Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (63 page)

Hollywood admires success, and it admires Spielberg's success. He is not only a great professional, but a nice man, who is not known for tantrums or egotism or controversy. After the academy voters failed to nominate him as one of the year's best directors, he steadfastly refused to be publicly angry, insisting "I am not a belly-acher," and turning up at the Oscarcastjust like all the other guests.

And yet, understand this. Spielberg achieves, over and over again, what so many people in the movie industry desperately wish they could do only once. Or half of once. He has good taste, technical mastery, artistic flair, and popular charm. People kill themselves out here-literally work and worry and negotiate themselves to death-trying to turn worthless little pieces of crap into movies. Because you cannot be stupid and get far in Hollywood, the people who make bad movies are usually smart enough to know they are bad. Hollywood is such a competitive town that you need to be smart, gifted, and lucky to claw yourself up to the point where you can make bad movies. There is a lot of self-hatred involved.

Now here comes this kid who makes it look so easy. Who can't seem to fail. Who makes a movie like E. T. that not only grosses hundreds of millions of dollars but is just as popular all over the world as here at home, and is even acclaimed as a masterpiece of popular art. There is something unfair about it. Nobody should get all the breaks.

In Hollywood, The Color Purple was widely seen, rightly or wrongly, as Spielberg's bid for a different kind of acclaim. He deliberately set out (you can hear people say) to buy an important novel such as The Color Purple and make it into an important film, and show that he had political and social convictions to go along with his storytelling skills.

Hollywood gets perverse about situations like that. It understands very well why a man might spend a year making a movie that a thirteenyear-old would disdain as trash. But if a man blessed with great success tries to do something really wonderful, there is a tendency to slap him down. It is just too much of an affront to all the compromises and little ethical deaths that happen every day all over town.

Someday, Steven Spielberg will win his Oscar. This year he was rebuked and snubbed, and so Hollywood will provide the happy ending and give him an Oscar two or three years from now, and people will explain that it is "really" for The Color Purple. That's the way the Oscar game has always been played.

But what about the people who made The Color Purple? What about Quincy Jones, quietly saying, "That's the way it is?" Someday he will win an Oscar, too, and someday maybe Whoopi and all the others will win Oscars-you never know. But the moment has passed for The Color Purple and will never come again.

I don't think Jones meant, by his comment, that the movie lost for racist reasons, or that those who voted against it didn't like the black faces on the screen, the black voices on the soundtrack or the black story that was told. Here's what I think he meant: that in a society run by whites, and with white values and assumptions so deeply entrenched that sometimes they are invisible and unconscious-especially to those who hold themThe Color Purple got passed over for all the same old reasons of politics and jealousy and shabbiness and business as usual.

Spielberg made the first major movie in years that was entirely devoted to an aspect of the black experience in America, and the Hollywood establishment ignored the movie for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the movie itself! It's not even that the voters didn't like it. They probably did like it. But in the politics of Oscar (can't you hear them saying), "This just wasn't Steven's year." The black protests against the film did not cause it to lose, but they helped, by creating a climate in which the voters felt no obligation to honor the film.

Spielberg will get his Oscar.

Life will go on.

It will be a long time before another major, serious movie by an important director is made about black people.

That's the way it is.

MAY 28, 1987

he fans came from nowhere. How had the word spread? By early morning on the day that Star Wars opened, ten years ago on May 25, the movie lines were snaking down the block. By late afternoon, when the press caught up with the story, instant experts were calmly explaining that they had already seen the movie two times and were back in line to see it again. And so was launched the most influential single film of the decade. "May the Force be with you," the new star warriors chanted on TV, and an instant mythology was born.

Star Wars gave birth to at least ten trends that have fundamentally changed the way Hollywood addresses the mass audience:

i. It symbolized the box-office rebirth of science fiction, which had been moribund since the 1950s, with the exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2. It was the first major film to use emerging computer technology to create animation.

3. It reached a new plateau in special effects.

4. It announced the end of the "film generation" and its fascination with personal films by auteurs such as Godard, Antonioni, Scorsese, Altman, and Bergman, and the beginning of what we might call a "narrative generation"-audiences who simply wanted to be told a story.

5. It built on the success of Jaws in proving that "breakthrough films" could make hundreds of millions of dollars, rewrite the fate of a studio, and spawn whole industries to supply books, toys, posters, and other tie-in merchandise.

6. It was the first film to conclusively demonstrate that "repeaters" could change box-office history. Few of the original Star Wars fans saw it only once. Some saw it dozens of times.

7. It proved that the star system-the use of expensive, famous actors-could be supplanted by a story that created its own stars. Few people knew who played the voices of R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) or C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), and if they knew that James Earl Jones was the voice of Darth Vader, did they know that the man inside the suit was named Dave Prouse? The costumes, not their inhabitants, were the stars.

