By 1999, when Spielberg turned his attention to the twenty-year-old project after Kubrick’s death that year, technology had caught up with Kubrick’s futuristic vision, and CGI was at last able to create the late director’s humanoid robots and robotic humans. The hundreds of robots used in the film ranged from actors wearing makeup to amputees playing damaged robots seeking replacement limbs, to fully mechanized robots. Interestingly, the same team that created the plodding giant reptiles for Jurassic Park, Stan Winston, Dennis Muren, and Scott Farrar, was called on to create the delicate, human-like creatures and even a talking teddy bear, David’s companion and counselor.
After the sixty-eight-day shoot, which began in August 2000, the famously phobic director once again confronted one of his most common phobias, fear of audiences. “I’m the fraidy-cat who makes a picture and immediately assumes that nobody is going to show up the first day, and it will be reviled around the world. That’s the way I’ve been on every single project. Every one,” he said.
In the case of A.I., his fears were more realistic than paranoid, or as Henry Kissinger said, “Even paranoid people have enemies.”
Opening weekend, June 29, 2001, may have temporarily allayed the director’s fears, when A.I. did near Saving Private Ryan-type business, earning $29 million in its first three days, only a million less than Ryan’s opening tally. But then word of mouth and some (but not all) poisonous reviews made Spielberg’s fears seem reasonable.
It seemed that the public would accept a serious, high-minded film by the director, and the critics would lionize him for such efforts. A roller coaster epic pleased moviegoers even more. But A.I. was neither fish nor fowl, and its schizophrenic flavor was reflected in equally schizoid reviews. There are some movies, they say, you either hate or love. Critics seemed to feel both emotions at the same time about this Pinocchio-goes-to-hell film. The Washington Post called it “fascinating, if uneven and silly.” Rolling Stone found it a “fascinating wreck.” “Both wonderful and maddening,” the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert wrote. “Involving and exasperating,” echoed the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Village Voice may have summed up the fish-fowl dichotomy best by labeling A.I. “fascinatingly schizoid.”
Less than two months after its release, as badly bruised as its protagonist, A.I. limped out of theaters having grossed only $78 million, not nearly enough to cover the film’s $100 million budget, although as usual, foreign, video, and cable sales will eventually put the dark film in the black.
As A.I. was finishing its disappointing run, the director was also putting closure to another unpleasant situation. Nothing the filmmaker does escapes the obsessive notice of the press, but once in a while he causes his own publicity nightmares, and that was the case for the five-story, 27,000 square-foot domed riding stable (half the size of the Rose Bowl!) he planned to build for his horse-loving wife in December 2000. The problem was that the equestrian center was located near his home in Brentwood, California, a tiny enclave made infamous as O. J. Simpson’s neighborhood. The $7 million structure would have required six city zoning variances, and neighbors, including movie producer Brian Grazer and TV producer Roger Gimbel, who lived in nearby multimillion dollar homes, hired attorney John Murdock to stop the five-story white elephant from moving in amid all the one-story mansions. Murdock promptly called the proposed structure “astounding and obnoxious.” Spielberg hired a new architect and developer, who dumped the dome and its retractable roof in favor of an outdoor ring, which still boasted a 24,000 square-foot riding area. A planned three-story gatehouse and a 2,400 square-foot residence for the staff that would be required to operate the ring were also dropped. The original eight-foot-high gate was reduced to six feet. The final plan was so simplified it required no zoning variances, and by August 2001, Spielberg had made peace with his rebellious neighbors, one of whom, Roger Gimbel, who lives next door to the slimmed down property said, “I’ve stopped screaming for right now. I’m greatly encouraged by the enormous improvements on what they had. Is it my dream come true that I have a riding ring as my next-door neighbor? No. But I appreciate they did something about it.”
At the time of A.I.’s release, Spielberg was finishing up his next film, Minority Report. Based on the short story by Philip K. Dick, who also provided the source material for the sci-fi classics Total Recall and Blade Runner, Minority Report teamed the most commercially successful director of all time with the most successful actor, Tom Cruise, who plays a cop in a future where psychics foretell murders, and the future murderers, as a preemptive strike, are executed for crimes they have not yet committed. Cruise, as Officer John Anderton, works as a detective in the “pre-crimes” division in Washington, D.C., circa 2080, where he tracks down these future felons, then finds himself named as a future perpetrator himself. On the run from his executioners, he spends much of the film trying to prove his innocence before his sentence is carried out. Meryl Streep and Max von Sydow have cameo roles. Principal photography, which began March 22, 2001, took place in Los Angeles, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and wrapped June 3, 2001.
The Washington shoot was convenient since it coincided with a January 29 ceremony at the British embassy where Sir Christopher Meyer, the British Ambassador, on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, knighted the director for “his extraordinary contribution to the entertainment industry and the British film industry over the past twenty-four years.” (An Embassy press release noted that American knights are not called “Sir,” although Spielberg will be allowed to place the letters KBE [Knight of the British Empire] after his name.) Spielberg’s knighthood put him in prestigious company; other American KBEs include George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, General Norman Schwartzkopf, Caspar Weinberger, and Bob Hope. Prince Phillip is the Grand Master of the KBEs.
