As soon as Katzenberg left Disney and announced his new plans, rumors spread that he would engage his former employer in a bidding war for the talent who have made Disney’s animated hits. Eisner took a raft of Paramount executives with him when he left for Disney ten years ago. Could his second in command now do the same?
One studio executive says that scenario is unlikely since Disney has most of its animators under long-term—and not so generous—contract. Another reason the animators will stay put is safety versus the iffy proposition of joining a new studio that may not be around as long as the Magic Kingdom.
Arnold Rifkin, head of the film division of the William Morris Agency, doesn’t think DreamWorks will be a flash in the pan, however. “All they have to do is show up in the morning,” he says of the SKG troika. “They’re not reinventing anything they’ve not done before.”
Katzenberg also will head DreamWorks’ television division, which already has a production agreement with ABC. Here, he actually has a better track record than Spielberg, the creator of Amazing Stories and the currently low-rated embarrassments, seaQuest DSV and Earth 2. Disney has produced such Nielsen hits as The Cosby Show and the current number-one hit, ER. If Katzenberg can produce just one or two similar blockbusters under the DreamWorks banner, the studio will be out of the red before Spielberg has the time to shout action on his first big-budget feature.
The director is hoping DreamWorks will allow him to realize a secret fantasy. “A dream I have is to produce ABC’s Saturday-morning schedule, because I think I can lift it up,” he said.
DreamWorks sounds as though it will be a dream place to work. The company has some profit-sharing ideas that smack of socialism. “It will share equity with all its employees, all the way down to the secretarial pool. Writers and animators will get gross points in the movies they help create. With a lion-size hit like The Lion King, gross points in a billion dollar movie will be a precedent-setting windfall for Hollywood’s most underappreciated artists, writers,” Time magazine reported.
Actor Tom Hanks knows all three men and feels each has a different way of operating that will allow for a delicate collaboration rather than collision of superstar egos.
Hanks says, “David does business in an ephemeral, gossamer way. Jeffrey is Mr. Bottom Line, Mr. Brass Tacks. He operates every meeting with a strict agenda. Steven has almost a cartoonist’s point of view. He can draw anything on paper and make it come to life.”
Hanks imagines how the three men might operate in tandem: “David would say [to a potential employee], ‘We think you’re great, and if you want to work with us, fabulous; if not, we still think you’re great.’ Jeffrey would say, ‘You’re great, and here are seventeen reasons why you need to be with us.’ And Steven would say, ‘I love that thing you did in that movie five years ago where you had the platypus dancing on the edge of the table, and if you could do that, you can do anything.’ That’s the way the meeting would go. And it would be over in twenty-two minutes.”
While the three men are clearly first among equals, they seem to be willing to give in when one of them really wants something. Geffen and Katzenberg hoped to put off building a physical home for their new studio, but Spielberg wanted his own backlot, and he’s getting it. Spielberg personally designed the layout for his dream studio. It looks like a college campus rather than the usual assemblage of warehouselike soundstages. Cost—$200 million—or as Sid Sheinberg, who may join them at the new pile, might say, “It’s the box office on E.T. in Venezuela.”
George Lucas will get a chance to pay Spielberg back for foregoing Rainman to direct Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Unconfirmed reports say that Lucas will allow DreamWorks to distribute Star Wars 4, set for a 1998 release. Sweetening the deal for Lucas, no doubt, is another unconfirmed report that Spielberg will direct the film, which would be his only sequel other than the Indiana Jones trilogy.
Way back in 1981, Spielberg said, “I’d love to do the fourth Star Wars.” That may have been the director merely thinking out loud during an expansive moment. When asked recently about the possibility of his boss directing Star Wars 4, Amblin spokesman Marvin Levy said gruffly, “Never heard of it. That’s ridiculous.”
It will be interesting to see who has the greatest effect on the others’ work habits. Geffen is so laid back he makes a throw rug look kinetic by comparison. “I’m the laziest of the three of us,” he says with studied languor. Spielberg is a workaholic, but he resembles a welfare recipient compared to the greatest Jewish exponent of the Protestant Ethic, Katzenberg, who once told his Disney thralls, “If you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother to show up on Sunday.”
Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw, already is worried about her husband being infected by the Jewish-Protestant Ethic bug. “I love Jeffrey,” she told her husband, “but I never want you to become Jeffrey. I don’t want you to become involved in that lather of workaholism.”
There’s no danger Katzenberg would ever deliver an ultimatum about Saturday work obligations to Spielberg.
“I perfectly understand the ground rules,” Katzenberg says. “8:30 to 5:30, Monday to Friday, is mine. Everything else is Kate’s.”
In a cover story, Time magazine predicted that Geffen could be the first to defect from the troika of overworked overachievers. “I made a staggering amount of money, and I enjoy being an investor. Before this came up, I was thinking very seriously of spending my time doing that.” If the day-to-day grind of running a major miniconglomerate grows too burdensome, Geffen could drop out and clip coupons.
While Spielberg was playing mogul with pals Katzenberg and Geffen, his wife was getting bored at home.
The same year he announced his new film-TV-record company, Mrs. Spielberg came out of retirement.
When she did, it was with a bang as workaholic as anything her husband had ever done.
She starred in four films back to back: as Warren Beatty’s girlfriend in Love Affair, as Sean Connery’s lawyer wife in Just Cause, as the hippie mom in An American Quilt, and as James Woods’s wife in Showtime’s Next Door. Capshaw apparently was so hot to work, she even agreed to star in a cable movie, something a star of her stature and with her connections rarely does.
Capshaw admitted that her husband was less than ecstatic about her revived career. “This is the first time I’ve put the working hat on,” she said. “I’ve been the domestic manager. It’s fun, but I think Steven has mixed feelings about it.”
In the spring of 1995, Capshaw was about to go on location for yet another film when Spielberg put his foot down—gently.
“Steven’s first words were, ‘Where does it film?’ You know if something’s good, everyone feels happy to be supportive. We go and set up a gypsy camp on a film—we’ve done it before.
“He said, ‘Let’s keep looking, hon—maybe we’ll find something to do together.’ ”
They’re still looking.
Regarding her husband’s aspirations for her, she said with a laugh, “It’s really a case of ‘Yeah, I have a job for you. How about rustling up some dinner?’ ”
After the earthquake, the Spielbergs like many other terrified Angelenos noisily announced they were moving out of state, probably to New York, where there may be more muggers but at least the ground doesn’t move underfoot while you’re being rolled.
Those plans were put on the back burner when the reality of uprooting their children and finding new schools for them sank in.
“The big move won’t happen for about a year and a half,” Capshaw said in March 1995. “We have to find schools for the kids. . . . Our apartment isn’t nearly ready.”
Then there was their amply comfortable home overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which beats a view of Brooklyn Bridge or Fire Island any day.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dinosaur Deux
“I have absolutely no plans to start a new movie. I spent many sleepless nights in toxic shock, going between the two movies, Schindler’s List and Jurassic Pa
rk.”
—STEVEN SPIELBERG, 1993
WHEN SPIELBERG TOLD DAILY VARIETY THOSE words, the director may have been suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from filming the deadly Holocaust during the day and editing footage of deadly dinosaurs by night.
As Spielberg had experienced before, flipping between two nightmarish worlds was so traumatic he had to call Robin Williams long distance from Poland for twenty minutes of trans-Atlantic shtick that served as the director’s version of psychotherapy.
But someone with Spielberg’s huge filmography doesn’t suddenly have a dramatic personality change and go from workaholic filmmaker to Mr. Mom, although the famously self-mythologizing director claimed he played the maternal role assiduously. He was not only Mr. Mom, he said, he was also “Mr. Carpool. We had breakfast and dinner together every day. It’s full-time work, because every one of our kids is a leader. Seven leaders, no followers—which makes our kitchen at dinnertime look and sound like the House of Commons between the Labour Party and the Tories.”
