Steven Spielberg (42 page)

Sugarland
was previewed on a double bill with Peter Bogdanovich's Depression-era comedy
Paper
Moon
in San Jose, the northern California city adjacent to Spielberg's former hometown of Saratoga. Spielberg attended with Zanuck, Brown, Gilmore, Barwood, Robbins, and a delegation of Universal executives.

“The audience loved the first half,” Gilmore recalls. “Goldie Hawn was a piece of fluff and she was involved with two nincompoops [Clovis and Officer Slide]; it was all a romp. But when the two sharpshooters came on the scene—we cast two real Texas Rangers [Jim Harrell and Frank Steggall] as sharpshooters—I can remember the audience gasping, ‘Oh my God, this is life and death, real flesh and blood.'

“From that moment on, we lost them. I think the mistake was that the audience perceived the film to be another Goldie Hawn piece of fluff, and she brought with her that goodwill. When we became deadly serious, about three-fifths of the way through the film, they sat there in stunned silence. They didn't know what they were looking at. They didn't want to hear about it. That taught me a lesson. We should deliver what they think they are going to see.”

Some of the audience members left in tears. And there were some, Barwood recalled, who “walked out with blue murder in their eyes.”

Zanuck and Brown wanted to leave the film as it was, but Spielberg persuaded them to let him cut it from 121 to 108 minutes and recut some of the intended moments of comedy in the first half of the film, when he had held for laughs that hadn't come. With the new version, the reaction was dramatically different at film industry preview screenings in the fall and
winter. As a result of those screenings, according to
The
Hollywood
Reporter,
“word went around the Hollywood circuit that a major new director and film were on the horizon.”

But with its fears of the film's lack of commercial appeal confirmed by the disastrous San Jose preview, Universal changed the release plans. Originally scheduled for Thanksgiving release,
Sugarland
was delayed to avoid competing with such major commercial entries as
The
Sting
(a Zanuck/Brown production for Universal) and Warner Bros.'
The
Exorcist.
The plan then was to open
Sugarland
in February at one theater in Los Angeles and one in New York, but Spielberg already was worried that Universal would quickly go wider if the openings weren't successful. At that time, films with any kind of prestige usually were opened in a few theaters in major cities before being released gradually across the country, in what was known as a “platforming” release strategy. Opening a film unusually wide (a “saturation” release) tended to indicate that the studio had little regard for its quality and wanted to get its money quickly, before negative word of mouth could spread. Universal finally decided to forego showcase runs for
Sugarland,
opening it in 250 theaters across the country on April 5. Box-office results predictably were disappointing, a modest $7.5 million gross in the United States and Canada, and an additional $5.3 million overseas. The film eventually made a small profit after being sold to television.

In an interview with
The
Hollywood
Reporter
three weeks after
Sugarland
opened, Spielberg complained that Universal had failed to capitalize on the Hollywood screenings. “There was a huge four-month gap between those initial screenings and the release,” he said. “The immediacy of the word of mouth wore off.” But it is unlikely that opening any earlier would have helped, for Hollywood's appreciation of Spielberg's directorial talents wouldn't have translated to the mass audience, and hosannas from leading American and British reviewers made little impression on the public.

S
PLELBERG
“could be that rarity among directors, a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation's Howard Hawks,” Pauline Kael proclaimed in
The
New
Yorker.
“In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this film is one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.”

Combining his review with a profile of the director,
Newsweek
's Paul D. Zimmerman also heralded “the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new filmmaker.” Dilys Powell of the London
Times,
who had spotted Spielberg's talent when
Duel
played in overseas theaters, wrote, “One is apt to fear for the second film of a promising young director, but for once anxiety was unnecessary.” While noting thematic similarities between
Duel
and
Sug
arland,
Powell was pleased to find that this time, “The human element has pushed into the foreground.”

Dissenting critics were outnumbered, but Stephen Farber's vituperative
commentary on the film in
The
New
York
Times
helped set the tone for subsequent critical attacks on the director. “Kael and some other gullible critics have probably been intimidated by Spielberg's youth, and by his technical facility,” wrote Farber. “…
The
Sugarland
Express
is a prime example of the new-style factory movie: slick, cynical, mechanical, empty…. Everything is underlined; Spielberg sacrifices narrative logic and character consistency for quick thrills and easy laughs….
The
Sugarland
Express
is a ‘social statement' whose only commitment is
to the box office.”

Even Kael's review expressed some concern about Spielberg's future development: “Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he really doesn't care if a movie has anything else in it…. I can't tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound.”

