Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  Spielberg countered accusations that “popular demand” was a euphemism for the billion dollars a sequel would almost certainly generate at the box office and in ancillary markets, saying, “A lot of this movie was made for what I hope is the pure pleasure of an audience.”

  While it took another terrific novel by Michael Crichton to get Spielberg back in the director’s chair, not surprisingly, the “suits” at Universal and Spielberg’s production company Amblin began drooling over a sequel as they smacked their lips and read each week the original’s record-breaking box-office returns.

  In addition to screenwriter Koepp, most of the creative people from Jurassic Park returned for the sequel: production designer Rick Carter, film editor Michael Kahn, and the director’s “in-house” composer, John Williams, along with special effects wizards Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, and Michael Lantieri. Interestingly, Spielberg dumped the original’s cinematographer, Dean Cundey, after collaborating with Janusz Kaminski on Schindler’s List, and chose that master of black-and-white photography to capture the richly colored world of dinosaurs for the sequel. (Kaminski has since become Spielberg’s John Williams-like in-house cinematographer, working with the director on Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report.)

  Also returning to the dangers of twentieth-century dinosaurs was Jeff Goldblum as the neurotic mathematician, Ian Malcolm, an Über-nerd and unlikely hero who has often been called Spielberg’s stand-in on screen, a geeky alter-ego. Sir Richard Attenborough has a cameo after starring in the original as megalomaniac tycoon John Hammond. Newcomers to the cast included Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, and Vince Vaughn.

  While the director claimed that Crichton’s follow-up novel to Jurassic Park compelled him to make a film version of it, it’s clear that he was so enthralled by “dinomania” that he began holding story meetings with David Koepp, and even storyboarding possible scenes for the sequel—all this before Crichton had finished the manuscript of The Lost World.

  Storyboarding before reading the screenplay? That’s unusual, but it reflects Spielberg’s top of the heap position as the story’s auteur, not the silently suffering author, Crichton. Executive producer Kathleen Kennedy, another veteran of the original, explained this “chicken-before-the-egg” phenomenon as typifying the world of animation, which must have given ammunition to detractors who say Spielberg too often makes live-action cartoons. Kennedy said, “This is a lot like the way animation works, where you start with a visual idea [Spielberg’s storyboarding] and then, in a very logical way, craft the story. Our story was very dependent on the visual imagery.”

  Computer generated imaging (CGI) had become dramatically more sophisticated in the three years since Spielberg and company brought sixty-five-million-year-old reptiles back to life. With advanced technology, the real “stars” of the film would be even more life-like. Still, Spielberg insisted that the story, not special effects, brought him out of retirement. “It was the story that justified doing a sequel, not the technology. [However], CGI has also improved. So there was a good chance that the dinosaurs would look even more believable than they had in the last adventure,” Spielberg said.

  Although the majority of critics would disagree about the final product, the story on paper at least is compelling and explains why the director returned for the sequel. (He could have easily turned Jurassic Park into a clone of Jaws, with embarrassing sequels like Jaws 3-D by Z-list directors that capitalized on the franchise while marring memories of the original’s excellence.)

  As it turns out, the Costa Rican island in the original was not the only place where dinosaur hatcheries churned out dangerous amusement park “rides.” On another nearby island—the title’s “Lost World”—scientists had been breeding dinosaurs for another park, but as in the original, the scientists lose control of the experiment, the lab “rats” escape, and when the movie begins the reptiles have been living and reproducing for four years in the wild outside the laboratory.