His wife refused to let him take it too far, however. When Forbes magazine estimates your personal worth at more than $2 billion, you can afford a battalion of nannies to do the heavy lifting, like diaper-changing and scavenging under the bed for dust bunnies. Capshaw explained, “I really loved the diaper part, the rocking, and the lunch menus. The things Steven does are the things he can do uniquely—telling stories and drawing creatures I could never imagine.” Mr. Mom was more like Mr. Storyteller, and even at home the world of the movies and moviemaking was inescapable. The Spielbergs’ so-called “family room” sounded more like his home office. Basically, Spielberg was working out of his home during this alleged period of retirement. Capshaw described his makeshift desk: “There’s also this couch, which is Steven Central. He has a bunch of scripts to read and tapes—casting reels, dailies, bits of animation—that he pops into the VCR.”
Just when it sounds as though Spielberg’s self-proclaimed commitment to being a hands-on father is good public relations, Capshaw adds that the needs of the children, however trivial, always supersede exigencies of his other passion, playing entertainment impresario. “If one of the kids asks him to build a castle, he’s immediately down on the floor, building that castle. The kid runs away, Steven crawls back on the couch and gets back to business.” This particular couch potato works on the couch.
No matter how hard he tried to keep the business at arms-length, like Al Pacino’s underworld ties in The Godfather III, it kept pulling him back. “In the family sense, I was fulfilled and happy, living the life of Chester A. Riley. I didn’t have my eye in a view-finder, except the one little High-8 video camera I used to take home movies of my kids. In those three years I probably told more stories during my kids’ bedtime than I did to the public in my entire career. Then later I’d ask myself, ‘Is there the germ of a movie in here? Where is the story? Where is my place? When can I tell a story, not just to my kids, but back to me?’ ” The family room had morphed into a place for story meetings. In his imagination, Spielberg would “take meetings” alone.
While it’s true Spielberg didn’t direct a film for three years after Schindler’s List (an eternity in Hollywood’s flavor-of-the-month timetable), his résumé during these years in the wilderness shows he had lost none of his work ethic, which could more accurately be called workaholism; he was just exercising it from the producer’s rather than the director’s chair.
Between 1993 and 1996, when he finally yelled “action!” again on a movie set, his credits were almost encyclopedic. If this is a househusband’s workload, this particular stay-at-home dad worked outside the home a lot. In 1993 alone, Spielberg’s name was attached, usually as executive director, to everything from the Saturday-morning cartoon series Animaniacs to special-effects laden prime-time TV dramas (SeaQuest DSV) and “we’re only in this for the money to capitalize on Jurassic Park” features like We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993).
Indeed, a list of films and TV shows on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) has no fewer than seventeen projects either produced or executive produced by the allegedly retired filmmaker. Mr. Mom had simply changed haberdashery, substituting a producer’s hat for his director’s baseball cap. Cynics might say that many of these projects credited to Spielberg used him more like a popular brand name—a very Famous Amos franchise—than as someone actively and creatively involved in the work. It is hard to imagine the re-creator of Bergen-Belsen showing up on the set every day for A Pinky & the Brain Christmas Special (1995), even though the credits list him as the TV show’s executive producer.
Three years is a long time to play the mogul (as opposed to the moviemaker). And no one in Vegas was taking bets, even at exponential odds, that Spielberg would not plant his fanny where everyone from studio stockholders to Saturday afternoon movie ticket-holders wanted it planted—firmly in the director’s chair.
But the question that obsessed everyone from columnists for The Hollywood Reporter to waitresses serving coffee and “insider Hollywood knowledge” was which direction the director would take after he finally came out of “working retirement.”
Would the auteur of Schindler’s List and recipient of multiple Oscars continue to make big budget art house films that were character-driven rather than computer-generated, or would the most commercially successful director of all time return to his suburbia/ Hawaii under siege themes and make an even bigger budgeted genre film? Would it be a “popcorn” movie or more nutritious fare?
Would Steven Spielberg choose the path toward prestige or profits? Film critic Jack Kroll described the War of the Stevens: “He’s clearly tempted by the lure of being the greatest money-maker in movie history, and also an artist who tackles the greatest themes.”
