Atypically, Spielberg didn’t try to micromanage 750 extras and gave them general rather than specific instructions, including a pep talk on the importance of their contribution to the film. “Steven told them that people don’t die like they do in Rambo films. And he’s right. People turn inside themselves, into the pain. There isn’t a lot of throwing out their arms and crying for Mama,” a consultant on the film said, contradicting the final cut of the film, which depicted dying soldiers doing just that.
Then there were the unpaid “extras.” Spielberg’s research uncovered firsthand accounts of thousands of dead fish on the beach, so bushels of fish from the local market were spread among the “dead extras,” who truly earned their SAG minimum that day.
The film’s “armory” consisted of 3,000 weapons, some originals, but mostly new pieces “stressed” to look battle-worn. The American company that manufactured the shoes worn by the Allies was still in business and for some reason had saved one vat of the dye used on the original footwear. Costume designer Joanna Johnston coaxed the company into making 2,000 pairs of shoes almost overnight. “Since we were going to be right in there with the soldiers, and were going to be getting a close look at the costumes and the shoes, it was crucial that they be right. And it really helped the actors to be anchored like that, wearing the same shoes that the D-Day soldiers had worn,” Johnston said. There was also a personal reason Johnston was so insistent on authenticity. “We knew that if we got anything wrong, there were people out there who would notice it,” including, ironically, her own father, who had been in the second wave that stormed Omaha beach. “We wanted to get it right. I wanted to get it right. I wanted this to be, in part, an homage to my father.”
The cast was also stressed to look battle-worn. Spielberg hired Vietnam veteran and film consultant Dale Dye to whip into shape the Army Ranger unit sent behind enemy lines to find the last of the Ryans. For ten days, superstar Hanks and the rest of the actors who comprised the Rangers were forced to suffer the indignities and humiliation of a real boot camp, which Dye said included eating real rations and crawling (and sleeping) in the mud. Midway through this unique form of method acting, there was a mutiny among the “soldiers.” One of the actors twisted his ankle and persuaded several of his colleagues to threaten to quit if boot camp continued. Father figure Hanks had a long talk with the mutineers and convinced them to resume their torture for the good of the film. Hanks recalled, “We were playing soldiers who were tired and miserable and wanted to go home, and I don’t think we could have done that justice without having experienced what Dale Dye put us through. I think he was trying to instill in us the idea that when you think you can’t go any farther, you can. You just have to decide to do it, which is exactly the situation in which many of the men involved in the Normandy invasion found themselves.”
Director-actor Ed Burns, who plays a mouthy G.I. from Brooklyn, was glad the mutiny failed. “When I saw the film, the first guy I wanted to thank after the credits rolled was Dale Dye, because we looked like soldiers, and he did that. During boot camp and even during the shooting, if you were forgetting the soldier side of your performance or your training, he’d scream at you. He’d say, ‘We don’t want to dishonor the guys who died on that beach or in that war,’ and I don’t think we did,” Burns said.
Amazingly for a self-confessed “control freak,” Spielberg did not storyboard a single frame of the film—a first in his filmography. Seeking a documentary look, he often used handheld cameras. “In that way, I was able to hit the sets much like a newsreel cameraman following soldiers into war. I decided to play the role of a combat cameraman more than a director,” Spielberg said.
To achieve the faded look of color newsreel footage of the period, a protective lens was removed from the camera, which made it similar to cameras of that era and desaturated the color because “early on we knew that we did not want this to look like a Technicolor extravaganza about Word War II,” Spielberg said. The film negative was also processed to make the colors less bright.
As if reinvading Normandy and getting all the details right weren’t stressful enough, the director had hellish personal problems that would have left a less dedicated professional running from the set for cover, serious cover.
