Steven Spielberg (40 page)

“Producing is an Excedrin headache job,” Spielberg told
The
Hollywood
Reporter
shortly after the film was released. “If I can avoid it, I will. Zanuck and Brown served the picture well and gave me total freedom, the kind of [freedom from] controls I never had in television. Dick Zanuck backed me all the way…. In our few disagreements, he was right and I was wrong.”

The third time proved lucky when Spielberg's feature directing “debut” on
Carte
Blanche
was announced in the Hollywood trade papers on October 17, 1972. The next day, Barwood and Robbins turned in the second draft of their novelistically nuanced screenplay, which underwent further revisions throughout the filming (Spielberg shared story credit with the two screenwriters). The title became
The
Sugarland
Express
that November, although for a while the filmmakers considered simply calling the movie
Sugarland,
the name of the small town where the “tragic fairytale” comes to an end.
††

In adapting the saga of Bobby Dent for the screen, Spielberg turned Dent's wife, Ila Faye, into the movie's central character, Lou Jean Poplin. In
Sugarland,
the couple's two-year-old son has been removed to a foster home, and it is
Lou Jean who persuades her convict husband, Clovis, to break out of a prerelease center—with only four months left on his sentence—to retrieve the child. The young mother's desperation over being separated from her baby, and the tragedy-of-the-absurd that results from it, provided fertile ground for a working-out of Spielberg's complex feelings about his own family. Spielberg conceived Lou Jean as behaving like a spoiled child,
sexually manipulating Clovis to go along with her whims and finally throwing an infantile tantrum that causes him to walk into the fatal ambush. Lou Jean's reckless need for her child is less an expression of mother love than an irresponsible prolongation of her own childhood.

Universal insisted that Spielberg and the producers provide commercial insurance for the offbeat film by signing a major female star to play Lou Jean. After meeting with several female stars, who all passed on the script, Spielberg became convinced that Goldie Hawn, best known as the giggling blond sexpot of the
Laugh-In
TV series, had the blend of scatterbrained charm and underlying mulish obstinancy the part required. “I always thought she
was
a dramatic actress, for she took her comedy very seriously,” Spielberg recalled. “So I met with her—we had a great afternoon—and you could tell she was thousands of kilowatts smarter than the people of
Laugh
-In
had ever allowed her to demonstrate.” Winner of an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for
Cactus
Flower
(1969), Hawn had her own production deal at Universal, and she had been turning down scripts for a year before agreeing to star in
The
Sugarland
Express.
She was paid $300,000 on a film that, according to Gilmore, cost about $3 million.

Spielberg and Universal hoped the public's affection for Hawn would help them accept a character whose actions worked against audience sympathy. The filmmakers also thought that in the wake of her Oscar, audiences would be intrigued to see Hawn in a demanding, three-dimensional role that was more dramatic than comedic. Spielberg said in 1974 that her Lou Jean would come as “a real surprise to those who only see her as a pie-in-the-face type. She takes herself seriously as a person and is mostly concerned with how far to reach inside a character.”

For Hawn, the “most exciting” aspect of the project was the director. “Think of the career Steven's got ahead of him,” she said.

W
HEN
he rolled the cameras on January 15, 1973, Spielberg had just passed his twenty-sixth birthday, making him a year older than Orson Welles was when he began shooting his first feature,
Citizen
Kane.
Zanuck vividly remembers Spielberg's first day of shooting on location in Texas:

“I had told the production people, ‘It's his first day. Let's start him off slow. Do something relatively simple until he breaks in.' He'd never worked with a crew this big. I didn't want to be there for the first shot; I wanted him to think he was running the show. So I deliberately took my time getting there. I got there about eight-thirty. Jesus, by the time I'd gotten out there, he had already laid out the most complex shot I've ever seen in my life! I walked up to the production manager and said, ‘What is this? We're supposed to be starting him off with something simple!'

“By then I had run
Duel
a
couple of times, and something with Joan Crawford [‘Eyes'], and I had been with him for three or four months on a daily basis, but it was a small body of work, and you never do know until
that day, standing there with a hundred people doing things, whether a guy has it or not. I knew right then and there, when I saw him in action, that he knew what he was doing. He was very definite in his opinions. He was in command. I could sense it, because I had been around long enough with a lot of great directors—the Robert Wises, the William Wylers, the John Hustons—and I knew almost immediately that he had knowledge and command and ability, and an innate, intimate sense of the visual mechanics of how you put all these pieces together so that the final result is very striking.

“I
still
don't think anyone I've ever worked with knows the mechanics as well as he does. It's like trying to read the mind of a master chess champion who's got all the moves. Like an old-time director did, he knew the capacity of all the lenses and equipment. He knew how to move the camera, when to move it, when not to move it, how to have it move in different ways, how to move people around—he just
knew
it.”

“Sugarland
was his first real location shoot,” recalls art director Joseph Alves Jr., who had worked with Spielberg on
The
Psychiatrist
and
Night
Gallery.
“Steven didn't realize how much other departments could do for him, that he didn't have to do all the visual things himself. When you're young, especially when you do your first little films, you have to do everything yourself. But to rely on others gives you choices. That was something he discovered on
Sugarland,
as opposed to television, when we didn't spend much time together.

“On
Sugarland,
Steven and Bill Gilmore and I went to Texas and drove around together on the initial scout, [four] weeks before we began shooting. I remember when we came back from scouting one day having solved a lot of problems. Within a thirty-mile radius [of San Antonio], we found a number of locations that all sort of fit together. To have that change of topography and less travel time allowed him to have more time to work with his actors and more time to work visually. He said, ‘Gosh, you guys are doing a lot of work for me.' We told him, ‘Well, that's what we're
supposed
to do. That's what we're hired for.' He said, ‘Oh. OK.' He realized that if people do these things, it could relieve the pressure he was under.”

Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-born cinematographer who shot
Sug
arland,
says it was “probably the only time when Steven worked as a director that he worked as a conductor and was relying on the expertise of his collaborators. He knew what he wanted, and still he was open—if there was a better way to do it, he would listen. He didn't seem like a novice—he already knew the business, he knew a lot—but I could still help him. He was not experienced enough to know everything. I caught him during
Sugarland
Express
when he was just learning—I think he learned more on
Jaws,
and by the time we did
Close
Encounters
he knew
everything.
On
Sugarland,
Steven gave a one hundred percent chance to collaborate. Everybody had a good relationship with Steven. He asked the impossible with a smile on his face. How could you say no?”

“Vilmos and I were almost brothers on our movie,” Spielberg said at the
time. “I'd heard about this crazy Hungarian who lights with six foot-candles [an extremely low level of light] and who'll try absolutely everything…. It's an enormous help when egos don't clash and you can creatively exchange thoughts—not on just the momentary problems, but on conceptual ideas as well. Vilmos is the kind of cameraman whom I'd invite into the cutting room, because he would have something to contribute. I would never do that with any other cameraman that I know.”

Spielberg and Zsigmond usually ate breakfast and dinner together on location, energetically discussing their plans for the day. One morning when they were having breakfast at The Greenhouse along the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio, Zsigmond introduced Spielberg to a pretty young waitress. “I wanted to take her out,” Zsigmond recalls, “but she was only interested in Steven. She told me, ‘I want to meet your friend.' I said to Steven, ‘This girl's in love with you.' It became a friendship, and he took her to Hawaii [after the filming]. She came to Hollywood, and he dated her for a long time. He was surprised, actually, that this girl really liked him. It was something new in his life. He was shy in those days.” Years later, when San Antonio film critic Bob Polunsky asked him about his memories of making
The
Sugarland
Express,
Spielberg replied with a smile, “I fell in love in San Antonio once, on the Riverwalk.”
‡‡

Before shooting began, Spielberg spent many hours with his cinematographer comparing their tastes in movies. “We both liked
Citizen
Kane,
we both liked European movies, we liked Fellini,” Zsigmond found. Spielberg greatly admired Zsigmond's daringly offbeat work with director Robert Altman on such films as
McCabe
and
Mrs.
Miller
and
The
Long
Goodbye.
The impressionistic visual style of those films, which freely used natural source lighting, diffusion, extreme variations in light intensity, and long lenses to compress spatial planes, was a major influence on
The
Sugarland
Express.

Freeing himself from the visual constraints of television, Spielberg shot for the first time in the Panavision wide-screen format, composing richly textured, multilayered images. But he strove for a grittier, less self-consciously stylized look than Altman's, telling Zsigmond that what he wanted was “European lighting” with “a documentary feeling.” He and Zsigmond watched documentaries together, examining them for creative solutions to the problems of location shooting. They agreed to shoot as much as possible with natural lighting and live sound, and to avoid using process photography
§§
for the many scenes inside cars. Spielberg hoped to encounter plenty of rain and to shoot scenes through moving windshield wipers, trying everything
to remove Goldie Hawn's “Tinkerbell” aura. Little rain materialized, but the wintry conditions in Texas gave the film a suitably overcast look.
“We considered it an art piece,” says Zsigmond.

T
HE
Texas Department of Public Safety, understandably concerned about how its image would withstand a movie about the Bobby Dent affair, initially refused to cooperate with the filmmakers. While location sites in Louisiana and other states were considered, Bill Gilmore eventually persuaded DPS officials that the film “wouldn't portray their people in a bad light. I'm sure I said whatever I had to.” That half-truth enabled the filming to proceed along Texas roads, but the film company still had to assemble its own fleet of vehicles for the pursuit of the police car in which Lou Jean and Clovis (William Atherton) are traveling with their hostage, Officer Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks). Gilmore bought 23 cars at a police auction and rented 17 others from non-DPS sources (the original chase involved more than a hundred police and civilian vehicles). After the film was released, DPS director Colonel Wilson Speir reacted with outrage, insisting that “no law enforcement officer of this department or any other police agency in Texas would conduct himself in such an unprofessional manner.”

Both
Duel
and
The
Sugarland
Express
are road movies, constantly in motion, but in contrast to the earlier film's elemental simplicity,
Sugarland
is almost baroque in its logistical complications. “What is surprising,” wrote
Newsweek
reviewer Paul D. Zimmerman, “is Spielberg's breathtaking command of action, the visual sweep he achieves with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, the vision, satiric but strangely beautiful, of an America on wheels.” To help keep his bearings, Spielberg, as he had done on
Duel,
had a mural made showing the progress of the chase. He also had Joe Alves storyboard some of the scenes, although much of the action was improvised on location, again with the expert help of stunt coordinator Carey Loftin.

For filming in and around Officer Slide's patrol car, the wheels were removed from a vehicle and it was mounted close to the ground on a flatbed trailer. Not content to shoot only with locked-down or handheld cameras, Spielberg and Zsigmond set up tracks on a platform attached to the vehicle, using a small dolly to film tracking shots alongside the car in motion. They went even further with the help of the newly manufactured, highly compact Panaflex camera, which was so mobile and quiet that it allowed for shots of astonishing dexterity inside the car, with the camera mounted on a sliding board that served as a makeshift tracking device. The Panaflex arrived during the last two weeks of shooting after the Panavision Corp. chose the
Sug
arland
company over a hundred and thirty other applicants to give the camera its “acid test” under production conditions. Although he shot the film largely in continuity, Spielberg saved some of the most complex highway shots until the end of filming in order to use the Panaflex.