CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hooked
IN 1990, STEVEN SPIELBERG FELT ADRIFT. HIS career was in a holding pattern. No one was ready to declare him washed up, but he felt artistically stalled.
One studio executive, who spoke off the record (natch), said, “Spielberg chose his last few projects unwisely.” The executive mentioned The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, and Always.
That was too harsh an assessment. Only Empire of the Sun was a certifiable flop, but it had earned Spielberg some of the best reviews of his career. With his track record, he could afford the occasional succès d’estime.
Spielberg’s track record as a movie producer, however, was spottier. While he had helmed hits like Gremlins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he had also made duds like Innerspace, Young Sherlock Holmes, and the unintelligible Joe Versus the Volcano, which had the distinction of being the only film in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan ever turned in a bad performance.
With films like Empire of the Sun and especially The Color Purple, Spielberg was trying to grow up, to escape the world of cuddly aliens, serial cliff-hangers and special effects extravaganzas. But whenever he tried more mature subject matter, either the public or the critics deserted him.
In the early eighties, Spielberg had drifted away from his agent, Jeff Berg, chairman of ICM. Why give somebody ten percent of a billion dollars when you can negotiate your own sterling deal? But in 1990, Spielberg, the most powerful director in Hollywood, signed with the most powerful agent in Hollywood, Mike Ovitz, then the chairman of Creative Artists Agency and now president of Disney. A studio executive speculated on why Spielberg was willing to surrender 10 percent of his earnings to Ovitz.
“If anybody can finally get Spielberg off producing his umpteenth knockoff of Jaws and E.T. and directing grown-up movies, it’s Ovitz at CAA.”
Spielberg reportedly was peeved that he was not being offered the best scripts. One script that got away was Dead Poet’s Society, a film that he would have dearly loved to direct. His own handlers had passed on Silence of the Lambs without even mentioning it to him, because its subject matter—cannibalism and serial murder—was not Spielberg territory. “Even my staff tends to pigeonhole me,” he lamented.
No one in development lost his or her job at Amblin’ after failing to run Silence of the Lambs past the boss. This kind of forgiveness isn’t necessarily typical of many filmmakers. When executives at Mel Gibson’s production company turned down the script of Ghost without even mentioning the project to their boss, Gibson fired his entire staff. Spielberg tends to be more passive-aggressive with employees who fail to please. As one ex-staffer said, “Steven never fires anybody. He just stops talking to you until you feel so left out you quit.”
Spielberg personally rejected another project, Full Disclosure, in galleys even though it was by the author of his biggest hit, Jurassic Park. Although nowhere near as graphic as Silence of the Lambs, Full Disclosure gave him the creeps. (It’s hard to imagine the director who shied away from showing Whoopi Goldberg’s vagina in The Color Purple directing Demi Moore to say a line like, “I want you to put your cock in my mouth.”)
His alliance with CAA would give him first crack at the agency’s 300-plus client list of writers and access to the agency’s roster of A-list actors.
Mike Ovitz had perfected the art of the package, putting together a raft of agency clients in one project, from director to writer to stars. CAA was a one-stop operation. Step right up and get your superstars, director and script here.
Spielberg’s first CAA-fueled project represented Ovitz’s packaging at its apotheosis.
The film was Hook, and it was a veritable cornucopia of CAA stars: Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Julia Roberts, and writer Jim V. Hart.
The only fly in the ointment of this superstar mix was that a decidedly B-list director, Nick Castle, was already attached to the project. But as soon as the king of Hollywood expressed interest, the studio paid Castle $850,000, net profit participation, and a story credit to go away. Sony’s subsidiary, Tri-Star, had bankrolled the film, and its then chairman, Mike Medavoy, took the blame for firing Castle. In fact, Medavoy claimed that Spielberg balked at causing a colleague to be muscled off a project. Spielberg’s longtime producing partner, Frank Marshall, said that Spielberg was unaware that another director was attached to Hook, and when he found out about the firing, “he was horrified.”