  This time, capitalist greed is represented by Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), John Hammond’s nephew, who now heads his uncle’s DNA-factory-from-hell, InGen, which is teetering on bankruptcy. Ludlow hopes to save the company by exploiting the surviving dinosaurs for yet another theme park. Two competing expeditions that want to mine this dangerous lode set out for Costa Rica, one organized by Hammond, in a valedictory attempt to atone for the deaths his original enterprise caused by turning the defunct theme park into a (very) wild life preserve for science and posterity. Ludlow mounts the other expedition for less noble and more commercial reasons, and hires Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite), a mercenary and great white hunter-type, to lead the group, which also includes documentary-maker Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn); Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), a munitions expert; and Dr. Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), a paleontologist and the standard damsel in distress, albeit one with a Ph.D. She is also Ian Malcolm’s girlfriend. Malcolm is unaware of Sarah’s dangerous participation, and at first declines Hammond’s request to lead a competing expedition, until Hammond tells Malcolm his girlfriend has left for the island. Reluctantly, Malcolm accepts Hammond’s brief, if only to protect his girlfriend.

  Hammond’s preservationist impulses versus Ludlow’s. “round ‘em up and show ‘em off” motivation led the director to describe the theme of the film as a battle between hunters and gatherers: Malcolm’s scientific crew and Ludlow’s armed mercenaries, whose conflicting goals provide almost as much drama as the ravenous reptiles.

  The three years between the two dinosaurs in Disneyland films represented a lifetime in terms of the advances made by technology during that brief interlude. Perhaps the biggest advance was the improvement in hydraulics, which allowed the critters to move more naturally. Advances in this and other technologies, along with research from the original and a decrease in the cost of CGI, cut the cost of creating the creatures in half. The Lost World’s budget was only slightly higher than the original’s $58 million, but it is filled with many more special effects. Even so, Spielberg didn’t rely on new technology alone for added verisimilitude. As he had in the original, he called on paleontologist Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies to serve as a technical advisor. By studying fossils, Horner said it is possible to deduce how the eons-old originals moved.

  The ten-ton T-Rexes proved as temperamental as some human stars. The models were too heavy to be moved to sets—much less to Kaui or even Eureka—so sets were built around them on the backlot of Universal Studios’ Stage 24 in suburban Los Angeles.

  Eureka’s Redwood Forests also caused problems. Although they have been around for twenty million years, it seems they used to be even greener than they are now. So plant coordinator Danny Ondrejko and fourteen assistants had to import plants from Southern California to Eureka. “It was like bringing coals to Newcastle,” production designer Rick Carter joked.

  Less than a year later, ahead of schedule and under budget despite all the new technology, the film wrapped on December 11, 1996. At the wrap party, Spielberg raised a glass of champagne and toasted his collaborators with the same words he used when Jurassic Park ended: “Thank you for a great show.”

  Despite the track record of the original, opening weekend for the sequel, May 26, 1997, marked a nervous time for the director. He felt that not enough time had elapsed between the two films to whet the public appetite for another dinosaur buffet. “You have to let the audience’s appetite build,” Spielberg told Koepp when he confided his apprehension about the film’s reception.

  The director’s worries proved unfounded. Moviegoers were famished for the next installment, and “chowed down” at movie theaters across America.

  In its first three days of release during the Memorial Day weekend, The Lost World broke all box office records with a take of $92.7 million. The weekend in effect recouped the entire cost of making the film, not including promotion and prints. Universal Pictures chairman Casey Silver was actually engaging in understatement rather than hyperbole when he ex
plained the film’s performance at the box office by saying, “A big part of it is, Steven’s back, and he completely delivers on his own ambitions.”

  Perhaps as co-auteur, screenwriter David Koepp didn’t want to attribute all the film’s success to his collaborator. The iconic “stars” didn’t hurt either (except the other stars they ate on screen). “Dinosaurs have this almost mystical appeal to children and adults: they’re thrilling and terrifying and safe.”

  In terms of setting box-office records, The Lost World even got a break from the cinema gods—the delayed opening of Titanic, set for the following month, due to production problems and studio politics; although the soggy ocean-liner would eventually go on to sink the dinosaurs’ box-office record.