The question “Whither Steven Spielberg?” was resoundingly answered in early 1996 when the trades announced that Spielberg’s first film as a director post-Schindler would take place not in Krakow or anywhere else spiritually or thematically close. His upcoming film would begin principal photography on September 5, 1996, in the Redwood Forests of Fern Canyon, forty minutes north of Eureka, California, for a second go-round with those box-office busting dinos in The Lost World: Jurassic Park II.
Six hours north of San Francisco, Eureka is located on a stretch of land appropriately called the Lost Coast. Redwoods are known to have existed in California for at least twenty million years and provided a chronologically apt “set” for filming.
After three years of soul-searching and playing with the kids in the middle of the day on the living room floor, Roman numerals had trumped auteurism. Even if a Schindler’s II had been dramatically possible (Oskar’s post-Third Reich career as a failed mink farmer in South America was depressing and uneventful), there was a lot more money to be made from live dinosaurs than dead Jews.
Spielberg’s timing suggests that he was truly fed up playing Mr. Mom. He took off on his private Gulfstream IV (cost $28 million) to shoot scenes in Kaui only a few weeks after his wife gave birth to their seventh child, a girl. Considering the birth and sex of his latest offspring, you wonder how he felt shooting the opening scene, in which a little girl (Camilla Belle) innocently offers a chicken-sized dinosaur called a Compsognathus a bite of her roast beef sandwich, and the reptile eats her instead—apparently preferring veal to beef.
Screenwriter David Koepp found the opening sequence emblematic of the movie’s theme. “On one level, this story evolved into one about parenthood and the instinct to protect your young from being eaten.” In a pan of the movie, Newsweek noted that Koepp, in a gag role as an extra, is indeed eaten by a T- Rex and added that “given some of the dialogue, he deserved it.”
Spielberg’s impulse to choose crass over class was understandable, if not particularly edifying. The Lost World’s progenitor, Jurassic Park, is ranked fifth on the list of all-time box office champs, just below No. 4, Spielberg’s E.T. Unlike Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park was an example of what people who read Variet
y call “tent-pole films”—they hold up or support studio profits with their endless potential for sequels. (Somehow, Oskar Schindler Alive and Well in Buenos Aires! even with an exclamation point just doesn’t have the same commercial cachet.)
“Something Has Survived”
That was the advertising line for the Jurassic Park sequel. Not quite as effective as “just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .” but just about any marketing slogan would have worked so great was the “wanna see” power of a movie that continued the story of dinosaurs on the loose. The sequel begins four years after the disastrous closing of the theme park in Costa Rica where the “special attractions” had the unfortunate habit of eating park visitors, giving the “E” in E-ticket new meaning.
As it turns out in most sequels, all the villains, i.e., dinosaurs, hadn’t been destroyed as portrayed in the fiscally irresponsible original. There was a second island off Costa Rica hatching dinosaur eggs, and a helpful hurricane destroyed the island’s lab and let loose the product of irresponsible reptile-cloning, free-range dinosaurs.
Spielberg claimed that it was Michael Crichton’s fault that he returned to dinosaurs instead of film-noir. Crichton wrote the original novel on which Jurassic Park was based, and the sequel was the engine that got him out of the house and executive suite and back on the set. The director avoided discussing his abdication of his job as a part-time art house director and explained that he chose the sequel simply because making the original had been such a ball. But he also subtly acknowledged commercial considerations by referring to the “popular demand” that had brought him back to Dino-land.
“I had always wanted to do a sequel to Jurassic Park—both because of popular demand and because I’d had such a great time making the first film. When I first heard that Michael was going to write the book and that he was thinking of calling it The Lost World, I was thrilled because I’m a big fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, The Lost World. I was compelled by the idea of being inside a prehistoric world that exists today—not behind electrified fences, not in a theme park, but in a world without the intervention of man. I thought, ‘Wow, what a great story!’ If I hadn’t found a story I was interested in, Jurassic Park would have remained just a nice memory for me,” Spielberg said at the end of principal photography on the sequel. (One wonders what nightmares he still retains from shooting the Holocaust.)
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