Violence and horror date as fast as technology. But at the movies very little is allowed to stand in their way, and we sometimes feel they are in alliance. If a new technology is discovered, a film subject will arise to demonstrate it. So how a thing is done can blind us to what is being done. In 1979, as it opened, my wife and I went to see the original Alien (1979). We knew little about it in advance—there was a greater innocence then in the publicity process—and when the creature, a raw, infant version of what was to come, burst out of the chest cavity of Kane (played by John Hurt), my wife got up, told me I could stay if I liked, but she was going home.
I stayed. She was afflicted by nausea, outrage, and the shrewd estimate that, if this happened that early in the picture, what worse sights were to come? She wasn’t having a good time. I suppose I was caught in the lofty notion that a film critic and historian wasn’t there for “fun.” That meant my wife was a truer moviegoer than I was. She was attending to Kane—I knew that John wasn’t actually hurt. (Thirty-three years later he’s still with us, still looking ravaged.) I could tell myself it was “only a movie,” but for my wife, it was an experience and a story in which she was involved. She responded as if she had been there in the room on the spaceship Nostromo.
Years later we had a son, Nicholas, and I was writing a book about the four Alien films. My son got wind of this and asked if he could see Alien. I said, no—he was too young. His mother agreed. This was in the age of the VHS cassette, when a child of his age, more or less, saw whatever his parents decided was fit for him. But he persevered, until one day I said, very well. He would sit beside me on the sofa, and the instant he became afraid, I would turn the video off. What idiots we are to think we can teach people terror—surely it is in the blood. Nicholas’s bedroom had a door with a peephole, and he told us much later that he used to lie there in the dark wondering if something was coming through the peephole. He was too brave to tell us he was afraid.
So I showed him Alien, in our living room, in the daylight, on a twenty-inch television. As usual, the scuttling, screeching crab broke out of Kane’s chest like a kid out of school. Nicholas did not waver. “That’s cool,” he said. “How did they do it?”
I was reminded of his question a few years later, in 2001, by the film Conspiracy, a dramatization of the 1943 Wannsee Conference on the technology of the final solution. Made for TV, the film was written by Loring Mandel (based on the minutes of the conference) and directed by Frank Pierson. It has Kenneth Branagh playing Heydrich, with Stanley Tucci as Eichmann. It is just a group of men in discussion at a table. They don’t waste time over whether their solution should be acted on. They know that. But they are passionately at odds over how it can be done. Eliminating several million people is easier said than done—or it was in 1943.
Violence had been nagging at restrictive censorship for several years, and often it went hand in glove with its showier sister, sex. The fusillade at the end of Bonnie and Clyde was the outlaws’ manifestation of love and orgasm. And that key moment of the late 1960s—working on so many levels that it left an awed hush in theaters—was evidence of the great advantage violence had over sex. When sex arrived, it was contingent on the modesty of the players and on that dismayed discovery that sexual experience was still invisible. But violence would find an expressiveness that started in the province of makeup and then discovered the technological freedoms of the late twentieth century. If you wanted it (and apparently we did), bodies could disintegrate before your eyes. As a physical thing, let alone as a metaphor, it might be more erotic than sex.
For the finale of Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had their clothes wired and loaded with small charges and sachets of blood that could be timed to give the impression of their being shot over and over again. Then the director, Arthur Penn, elected to slow the motion just a little so the violence and the death were…well, what is the word? Prolonged for our study? Made poetic? Rendered as romantic glory?
The preparation of costumes was a feature of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, along with slow-motion elongations learned from Akira Kurosawa. Some said this was beauty; some wondered if it was the start of a new cruelty. It was not perverse for cameramen to suggest slow motion, or for makeup people to think of blood sachets. It was inventive and professional, and both had been used before, just as the history of movie is full of fights—think of the battles in Fritz Lang’s Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924); or of Canino slugging Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946) and then letting the ball bearings drain out of his hand; think of the prolonged fist fight between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man (1952; and McLaglen had once fought Jack Johnson in the ring); think of the girl screaming in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) after the suggestion that torturing pliers have been taken to her body—no, you don’t see more than her bare legs hanging down, like meat on a hook, but try wiping away her screams.