For years, it was rumored that Steven Spielberg, the director who refused to grow up, would make a film about the famous boy who refused to do the same thing, Peter Pan. In the early eighties, the totally unsubstantiated story that Spielberg would direct man-child Michael Jackson in an updated version of the J. M. Barrie tale was reported as fact, even though Spielberg consistently denied any intention of tackling the story.
What hooked Spielberg on Hook was its twist on the J. M. Barrie theme. The updated script examined what happens when Peter Pan finally grows up. The writer, Jim V. Hart, said the idea for Hook came to him when his six-year-old son asked, “Dad, did Peter Pan ever grow up?’ An hour later I had my story. I knew Spielberg too had been obsessed with Peter Pan. He had never been able to crack it, and when he found what I had done, it answered his questions too. I guess a lot of us had grown up.”
In the film, Peter Banning (né Pan) is indeed all grown up. He’s an attorney who leads corporate takeovers. The quintessential shark of the eighties’ Decade of Greed.
Hook was the quintessential Spielberg movie. All his adult life, critics had been urging the director of children’s films to turn his prodigious talents to more adult themes. Hook would allow the director to play both sides of the field, to explore his childlike wonderment and counterpoint it with witty adult satire.
Five years before he made Hook, Spielberg confessed to Time magazine, “I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like him. It has been very hard for me to grow up.”
Although Spielberg had once said, “My main drive is not to use people who were on the cover of Rolling Stone,” he contradicted himself later saying, “I have a stomachache because I haven’t worked with Dustin [Hoffman]. I have a pain in my right side because I haven’t worked with De Niro. I would love to do something with Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.”
But that was before he linked up with the star-studded CAA, which gave him the services of three stars who had graced the cover of the hip music magazine: Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, and Julia Roberts.
Besides hooking him up with Rolling Stone-quality talent, CAA also worked out one of the richest deals in history for Spielberg and his cover-boy cast. Spielberg, Williams, and Hoffman divided among themselves 40 percent of the film’s gross from all markets, including theatrical, video, television, and precedentially, merchandising. Usually, filmmakers get only 10 percent of the take from toys.
Hoffman played the title role, Roberts was a seven-inch-high Tinker Bell, and Williams played the boy who wouldn’t grow up—grown up.
Williams had his pick of scripts since he had starred in one blockbuster after another. He picked Hook because the original text haunted him. “The story is really an exorcism. If you read the book, Peter is a lethal boy. He’s also very egocentric. There’s a real dark side to him that was expunged in the cutesy Disney cartoon version.” (In fact, Disney originally had planned to produce Hook but backed out when the budget ballooned to $60 million.)
Williams was intrigued by the ghoulish side of the character he signed on to play. “In the book, Peter kills fourteen pirates. This is not a child you go up to, pinch his cheeks and say, ‘Oh, how cute!’ Remember, he scared the shit out of Captain Hook. He doesn’t give a shit about anybody but himself. This is not a simple little child. Macaulay Culkin could not play this kid,” Williams told me.
The supporting cast was eclectic to say the least. Bob Hoskins, a personal favorite of Spielberg’s since they had worked together on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was cast as Captain Hook’s valet or batman, Smee. Two-time Oscar winner Maggie Sm
ith played Peter’s original love, Wendie, now a creaky dowager. Glenn Close was invisible in pirate drag. Rocker David Crosby also played a cutthroat, joined by fellow musician Phil Collins as a London bobby. Missing from the cast were the “Redskins” and “Tiger Lily,” who were personally cut from the original script by Spielberg. In an era of heightened sensitivity, treating Native Americans like cigar store Indians was taboo.
Spielberg may have wished he had stuck to his intention of never working with a star who had been on the cover of Rolling Stone.
