by Paul Bullock
FROM DIRECTOR STEVEN SPIELBERG: JURASSIC PARK - PAUL BULLOCK
The author does not own ‘Jurassic Park’ or any of the films referenced in this book. ‘Jurassic Park’ is property of Amblin Entertainment and Universal. All other films have been correctly credited to their owners inside the book (please see ‘References’ section).
This book is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amblin Entertainment, Universal, Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, or anyone associated with ‘Jurassic Park’, or the other films and books mentioned within it.
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From Director Steven Spielberg: Jurassic Park was published on 25th March 2013.
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© Paul Bullock 2013 (except where noted)
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INTRODUCTION: A BUTTERFLY FLAPS ITS WINGS…
"You never had control, that's the illusion!"
Jurassic Park
An author clacks his keys in New York and in Hollywood a director loads his camera with film.
Fate? Coincidence? Chaos? Whatever it was, there was certainly something at play in the involvement of Steven Spielberg in the cinematic adaptation of Michael Crichton's best-selling novel Jurassic Park. The film, really, should never have happened. Spielberg had distanced himself from big budget blockbusters during the late 1980s, and while he had returned to the well with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), his most recent relapse - 1991's Hook - was a critical disaster that betrayed his disgust with the genre and which he continues to rue to this day. When he first heard of Jurassic Park in 1989, he was meeting with Crichton to discuss an entirely different project - TV medical drama E.R.. In passing, Crichton mentioned a novel he was writing about a theme park populated by bio-engineered dinosaurs, and the idea piqued Spielberg's interest. "You know, I've had a fascination with dinosaurs all my life," he told Crichton. "I'd really love to read it." (Shay and Duncan, 6) Crichton passed Spielberg a copy of the galleys, and a path was set. Pre-production got under-way in 1990 and Jurassic Park (1993) hit cinemas three years later, revolutionising cinematic special effects and breaking a number of box-office records.
The film has never quite emerged from the monolithic reputation those achievements earned it. Widely accepted as a triumph of technical expertise and modern movie marketing, Jurassic Park is in almost every other respect the subject of scorn. The film's "technical achievement... represented an entire visual revolution," according to Empire magazine's Colin Kennedy, but overall it "lacks heart." Peter Biskind agreed, writing in 1997 before the release of sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, that "Jurassic failed the Jaws [1975] test miserably... the characters, and the actors who played them, were simply overwhelmed by the dinos."
Perhaps the most damning criticism came from Kim Newman, who argued in his review for British film journal Sight and Sound that Jurassic Park is a simple potboiler, which does little else but bolt a series of common Spielberg tropes onto a new story:
"[The film features] the paring-down of a monster best-seller into a suspense machine ('Jaws'); the tackling of a popular-science childhood sense of wonder perennial within state-of-the-art effects that re-imagine 1950s B science-fiction ('Close Encounters of the Third Kind'); the all-action jungle adventure littered with incredible perils and gruesome deaths ('Raiders of the Lost Ark'), and big-eyed creatures who range from beatifically benevolent to toothily merciless ('Gremlins', 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial')."
Even Spielberg himself has accepted the film's low regard in his canon, admitting that Jurassic Park was nothing more than "an attempt to make a good sequel to Jaws - on land" (McBride, 418) and that in production he "just opened the tool box, and took every tool I've ever used in my entire career." (Empire, 2001). The film's placement between two periods of historical dramas (The Color Purple/Empire of the Sun (1985 and 1987) and Schindler's List/Amistad/Saving Private Ryan (1993, 1997 and 1998)), only cements its reputation - Jurassic Park is a regressive anomaly, a hollow throwback to the comforting blockbuster fantasies of the director's past. This isn't an incorrect judgement (the film does indeed trade on childhood awe and wonder), but it is something of a shallow and misguided one that shows an ignorance of Spielberg's style, his intentions for the film and the savage self-criticism it possesses.
Indeed, dig beneath the lush surface of Jurassic Park and the film emerges as a work of overlooked significance in Spielberg's evolution, helping set up in earnest a new period of development while at the same time closing an old one. It was a process that began in the 1980s. Following the critical and commercial successes of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) in the first half of the decade, Spielberg turned out a brace of low key literary adaptations in the shape of The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987) in the second half. Both films are disturbing looks at the dark side of human nature, and both actively seek to subvert Spielberg's usually optimistic outlook on life. Empire of the Sun displays a particularly desolate viewpoint, concluding with a shot of its young protagonist's eyes staring blankly into the distance and closing with deathly finality.
Both films were determined bids to change how Spielberg and his films were viewed. The man who was accused of pandering to the audience's every whim in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) "suddenly realised that, 'God, maybe I should please a part of me I haven't pleased before... a side that doesn't necessarily think of the audience with every thought and breath.'" (Forsberg in Friedman and Notbohm, 127). Spielberg was at this time interested in "a story [that] is not larger than the lives of the people [I'm depicting]" and aiming to "challenge myself with something that was not stereotypically a Spielberg movie" (Collins in Friedman and Notbohm, 121). The stereotypical Spielberg movie being, of course, something dominated by high-concept plots and even bigger special effects.