“I
T
did get good reviews,” Spielberg said of
The
Sugarland
Express,
“but I would have given away all those reviews for a bigger audience.” That disappointment left Spielberg somewhat wary of overtly “personal” filmmaking and more dedicated than ever to surefire crowd-pleasing entertainment.

Internal postmortems by the filmmakers pointed to several reasons why the public rejected the movie. “Bad title” was the diagnosis of Universal publicist Orin Borsten. “So many pictures are ruined by a bad title.” Although intended ironically, the title unfortunately played into the Goldie Hawn image that Spielberg otherwise had worked so hard to avoid. Perhaps the commercial fate of the film was inevitable once the decision was made to cast Hawn. “It wasn't a happy picture, and people didn't want to see her in a serious role—they wanted to see her as a goofy gal,” Richard Zanuck concludes. Stubbornly loyal to his star, Spielberg said in September 1974 that the film's box-office failure “was not due to the presentation of Goldie as an anti-
Laugh-In
character, but to the promotional campaign, timing, release pattern, and appreciation of the film by the studio. It had nothing to do with Goldie being rejected by audiences.”

Not known for sophisticated ad campaigns during the early 1970s, Universal seemed to have even more trouble than usual when it came to selling
Sugarland.
The trailer and the print ads vacillated between portraying it as a shoot-'em-up melodrama and emphasizing Hawn's cuter, more comedic  moments. But Spielberg was being a bit disingenuous in pinning all the blame on the studio. As David Brown recalled, “Universal gave Spielberg and us carte blanche in developing advertising and getting outside creative shops, to avoid that studio look. Our early ads were our own; Spielberg himself shot one of them. Our campaigns didn't work.” “I now think the right graphics campaign and a plan of attack for releasing a picture are as important as finding a good script and making a good movie,” Spielberg told
The
Hollywood
Reporter
in retrospect. But he admitted, “There's nobody to
accuse. This is an immensely difficult picture to sell.” It was an especially hard sell to the youth market because of its harshly critical view of its young female protagonist and its more sympathetic portraits of lawmen. Nor was its frontal attack on the public's sentimental gullibility calculated to endear the film to the majority of American moviegoers. In the final analysis, the public's rejection of
The
Sugarland
Express
probably stemmed from the single overriding fact that, as Lew Wasserman had warned, it was too much of a “downer” for the mass audience.

But as Vilmos Zsigmond says, “It's a shame that Steven doesn't make people remember more of
Sugarland
Express.
He just wants to forget it, because he thinks of it as a failure.
I
don't think of it as a failure. It's an artistic triumph.”

W
HEN
he received the bad news about
Sugarland
in April 1974, Spielberg did not have much time to sit around engaging in second-guessing or nursing his wounds. He was on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, immersed in preparations to make another film for Zanuck/Brown and Universal. This was no “art piece,” but a genre film aimed squarely at pleasing the mass audience.

It was a modestly budgeted thriller called
Jaws.

I
N
November 1973, with
The
Sugarland
Express
completed and awaiting release, Spielberg told an American Film Institute seminar that “when you make your first feature in this town, you're incredibly hot, and if you have a good agent, he'll make your next three deals—before your film comes out. Then, if your film comes out and it crashes … you've got three films in which to redeem yourself. I have a terrific agent [Guy McElwaine], and he has created the greatest hype…. At four studios, he's got me carte blanche to do whatever I want for a reasonable sum of money.”

“Carte blanche” was something of an exaggeration. Spielberg was eager to direct Peter Stone's screenplay
The
Taking
of
Pelham
One
Two
Three
, from the thriller novel by John Godey about the hijacking of a New York subway train. After a rough-cut screening of
Sugarland
,
United Artists production chief David Picker acknowledged Spielberg's promise. But Picker considered
Pelham
“director-proof” and opted instead for the journeyman Joseph Sargent, who had succeeded Spielberg on UA's
White
Lightning.
Then Spielberg passed up another picture that Sargent went on to direct. Richard Zanuck and David Brown offered him
MacArthur
,
a screenplay by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins about the controversial career of General
Douglas MacArthur. Spielberg claimed he rejected the film because he was wary of the logistical problems involved in staging World War II and the Korean War, but Zanuck thinks he “just didn't care for the subject.”

Spielberg knew how important it was to choose his projects with care in that formative period of his feature career. On the heels of
Sugarland
,
another failure, particularly an artistic as well as a financial failure, could have been a catastrophic setback for the young director. It was around this time that, according to Brown, Spielberg “turned down a script given to him by one of the biggest stars in the world because he didn't think the star was right for the role. In explanation, the young director said, ‘Look, if I ever make a picture again, I'm not going to make those kinds of compromises or I will have a very short career.'”

