Spielberg

by Frank Sanello

  The experience must have had a horrible déjà-vu feeling for Spielberg, because he had been unable to look through the camera lens when filming the scene at Auschwitz where female concentration camp inmates were forced to sprint in the nude to prove to their Nazi captors that they were healthy enough to work instead of being gassed.

  While claustrophobia may have been the worst discomfort of the cast crammed below decks, the actors continued to suffer even after being set free—if that’s the right term—from the ship. Arrested for killing the Amistad crew and put on trial, the African captives were kept in shackles most of the time, and so were the cast members during filming.

  The director made no apologies for insisting on his usual verisimilitude. “They weren’t fake movie chains; they were the real thing. They hung heavy on the neck and created chafing. You could understand how chains worn for months could scar for life. They had to carry this poundage around with them, and I think, more than anything else, that became the ‘time machine’ that placed them at a time that was no different from 1839,” Spielberg said.

  Was all this just method acting or was there a method to the director’s “madness?” According to Razaaq Adoti, who played one of the captives and a tribal leader, “When you’re in chains, you really do get into the moment. It was only afterwards that it really hit me: we were recreating history and reliving history at the same time.”

  In his famous 1987 acceptance speech for the Irving Thalberg Award at the Oscars, Spielberg chided himself for often being more interested in the image than the written word, but for Amistad he relied on such classy images that no one would have faulted him for favoring imagery over dialogue. Wearing yet another new hat, Spielberg became art historian while visualizing Amistad, and, in particular, a connoisseur of the early nineteenth-century Spanish painter, Francisco Goya, whose wrenching paintings captured the suffering of the Spanish people during the Napoleonic occupation of his country. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the director focused on Goya’s style because he was a realist during a period of lush romanticism, and he wanted that “warts-and-all” look for his depiction of slavery in America. Although Kaminski liked the look of Goya’s work, he felt a bit guilty using a Spaniard for inspiration. “That might seem a little sacrilegious considering what the Africans went through at the hands of the Spanish in this film, but I thought Goya had a look, especially in his later work, that was darker and more brooding, and I really liked his use of light,” Kaminski said.

  The production designer, Rick Carter, also liked Goya’s style and used it to create one of the pivotal sets in the film, the New Haven, Connecticut, prison where the Africans spent much of the movie during their courtroom battles. Ironically, the exterior of the prison was built in super-luxe Newport, Rhode Island, the Bel Air of New England. The prison’s interior was constructed on a studio backlot in Los Angeles. Carter said, “We designed the prison to be kind of Goyaesque, something resembling a dungeon that might have been built a hundred years earlier, but was evocative of the time period. Since so much of the story takes place with the Africans in prison, I think it’s imperative to have a place that’s rich and deep with textures. Anytime, you’re there, I would say, it’s the heart and soul of the movie.”

  Washington Square, the New York neighborhood made famous by the Henry James novel of the same name, contains a 200-year-old building called the Colony House, which was used to shoot some of the courtroom scenes where Hopkins and McConaughey defend the imprisoned Africans. In fact, all of Washington Square became a set, “dressed” to resemble a nineteenth-century town. Among the tasks required to turn back the clock to a previous century: 10,000 cubic feet of dirt to cover the square’s asphalt streets. “The task of removing the twentieth century was one of the greatest challenges in creating the illusion of the mid-1800s. When we were shooting, you felt you had stepped back in time,” producer Colin Wilson said.

  Newport, Rhode Island, was also turned into a mammoth set, with one of its mansions serving as Queen Isabella’s palace in Madrid and the interior of another mansion as Van Buren’s office.

  Despite his clout, reputation, money—not to mention his intimate relationship with then President Clinton—Spielberg was refused permission to film in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the fate of the Africans was finally decided. A sound-stage in Connecticut was used instead. “It was a disappointment because Steven had hoped that being in the actual place where it happened would help anchor him and the cast for the scene. But I think once he saw the set and how close it was to the real thing, he felt the same kind of inspiration,” Carter said.

  The cast and crew also went on location in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where a sixteenth-century fortress called El Morro stood in as the prison where British soldiers liberate the captive Africans, one of the most stirring scenes in the film. (In 1832, Great Britain unilaterally outlawed the transportation of Africans to America and used its impressive military might against the trade in human lives.)

  Costuming a cast of extras that often reached 800 was a logistics nightmare for costume designer Ruth Carter, who found herself designing everything from Queen Isabella’s lavish court dresses to skimpy loin cloths for the captives. “It was a terrific challenge [dressing] a Queen, two Presidents, and Africans,” Carter said.

  The “role” of La Amistad was actually played by two ships, The Pride of Baltimore II and The Californian, both historic schooners.

  Spielberg dismissed the same criticism he endured when making The Color Purple, which was basically, “Why is a white guy making a movie about black women?” The director remained unrepentant. “This film will never leave any of us. We can walk away from the production, but the subject will always be with us. It’s just something I’m really glad I had a part in. While making this film, I never felt I was telling someone else’s story. This is a story that people of all nationalities and races should know.”