  The critics, however, didn’t share the enthusiasm of moviegoers, although The Wall Street Journal did call The Lost World a “must-see for anyone who thrills to elegant technology in service of cinematic imagination.” Kevin Thomas, the Los Angeles Times’ second-string film critic, who has been called the Will Rogers of reviewers because he rarely meets a film he doesn’t like (as opposed to the No. 1 critic at the Times, Kenneth Turan, who seems to hate everything), in a rare instance of pique slammed The Lost World by comparing it unfavorably to its progenitor: “Jurassic Park proves impossible to top or equal. The Lost World has stupendous production values and special effects, but the thrills and chills are just not up to the original. It’s not just that we’ve been there before, but also that Steven Spielberg and his associates simply haven’t been able to imagine as many flat-out scary moments this time around.” This from the man who put Heaven’s Gate on his year-end list of the top ten films of 1980!

  The wet-blanket New York Times, in reporting the film’s record-breaking opening weekend, tried to sound less puffy by mentioning the possibility that The Lost World’s final gross might not live up to the “wanna-see” opening weekend’s expectations. Wrong. In movie theaters alone, the sequel grossed more than half-a-billion dollars. Double that figure or more for video/cable sales/rentals, and if The Lost World did not live up to the dramatic excitement of the original, its box-office take must have excited a lot of Universal stockholders.

  It’s a true cliché in Hollywood that once a filmmaker makes a lot of money, he wants respect. Spielberg after twenty-five years behind the camera had both, but the financial success of The Lost World had the director once again longing for the approbation of his peers and critics (especially after one suggested his screenwriter should have been eaten by one of their reptilian creations).

  So it’s psychologically understandable why Spielberg said a few weeks before The Lost World screamed its way into theaters that he longed for some quiet time on screen. He couldn’t discuss actors’ motivation with ten-ton hydraulic animatronic puppets, and Spielberg now said what he really wanted to do was direct . . . actors that ate the scenery but not the other actors. “The Lost World made me wistful about doing a talking picture,” he said a week before the film’s release, “because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big, silent-roar movie.”

  The director was tired of making feel-good movies. It was time for another feel-bad flick. While the Holocaust may be the all-time best subject to fuel a feel-bad movie, America’s vicious history of slavery comes a close second. And so, after indulging his inner-child by making a kiddie-pic, Spielberg chose to tackle a film project that would torment him almost as much as the murder of six-million Jews, half-a-million homosexuals, and about 50,000 Gypsies.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Feel-Good Film

  About Slavery

  WHEN IT CAME TO FEELING GOOD ABOUT feeling bad, Spielberg knew where to turn for inspiration and despair: Steven Zaillian, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Schindler’s List. Although not as emotionally taxing as deconstructing the Holocaust, Spielberg had found playing dinosaur wrangler exhausting, and after finishing The Lost World planned to resume his roles as Mr. Mom and Mr. TV Executive Producer.

  “Steve’s [Zaillian’s] script sucker-punched me,” Spielberg said by way of explanation for coming out of retirement, which was more like a breather. Zaillian’s script brought his heavy touch and depressing dialogue to the true story of La Amistad, the Spanish-Cuban slaveship hijacked by its human cargo and detoured to the freedom-loving shores (or so the shanghaied Africans thought) of 1839 Long Island, New York.

  Until Spielberg decided to tackle the event cinematically, the Amistad slave revolt (ironically, Amistad means “friendship” in Spanish) was a little known event in American history, a nightmarish tale of how fifty-three abducted Africans chained together in the hull of a ship managed to regain their freedom by taking on the United States Supreme Court. It sounded like improbable fiction, but it was historical fact. And Spielberg is a master at making the improbable seem not only probable, but compelling.

  An industry source quoted in this book’s epigraph noted the ironic significance that of the literally six million stories that might be told about the Holocaust, Mr. Feel Good chose the only one with a happy ending. The same “feel good about bad history” mindset operated in Spielberg’s choice of Amistad—the “Honest Abe” of American filmmaking found another happy ending to one of the greatest civil rights violations in the history of this country. This story of horror and happiness proved irresistible to the director who had turned optimism into an art form and a major source of money.