But those were what, in hindsight, we might call clean fights, reliant on what big strong men might do (or think of doing), with the benefit of cutting and stand-ins. Violence built in the 1970s, as technological innovation spread. Was it a prosthesis and some available blood substitute that allowed Roman Polanski to slit Jack Nicholson’s nose in Chinatown? That was nasty but funny. But the revelation that Noah Cross had raped his own daughter was the kind of plot detail that films had not always permitted themselves. When Cross’s daughter, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), is killed, the bullet goes through her eye socket, and we get a shocking glimpse of the damage. But there is more: at the close of the film, with Evelyn dead, not only is Cross not arrested or put away, but he also has his daughter (or granddaughter) to himself, and he seems to be an unchallenged power in Los Angeles. By the 1970s, film was more wounded or cynical: the wickedness went unanswered (The Parallax View, 1974), and dangerous men remained on the streets (Taxi Driver, 1976).
In that concluding slaughter in Taxi Driver, when Travis kills anyone he can find, the Ratings Board felt too awash in bright blood, and so they asked that the scene be printed “down,” not denied but tamed a little. That was a sign of rampant developments in the science of film, or what George Lucas would call Industrial Light and Magic (a company founded in 1975).
Special effects, screen moments in which the imaginary is made visible, are as old as the movies. Welles scratched the film stock to mimic newsreel for the obituary of Citizen Kane. At the end of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), a crew hustled actors, their hearth, and its lighting into place in the course of an unbroken panning shot to allow Genjuro the potter a few hours in which he could believe the worst damage had not been done. That was a trick; it was art; it was magic, and movie.
There is a moment near the end of The Godfather when an assassin breaks in on Moe Greene on his Las Vegas massage table. He looks up and puts on his spectacles to see who it is. In an instant, a lens shatters and blood flows out of his eye. No, they didn’t shoot the actor, Alex Rocco, but we wanted Greene dead because of his arrogant treatment of Fredo, and because he was not one of our guys. The panache gets me just as it did at the end of Red River, where Tom Dunson comes striding through the herd that Matthew Garth took from him, and he seems insouciant—unless you look through the Western romance to the helpless document of 1947, with John Wayne just a little padded at the midriff, and anxious about the horns his hand flaps at. That’s a cheat, too, but it’s cheating in the cause of a great illusion.
What troubles me, and what seems to have frightened away so many moviegoers in the last twenty years or so, is the way photography and its attempt to record life have yielded to a range of special effects, building toward computer-generated imagery, and the depiction of people who have never lived as actors or characters—and of their death and destruction. The ultimate conclusion of that great energy and its orgy of simulated killing is in the video game entertainment that has long since surpassed theatrical moviegoing, though it steadily trades upon children’s appetite for toys and triggers.
The mise-en-scène of many vide
o games is exciting and compelling. As in some pornography, it consists of a ceaseless forward-tracking shot, attached to some fetishistic weapon, with a flickering subscreen on which a player’s score or kill count is advancing. There is an intense concentration on this forward attention and on the shooting that works through a remote-control button. In some games, the elaborate weapon is at the very front of the screen, aimed forward, and it seems to be in our hands. You fire away.
If you’re skilled at these games, you can kill a couple of hundred by the hour, and if you’re hesitant about the “violence” or feel any kind of shame, it may help that the victims are generally faceless. The lavish splatter of blood, or red, is something you have to get used to, along with fragmented corpses. The impersonality of the figures is often uniformed and monopolized by weapons, and it’s hard to ignore their fascistic character. I don’t know what this does to life, much less on any measurable basis. But I know what it feels like and the feeling has to do with dread and the uncanny contradiction that what I am seeing is there but not there, that it is lifelike but as apart as the screen. Kids at play will tell you, “It’s only a game,” if you protest, but then they boast that the army uses some of these games for training.