There were superstar collisions of ego from day one. As he had on Rainman, Hoffman brought his own personal script doctor to punch up his scenes. His choice of personal scribe was a strange one, Malia Scotch Marmo, whose biggest credit was the flop Once Around.
Hoffman also fancied himself a fencing expert and reportedly directed most of his dueling scenes himself. “We would go to the dailies and hear Dustin clearly shouting the directions,” one crew member recalled.
Williams was just the opposite of the demanding superstar. The comic actor was a mass of insecurities, terrified of Hoffman’s superior talent.
“For the first week I was scared shitless Dustin would act me off the screen. I thought, ‘Why can’t I play Hook?’ But Dustin turned out to be helpful and not competitive at all.”
In fact, the two men became fast friends. In the makeup trailer, they would do impromptu riffs off one another that witnesses said was Vegas-quality material.
Hook was shot on the backlot of Sony, formerly the home of MGM. The production took up nine stages, including the Wizard of Oz stage, Esther Williams’s swimming tank, and the soundstage where the Bounty crew staged their mutiny.
The budget was $60 million, even though the stars didn’t take a salary up front. The lavish sets suggested where the money had gone. They were created by John Napier, the Tony-winning designer of Cats, Les Miserables, Nicholas Nickleby, and Starlight Express.
The pirate ship was an eighty-foot black and gold galleon. It was built on a soundstage and then launched by flooding the entire set. The ship was so tall that the cinematographer, Dean Cundey, had to move out into the street and shoot through the doors to get the whole ship in one frame. The giant tree house where the Lost Boys hung out took up two entire soundstages.
The Hook set became a private Disneyland for superstars working on other projects at Sony. Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, and director Bugsy Siegel dropped by from Bugsy. The VIP guest list also included Michael Jackson, Michael Ovitz, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Tom Cruise, the Queen of Jordan, and the chairman of Sony, who flew in from Japan. The set was closed to lesser mortals.
One of the fringe benefits of making the film was that the director and Williams became best friends. They still play video games together, and when separated by a continent, they continue the game over the phone via modem. Some superstars have personal trainers; others like Dustin Hoffman have personal screenwriters. The king of Hollywood has his own personal comedian, who also happens to be one of the biggest stars in the business.
Ah, clout.
The director didn’t enjoy such a happy collaboration with his female star. During an interview on television’s top-rated news show, 60 Minutes, a reporter asked him if he would ever work with Roberts again. After a painfully long pause, he said tersely, “No.”
It was the rejection heard around the world.
Roberts definitely heard it. She happened to be watching television when she surfed over to 60 Minutes, and there was the man she considered a good friend implying she was a pain to work with.
In an interview in Premiere magazine, Roberts was described as “on the verge of tears” when she recounted Spielberg’s public rejection of her. “People disappoint me,” she said. “It’s too bad. Steven and I had an enjoyable time. The last day on the set, a friend shot a video of me and Steven saying, ‘You are just the greatest Tinker Bell . . . I love you. And you were fabulous. You dealt with all that crazy technical blue-screen isolation, blah blah blah.’ I didn’t leave Hook on bad terms with Steven. We hugged and kissed and did the whole good-bye thing in what I felt was a genuine way. It was so nice.
“Then to unknowingly turn on my television and watch him on 60 Minutes . . . that’s surprising. He obviously missed some aspect of me as a person. You can only find disappointment in an expectant mind, and I don’t really expect anything from Steven.”
There was one widely reported incident that suggested just how prickly the atmosphere was on the set. Standing in front of the cameras one day, Roberts grew tired of waiting for filming to begin. Finally she said, “I’m ready now.” Spielberg replied, “We’re ready when I say we’re ready, Julia.”
More problems arose when Roberts shut down production for one whole week while she checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The official report said she was suffering from a severe fever. Persistent rumors, which she later denied, insisted the troubled actress was being treated for heroin addiction.