Spielberg's choosiness paid off when he made a development deal for his dream project. An unofficial remake of his 8mm sci-fi feature
Firelight
on a far grander scale, the film that would become
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
was even more deeply personal to Spielberg than
The
Sugarland
Express.
“I would have gone to great lengths to make it—whether I did it here in this country, or elsewhere,” he said. “Somehow I would have found the money. It's a movie I'd wanted to make for over ten years.”

He first considered making a documentary about people who believe in UFOs, or a low-budget feature, before realizing that “a picture that depended a great deal on state-of-the-art technology couldn't be made for $2.5 million.”
Close
Encounters
evolved from a short story he wrote in 1970 called “Experiences,” about a “lovers' lane in a small midwestern town and a light show in the sky overhead that these kids see from inside their cars.” Borrowing a famous phrase from the ending of the 1951 movie
The
Thing
from
Another
World
,
Spielberg retitled the project
Watch
the
Skies
before making a development deal with Columbia Pictures in the fall of 1973.

D
URING
postproduction on
Sugarland
,
Spielberg had become friendly with the young producer Michael Phillips, who was at Universal producing
The
Sting
for Zanuck/Brown along with his wife, Julia, and Spielberg's friend Tony Bill. Michael Phillips found Spielberg “an eager kid who continually bubbled with enthusiasm. He was interested in everything, not just films, he wasn't one-dimensional. He was always interested in new technologies, and he was one of the first people to get hooked on video games; he was the first filmmaker to install a
Pong
game or a
Tank
game on his dubbing stage. He was full of genuine love of movies, and he didn't seem to have much competitiveness with other filmmakers; this distinguished him from the group. And he had this incredible film under his belt called
Duel.

“We became friends by having lunch every day at the Universal commissary and talking about our favorite science-fiction films, such as
The
Day
the
Earth
Stood
Still.
He said, ‘I want to invite myself over for dinner and pitch you a story.' All he said was that it was about ‘UFOs and Watergate.' It
focused on the cover-up of the truth that the government was hiding from the citizenry about UFOs and Project Blue Book [the long-classified U.S. Air Force study of UFOs]. It was very, very different from what we wound up making, and I don't think it was anywhere near as good as it wound up being.”

Screenwriter-director Paul Schrader remembers the summer of 1973 as “very heady, because every weekend a lot of people would assemble at Michael and Julia's house” at Trancas Beach in Malibu. “We used to have a continual open house,” says Michael Phillips. “It was a place where all of us in the film community of roughly the same age would have a barbecue, swim, lie in the sun, listen to music, and talk about movies. A lot of these writers and directors helped each other. They worked on each other's films, they would contribute scenes or dialogue, and help on the rough cuts. It was a wonderful community at that time.”

The group included Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, John Milius, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Blythe Danner and her producer husband, Bruce Paltrow, Margot Kidder, Janet Margolin, attorney Tom Pollock (later an executive with MCA and Universal), screenwriter David Ward (an Oscar winner for
The
Sting
),
and the married screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck (George Lucas's collaborators on the script of
Ameri
can
Graffiti
).
“Even though we were relatively unknown,” Schrader recalled, “there was a real feeling that the world was our oyster.”

After meeting the Huycks at one of those gatherings, Spielberg asked them to write a screenplay based on what Katz calls a “little weird pink book. It was a biography of the inventor of the toilet, Thomas Crapper. It was titled
Flushed
with
Pride:
The
Story
of
Thomas
Crapper
[by Wallace Reyburn, 1969]. We came up with the great idea of doing it as
Young
Tom
Edison.
”
“But like
Little
Big
Man,
”
adds Huyck. The book that so tickled Spielberg's fancy begins (quite earnestly) with these words about the British inventor: “Never has the saying ‘A prophet is without honour in his own land' been more true than in the case of Thomas Crapper. Here was a man whose foresight, ingenuity and perseverance brought to perfection one of the great boons to mankind. But is his name revered in the same way as, for example, that of the Earl of Sandwich? … It was left to the Americans to give the man his due.”

“We wrote a treatment,” Huyck relates, “and we gave it to our [mutual] agent, Guy McElwaine, who said, ‘Steve, if this is the kind of movie you want to do, I don't want to be your agent.'”

That bizarre excursion into bad-taste humor made the Huycks more skeptical when Spielberg pitched another movie idea. “Steve took us to dinner and told us he had this story he wanted us to write about things from outer space landing on Robertson Boulevard [in West Hollywood],” says Katz. “I go, ‘Steve, that's the worst idea I ever heard. I don't want to be told an idea about a spaceship. It's very strange.' He had Paul Schrader write it.”