The much anticipated Minority Report has a June 2002 release date. Regardless of the film’s ultimate box office, you don’t have to be a psychic to predict that a film starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg will have one of the biggest, if not the biggest, opening weekend in the history of the business. The term “synergy” seems to have been coined to describe the Cruise-Spielberg alliance.
What’s next for the unpredictable director? More film projects have been attached to his name than anyone could possibly make in a lifetime (remember the urban legend about collaborating on an update of Peter Pan with Michael Jackson?), but without the aid of psychics, we have this information from the director himself.
On the set of Minority Report, he told a reporter from the New York Times, “I have three irons in the fire.” Memoirs of a Geisha, based on the romantic novel by Arthur Golden, has been an on-again, off-again project for years, but Spielberg told the Times he would “probably” direct it after all. Another candidate is Big Fish, from Daniel Wallace’s novel about a troubled father-son relationship. Spielberg has also purchased the film rights to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography, which focuses on the last six years of Lincoln’s life and speculates that the president may have been bipolar. After two popcorn movies in a row, it appears that Spielberg wants to return to meatier subjects. A manic-depressive Lincoln!
One film Spielberg will definitely not be making is a bio-pic based on A. Scott Berg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Charles Lindbergh, even though the director paid $500,000 for film rights before the book came out and before Spielberg had a chance to read it. Spielberg said he just couldn’t devote a year of his life making a movie about an anti-Semite, which led some to wonder why he spent half-a-million dollars to buy the film rights and others to speculate that the director may not have known the aviator and infamous Nazi sympathizer was an anti-Semite when he bought the book.
Coincidentally, Berg happens to work out at my gym, Crunch, in West Hollywood, California, where I ambushed him as he pedaled on an Exercycle in the summer of 2001 and asked about the rumors that Spielberg, a notorious non-reader, had been unaware of Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies when he shelled out all that money. (A screenwri
ter who has collaborated with the director once said Spielberg “is neither a profound man nor an especially well-read one.”) The affable biographer spiked that theory with a chuckle. “Lindbergh was a national hero, and everyone of Steven’s generation knew that this great American hero was also an anti-Semite, but a genteel anti-Semite, which is the most insidious kind.” Berg also has the distinction of perhaps being the only writer in Los Angeles who ever turned down a screenwriting request from the director. “After squeezing Lindbergh’s huge story into 600 pages, I wasn’t about to squeeze it into a 120 page screenplay,” he told me between huffs and puffs on his gym bike.
Meanwhile, the director has flourished as a movie mogul. DreamWorks has become an Oscar-magnet, winning three best picture Oscars in a row for American Beauty, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mind, plus Best Animated Feature for Shrek. Industry handicappers say DreamWorks has replaced Miramax as “Oscar’s home away from home,” with one prestige production after another dominating the Oscar race for the past three years. And the company, about which an agent back in 1998 had caviled, “Based on a billion dollars and those three minds [Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg], what a completely unimpressive start,” had the bragging rights of releasing the top box-office hit of the summer of 2001, the subversive fairy tale Shrek, which remained No. 1 until The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, knocked the cartoon out of first place at the end of the year. The critically acclaimed animated feature about a cuddly ogre must have taken the sting out of the company’s previous animated disappointments, the arid Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado (the latter a comical “buddy movie” that sanitized genocidal Conquistadors for laughs)—both costly bombs and a personal embarrassment to the studio’s animation chief, Katzenberg.
Despite the Oscar haul and Shrek’s monster box office, rumors continue that the privately held company is bleeding red ink. Financial stress may explain what the Sunday Times (London) described as “furniture-throwing” arguments involving the three principals. Indeed, Katzenberg has publicly complained that the films Spielberg has produced for other studios (megahits like Men in Black and The Mark of Zorro) were “more demanding than any of us had anticipated” and deprived DreamWorks of Spielberg’s full attention, which may explain the flying furniture without aid of special effects.
Another “project” has also diverted Spielberg from his labors at DreamWorks. In 1994, after Schindler’s List “opened [his] eyes to the harrowing stories of survivors,” he founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and put $25 million of his own money into the $100 million organization dedicated to recording eyewitness testimony of concentration camp survivors. To date, the foundation has taped 50,000 interviews in thirty-two languages in fifty-seven countries, then cataloged and digitized the 115,000 hours of tape on the backlot at Universal Studios. The archives are available at the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Yale University, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
The testimony of 10,000 more survivors remains to be recorded. “There’s still an enormous amount of work to do,” said Sam Gustman, the executive director of technology at the foundation.
The exact same thing might be said of the burgeoning career of Steven Spielberg, KBE.