To Own the Summer
Steven Spielberg has so much more mystery than shows in his still young eyes. I can never make up my mind about him. I watched him recently on television, in conversation with his composer over the years, John Williams. He seemed so young, so earnest, as if he were just beginning. It was hard to remember what a defining success he is, until one looked at the nearly crouched awe in Williams. Spielberg is a phenomenon; it’s easier to say that than to work out the components of artist, businessman, and entertainer. I’m sure he’d say they’re all the same.
I have enthused over some films of the early 1970s, American and otherwise. These were challenging pictures that were well received by many critics; they altered the way we thought about ourselves and introduced new attitudes to the cinema and what it might be. They were not always cheerful experiences, but they left one excited about film. You could call a film “mainstream” then and expect to have people hopeful about it. The Godfather was that kind of show.
Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) was attached to the American bicentennial, though without any conventional optimism: it beheld a panorama of liars, freaks, frauds, and crazies and settled for the vague feeling that, despite all the wreckage, perhaps as a country we must be doing something right. It cost $2.2 million and it grossed $9.9 million in that United States. Altman said it didn’t really make any money, which means that very little got back to him. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) was a psychotic pilgrim’s progress in which, thirty years earlier, the loner would have had his desperate fling and ended shot to pieces. Now he was free again, a strange, isolated figure, frightened and frightening, a disconcerting celebrity. That film cost $1.3 million and grossed $28.2 million. Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) had us watch an amiable, enlivening rebel whose bumpy mind is flatlined by a drab institution. It cost $4.4 million; it grossed $112 million domestically; and it won Best Picture.
I fear there would be little chance of getting such projects made today in the mainstream of American film. But we are still seeing remakes or duplications of another work from 1975, a milestone entertainment yet maybe a millstone, a brilliant exercise, a model of reassuring disaster: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, one of the most influential movies ever made in America.
Spielberg is a decisive achiever in American show business, unrivaled in his record, so close to genius as to be infuriating, and exactly the kind of fellow the business has always wanted to believe in. Not that Jaws is simply his film or vision. It was a commercial enterprise. As anyone on the picture will tell you, the shark was a technology and a nightmare (long before computer-generated imagery). Some say it was the hardest film ever made in movie history, and pictures in such jeopardy survive only if the gamblers stay steady and make their own luck. Just because it was business doesn’t mean it was businesslike.
Peter Benchley, the grandson of Algonquin Round Table humorist Robert Benchley, had had an idea for a novel about a white shark that terrorizes a resort community. Doubleday gave him a starter advance of $1,000 (it grew to $7,500), and after much rewriting, the novel became an object of excitement. It would not be published until 1974, but already in 1973, Bantam had bought the book for paperback for $575,000. Universal wanted the film rights. An executive at the studio, Jennings Lang, had alerted his boss, Lew Wasserman. They were thinking of Hitchcock to direct, with Paul Newman as the police chief. Then the studio’s humble story department read and reported and said they were not impressed. In that clerical gap, the independent producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck (the son of Darryl Zanuck) stepped in and said they’d buy it independently, and let Universal produce. So the studio would have the film, but on reduced profit terms. It was Zanuck and Brown who assured Benchley they would look after the project personally and who made the deal with the novelist: $150,000 and 10 percent of the net profits, plus $25,000 to be part of the screenplay (plus money for any sequels—if they blew the shark up, they’d put it back together again; it was their shark).
Outside the story department at Universal, everyone who read the galleys was fired up, even the young director Steven Spielberg, who had lifted the galley from Zanuck’s desk. But Spielberg seems to have been the first person to read the book twice, and ask himself the awkward question “How on earth, or on water, do you film this?” That’s why he was always torn about doing the picture.