Two weeks after principal photography began on Saving Private Ryan, the director received a phone call from his attorney in Los Angeles with news that traumatized Spielberg and made him fear for his life and his loved ones. On July 11, 1997, a former male model (the press overexaggerated his physique by calling him a bodybuilder) with a prison record, Jonathan Norman, then 31, was apprehended by police at the front gates of Spielberg’s home in Pacific Palisades, a Los Angeles suburb near the Pacific Ocean. One can only imagine the intensity of the director’s reaction when his attorney told him what the stalker had brought with him. Parked outside Spielberg’s home, Norman’s van contained handcuffs, duct tape, a box cutter, razor blades, chloroform, eye masks, and a black leather scrapbook filled with photos of Spielberg’s wife and seven children. Even his car terrified the director. It was the same make and model as his wife’s. Norman apparently hoped to be waved past security guards outside the Spielbergs’ home, thinking it was Mrs. Spielberg behind the wheel. Norman would later testify that he had fantasies of raping the director.
Famously phobic about everything from heights to insects to furniture with “feet,” the director was the perfect candidate for a panic attack, which he had while he listened to his lawyer recount Norman’s intrusion and hardware. “Disbelief was my first reaction,” he said during Norman’s trial a year later. “I have had a lot of fans and people asking me for autographs and wanting to send scripts, but I’ve never had someone stating their intention to do me harm. . . . I became completely panicked and upset, and very afraid to tell my wife.”
Although security guards were posted outside his home, his children’s school in London, where Saving Private Ryan was being filmed, and his mother’s kosher deli in West Los Angeles, the distraught director was overwhelmed by “what ifs?,” even though Norman had been apprehended by the time Spielberg learned of the plot. “We had a thousand soldiers firing guns and firing blanks. I was very upset that he could have shown up in Ireland, put on a uniform and gotten access to a gun with live ammunition,” Spielberg said.
For the first time in his professional life, the director found it hard to concentrate on filming. Although Norman had been arrested on one count of stalking with bail set at $1 million, which the director knew the out of work model and aspiring screenwriter couldn’t raise, he was obsessed with the idea of Norman breaking out of jail and slaughtering him and his loved ones. While nightmares roiled his sleep, during the day his mind raced over and over on the unlikely prospect of his tormentor coming to get him. “I’m very distraught over the possibility that this man could come out of jail and go right back on the warpath again. It’s become an emotional obsession with me,” he said in October 1997.
Norman never returned to the warpath (or Spielberg’s front door), but the director still had an irrational fear that his stalker would somehow get him. He found himself reliving the facts of the case and imagining worst case scenarios when he had to confront his would-be assailant during the trial, which took place in February 1998 in a Santa Monica, California, courtroom.
Spielberg showed up in court with two bodyguards, but was still so frightened by Norman’s presence, the Los Angeles Times reported he only glanced at the defendant once during the entire trial and began hyperventilating.
Deputy District Attorney Rhonda Saunders asked the shaking director the obvious: “Are you still frightened [of Norman]?”
“Yes, I am . . . because I think he is on a mission, and I don’t think he will be satisfied until he accomplishes his mission. And I think I am the subject of his mission.”
In testimony, Spielberg went over the list of paraphernalia, which Saunders called a “rape kit,” found on Norman when he was arrested and imagined how each might
have been used.
“I was concerned that he brought so many handcuffs. I could only speculate that what he wanted to do to me, he might also want to do to someone else in my family. The razor knife could have been used for . . . you know. . . .” Spielberg seemed unable to verbalize his fear and made a slashing motion across his throat instead.
The director need not have feared that his stalker would get out of jail and finish the job. In 1995, Norman had plowed into a group of pedestrians with his car, then punched two of his victims. He was convicted on two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. As a result, on June 17, 1998, after being found guilty on a single count of stalking, Norman was eligible for sentencing under California’s three-strikes law, which increases the penalty for each successive crime. Norman got the maximum Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Steven Suzukawa could hand down, twenty-five years to life.
As terrified as the director was of his stalker, he forced himself to testify before sentencing. “So, your honor,” he told the judge, “I’m here today because the prospect that Jonathan Norman might have another chance to carry out his intent is beyond frightening to me. As I testified at trial . . . I was and still am fearful of Mr. Norman.” As if to prove his point, the director once again fled the courtroom, this time without waiting to learn Norman’s sentence.