8. The success of the movie and its sequels, which were frankly inspired by the Saturday afternoon cliff-hanging serials of the 193os and 1940s, brought a reevaluation of those kinds of popular entertainments, spinning off such other blockbusters as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

9. In the decade before 1977, young American directors were trying to make the Great American Film. Afterward, many of them were trying to make the Great American Hit. In 1976, a year before Star Wars, Martin Scorsese was an example of the best young American directors, and he made Taxi Driver. In the years after Star Wars, the directors after Scorsese have, by and large, stopped swinging for that particular fence, and started measuring their success by the box office.

io. It is not a trend, but it is a sign of something: like many other great movies, Star Wars contributed a phrase to the language, "May the Force be with you."

If I sound less than thrilled by the Star Wars revolution, that is not altogether fair. I loved Star Wars. After seeing it for the first time, I compared it to those "out-of-the-body experiences" you read about in the supermarket tabloids-where people are transported to other dimensions, and unceremoniously deposited back here, hours or days later. The movie was made with skill, craft, intelligence, and a sense of humor.

It represented a breakthrough in popular culture: the insight that big budgets need not be limited to historical epics and the film versions of turgid bestsellers, but could be applied to thrilling "kids' stories," transforming them into enormously enjoyable entertainments.

The best story I've heard about Star Wars involves a board meeting at Twentieth Century Fox when George Lucas was halfway through directing his saga, and was running over budget. The Fox board sat through footage of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo; then the lights went up and the board members suggested that maybe Fox should just admit it had made a mistake and stop production on the picture. Maybe the special effects could be recycled into some kind of Saturday morning kiddie TV show.

Alan Ladd, Jr., the production chief, rose to his feet. Known for his reluctance to make long speeches in public, he immediately had the room's attention: Laddie spoke so rarely that he was always listened to. There was a silence.

"Could ... be great," he said, and sat down. The board voted the additional money.

The important thing to realize is that the Fox board was not totally out of its mind. There was no historical precedent for the success of a movie like Star Wars, a movie which said a cliff-hanging "children's story" could be married to breakthrough technology. When George Lucas submitted his original script to the studio, how did anyone have the imagination to envision what he had in mind? His previous credits had included THX 1138 (1970), a futurist fantasy modeled on 1984, and American Graffiti (1973), a wonderful comedy about adolescence. What did either film have to do with the Force?

Picture in your mind those thrilling sword fights with laser beams. The breath-stopping moments when the scout ships swoop low between the steel canyons of the Death Star. The amazing use of throwaway detail in the scene set in the saloon on Alderaan, the intergalactic watering hole. How could mere words on a page convey what Lucas had in mind, or inspire belief in the special-effects genius he would use to achieve it?

Star Wars was a great landmark in American movies, and the trilogy (completed by The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) has created a group of classics that will be returned to and enjoyed for generations, like The Wizard of Oz (which, indeed, Star Wars resembled-especially in the trio of C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca, who bore unmistakable resemblances to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion).

But the news is not altogether good. The news never is. In the ten years before Star Wars, American cinema was passing through a sort of golden age, in which a new generation of directors was looking for new directions. Inspired by the French New Wave-that early i96os explosion of personal filmmaking by Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, and othersthey wanted to make films that reflected how they saw the world. Look at some of the titles from that period: Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Days of Heaven, M*A*S*H, Annie Hall, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, The Conversation, even the original Rocky, which was the personal film Stallone made before selling Rocky's soul to the box office.

In the decade since Star Wars, there has been less emphasis on personal vision. Indeed, Hollywood production chiefs are often hostile to filmmakers who have some kind of an offbeat project, and films such as Terms of Endearment and even Platoon were turned down by dozens of executives.

What they're looking for is a new combination of old formulas. Hollywood believes it knows more or less what will sell: special effects, nonstop action, humor based on violence. Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop II is a textbook example of this new mentality. If Murphy, with his talent, had come up in the decade before Star Wars, he might have become one of the great original screen comedians of his time. In the decade since 1977, a talent like his is routinely shoehorned into bankrupt shoot-and-chase, sliceand-dice plots like Cop II. Hollywood believes Eddie is a genius-but could he get backing for a truly personal project, an oddball screenplay that only he could picture in his mind's eye, for a movie that would be all Murphy and no formula? Not likely.

In Hollywood the other day, at ceremonies marking the first decade of Star Wars, George Lucas announced that another Star Wars trilogy is on the drawing boards. His master plan is to eventually make nine movies in the series. The Star Wars saga will likely live forever-and that might even be long enough for Hollywood to outgrow it.