Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Hook didn’t impress film critics but the public loved it. His next film would please both constituencies.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Culmination

  MICHAEL CRICHTON, A HARVARD-EDUCATed physician and best-selling novelist, came up with an ingenious idea for a book. What if scientists unearthed a piece of amber in which was imbedded a mosquito from the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth? And what if the mosquito had feasted on one of those dinosaurs? And what if the DNA from the dinosaur’s blood in the mosquito’s gut provided a blueprint for creating a real-life dinosaur? And what if some entrepreneur came up with the idea of creating an amusement park populated with a whole menagerie of reconstructed tyrannosaurus rexes and velociraptors?

  The answer to those hypotheticals would lead to a best-selling novel, Jurassic Park, and the most successful movie in the history of the industry.

  Spielberg envisioned the project as a sequel of sorts to his previous number-one film. “With Jurassic, I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws. On land. It’s shameless,” he said.

  As he had with Jaws, Spielberg immediately began to tear the novel apart and reassemble it to fit his cinematic vision. The billionaire entrepreneur who builds the amusement park was a greedy, amoral sludge in the novel. Spielberg cast the avuncular Sir Richard Attenborough in the role and made him more of a father figure cum Santa Claus (a role Sir Richard would play a year later) and less an Ivan Boesky with Walt Disney delusions of grandeur.

  The exteriors for Jurassic Park were shot on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, standing in for the novel’s Costa Rica, site of the reptilian amusement park.

  Despite the mind-boggling logistics involved, Jurassic Park actually came in under budget and a few days ahead of schedule.

  Spielberg joked that good old-fashioned guilt made him cost-conscious. “In the old days, studio heads would go over to a director and say, ‘You’re behind schedule. If you don’t catch up, I will personally kill you with my bare hands.’

  “Today, the same studio head will come over and say, ‘If you don’t pick up the schedule, I’m going to lose my job and my children will leave me.’ It’s a whole new technique, but both are effective.”

  It was new technology, not guilt-tripping studio executives, however, that prompted the director to scrap two expensive processes in favor of cheaper computerized animation.

  Spielberg originally had planned that most of the dinosaurs would be life-sized robots. Only the largest reptiles were to be miniatures, animated by a nerve-wracking process called “go-motion,” in which each film frame is shot separately, then the miniatures are moved a fraction of an inch per frame to create the illusion of fluid motion when the frames are run together at the speed of twenty-four frames per second.

  Then the director saw Terminator 2, which achieved many of its lifelike effects through CGI, a new technology that stood for Computer-Generated Imagery. What specifically changed Spielberg’s mind about CGI was when his visual-effects supervisor Dennis Murren created a single test shot of 200 dinosaurs running through the tall grass like so may stampeding deer. When he saw the scene on the page, Spielberg had cut it from the production, suspecting it would be an impossible nightmare of logistics: 200 large reptiles running around in one frame. But Murren’s test shot, which was completely created on a hard disk, made Spielberg a convert to CGI. Universal refused to comment officially, but a studio source estimated that this particular conversion saved the studio a whopping $10 million that would have been spent on the herky-jerky movements of life-sized robots and stop-action puppets.

  Not all the dinosaurs, which Spielberg paternalistically insisted the crew refer to as “creatures” not monsters, were created inside CPUs. Although it was technically a “miniature,” i.e. not life-size, the tyrannosaurus was plenty big. Eighteen feet tall and 9,000 pounds. It was the largest animatronic (remote-controlled) robot ever created for a film and took two years to construct. For one scene in which a tyrannosaurus smashes into a tree and obliterates it, a computer-generated dinosaur was used, saving the expense of destroying the robot along with the tree. For another scene both a robot and a CGI were used to show one creature (a robot) nudging a jeep while another tyrannosaurus (computer generated) pops into the frame. The more expensive robot was used to nudge the jeep because only the head and shoulders were seen in the shot, while the other, computerized tyrannosaurus showed its entire body.