  Filming began in February 1997 with a dream cast, which is not always the case in Spielberg projects, especially when special effects are the stars and you don’t need a Meryl Streep emoting opposite a dinosaur puppet. But when the director makes a “people” film, he often calls on A-list actors, and in Amistad, he got the crème de la film. The assembled cast members must have felt as though they were at an Oscar-reunion party.

  Anthony Hopkins plays former president John Quincy Adams, now a congressman from Massachusetts, an ancient seventy-two for the time, who reluctantly agrees to defend the Africans on trial in the United States for killing most of their captors aboard the slave ship. Nigel Hawthorne, an Oscar-nominee for the title role in The Madness of King George, plays another bigwig here, the racist President Martin Van Buren, who wants the slaves convicted to enhance his chances of reelection by securing the all-important Southern, slave-owning vote. Tiny Anna Paquin, who cried instead of giving an acceptance speech when she won the best supporting actress Oscar for The Piano, shows she knows when it’s time to stop wailing and turn in a diamond-sharp performance as the iron-willed child Queen of Spain, Isabella. Unlike Van Buren, the queen doesn’t want the Africans condemned and executed. She wants them returned to Spain as recovered property. The leader of the slave revolt, Cinque, is played by an unknown, Djimon Hounsou, whose biggest credit up to this point—and afterwards—was modeling for Calvin Klein. Like the character he plays, Hounsou is a native of West Africa. His skin seems barely capable of containing the rippled muscles that flex with the rage of a captive. Heartthrob Matthew McConaughey is the bumbling real estate attorney, Roger Baldwin, who is the first to sign on as the defendants’ counsel, although his portrayal of an incompetent rube doesn’t mesh with history. The real attorney was well connected and related to several American governors. In the film, to emphasize the David vs. Goliath (the racist U.S. government of the time) aspect of the battle, Baldwin is a poor lawyer with no influence, power, or family connections. Despite its lofty theme, Amistad is also a buddy movie. And just as action films tend to pair a white cop with a black cop, Spielberg created a composite character based on several black abolitionists, Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman, another multiple Oscar-nominee). Joadson was one of the few fictionalized characters in the film.

  The Oscar-studded cast was rounded out with more nominees, Pete Postlethwaite as the government’s prosecutor Holabird, and David Paymer as Van Buren’s consigliere and Secretary of State. In a genuine case of typecasting, former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun plays Joseph Story, one of the Supreme Court Justices wh
o decides the fate of the imprisoned Africans.

  But the production’s casting didn’t end with easy choices like finding Oscar-caliber actors. The casting director put as much effort into the authenticity of the accents of the actors who played the African captives (the rule on the set was never refer to the abductees as slaves since they were abductees who had yet to set a manacled foot on a plantation in America) as was expended on making the hydraulic “acting” of The Lost World seem real. Scouts scoured the west coast of Africa, where the original abductees hailed from and checked out theater companies in Sierra Leone. England also has a large population of first- and second-generation West African residents, and they also auditioned. But not all the black actors came from Africa or Europe. A student at Harvard, an Olympic medalist, and a college professor were also cast as victims of the slave trade.

  In retrospect, casting turned out to be a cakewalk compared to filming the cast during the re-creation of the Middle Passage, that bland euphemism for the nightmarish crossing of the Atlantic by the captives packed like logs of wood in the hold of the Amistad. Imagine how hard it must have been for the actors to play those scenes if even the people behind the camera couldn’t bear to watch. Producer Colin Wilson said, “There are images from the filming of this movie that are going to be permanently imprinted in our minds because we felt that we actually witnessed what the Africans were subjected to on their journey. It tore many of us apart emotionally. There were several sequences where the visuals were so powerful that many cast and crew members were reduced to tears.”