So what made Jonathan Norman run? Or stalk? His former roommate, Chuck Markovich, claimed Norman had shown up outside Spielberg’s home to deliver one of his screenplays, a preposterous hypothesis Norman’s attorney, Charles L. Kreindler, tried to peddle during the trial. Unsuccessfully begging the judge for mercy during the sentencing phase, Kreindler attributed his client’s behavior to “methamphetamine-induced psychosis.” Or as they say in drug circles, Norman was “tweaking” when he appeared on Spielberg’s doorstep.
Only a few weeks later, Spielberg may have found comfort or at least distraction in the public and critical reception of Saving Private Ryan, although only a cynic would have noted that the international attention the stalker trial received provided a PR bonanza for the film—as though any new Spielberg project needed a publicity boost.
Before Saving Private Ryan’s release on July 24, 1998, some pundits questioned the film’s prospects. The New York Times’ Rick Lyman lauded it as “almost certainly the most intense and realistic war film since Platoon, but it may not be what audiences are expecting from a movie that pairs the director of E.T. with the star of Forrest Gump.”
Expected or not, the public and critics alike embraced the film. Within three days, the war epic grossed $30 million, and after only seventeen days in release, it hit the magic blockbuster number of $100 million. Its final $200 million take in the U.S. made it Spielberg’s sixth biggest money-maker, outgrossing such commercial fare as the two Indiana Jones sequel and even the sci-fi classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For once, the critics and moviegoers were of one mind. The reviews were spectacular. “Spielberg has made an amazing piece of pure, visceral cinema, akin to a great silent film, in which the words are basically superfluous,” Variety wrote, apparently having forgotten that Spielberg had chided himself during an Oscar acceptance speech for paying too much attention to the image and not enough to the words.
Bob Graham in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Saving Private Ryan launches and climaxes with two of the greatest extended battle sequences ever put on film. The first evokes the horror of the Normandy invasion, and the last is an extraordinary account of a pitched battle. Prepare to weep.”
Vanity Fair called the opening sequence “the most orchestral fury ever committed to film.”
Oscar voters as usual followed the critics, and Saving Private Ryan received seven nominations. The film had tough competition that year from the sentimental favorite, Shakespeare in Love, and indeed the lavish period comedy won the lion’s share of awards, including best picture. But its director, John Madden, did not win. That statuette went to Spielberg, who may have felt that at last the Academy had made special amends after two decades of snubs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Robo-Tot
WHETHER IT WAS THE EMOTIONAL AND physical exhaustion of recreating World War II or a desire to resume his homemaker role after finishing Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg took a three-year break from filmmaking (although he did executive-produce several movies, including Jurassic Park III). The hiatus wasn’t without its drama, however, and included a reminder of his mortality and yet another creepy run in with a crazed fan, albeit not a dangerous one.
In February 2000, the director made international headlines. The newsmaking event? One of his kidneys was removed after doctor’s found an “irregularity” on the organ. (People can live healthy and productive lives with only one kidney, which enlarges or compensates to take over for its lost brother.) “My other kidney is as good as the day I was born,” Spielberg said after surgery.
Like any Spielberg “project,” details of the surgery were surrounded by secrecy and cryptic comments to the press. Spielberg’s kidney ailment must have come as a surprise to the director since he had no physical symptoms, and the problem only became evident after a routine physical examination.
Spielberg’s longtime spokesman, Marvin Levy, revealed that the surgery was performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, but would not give the date of the procedure and refused to say if the kidney had been cancerous. (Spielberg may have felt especially at home at Cedars-Sinai, since a building that houses pediatric research which he funded, has his name on it.)
Dr. Mohamed El-Shahwy, the medical director of the University of California’s kidney transplant center, had no connection with Spielberg’s surgery, but speculated that the kidney may have had “suspicious lesions” that required its removal. Because of the secrecy surrounding the director’s hospital admission and treatment, rumors arose that he was terminally ill. A hysterical camera crew crashed the condo of the director’s mother, Leah Adler. Mrs. Adler came to the door and told the crew her son was in “perfect health,” which may have been a bit too optimistic an opinion, then she shut the door on the camera crew. Responding to alarmed calls from friends who believed the rumors that he was at death’s door, his publicist issued a statement that said, “A complete recovery is promised and no follow-up treatment is necessary.” In fact, Levy promised the director would be back in the office in a few days.