  Keeping to schedule and budget was all the more amazing since Spielberg had to contend with an act of nature that no one could have foreseen.

  While filming on Kauai in 1992, Hurricane Iniki struck the island. Spielberg, the director, turned into Spielberg, the television news reporter. He bravely reported live by telephone from Hawaii for a local Los Angeles news station.

  Doing an Indiana Jones turn, he bravely stepped outside during the full force of the hurricane to get a better view for his television reportage. The rest of the cast and crew huddled inside the hotel while Indiana Steve described gale force winds and toppling palms.

  At a sneak preview of the film, as the lights went down, a child in the audience yelled out, “This better be good.”

  If box office is any indication, it was very good. Released in the summer of 1993, Jurassic Park soon became the number-one film of all time, knocking out the previous champ, although the director of that film, E.T., couldn’t be too upset, since he had made both films.

  At last count, Jurassic Park had grossed $850 million. Toys and other trinkets have brought in even more, an estimated $1 billion.

  Spielberg, per usual, got 10 percent of the toys. His take from the box office was a reported $250 million—the most, Forbes magazine breathlessly reported, ever made by a single individual from a movie or any other form of entertainment.

  The magazine estimated his hard assets at $460 million in 1994. Throw in his 100 percent ownership of his production company Amblin Entertainment, and Forbes acclaimed him the first billionaire director.

  In an interview with the magazine, Spielberg claimed, “I’m a gambler. I haven’t taken a salary for almost a decade now. I love gambling to see what’s going to make it and what’s not.”

  The magazine was not seduced by the hype. Spielberg was as big a gambler as Mother Theresa.

  The difference between Spielberg and a real gambler is that Spielberg can’t lose. Every time a Spielberg film came out, it wasn’t a question of whether he would make any money, but how much.

  Forbes provided a thumbnail sketch of the typical Spielberg movie deal: The studio financed all the costs, including production, advertising, and distribution. If Spielberg only produced the film, he got 5 percent of the gross from the first dollar that made its way to the ticket booth. If Spielberg directed the film, he got an additional 15 percent of the gross. So even if a film flopped, Spielberg made money. For example, although Empire of the Sun didn’t turn a profit after costs were factored in, it did bring in $66 million, of which Spielberg as producer and director earned a whopping 25 percent. For a flop!

  Forbes estimated that after the studio paid all the overhead, the typical split between the director and the company was fifty-fifty.

  Every studio in town was more than eager to give in to such an extortionate deal. Mike Ovitz, who rarely talks to the press, was willing to come out of his cocoon and tell Forbes, “It’s easier to ask for a partnership when you have the extraordinary track record he has.”

  Tom Pollock, the chairman of Universal, said simply, “He has the clout to make any deal he wants.”

  With its aesthetic eye firmly directed toward the bottom line, Forbes described “creativity” in dollars and cents. “If creativity is defined as a feel for mass tastes, Spielberg may be the most creative person in the entertainment history.” After all, he had directed six of the top fifteen money-makers of all time.

  Jurassic Park broke other records for Spielberg. In the period 1993–94, Spielberg earned $335 million, an all-time record. The previ
ous record holder was Michael Jackson for 1988–89, with a mere $200 million. When Spielberg ascended to the top spot, he knocked former protege Oprah Winfrey off her perch. Oprah, during the same time period, had made only $105 million.

  Although in the past he had called sequels “cheap carny tricks” and only made the Indiana Jones series as a personal favor to a good friend, Jurassic Park’s payday made him more amenable to duplicating himself. Sure enough, a sequel to dinosaurs on the lam was announced for 1997.

  This must have all been heady stuff for a college dropout with a reading disorder who had made all of $100 from his first professional film at sixteen. But there was this little irritant gnawing at him. He hinted at this when he commented on the work of a good friend, Martin Scorsese:

  “I don’t have to make Mean Streets to prove I’m a great director. I think my friends’ definition of ‘importance’ is that nobody goes to see your movies, but the critics like them.”