It was during Hook that Roberts made headlines for another reason: the abrupt cancellation of her much ballyhooed wedding to actor Kiefer Sutherland. Roberts further delayed shooting by running off to Ireland for a week with her new boyfriend, actor Jason Patric, after practically leaving Sutherland standing at the altar.
Roberts’s absenteeism led to reports that Michelle Pfeiffer, among others, had been interviewed by the director to replace the errant Roberts. To spike such rumors, Spielberg generously appeared with Roberts at a press conference outside the studio gates and insisted for the record that Julia’s job was secure.
It’s interesting this man says he loves women, and indeed has a largely female staff at his production company, yet the only people he ever seems to have trouble with are his female stars. Karen Allen bad-mouthed him and found herself blacklisted from the rest of the Indiana Jones films. Teri Garr accused him of treating her like a puppet. And Dee Wallace Stone found her career on a downward spiral after clashing with Spielberg over the advertising campaign for E.T.
Spielberg had an even worse time with lesser cast members on the set of Hook. He’s a devoted father and playmate to his brood of five kids at home, but too many child actors can drive him up the wall. On the set, the usually genial director found himself turning into the grumpy title character of Hook.
“I had never worked with that many kids . . . and I never will again,” he said with a shudder. “You’ll know when I’m trying to self-destruct if you read I am making a movie about a school teacher teaching a class of thirty-five kids,” he told me at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
“I am really good one on one with kids, and of course I adore my own children. But when they’re all together on a set, it’s kind of like you’re a classroom teacher. You are the principal and you become the ugly authority figure.
“I’m afraid I became Captain Hook to some of these kids. I had. We had to make a movie, and most of the kids weren’t actors. They were just kids off the street.”
The discipline problem at one point became so annoying Spielberg confessed that he threw a good old-fashioned superstar tantrum. He warned one pint-sized extra, “If you don’t keep quiet, you will be replaced.” The child immediately shaped up so he wouldn’t be shipped out.
Spielberg was no doubt more diplomatic with the children of his stars, who all had cameos in the film. Perhaps as a sign of who had the greater clout, Hoffman’s son made the final cut (he was the child staring out a window) while Williams’s kid ended up on the cutting-room floor.
The studio suits were ecstatic when they saw the final cut. Forgotten was the $60 million price tag and the stars’ take of 40 percent of the gross. Preview audiences gave the film a rare 95 percent approval rating, saying they would recommend the film to their friends, the kind of glowing endorsement studio executives fantasize about.
Tri-Star chief Medavoy said with typical executive hyperbole, “If you look at Steven’s entire body of work, and you read the Hook script an
d see the movie, it’s the culmination of all those years rolled into one. It looks like the pinnacle of his achievement. This is his real shot at the Oscar!”
Those overwrought sentiments were not shared by the critics, who called the film “bloated” and “overproduced.” Before seeing the film, the New York Times prematurely announced that “in Hook he finally confronted the grown up side of himself, by examining the life of Peter Banning, ne Pan, a hard-driving takeover lawyer who struggles with the conflicts between creativity and ambition, between fatherhood and the pursuit of power, speaking to a side of himself the director has long tried to obscure.”
But when the Times finally saw the film, it agreed with the rest of the critics who felt this was the same old Spielberg with better sets and costumes than usual.
Newsweek compared Hook to a “huge party cake of a movie, with too much frosting.” British film critic Alexander Walker quipped, “The child in me, I’m afraid, just threw up.” But another film critic, George Perry, hailed it as “quite simply the best kids’ film in many years.”
The audience didn’t agree, and Spielberg et al. ended up with 40 percent of the film’s worldwide gross of $288 million. And that tally didn’t even include the money brought in by all those Peter Pan and Tinker Bell toys and lunch boxes, of which they also earned 40 percent.
The sets from Hook were disassembled carefully and stored amid rumors that Sony planned to use the movie as the centerpiece for a backlot theme park. Just more money for Spielberg, Incorporated.
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