The troubled but brilliant Schrader, who was in rebellion from a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing in Michigan, explored his religious preoccupations in his 1972 book
Transcendental
Style
in
Film:
Ozu,
Bresson,
Drey
er.
Spielberg briefly expressed interest in directing Schrader's dark, semiautobiographical screenplay
Taxi
Driver
,
which became the controversial 1976 Robert De Niro film directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by the Phillipses for Columbia. Spielberg agreed to serve as a back-up director on the film, a condition Columbia insisted upon before allowing Scorsese to begin shooting; Spielberg's only other involvement was to make suggestions on the rough cut.

Spielberg chose not to offer
Watch
the
Skies
to Universal. “He wanted to get away from Universal a little bit,” Michael Phillips explains. “He didn't want to be a captive of Universal. He's been consistent with this—he's been incredibly loyal [to Universal], but he makes movies with all the studios, he works with everybody. He had other people in town that he was friendly with. He used to play cards every week with Alan Ladd Jr. [Twentieth Century-Fox's feature-division executive in charge of creative affairs], and that's why we started to go to Fox first [with
Watch
the
Skies
].”
In her waspish Hollywood memoir
You'll
Never
Eat
Lunch
in
This
Town
Again
, Julia Phillips took a more jaundiced view of Spielberg's first steps at becoming a mogul: “Steven was hanging out with men who were too old for him. Who bet and drank and watched football games on Sunday. Who ran studios and agencies…. We got Steven outta Guy [McElwainel's house in the Bev Hills flats, and on to the beach, where people were still discussing art and greatness, and were occasionally smoking a joint.”

After initial discussions with Fox, Spielberg and the Phillipses concluded that the studio had insufficient enthusiasm for
Watch
the
Skies.
The producers suggested offering the project to an executive with whom they all had a friendly relationship, David Begelman, the recently hired president of financially shaky Columbia Pictures.
*
  “We went with Columbia because David was ready and able and willing to step up at a level of a commitment that made us think he was going to stand behind the film,” Michael Phillips says. “It was a big bet, and he took it. David was a believer in Steven from
Duel.
”

In the two decades since
Star
Wars
and
Close
Encounters
were released, science-fiction films have accounted for half of the top twenty box-office hits. But before George Lucas and Spielberg revived the genre, “There was no real appetite at the studios for science fiction—it was a B genre,” Phillips recalls. “The conventional wisdom was, ‘Science-fiction films never make more than $4 million, except for
2001
,
and that's an exception.' But Columbia needed a hit. Had they not been in such desperate financial condition,
maybe they would have been less needy, less aggressive, but here they had a shot. They could see that if it all worked out well, they had a chance for a big, big hit.”

Intrigued by the unorthodox spiritual overtones implicit in mankind's yearning for contact with extraterrestrial life, Paul Schrader was hired by Columbia on December 12, 1973, to write the screenplay of Spielberg's UFO project, for which the writer was to receive $35,000 and 2.5 percent of the net profits.
Watch
the
Skies
originally was scheduled to begin shooting in the fall of 1974. But as Phillips recalls, “We went through a lot of trouble getting the script in its final form. We were struggling with it for a couple of years. Steven came to us one day [in 1973] and said, ‘Listen, would you mind terribly, I really need the money, this picture's being delayed and I've got an offer to do a movie about a shark. It will take me six months. Then I'll get back and finish
Watch
the
Skies.
'
We said, ‘Oh, no, that'll be fine, we're stuck here anyway.'”

S
HORTLY
after Spielberg returned from the Texas locations of
The
Sugarland
Express
,
he spotted a copy of an unpublished novel in his producers' office and “stole the galley proofs off Dick Zanuck's desk! I said, ‘I can make something of this. It'll be fun.'” But for Zanuck, Brown, and Universal, Spielberg was not the first choice to direct
Jaws
,
the film that would become the biggest moneymaker in motion picture history.

The idea for the novel began germinating in the mind of author Peter Benchley during the summer of 1964, when he read a small item in the New York
Daily
News
about Long Island shark fisherman Frank Mundus, who had harpooned a giant shark weighing an estimated 4,500 pounds. Mundus would become the prototype for Captain Quint, the obsessed shark-hunter in
Jaws.
As a youth, Peter Benchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of novelist Nathaniel Benchley, had spent summers in Nantucket going on shark-fishing expeditions with his father and brother. His awareness of the power of sharks to strike awe and terror into movie audiences was heightened by his viewing of Peter Gimbel's 1971 documentary
Blue
Water
,
White
Death.
That same year, Benchley, who was working as an associate editor at
Newsweek
,
accepted the first $1,000 of a $7,500 advance from Doubleday and began writing his first novel, a thriller about a great white shark feeding on human prey off the coast of Long Island.