That summer of 1974, Spielberg was twenty-seven. Born in Cincinnati, he was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and he had been making “amateur” films since childhood. There is a still of him shooting Firelight (1964, a two-hour effort, on 8 mm) at the age of seventeen—staring past the tiny Bolex camera at his actress—that is the epitome of the narrow intensity of a film-mad kid with a one-track mind. Anyone who has taught film knows the look, and realizes that it is both awesome and alarming.
Under an early contract with Universal, he had made a television movie, Duel, in 1971 (it was later released in theaters), that is a perfect diagram (with terror) and a sign of what was to come. Dennis Weaver is an innocent motorist on a desert road pursued by a malignant truck. The irrational menace comes from horror films, but it is also part of being a kid in the atomic age, when demons may lurk in the desert. Duel earned him promotion, and in that summer of 1973, Spielberg was doing The Sugarland Express (1974), another film about transportation, at Universal for Brown and Zanuck. It is the story of a young mother (Goldie Hawn), just out of jail, who frees her convict husband and then kidnaps a cop in order to rescue their baby from an adoption home. Involving an immense police pursuit, the film is a triumph of informational logistics, and a tragedy—the husband will be killed, the baby cannot be freed, the woman is devastated.
The Sugarland Express had excellent reviews. Pauline Kael called it “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies,” but the film did poorly, and left Spielberg very disappointed. The look on his face in that still photograph was not ready for critical glory without a payoff. That’s why Spielberg is so instructive: he has always wanted to be a comprehensive American success, and never seemed to notice how that commodity might turn suspect. So he was not obvious casting for Jaws. Lew Wasserman was surprised when Brown and Zanuck proposed the kid. He thought that Sugarland had been a “downer,” and bosses mistrust that gloomy tendency in young talent. It can be a sign of doing a project for its own sake—the fatal kiss of privacy. So John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, 1960; The Great Escape, 1963) was talked about as director, but he may have been put off by the producers saying they thought Jaws was just a small picture, doable for $1 million. Despite the producers’ backing, Spielberg was uncertain. He said he didn’t want to get known for just trucks and sharks. He had liked the Goldie Hawn character in Sugarland. He had a wide sentimental streak, but W
asserman told him that in casting Hawn, he had set the audiences up for the lovable kook from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a woman who’d end up happy. Spielberg had decided he didn’t much like the characters in Jaws (there was romantic and sexual betrayal in the book), and was ready to side with the shark. You can feel that in the opening sequence, when the shark goes at the skinny-dipping kid in a way that releases our energy.
When you know how Jaws the film turned out, it’s hard to grasp how nearly it foundered. A very young director, without a hit, was allowed to extend the schedule from 55 days to more than 150, and the budget from $3.5 million to close to $12.0 million. He thought he was going to be fired. He wanted to quit. The elaborate work to build and control a mechanical shark (named “Bruce”) produced insoluble problems. In the script (by Carl Gottlieb and Benchley, but with other hands enlisted), there was a climactic scene where the shark was meant to leap out of the water and crush the boat. The production controller, William Gilmore, recalled:
The shark was supposed to come out of the water with tremendous energy. Take one was no good. The shark came out of the water kind of like a dolphin walking along the water and fell on the boat. We assumed it was a rehearsal and that the second take was going to be better. It wasn’t. The shark sort of came up like a limp dick, skidded along the water, and fell onto the boat.
That scene never happens in the film, of course, and that’s part of why the schedule was tripled. At one point Spielberg resolved that a lot of the time we need not see the shark (because “Bruce” couldn’t act and couldn’t be engineered). He called that going “the Hitchcock way,” doing it by suggestion. To this day, the possibility remains that the crew came back from the shoot off Martha’s Vineyard with a mass of shaky material that was then made into a movie by the editing of Verna Fields (she was raised to be a vice president at Universal after Jaws), by the throbbing underwater menace delivered in the score by John Williams (the closest we get to the shark’s mind), by the perseverance of Brown and Zanuck (and Wasserman), and by Spielberg, of course, who may have felt lost on many occasions but who proved an indefatigable learner.
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 56