producer, Warner Brothers, which he thanked after the fact. “Empire of the Sun ranks among the most satisfying experiences I’ve had directing. I will be forever in debt to Warner Bros. for risking all that money. It was a horrendous risk. But they pretty much let me make my large canvas, personal film.

  “I knew it wasn’t going to have a broad audience appeal. I knew I had to make this movie despite my producer hat, which kept nagging at me that this was not a movie to spend a lot of money on because you’re not going to get it back. And yet sometime things need to be done regardless of commercial return,” he said.

  Spielberg, the crafty negotiator, was being
a bit disingenuous here. His standard deal gives him a percentage of the gross from the first dollar taken in at theaters. That meant he would make a bundle regardless of whether Empire ever earned a nickel of profit.

  The director’s next film would reinstate him as the king of the box office, although that must have been sore consolation to Warner Brothers, since he made Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for another studio.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Raiders of the

  Box Office Again

  THE ONLY REASON STEVEN SPIELBERG MADE the third installment of Raiders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was to honor his handshake deal with George Lucas. Financially it enriched him, but aesthetically it prevented him from directing the following year’s Oscar champ, Rainman.

  Rainman was a project he devoted five long months of his valuable time developing in preproduction. He abandoned the project with great reluctance. “I was very upset not to have been able to do Rainman mainly because I’ve wanted to work with Dustin Hoffman ever since I saw The Graduate. But I couldn’t go to my best friend [George Lucas] and say, ‘I know I’m a whore, but I found something I like better—hire George Miller’ [Mad Max].”

  Instead, he generously recommended his friend and protege, Barry Levinson, to replace him on Rainman. But Spielberg’s generosity went beyond a friendly recommendation. He met with Levinson in a Westwood, California, restaurant and turned over his copious notes on the script from the five months he had spent developing it. “I sort of debriefed in front of Barry and gave him all of my notes and everything,” he said.

  Sadly, he recalled, “With Rainman, I spent almost half a year developing it with Dustin and Tom Cruise and [writer] Ron Bass. I kept trying to get the screenplay to be better and better while having a stop date of the 12th of January, at which time I had to start shooting Indy III. When I saw I was going to go past January 12th, and I would have to step down from Indy III, the promise I made to George was more important than making Rainman. So with great regret, because I really wanted to work with Dustin and Tom, I stepped down from the movie.”