  One industry cynic compared that comment to Sam Goldwyn’s famous claim about the social significance of one of his productions: “I don’t care if this picture makes any money. I just want everyone in America to see it.”

  Unfortunately for the director, not a whole lot of “people of all races” cared to know about the story of La Amistad. And one woman wanted to know how her story—uncredited—ended up on the screen. More on that later.

  The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan felt Amistad proved “Gresham’s Law,” i.e., the bad drives out the good, and Spielberg’s popcorn movies were influencing his art house efforts. Turan wrote, “Amistad also shows that Spielberg’s system is not working. There’s been leakage from the no-brainers to the quality stuff and, in a cinematic version of Gresham’s Law, bad habits picked up in the mindless movies are driving out better ones.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times couldn’t resist comparing Amistad to Spielberg’s masterpiece, Schindler’s List, which seems unfair—like condemning Orson Welles for never topping Citizen Kane. In her review, Maslin said, “But what the estimable Amistad does not have is an Oskar Schindler. It has no three-dimensional major character through whose flawed human nature an unimaginable atrocity can be understood.”

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times couldn’t resist the comparison either. Roger Ebert wrote, “Schindler’s strategies are ingenious and suspenseful, and lead to a more gripping and powerful film than the legal tactics in Amistad.” So many reviewers made the same invidious comparisons, Spielberg’s greatest work was beginning to seem like an albatross that distracted critics and viewers from judging Amistad on its own merits.

  No one in the press pointed out an amusing element in the film. As he had with the Holocaust, Spielberg managed to make a film about the depravity of slavery with a happy ending. Amistad concludes with the Africans sailing for home with an Ür-Spielberg sunset in the background. The film declined to depict what happened once the captives arrived back home. Most of them tore off their heavy New England winter clothing and danced naked with
relatives, much to the horror of the white American missionaries who had accompanied them. Many of the captives resumed their tribal ways, but Cinque, the film’s hero, had absorbed enough of the white man’s culture to become a successful businessman and entrepreneur. Another factoid about Cinque never made it into Spielberg’s film: He may have engaged in the slave trade in Sierra Leone after his return.

  The public seemed to agree with the critical consensus, and Amistad was a box-office flop, grossing only $4.6 million during its opening weekend, December 14, 1997, and ended its theatrical run with a total U.S. box office of only $40 million, a figure which matched the official budget, although Hollywood insiders claimed the real budget was closer to $70 million. But theatrical releases these days are only one source of revenue, and to determine the real “box office,” which includes video sales and rentals and sales to cable and network television, the rule of thumb is to triple the amount brought in by movie theaters alone, which means Amistad eventually made a tidy profit, with a total gross of $120 million.

  Despite the critical roasting and public indifference, Amistad was a prestige project, the kind Oscar loves to honor, and it did, nominating the film for best supporting actor (Anthony Hopkins), best cinematography (Janusz Kaminski), best costume design (Ruth E. Carter), and best original dramatic score (John Williams). None of the nominees went on to win the Oscar.

  Spielberg had a bigger and more embarrassing problem than cranky critics and the Oscar snub that left him without a nomination. In October 1997, before the film was released, the production was inundated with bad press and an alleged scandal. Barbara Chase-Riboud sued DreamWorks for $10 million, claiming the film script borrowed heavily from her 1989 novel, Echo of Lions, which also dramatized the Amistad incident. Chase-Riboud’s copyright infringement suit even tried to stop the film’s release. A federal judge agreed with her that the author “raised serious questions going to the merits of her copyright-infringement claim,” but Hollywood being Hollywood, the judge refused to grant an injunction against Amistad’s release.

  Both Spielberg and Amistad’s screenwriter, David Franzoni, insisted they had never even seen Chase-Riboud’s novel, but Chase-Riboud claimed that at one point Franzoni had been hired by another production company to adapt her novel for the big screen. Representatives from Amblin, Spielberg’s production company, however, had met with the author to discuss the project after Chase-Riboud’s close friend, Jacqueline Onassis, sent the novel to Amblin, which eventually passed on the project.

  The lawsuit received national coverage, but the press’s horror that Spielberg might be guilty of plagiarism was a bit exaggerated. It’s a little known fact that almost every Hollywood film, even flops, are sued by wannabe scriptwriters for plagiarism. Most are nuisance lawsuits dismissed by judges. (E.T. was sued for plagiarism, as have many other films, even when based on published books for which the filmmakers purchased the rights.)

  But Chase-Riboud’s arguments carried enough weight to solicit a settlement offer from DreamWorks of $500,000 and a recommendation in the final credits that viewers read her novel. Chase-Riboud had originally demanded $2 million and a credit that listed her novel as one of the film’s sources.

  Three months later, Chase-Riboud dropped her lawsuit and in a statement exonerated the filmmakers of any plagiarism. “After my lawyers had a chance to review DreamWorks’ files and other documents and evidence, my lawyers and I concluded that neither Steven Spielberg nor DreamWorks did anything improper, and I instructed my lawyers to conclude this matter in a timely and amicable fashion. I think Amistad is a splendid piece of work, and I applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the courage to make it.”