Spielberg was changing tack in his blockbusters too, displaying a listlessness with escapist entertainment that would grow through the decade. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of his first meta-textual movies (Jurassic Park, Minority Report (2002) and Catch Me If You Can (2002) followed) and it uses the eponymous relic as a symbol for the power of cinema and the need to use it responsibly. Sequel/prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom looks back at the years prior to Raiders and portrays its hero as an ambiguous mercenary whose journey through the film teaches him that there are treasures greater than "fortune and glory". Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, meanwhile, brings that story to its logical conclusion by having Indy abandon the greatest glory of all - the Holy Grail - to reconcile with his estranged father.
The extended sunset horseback ride that concludes the film is both a loving homage to the Westerns Spielberg enjoyed as a boy and a melancholic farewell to the traditional film-making styles and simple pleasures those movies represent. Spielberg confirmed his desire to move away from blockbusters when promoting Last Crusade by telling press with a reference to Indiana Jones co-creator George Lucas that, "I've graduated from the Lucas Cliffhanger U" (Corliss, 83) Two years earlier, he had told the New York Times in an interview marking his 40th birthday that "I've had it up to here with 'I don't want to grow up'" (Forsberg in Friedman and Notbohm, 130). Hollywood's Peter Pan was finally ready to become a man.
So why direct Jurassic Park, a film that posed no great challenge and no obvious opp
ortunity for artistic or personal development? The answer lies in Always (1989) and Hook, two of Spielberg's most poorly received films, and seemingly two of his most regressive. Both are, after all, based on the director's childhood favourites (Hook is a revisionist take on Peter Pan, while Always updates Victor Fleming's 1943 wartime melodrama A Guy Named Joe), and both seemed solid box office bets following the commercial failures of The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. Critics were quick to emphasise both these points as motivation for Spielberg making the films in their often-scathing reviews.
Yet, while Always and Hook may seem regressive in concept, their messages are anything but. Spielberg had become a father for the first time in 1985 and by 1990, he had added another child to a family that would eventually grow to number seven. For the first time, Spielberg's personal life was demanding as big a share of his time as his career, but his professional life showed no sign of slowing down. By the end of the '80s, Spielberg had directed six films (along with a segment of 1983's ill-fated Twilight Zone: The Movie) and produced countless others, including blockbusters Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985) and the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-1989). The man who had abandoned a Peter Pan musical in 1985 because he "wanted to be home as a dad" (McBride, 409) seemed as pre-occupied with work as ever.
Always and Hook tell of men who are also struggling to balance their personal and professional lives. Hook's Peter Banning (Robin Williams) tries to find an emotional connection with his children but can only do so by returning to Neverland and becoming Peter Pan again, while Always's lead, deceased aerial firefighter Pete (Richard Dreyfuss), has to learn to let go of his fiancee Dorinda (Holly Hunter), who has fallen for another man. They also display the work of a director unsure of his style. Dominated by mawkish sentiment and gratuitous special effects, Always and Hook inadvertently bury their serious subtexts with surface-level superficiality. Spielberg was at war with himself, attempting to explore the complexities of adulthood and parenthood, without quite letting go of the comforts of childhood.
Following Hook's poor critical performance, Spielberg was facing arguably the worst period of his career. Since the widespread acclaim enjoyed by E.T. in 1982, the director had released six films, including two sequels and a remake - a surprising state of affairs for a director who had dubbed such unoriginality "a cheap carny trick" at a retrospective in San Francisco in October 1975. Only the sequels (both Indiana Jones films) earned the sort of box office usually associated with Spielberg's cinema, and, perhaps more significantly, none were in-touch with the dark, edgy blockbusters that had been ushered in by Tim Burton's Batman (1989), which, Spielberg confessed, he "didn't get" (Taylor, 1992). Jurassic Park offered familiar territory, an opportunity to explore somewhat darker territory, and a proven popular success. It was the perfect film to help Spielberg reclaim his position as King of the Blockbuster.
It was also the perfect film for him to expand his thematic range more comprehensively than he had ever done before. Just as the known terrain of Indiana Jones allowed him to evolve his interest in father-son relationships in Last Crusade, this "sequel to Jaws - but on land" afforded him the chance to fine-tune the issues he'd explored during the troubled second half of the '80s without sacrificing the thrills and spills he'd mastered in the '70s. Jurassic Park does this with a focus on four key themes that recur throughout almost all Spielberg films: fear as a means of self-expression, audience involvement as a means of communication, nature as a force of emotional transformation, and physical masculinity as a source of destruction and weakness.
Though it pales in comparison to Schindler's List (1993) in terms of quality, Jurassic Park is in many ways a more significant film than the Holocaust drama for understanding Spielberg's subsequent offerings, many of which, like Jurassic Park, added rich and complex thematic depth to seemingly standard genre narratives. Indeed, it proves something of a tipping point in Spielberg's career, a missing link between the two different styles of film-making Spielberg has now become known for: the pure entertainer who made Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark and the educator who went on to make Saving Private Ryan, War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012).
Call it chaos theory, call it fate, call it simple coincidence, but with Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg engineered a fundamental change in his cinematic DNA that would enable him to evolve into one of American cinema's most distinct, eclectic and important directors. To understand how, we must go back to Spielberg's childhood and revisit his early obsession with television, cinema, and the things that go bump in the night.