  For his next film, Spielberg finally would nail the green-eyed monster and bury it forever under an avalanche of Oscars and effusive reviews.

  Way back in 1983, the same year the novel Schindler’s List was published in America, the critic Charles Derry wrote of Spielberg: “His vision is that of the child-artist, the innocent and profound imagination that can summon up primeval dread from the deep as well as transcendent wonder from the sky. If Spielberg’s films may sometimes be attacked for a certain lack of social issues or ‘adult concerns,’ they may be defended on the grounds that his films—unlike perhaps so many of the special effects action films of the ’70s and ’80s—never seem to pander to their audience, but derive, rather, from a sensibility which is sincerely felt.”

  For years, fans of the director’s technical prowess wished he would lend his consummate talent to something more worthy of his great gifts than careening boulders and twinkling mother ships.

  With Schindler’s List, he would more than satisfy all those wishes.

  In The Movie Brats, authors Michael Pye and Lynda Myles discussed the theme of Spielberg’s works long before Schindler’s List came out. But their analysis would turn out to be prophetic when it came to understanding the protagonist of the book and the film.

  Spielberg’s themes, the authors wrote, deal with “how the ordinary person transcends the limitations he expects to find and becomes a hero, a martyr, an adventurer. It is at once a glorification of suburbia and a pointer to escape routes from that class. It expects identification from the audience. That may be why certain Spielberg films have so extraordinarily wide an appeal. They show the way out of most people’s live.”

  With Schindler’s List, Spielberg was through glorifying suburbia, and his film was escapist only in the literal sense of escaping the greatest horror of the twentieth century, the Holocaust.

  And for his hero, he chose someone who was arguably sub-ordinary, an amiable loser who for a short period of time transcended his limitations to achieve greatness.

  Schindler’s List was based on a prize-winning novel by Australia’s Thomas Keneally. It was a fact-based account of a Nazi Party member, Oskar Schindler, who secretly saved more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers.

  Oskar Schindler came to Cracow, Poland, in 1939 in the wake of the invading German army. He had big dreams of making it rich. To that end, he bought an enamelware factory that had been “Aryanized,” i.e. expropriated from its Jewish owner.

  Schindler was no saint, although he ultimately would perform good deeds that went beyond saintly. He was a bon vivant who kept a wife in Germany and a girlfriend in Cracow, while conducting an affair with his Polish secretary.

  The book and film title refers to the list Schindler compiled to save lives. Claiming he needed Jews who were about to be deported to Auschwitz to work in his factory, Schindler put everybody on his list, including children and even babies. To smooth over his larceny, he plied Nazi bureaucrats with black-market brandy, cigars, food, and other luxuries. He risked his life and wiped out his personal fortune to save the 1,100 Jews on his eponymous list.

  Universal’s Sid Sheinberg, who had bought the rights to the book in 1982, showed it to his protege, telling him, “This is the film you have to make.”

  Spielberg agreed, but it would take him more than ten years to make the “film he had to make.”

  “I wasn’t ready in ’82 to make Schindler’s List. In 1982, when I acquired the rights, I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t emotionally resolved with my life. I hadn’t had children. I really hadn’t seen God until my first child was born. A lot of things happened that were big deals in my personal life that I didn’t give interviews about. But they changed me as a person and as a filmmaker. And they led me to say, ‘I want to do it now. I need to make it right now.’ ”

  Though this emotional immaturity slowed Schindler’s progression to the screen, getting the script right was also a ten-year ordeal. Keneally, the author of the book, turned in a first draft, but it was the length of a mini-series! Kurt Luedtke, the Oscar-winning writer of Out of Africa, labored over the project for three years and finally gave up in frustration. Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese expressed interest in directing the film. And it was Scorsese who found the writer, Steven Zallian, who finally could wrestle the book into script form.

  Spielberg was fascinated by the intrinsic drama of Schindler’s story. But he had bigger reasons for tackling the project.