  The details of the settlement were never disclosed, and it was never made public how much DreamWorks had to pay Barbara Chase-Riboud to go away. The cost of settling the suit, whatever it was, didn’t put a dent in the billionaire director’s pocketbook. The cost of the psychic wounds was harder to measure, but they apparently went deep.

  A year later, on the set of his next film, where all his attention should have been trained on re-creating World War II, Spielberg seemed distracted, still obsessing about the plagiarism charges, as he lamented, “People seemed more interested in asking me questions about the lawsuit than about the content of Amistad.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Stalking Steven

  Spielberg

  SOME SAY WORLD WAR II WAS AMERICA’S LAST “good war,” and it certainly has been good to Steven Spielberg and his résumé. He has found the event so mesmerizing he’s revisited it five times, six if you count him listening to his father recount his participation in the war. The director’s fascination with the subject began in childhood, when he directed the battle “epic” Escape to Nowhere, his second film, followed by his adult re-creation of the war in Empire of the Sun, climaxing with Schindler’s List, the film that Time magazine said “more than any other justified the justness of World War II.” He even made a slapstick comedy about homeland hysteria during the war, the disastrous 1941.

  He returned once again to the subject in his next film, Saving Private Ryan.

  “Making a war movie isn’t glamorous to me. My dad brought home stories of the war and explained to me how unglamorous war is. What I tried to do in this film was approximate the look and the sounds and even the smells of what combat is really like,” Spielberg said.

  The second world war may not have been glamorous, but the man who found happy endings in the Holocaust and American slavery remained the eternal optimist while conceptualizing Saving Private Ryan, and tried to find the “good” in America’s last good war. “How do you find decency in the hell of warfare? That was the paradox that first attracted me to the project,” he said.

  It helps if you cast the actor who has practically patented decency on screen, Tom Hanks. Hanks, as the captain of a small Army Ranger unit that survives the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, begins his real mission: to find the title character (Matt Damon) lost behind enemy lines. Why all this fuss over one non-com? Damon’s Ryan is the sole surviving brother in his family—three siblings have been killed in the war, and he’s been reported missing behind enemy lines. The kernel of the fictional story is based on the real-life tragedy of the five Sullivan brothers, who all perished when their ship sank. To avoid another morale (or PR for the cynical) disaster, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall sends the ranger unit to rescue the last of the Ryan boys.

  After a brief, somewhat maudlin, opening sequence in modern day France at a cemetery for the casualties of the Omaha landing, Spielberg begins a twenty-five-minute assault on the Normandy beaches—and on our senses. Heads disappear in the withering counter-fire from the defending German soldiers, severed arms are carried by their owners, one G.I. tries to stick his blown-out guts back in his belly; and dying men cry out for “mommy” (based on real accounts) with their last breaths. The roller coaster ride of previous Spielberg outings has turned into the train to hell. The director who had been accused of prettifying everything from spousal abuse (The Color Purple) to American slavery (Amistad) and the Holocaust (Schindler’s List) realized that a marzipan-and-mortar re-creation of the horrific landing sequence would generate yet another firefight between himself and the critics. And for once, violence on film would be justified. “Omaha Beach was a slaughter. It was a complete foul up from the expeditionary forces, to the reconnaissance forces, to the saturation bombing that missed most of its primary targets. Given that, I didn’t want to glamorize what had really happened, so I tried to be as brutally honest as I could,” Spielberg said.

  It was out of the question to shoot on Omaha Beach because it has become a sacred landmark, plus so many tourist attractions have sprouted up around it that it was unusable for re-creating 1944. Production designer Thomas E. Sanders checked out other French beaches and came up against similar problems. “It was the hardest location I ever had to find, because we wanted it to be so specific. Most of the beaches were controlled by the military or we
re part of a wildlife refuge or were too developed,” Sanders said.

  When nature didn’t intervene, the French government did. The production ran into so much red tape, Spielberg began to suspect that the government was trying to keep embarrassing scenes of a captive France liberated by outsiders from being filmed there.

  Associate producer Kevin De La Noy began pushing for location shooting in Ireland, where he had a good relationship with the Irish army, which had supplied warrior extras for another De La Noy project, Braveheart. After a three-month quest, the production shot the stomach-churning invasion sequence along an untouched stretch of beach in County Wexford, Ireland, where the cliffs and even the color of the sand bore a striking resemblance to Omaha’s. Sanders “dressed the set” with defensive iron “hedgehogs” designed to poke holes in arriving ships, barbed wire, German pillboxes atop the cliffs, and reinforced shelters the Germans used to mow down the Allied invaders in the opening battle sequence.

  It took 3,000 uniforms and 2,000 pairs of boots to clothe the 750 moonlighting Irish army extras. De La Noy was glad he had insisted on using the military rather than civilian extras. “There was a big interplay in the scene between the soldiers and the special effects, the explosions and things. That was where I came down against recruiting ordinary extras from off the street. We needed guys with some training and discipline to do what they were told when things were blowing up around them,” he said. Even so, not all the extras came from the army. Amputees joined the production and wore prostheses, which were blown off during the ultra-violent landing sequence.