In July 2000, a comical variation on his stalker nightmare also made headlines when a twenty-seven-year-old Iranian immigrant, Anoushirvan Fakhran, was arrested for claiming to be Spielberg’s nephew. The incident seemed like something right out of a movie, in particular, the film Six Degrees of Separation, in which a con man played by Will Smith crashes Manhattan high society by passing himself off as Sidney Poitier’s (nonexistent) son. The inventive Iranian also passed himself off as a fourteen-year-old and enrolled in Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax City, Virginia. Despite his age, school authorities did not become suspicious when he showed up on campus driving a BMW with a license plate that read “SPLBERG,” but the school did call DreamWorks when the impostor failed to pay tuition after he had spent an entire year there. The young man seemed harmless enough, as it appeared he only used his connection to “Uncle Steven” to impress his sixteen-year-old girlfriend and other students.
After his ruse unraveled, Fakhran tried to cash in on his fifteen minutes of infamy, and the now defunct Talk magazine seemed happy to oblige, flying him to New York for a photo shoot, during which time Fakhran shopped around for a book deal. He was later deported under U.S. immigration laws that allow the expulsion of foreigners for “moral turpitude.”
A month after the fake nephew story broke, Spielberg decided to go back to work, this time to please his children. They wanted him to stop playing Mr. Mom and wanted Dad the Director back. Even the nature of the film’s subject matter was dictated by the children of this most devoted of fathers. While the critics and Oscar rewarded him for tackling tough subject matter in films like Sch
indler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, his children wanted more of the greasy kid stuff.
After years of being accused of making roller coaster movies, Spielberg confessed, “I happen to like roller coaster movies. There’s nothing wrong with being a roller coaster movie, if that’s all you’re trying to be.” And that’s what his kids wanted. “I had a lot of complaints from my kids that I’m not making movies for them anymore.”
But the director couldn’t escape his more recent serious efforts completely, and the project he chose to please his kids was not entirely a kiddie movie, more like kiddie-noir.
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a children’s movie that members of the Addams Family might have thought up. Set in the distant future, A.I. presents a world where robots called “mechas,” short for mechanicals, satisfy all human needs, from housekeeping to gardening to sex. The story begins just as scientists have managed to create a robotic child (Haley Joel Osment) who is capable of feeling love. The prototype, named David, is given to a couple whose own child has been cryogenically frozen until a cure for his terminal illness can be discovered.
David is programmed to love his parents, and they fall in love with their “mecha” son as well, until their real-life son is miraculously cured of his disease, thawed out, and returned home. David is now one son too many and he is abandoned in a forest where, with the help of a sex “mecha,” Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), he sets out to become a real boy. Critics called this dark tale a cross between Pinocchio and E.T.—if E.T. were dissected at the end of the film or if Gepetto tore Pinocchio limb from limb.
How did a man who seems to own the patent on upbeat films with happy endings come to such a grim story, writing the screenplay himself—his first writing credit since Poltergeist in 1982 and the first film he both wrote and directed since Close Encounters in 1977? The project originated with a filmmaker with a much darker view of life and art than Spielberg—his idol, mentor, and friend of eighteen years, Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick had written a ninety-page treatment based on a short story by sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1969. Kubrick asked Spielberg to collaborate on a screenplay and direct. This was back in the early 1980s, however, and the technology to create A.I.’s wonderworld of humanoid robots simply did not exist. By the time computer generated imaging came into its own, Kubrick had died, but Spielberg felt compelled to resurrect the project, if not to keep his kids happy, then to pay homage to his idol. The resulting script, which took the director only two months to write, had “Steven Spielberg’s sensibilities all over it. But the subtext is all Kubrick,” the film’s producer, Kathleen Kennedy said. Or as the Washington Post described the unlikely collaboration: “Spielberg sees the glass as half full; Kubrick saw the glass smashed and ground into your face.” Ironically, Kubrick had declined to direct himself because he thought the subject matter too light and better suited for Spielberg’s tastes.
Spielberg Page 29