  “I wanted something that would confirm my Judaism to my family and myself, and to a history that was being forgotten. When my son was born, it greatly affected me. I decided I wanted my kids raised Jewish, as I was. I have wonderful memories of my Judaism when I was child—not a teenager, but a child,” he said, perhaps recalling the high school bullies who bloodied his nose and shoved his face into the water fountain. “I wanted my children to be proud of the fact that they were members of the oldest tribe in history.”

  As he has said in interviews, Spielberg’s childhood memories of Judaism were more cultural than religious. Although he was Bar Mitzvahed, his family, he has said, was not observant. One of his happiest childhood recollections was guiltily boiling forbidden lobsters with his mother. He seems to have had only two memories of what it meant to be Jewish when he was a child. He remembered Hasidic elders in shul passing him ritual Matzoh, and his mother lighting candles on the Sabbath. It’s not surprising that Spielberg should remember the ritual rather than the theology of his life. Many an adult ex-Christian atheist has fond childhood memories of Nativity scenes, Midnight Mass, and stockings stuffed with goodies on Christmas morning. The fact that Spielberg wasn’t raised in a strictly religious household doesn’t diminish his enthusiastic embrace of Judaism as a middle-aged man. When Barbra Streisand was directing Yentl, she underwent a similar religious rediscovery.

  Newsweek magazine noted that in a twenty-year career, Spielberg had never confronted his Jewish roots on film before. “Until Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s Judaism never touched his work . . . The fantasies he concocted were the ultimate triumph of assimilation. He colonized the world with his imagination.”

  Besides finally exploring his roots, he was fascinated by the character of Oskar Schindler. “He changed from a Great Gatsby to a great rescuer and it fascinated me. He was like an agent, like a Michael Ovitz, on top of the mountain pulling strings in every fiefdom down below. One of my role models for Schindler was Steve Ross,” the chairman of Time-Warner, who died in 1993. Like Sheinberg and Wasserman at Universal, Warner Brothers’ chief was a father figure and a good friend to the director. In fact, to help Liam Neeson, who played Schindler, understand the role, Spielberg gave him home movies of Ross so he could duplicate his mannerisms, including Ross’ expansive use of body language.

  Schindler’s List would be a major departure for Spielberg, and not just because he retired his bag of cinematic tricks to make the low-tech film. “I came to realize the reason I came to make the movie is that I have never in my life told the truth in a movie. My effort as a moviemak
er has been to create something that couldn’t possibly happen.”

  It’s not surprising that Schindler’s List intrigued Spielberg. The real life story of Oskar Schindler had more derring-do than anything concocted for Indiana Jones or the kids who bicycled E.T. to freedom. When a few of Schindler’s factory workers were deported to Auschwitz, Schindler took a train to camp and demanded his “employees” be freed because they were “essential personnel” needed for the war effort. Making enamel pots and pans?

  The concentration camp commandant, with the douceur of a hefty bribe of diamonds, returned the prisoners, including small children, to Schindler.

  Schindler’s List was a film Steven Spielberg had to make.

  When he received the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars ceremony in 1987, his acceptance speech excoriated filmmakers for paying more attention to the image on the screen than on the words coming out of the actors’ mouths.

  Before any critic in the audience could shout out, “The pot calls the kettle black,” Spielberg anticipated such criticism and admitted he perhaps was the biggest sinner in this area.

  The director need not have apologized too profusely for preferring the visual over the verbal. Film, after all, is a visual medium. Scholars write monographs on the films of John Ford, who “painted” epic Western vistas, not the films of Noel Coward, who stuck a camera in a drawing room and let it run. More likely, Spielberg’s self-deprecating acceptance speech was a way to show a little humility at such an ego-gratifying event like receiving the Thalberg award.

  In 1987, the director was still dismissed as a maker of roller-coaster rides. He was the king of techno-films, from Jaws to his last, pre-Schindler high-tech orgy, Jurassic Park.

  It wasn’t surprising that Spielberg had sought refuge in the world of special effects. Whenever he tried to make a sensitive, relatively small, people-oriented film, he either was ignored by the public or the Oscars.