FILMOGRAPHY
Selected Films of Steven Spielberg
Amblin’ (1969)
This is the one that started it all. Spielberg specifically made this twenty-two-minute silent film about a boy and girl hitchhiking from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Ocean to attract the attention of studio executives. It did so in spades. The day after Sid Sheinberg, then head of Universal Television, saw Amblin’ at a private screening, he offered the twenty-one-year-old college student a seven-year contract. Spielberg later would dismiss Amblin’ as “crass commercialism” with about as much depth as a “Pepsi commercial,” but he was being too hard on himself. (Later, the highbrow film critics would take over that job.) Despite its creator’s misgivings, Amblin’ went on to win top prize at the Atlanta Film Festival and another award at the Venice Film Festival. Trivia note: In 1970, this modest student film was seen by millions when the studio released it on a double bill with the year’s biggest hit, Love Story. Another trivia note: Spielberg doesn’t forget old comrades. Allen Daviau, the cameraman on Amblin’, later would be tapped for similar duties on the big one, E.T.
Duel (first aired November 13, 1971, on ABC)
This made-for-television movie was almost as silent as Amblin’, with less than fifty lines of dialogue in its eighty-five minutes. Travelling salesman Dennis Weaver hits the road and finds himself relentlessly pursued by a huge truck whose driver, never seen, seems intent on running Weaver off the road. Spielberg called Duel an “exercise in paranoia,” although the truck, like his later shark, poltergeists, and Nazi commandants, are terrifyingly real. The “realness” of Spielberg’s alleged paranoid fantasies brings to mind Henry Kissinger’s famous aphorism: “Even paranoid people have enemies.” Duel was released overseas in movie theaters in 1973. Ten years later, in the wake of E.T.’s success, Universal released Duel in American movie theaters.
The Sugarland Express (1973)
Ex-con Goldie Hawn springs her husband from prison so they can retrieve their kids, who have been placed in an orphanage because mom and dad are cons. En route to the foster home, they are pulled over by a policeman, whom they take hostage. The ensuing pursuit by a parade of police cars displayed for the first time Spielberg’s mastery of the logistics of filming car crashes and crowd scenes. Ironically, his first feature film, although it received rave reviews, barely broke even, giving no hint of his future as a box-office champ.
Jaws (1975)
This megahit typifies the definition of a high-concept movie, one that can be described in a simple declarative sentence—in this case: shark terrorizes resort community. The world’s largest great white, unseen like Duel’s truck driver for much of the movie, plays havoc with the tourist industry of an island off Martha’s Vineyard. Roy Scheider is the local police chief, Richard Dreyfuss the nerdy ichthyologist, and Robert Shaw is the great white shark hunter, who all team up to hold a giant fish fry. The production careened over budget and over schedule, but no one complained when it quickly became the biggest money-maker of all time (until Spielberg’s E.T. knocked it out of first place). Trivia note: Spielberg wanted Charlton Heston for Scheider’s role. (The screen’s Moses wasn’t interested.) However, the director turned down established stars Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in favor of an unknown, Dreyfuss.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Spielberg shifts gears dramatically here, with the unseen horror gradually revealed as a benevolent presence: a twinkling, xylophone-playing spaceship. Trivia note: Carlo Rambaldi, the master puppet-maker who later would breathe life into E.T., also designed the mother ship. Richard Dreyfuss returns as Everyman, a telephone lineman who is mysteriously beckoned aboard the spacecraft. Spielberg’s running preoccupation with children separated from parents, a throwback to his parents’ divorce, is dramatized here when the aliens literally suck a four-year-old out the door of his mother’s home. The theme of separation, already explored in The Sugarland Express, would pop up again in films as diverse as Hook, E.T., and Empire of the Sun.
1941 (1979)
After two monster hits back to back, it seemed Steven Spielberg could do no wrong. Then he made 1941. The director claimed he laughed himself “sick” when he first read the script, cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, who later would make a little confection called Forrest Gump. Plain sick, however, is the way the critics and the audience reacted to this overblown farce about an imagined Japanese attack on Los Angeles in the paranoid days following Pearl Harbor. Spielberg at least learned a valuable lesson. Never again would he attempt a flat-out comedy, preferring instead tongue-in-ch
eek humor sparingly rationed out in action adventure films.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
After the disastrous box-office performance of 1941, industry experts were ready to count Spielberg out, calling him the Orson Welles of action films. Chastened by 1941’s failure, Spielberg allowed himself to be mentored by Star Wars’ auteur, George Lucas. Lucas kept a tight fiscal rein on Spielberg as he directed (under budget and ahead of schedule) this affectionate homage to Saturday matinee serials. A whip-wielding archeologist who leaves academe to track down the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, Harrison Ford encounters along the way Nazis, snakes, and a heroine (Karen Allen) who is arguably scarier. The producer and the director would collaborate on two sequels, creating a big thrills, nobrainer style that some critics derisively nicknamed “lucasberger.” Trivia note: Spielberg originally hired Tom Selleck for the Harrison Ford role, but CBS, which aired his hit series, Magnum, P.I., wouldn’t give Selleck time off. Today, Ford remains one of the most respected—and bankable—stars in Hollywood. Selleck last appeared in a cable movie for TNT.
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